People are an excuse to show locations: Lisandro Alonso on Jauja from Film Quarterly by Megan Ratner
Ingeborg (Villbjørk Malling Agger) and Capt. Dinsen (Viggo Mortensen) see different futures
Few directors pit men against the elements like Argentinian Lisandro Alonso. In 《Jauja》 (2014) those elements include foreign conquistadors intent on aboriginal genocide in Patagonia. Set during the “Conquest of the Desert,” a late 1870s military campaign to wipe out the indigenous Mapuche population, 《Jauja》 is a tale of brutal folly and blinkered misery. For either side, existence is precarious. In a narrative less linear than digressive, with ironies abundant, Alonso implies but never states the film’s central theme: surrender versus conquest, awe versus fear.
As the film’s epigraph notes, “Jauja was a mythological land of abundance and happiness. People were undoubtedly exaggerating, as they usually do. The only thing that is known for certain is that all who tried to find this earthly paradise got lost on the way.” In the opening shot, Danish Captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) perches beside his teenage daughter Ingeborg (Villbjørk Malling Agger) on a boulder near a military outpost in Patagonia. Around them stray soldiers relax, feasting their eyes on Ingeborg. Dinesen tells his daughter they will soon return to Denmark, his stated plans visually undermined by their position: she faces the camera, he is turned in the other direction. She says nothing in return, later telling her father, “I love the desert. The way it fills me.” When Ingeborg subsequently decamps with one of the soldiers (Alonso regular Misael Saavedra), only Dinesen seems nonplussed.
With no idea even in what direction to search, Dinesen puts on his sabered dress uniform, saddles up, and lights out to find Ingeborg. For a while, the film follows both the runaways and the father, each party puny against a clearly indifferent and inhospitable landscape, replete with wild animals and bandits. But finally, it becomes Dinesen’s film and Dinesen’s nightmare, an oneiric expedition into confusion, disillusion, and dissolution.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Alonso released his first film, 《La Libertad》, in 2001. In that debut and subsequent releases—《Los Muertos》 (2004), 《Fantasma》 (2006), and 《Liverpool》 (2008)—Alonso relied solely on nonprofessional actors, often people that he met in the far-flung areas of Argentina where he chose to shoot. Always, location precedes story for him. Shooting in the jungle, Tierra del Fuego, or Patagonia, his documentary-style semi-fictions track the ordinary work of rural survival: cutting down trees, slaughtering a goat, cadging honeycomb from a tree trunk. Intention and meaning are left up to the viewer. His loners do nothing to make themselves likable, yet are curiously compelling even while, say, maneuvering a rowboat or wielding an ax.
Alonso details the complexity of a mastered skill, a very different form of intelligence than intellectualism. His films insist on the validity of making one’s life in the wild as at least equal to the more customary modern settings of office or supermarket foraging. Protagonists such as an ex-con (《Los Muertos》) or a merchant seaman (《Liverpool》) convey complex backstories in the way they carry themselves and resist settling down. These men are restless, defined and impeded by a narrow masculinity.
Working from thumbnail scripts, Alonso often lives among those he films, guided by their customs and open to their ideas. Prior to 《Jauja》, each film was set in the presented and used minimal dialogue, extended takes, and virtually no explanation as to who the protagonist—always male—is or how he arrived at the juncture at which the film finds him. Each film relies on a form of collaboration contingent on Alonso’s clear ability to put nonactors at ease: they appear simply to live their lives on film.
Much of this technique remains in 《Jauja》, the period setting offering yet another facet to Alonso’s cumulative account of inwardly struggling men. Under the fancy dress, the characters are still doing all they can to survive. Murder, incest, alcoholism, and ditching responsibility have all figured in the earlier work, but the fact that Ingeborg rather than the soldier appears to have plotted their flight marks a distinct shift in the filmmaker’s focus. In 《Jauja》, Ingeborg and two other female characters have agency—a novelty for which neither Dinesen, the AWOL soldier, nor any of the other men are prepared.
