The visual element is not discussed as often as it should be (other than,“it looks really pretty”). I will be looking for these techniques in other films and have added Los Muertos to my Netflix que.
Excellent analysis, Bob! It was watching this film and absorbing your approach that inspired me to approach Wanda in a similar way (thanks for that).
Los Muertos has almost no dialog (though it’s hardly a silent film), eschewing traditional narrative in favor of a contemplative style. I would have enjoyed the film on this level alone, but what I was fascinated by was exactly the “how” you examine here—how the framing creates constant tension between its subjects—even if one of the subjects is nature itself. It’s an excellent technique since I think it works on the spectator intuitively even if they’re not conscious of it.
I noticed Alonso using this framing in several other scenes, including the somewhat abstract opening in which we see the corpses and someone walking among them, framed on the left side and only partially visible. It seems to suggest, again using only the visual, that the walker is not important—these events occurred and nothing can be done to alter that fact. Juxtaposed with the lush jungle landscape (harsh, unfeeling Nature) the point is driven home.
Wonderful piece, and I feel it my duty to inform anyone that has not seen it yet… Facets has recently released Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool on R1 DVD. It is both a continuation and departure for Alonso in that it is his first film outside his initial trilogy, but again places a “protagonist” on a search to reconcile his past (and to do so he must, again, leave wider “society” behind). It’s almost a remake of Los Muertos, actually.
But on Los Muertos:
This is a very interesting deconstruction of Alonso’s framing. And there is a definite balance achieved between Vargas and his natural surroundings (one thinks of the scene in which Vargas kills a goat in which the goat is given the center of the frame and Vargas (though standing over the goat) is centered in the left, even being cut off by the framing). It’s interesting how this idea instructs the other two films in the trilogy, which all use a similar approach to framing to come to altered conclusions on the same concept.
Thank you for this Robert! This topic had been discussed briefly during the Directors’ Cup match and I am glad to see it expanded upon. Los Muertos is a great film, IMO Alonso’s best. The framing does indeed give Vargas a sense of unimportance, especially when juxtaposed with nature. Liverpool does a good job of expanding the sense of man being lower than nature that is displayed in Los Muertos to an urban setting.
@ Joe and Karen This particular convention was more vivid Los Muertos than in any film I have seen – the film with the most visual conventions is probably Citizen Kane.
@ House it works on the spectator intuitively even if they’re not conscious of it
Yes, understanding the power dynamic between objects is a survival necessity – theoretically there is some universality to the feelings that framing produces.
Los Muertos is the sole Alonso feature I haven’t watched yet. Quite a helpful review in retrospect, one more reason to delve into this after I’ve watched it. And you’re all so experts on how to save film stills, damn you!
Bump.
Great post.
“…understanding the power dynamic between objects is a survival necessity…”
That’s it—I was trying to solidify why it was so intuitive and that makes perfect sense. The frame’s affect on our perspective is to order that power dynamic for the spectator—it’s the director’s manipulation of how to view the scene (whether that manipulation is intentional and regardless of agenda).
I can think of numerous examples of this, but I’m trying to think of an example that’s contrary to these ideas—that uses reverse-psychology as it were in its framing. Any ideas?
Fascinating post. Are you certain the left side of the frame is meant to be psychologically weak here? If one constantly puts the protagonist on that side of the frame couldn’t that simply be a way of suggesting that in this case the side that is usually weak is strong, or simply creating what HOL calls a “constant tension?”
I agree with everyone here Robert, this is a fine post indeed. (It seems like we’ve been getting an unusual amount of good conversations lately, which is something to be supported.) Although I haven’t seen Los Muetos, I think this type of close analysis is very helpful in thinking about a whole host of films. I would caution about reading the frame weighting the same way for all films though since as Mike points out there are times that tension is built by “breaking” the weak side rule, which works due to the less stable frame, and thus understanding of a frame, that a motion picture has versus a still picture or painting, and by certain less objectively measurable factors like the “who” is being placed where and our identification with certain stars or characters, as well as the invisible use of dialogue helping to create a different sort of directional “feel” to a scene as if the words themselves hold additional weight. I’m sure you may have some thoughts on those kinds of ideas but they didn’t fit into this particular film. I also have a feeling, one that I’ve seen some evidence for but not studied in enough depth to make a broader claim about, that the weighting of the screen you are speaking of is more true in western films than in some eastern ones. I suspect this, if true, has to do with the direction one reads a page in different laguages. I noticed the direction of traveling, suggesting going “forward” or “back”, to the future or past in essence, does have, at least, a greater degree of variance in Japanese films than in US ones for example.