The images in 《Jauja》 are painterly, sometimes reminiscent of what an official military artist might have made of the scene, but with a twist: their lighting is modern, the expected sepia traded for Kodachrome. Shots are composed with the landscape as star, the humans almost an afterthought. Particularly effective is a scene in which Mortensen rides at the camera, then away from it, a long traverse that may even be covering terrain where he has already been, that renders one part of the pampas indistinguishable from another. He persists, determined to find coordinates, to marshal an obvious chaos. In one subtle image after another, Alonso shows a man lost in time and space. The captain’s travails are cyclical problems repeating across nations and histories. In a different uniform, Dinesen could easily be appearing on tonight’s evening news.
《Jauja》 screened at the New York Film Festival, where Alonso was filmmaker in residence and where this interview was conducted.
Lisandro Alonso
MEGAN RATNER: Can you remember when you first became aware that you wanted to work with images?
LISANDRO ALONSO: Wow! When I was six or seven years old my parents sent me to painting lessons. I didn’t know if I was good or not but I think I fell in love with the teacher. I took lessons for a year and a half, but once she decided to quit, I never went back to painting. That class could be the point when I started to look at images, colors, figures, and objects and whatever.
RATNER: In other interviews, you’ve mentioned your parents’ weekly trips outside Buenos Aires to their farm as formative.
ALONSO: Probably the most important thing to me was that in the first ten years of my life my parents took me every weekend out of the city. My father has a little farm about an hour from the city. I just remember being surrounded by people who were not from the city, surrounded by cows, pigs, horses, and eating grilled meat family-style. During the week I would still be thinking about things that happened on the weekend. I contrasted the city noise with the country sounds—and the silence. I think I really enjoyed that time more than life in the city. Maybe that was stuck in my mind when I had to decide what to study after high school. I got used to thinking more in green than in gray.
RATNER: What led you to filmmaking?
ALONSO: In a way, I just went back to images. I heard a rumor that there was a film school about to open and I decided, why not. I’m not a cinephile, I’ve never been a cinephile. But nevertheless I found a way to express some of my approach with outsiders, with people who live far away from civilization, who don’t have the same opportunities I do. I could express some of my ideas with the cinema.
RATNER: Did you encounter any resistance from your parents?
ALONSO: After I finished high school, my father told me do whatever you want but put some passion in it and be good at what you do. He was my grandparents’ only child. He grew up in the state of La Pampa, where I shot my first film (《La Libertad》, 2001). I think he lived there until he was five and then moved to suburban La Plata. He dropped out of school, gambled a lot, and lived on the street. He loves horses. After he met my mother he just started to relax and calm down. He moved to Buenos Aires and started a business career. I know some of my father’s childhood but I don’t think he wants to tell me a lot of things. It was not easy, I can tell.
When I told him, “I think I’m going to study cinema,” he said (head in hand), “It’s not a good thing for a living. You will not make any money.” But actually, at that time in Argentina, lots of doctors and architects were driving taxis. The future isn’t set: nobody knows what will happen, especially in countries like the one where I live.
I started studying cinema but didn’t finish my studies. I used to work as a sound assistant in short films and features, but I didn’t make enough to survive doing that. So I went back to the farm to work in my parents’ business with my brothers. Working there I discovered Misael Saavedra, who became the main character of 《La Libertad》.
Ingeborg and her soldier (MisaelSaavedra) before their escape
RATNER: Can you talk about your relationship with Misael, who has been in many of your films and in 《Jauja》 plays the soldier who the captain’s daughter runs off with?
ALONSO: He’s a friend. He’s more than a friend to me. He represents much of the luck that I feel I have making films. He’s part of it. He’s part of—how can I say it—my film life, or film career or whatever. So I really appreciated the chance to meet him. He’s like a symbol to me.
RATNER: Can you talk about the beginnings of 《Jauja》? Poet and writer Fabián Casas played a big part, right?
ALONSO: Actually I stopped making films in 2008 because... I just got bored repeating the same kind of questions in the film. So I went back to the farm. I got married, I have a kid. I just changed my life completely for four or five years until I felt that I had a reason not to completely get away from films. I started writing with Fabián and he brought me crazy ideas about crazy Indians. He’s writing a novel in parallel with the film where the main character is a dog. But I didn’t want to make a film about the dog—it would not be easy. So I used characters and dialogue from his novel and put it in this script. Then Viggo got on board.
RATNER: Was Fabián, your co-scripter, on the set?
ALONSO: Yeah, for maybe half of the shoot, near the end. Fabián is a very close friend of Viggo. In a way, Viggo is in the film through Fabián. I don’t trust words. I don’t like too many in a film. But Fabián’s poetic point of view changed how I look at things through dialogues and words.
RATNER: Until 《Jauja》, you worked only with nonprofessionals, but this time there were professional actors and an international star: Viggo Mortensen. Was it a tricky transition?
ALONSO: Having the chance to mix actors like Viggo and nonactors like Misael made me happy. Even if Misael didn’t know who Viggo is. For me it represents mixing someone who has no education, who’s been working with an axe all his life, with Viggo and together we construct something in the fantasy of cinema. There are also theater people in the cast, and some crew members, people I’ve been working with for ten or fifteen years.
RATNER: All those different life experiences are a kind of undercurrent to the film. Was there any tension around the differences?
ALONSO: There was real tension and I used it. Being around Viggo, you feel nervous because he knows a lot. In a way he had to slow down to let the other people follow. It’s a good thing, especially for this film which is about a foreign guy from Denmark trying to get make contact with the soldiers, the Indians, and that part of the land where nobody rules. It was a time when people were not so civilized, especially in our place.
RATNER: His posture and attitude have a northern European formality, more appropriate to Denmark than the pampas.
ALONSO: Yeah, he doesn’t want to take off his sword, his medal, and his jacket. He is trying to understand. He thinks if he understands he will get answers. That’s his logical way of thinking because he came from some other place. But it doesn’t help him to find the answers that he’s looking for, with his daughter, or to understand what is happening in that place. And I guess that Viggo did it in a very good way.
Looking for Ingeborg, Capt. Dinesen only manages to lose himself
RATNER: Even off his horse, he moved around as if he were trying to map the territory, to get a fix.
ALONSO: He’s trying to organize things that cannot be organized.
RATNER: Certainly he’s not the first invader to try that! Your previous films were more observational, less overtly fictional; not least because of the historical setting, 《Jauja》 seems to mark a new direction.
ALONSO: The themes of 《Jauja》 are very different from my previous films. In the other ones I just worked more with real time and with observing real people doing things that they do every day. In this film there’s more fiction. In the way, it looks and in the way people deal with each other—and it’s much more artificial. I think that is partly because of Timo Salminen (Aki Kaurismäki’s cinematographer). Timo is Finnish and has a particular way of looking at nature and his own way to approach the picture lighting. So much in Kaurismäki films is fake and artificial. If you see my work, it’s completely the other way around, so for me it was a good collaboration, just to get out from my point of view and connect with... classical narrative. And it helps to remember that there are so many ways of doing things. Many times I didn’t understand, but Timo told me: you just have to create an illusion. This is cinema; it doesn’t have to be real. For me, that is kind of like committing suicide. But little by little I started to enjoy that this is an illusion and you just have to make the audience believe a little bit in that and it will work well.
RATNER: That feeling of an illusion, or maybe better, delusion, starts with the extraordinary opening shot of the father and daughter, nestled together but facing opposite directions. Was that how you planned to begin?
ALONSO: It was in the script. The script was only like twenty pages. After we shot all the pages, the soundman Catriel Vildosola approached me—he’s like a brother to me—and said: I think we’re still not feeling the relationship between the father and the daughter, maybe there is something we can do to get the melancholic feeling about those two across. I started talking with Viggo. The next day Viggo came to me and said can we do this: he wrote the lines.
RATNER: You are open to ideas from the actors?
ALONSO: Everybody has a say. I don’t like to decide many things, so everybody can suggest an idea. I pick the crew very carefully. Not just anybody can be in it, but once you are part of the family, everybody can talk and say whatever they want. It’s like a friends-and-family thing. And we live like that during the shooting. I like it that way.