@ House
There are many aha moments in Arnheim’s book The Power of the Center after which one thinks: that was obvious. For example, when he talks about larger objects exerting more power than smaller objects.
The thing to be aware of is that there is a dynamic – it is the dynamic that is important – not that the large object has power, but what does that power do in terms of being or acting on a center-of-influence.
@ Mike Spence
Would you have framed the river scenes that way?
I think House found tension because they were framed counterintuitively. Traveling from right to left is more comfortable for most. Arnheim explains that feeling is the result of center-of-influence having the ‘correct’ psychological weight by way of its position in the frame.
@ greg X weighting of the screen you are speaking of is more true in western films than in some eastern ones. I suspect this, if true, has to do with the direction one reads a page in different laguages.
You’re mixing visual processing with language: the visual perception of symbols when reading vs the hearing of spoken language. How that works, I don’t know.
I watched a Kenji Mizoguchi (the king of mise-en-scene) film once to see whether the objects had a discernable psychological relationship to the ‘HOW’ of the film. Visual thinking is about integration or disintegration of structure. e.g. if the object is foreground or background and which quadrant it is in matters visually. I don’t have to know it is a sake bottle or the significance therein.
Another perspective on the film, though he does mention a bit about “the visual how” as well.
The Killing Floor
Benjamin Mercer on Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos
“What do we know about Vargas, the main character of Argentinean filmmaker Lisandro Alonso’s second feature, Los Muertos? About as much as we know about the protagonists of Alonso’s two other features—2001’s La Libertad and 2008’s Liverpool (Fantasma, an hour-long 2006 film set in a Buenos Aires movie house, rounds out the director’s body of work)—which is not a lot: that he is from a remote part of Argentina, that he is a man of very few words, and that he has grown accustomed to an all-consuming daily routine, in the graying Vargas’s case a long incarceration for the murder of his two brothers. In all of Alonso’s films—which look at the lives of the rural poor, often observing non-actors in long, contemplative takes as they approximate for the camera their everyday labor against scenic but vaguely threatening natural backdrops—the director takes a quietly defiant stance against cinematic conventions. The only label the thirty-five-year-old filmmaker doesn’t apparently shirk is that of “Argentinean”; the director’s committing to film of some of the country’s most remote and forbidding locations, for the most part far from bustling Buenos Aires and its most basic amenities, practically constitutes a national project at this point. Otherwise, Alonso’s films are meditative but thoroughly unsettled: his films refuse the documentary classification by insisting on including fictional elements, and reject the narrative categorization by dropping hints concerning character and story only obliquely.
“So we gradually learn during Los Muertos’s opening chapter that Vargas has been imprisoned and why, but any other significant information about him, particularly regarding his interiority, is less readily discernible. At the beginning of the film he’s in the last days of his sentence in a rural jail, where inmates are more likely to share maté than menace each other. The prison has a morning roll call and established sign-out procedures, but it’s not punishingly institutional in any traditional sense, with an overgrown, sun-dappled yard and what seems like a rather leisurely work routine. Vargas appears less at ease once he’s freed from the place, though he feels the pull of family, setting out immediately to visit his daughter. Before his trip, he spends most of his savings at one provisions outpost, buying her a green blouse, the only gesture Vargas makes in the film that suggests anything like tenderness. (For point of reference, direct lines of inquiry about his inner life in the film go nowhere; when a boatman later asks about Vargas’s brothers, Vargas claims to have forgotten the whole horrific episode.) Like the woodcutter Misael, who inquires eagerly after his mother over a payphone in La Libertad, and the sailor Farrel, who treks over the Patagonian tundra to check in on his mother and daughter in Liverpool, Vargas contemplates his separation from his own family, and attempts, however feebly, to atone for it. These are hardened men resolutely on their own, but we know they have at least considered the alternative of family togetherness.