RATNER: Just to stay with the opening a bit, I was struck by how much you communicate about the father and daughter. And Ingeborg is already escaping, if only into a book.
ALONSO: The book might have been there because Villbjørk Malling Agger is not an actress and maybe needed something to hold in her hands. You need lots of luck in making a film. For instance, we couldn’t put Viggo’s full-face on camera because of continuity problems with the beard. It wasn’t full enough yet. Viggo said let’s try it with my back. You focus more on the girl’s presence and not on Viggo. And it’s like a painting you know.
RATNER: There’s a sun-washed feeling in the film, a kind of overexposure.
ALONSO: Actually, I didn’t make that decision. I just picked the locations. Timo made the color correction. He’s the one who decided to saturate the colors. But most of that was already printed in the film. He just adjusted some of the color temperatures, you know, and that’s one of the things that I really liked about his work. If you saw the last Kaurismäki film, there is a non-naturalistic way of lighting and using color which I like a lot. Especially in a period movie that it should be lit by the fire, or by candles, and you can feel that Timo put this big light on the scene, creating a great distance between what you expect and what you see. It’s ambiguous in a way, no?
RATNER: It makes it feel less specifically of one era or another because of its geographical and temporal disorientation.
ALONSO: The color worked to create a unique world that only functions inside the movie. It doesn’t come from books or history. That’s why the main couple is Danish. The more conventional choice would be English, but I don’t want people to start comparing things to books. Only three or four million people speak Danish so it’s a kind of exotic language. I like how it sounds. It also references the Scandinavian or Nordic Viking colonizadores. You know they were the first ones.
RATNER: You bewilder the viewer. There’s no clear sense of where we are or what these outsiders are up to in Patagonia.
ALONSO: You want to know what they’re doing there. Even at the beginning, Captain Dinesen says to his daughter: we don’t belong here, we should go back, soon we will leave this place. I don’t know what the hell they were doing there. I think they’ve been contracted by some government. Or they just ran away. There were people who had committed all sorts of crimes who were sent away rather than being put in jail. We don’t know what happened to the girl’s mother. It’s an open question that doesn’t matter for the film.
RATNER: You worked with two editors. Did they edit while you were shooting or only after?
ALONSO: First of all, I shot the whole thing and developed the film. Then I waited a couple of months to edit the film in my own home with Gonzalo del Val, a relative of my mother’s who’d just finished cinema studies. Six months later, I still wasn’t feeling secure about everything, so I Skyped with Natalia López. I needed an outside view about the editing, about whether or not the film worked. It’s about 120 scenes, that’s all; not so many, though a lot for me. The film creates its own space and time, a reality based on rhythm and timing. It’s almost a hypnosis. And then you can use whatever happens: whether it’s a little toy or whatever, it can create a big impact on the audience. You go “real, real, real” and— suddenly—something happens which is not real. The contrast makes you pay more attention. You see that things can change in a radical way in a minute.
RATNER: You place demands on your audience.
ALONSO: I make it for me. That’s the audience.
RATNER: You’ve talked about using long takes to give viewers time to be in the film, to think about something else and then come back into the film they’re watching.
ALONSO: I don’t think that they are long. I like to have the time to think about what is happening onscreen, to have the sense of someone behind the camera telling me the film. Otherwise, I feel that somebody wants to take me by the nose and make me smell different things in different situations, and that’s all. I get bored with that. I really enjoy not understanding what is happening in front of my eyes. I’m uncomfortable because it forces me to pay attention, to put myself in someone else’s shoes, and to learn something about myself. Sometimes I just get bored, but that’s not bad. I may not enjoy a film, but I can be curious about it. I can ask myself: why did it take so long to tell me about this little thing? An idea may stay with you through all the movies you see after this one. For me, that’s how cinema works. Just to feel some excitement, that there are still mysterious ways to tell things.
RATNER: Each image is about more than its current context, right? Each time anyone views something, they are bringing their experiences, both of other films and of life, to it.
ALONSO: I like to feel some kind of aesthetic pleasure. Probably it’s more like painting than narrative. I like to have the time while I’m watching a film to understand what is happening inside the main character’s head or what I would do in his situation. Maybe I’m very slow, but I need time to understand. But people are secondary. The location is central.
RATNER: At a recent press conference, you spoke about filmmaking as a means to spend time with people you would not ordinarily encounter, because it took you out of your familiar surroundings. Your earlier films were contemporary and observational, but in 《Jauja》 you’ve made a period piece. I wonder whether your own sense of disorientation in the earlier films influenced this project?
ALONSO: It’s a complicated question. I put the crew, the actors, and myself in unexpected places. We didn’t know what we would get or how I would use a particular image or frame. But that’s fine, it’s enjoyable. With my first film, I realized that I didn’t control more than twenty percent of what was going on, but nevertheless everybody was really excited. In 《La Libertad》 we took some risks, we didn’t control the images but I really like that sensation when I’m making a movie, knowing I will learn a lot from the movie or the image. There are actually a lot of questions people ask me about my films for which I don’t have answers. I’m not trying to be an idiot or an arrogant guy. I really don’t know how I choose this or that. When you see some painting you never ask why this blue or red, or what is this triangle or circle. It is what it is.
RATNER: Did you do all the shooting at once?
ALONSO: The last part of the film was the first thing that I shot, in 2012. We stopped for a year waiting for Viggo to confirm. Then he had room in his full schedule. It was a risky structure. I enjoy that: if the films are good at the end, that’s wonderful, but if they are bad, they’re not going to kill anyone. If I learn something during the shooting that’s the most important thing to me; that, and to be working with other people. When you get out of your home and you spend two months just living like gypsies, you depend on others. There’s no phone, no internet. It feels like a nice family.
RATNER: A functioning family?
ALONSO: Or dysfunctional. But to share that feeling with a guy like Viggo and with nonprofessional actors made me feel like we are all on the same level. We were working in a serious way on the film. There’s no boss. And I really like to feel that way, as if everything could be that way.
RATNER: Did having such a big star throw things off balance?
ALONSO: Viggo was the first to wake up at seven in the morning. He got the tripod and started knocking on all the doors and said: it’s time, let’s go. During dinnertime, he’d just disappear. We said: where the fuck is Viggo? He was doing the dishes for thirty-five people! So that was quite an experience for me and for the people I worked with. They thought that since Viggo is a star he was going to be a pain in the ass. At first, everyone judged him. But by the second week, everybody was having drinks with the guy, completely in love. He took a risk being in the film. He told me he liked my films, especially 《Los Muertos》, but he worried because he read that I never know how they will end. I will appreciate his risk for my entire life. I feel very lucky to get to know an actor and a producer like Viggo.
RATNER: Do you have ideas for what you might do next?
ALONSO: (Shrugs) I don’t know. Am I going to shoot with some professional actors again? I don’t know, probably yes. Am I going to a wild location? Probably yes. Should I make the next movie more artificial or go back to the more observational contemplative way? I don’t know. I’m curious to keep getting farther from the way I live, so next time I hope to be near the Amazon. It’s like a dream for me to get inside of the real jungle and see what happens.
RATNER: Have you been there already?
ALONSO: No. I only go [to a location] once I’m shooting or I get blocked. But once I finished 《Jauja》, I immediately began thinking of the jungle, probably because in this film there were no trees. I like to be surrounded by green and trees, to get a sense of what it must have felt like four hundred years ago.
RATNER: You open 《Los Muertos》 with a view of trees, in and out of focus, very much like a child’s view. It’s certainly not a city dweller’s view.
ALONSO: I prefer not to shoot in Buenos Aires, but I keep asking myself why in every film I choose to shoot people far from civilization, far away in time. But I guess we are not that different from those guys. It might seem like there’s a lot of difference between a New Yorker and an Indian guy who doesn’t know how to read, but they’re not all that different.
Author’s Note
Special thanks to John Wildman of the Film Society of Lincoln Center for help in arranging this interview.