“But Los Muertos is the most radical of Alonso’s features because of the nature of what we don’t know about the protagonist: namely, whether or not he is a serial killer. The film begins with a prologue that hangs the specter of death over the rest of the film. During this brief sequence, shot in disturbingly calm whorls (this is perhaps the most conventionally stylized sequence in Alonso’s oeuvre), we glimpse two corpses lying face down on the jungle floor, and a blade-wielding figure flitting by. Later, we see Vargas slay a goat with a machete, slitting its throat and letting its blood cascade onto the floor of his boat. To survive in the kind of jungle terrain that Vargas traverses, surely you must be able to slaughter a marooned and seemingly helpless animal without pause, but there is something off-putting about the efficiency with which he removes its innards and scrubs down the emptied inside of its body. Tellingly, we do not see him cooking or eating the goat, as we see Misael do with an armadillo at the end of La Libertad.
“So we have only these instances of violence to suggest a way of filling in two troubling blanks in the last third of the film, elliptical domestic scenes through which Vargas ominously drifts. On his way to his daughter’s, Vargas stops at the dwelling of a woman named Maria, the wife of a former fellow inmate, to whom he delivers a letter. She also has a son, Angel, a carpenter. Vargas dines with them and stays the night, emerging from their house in the morning by himself, washing his face, hands, and hair, and without any sort of farewell making haste to his boat. Alonso then cuts to him by the river, cleaning his machete. At the end of the film, when Vargas, goat carcass in hand, finally reaches his daughter’s residence—only to find that she is not there, having left her son in charge of his younger sister—Vargas enters the tent where his grandson and granddaughter take shelter. He brings his machete in and lays it down. The camera wanders off, focusing eventually on a plastic toy on the ground outside the tent; chickens pace back and forth. There is a noise that sounds like the machete being picked up before an unsettling, though none too loud, ripping sound.
“Whether Vargas is a cold-blooded killer terminating those he visits with extreme prejudice, or whether something altogether more benign is going on here, is a question that Alonso is all too happy to leave unanswered. After all, one suspects the minimalist, ever eager to play with audience expectations (the opening credits to the glacially paced La Libertad and Liverpool both feature incongruously uptempo music), enjoys structuring the narrative of Los Muertos as a linear horror film of gathering suspense, but one which at every turn refuses to acknowledge the horror, looking away when violence might rear its head. This is not a film that recoils at any suggestion of bloodshed—as the prologue and the goat-slaughtering sequence attest. Violence is not beside the point, then. It is Alonso’s suggestion, rather, that it is immaterial whether Vargas remains a killer after his incarceration; despite its initial prison-film trappings, this is emphatically not a film about recidivism—this seems a foregone conclusion for Alonso’s other protagonists, who yearn to change, yet don’t appear capable of it—but about the dominion of the landscape.
“Alonso’s films are never so much about what as where—severe settings that condition their inhabitants to adhere to strict routines, to constantly keep in motion performing their lonely work, resigned to the likelihood that if they rest for too long their surroundings will engulf them once and for all. These places often open up space for contemplation only to rapidly colonize it, both for the characters traveling through them and the audience watching—in the case of Los Muertos, in which the camera lingers over lush greens, the viewer’s mind wanders before coming back around and registering how hypnotically (and terrifyingly) lush the flora is. Alonso often drifts away from his protagonist to gaze on the environs. When Vargas gets off the back of a truck, the camera stays on, keeping track of him in the receding distance until he is no longer visible, at which point the camera pans up to the tops of the trees and the sky; later, the camera strays from him while he’s rowing downriver, drawing attention to the thick of the jungle on either side—but it never feels as if the film’s focus has shifted in these moments. Vargas is always adapting to the environment, so in that sense he seems to become a sort of mirror image of it.
“The same could be said of Farrel, the sailor in Liverpool, who uses his leave to undertake a long journey home. He is often captured tramping through the icy expanse of Tierra del Fuego in long shot, as if he is making no impression on the icy environment, that it’s entirely indifferent to him, and that this is, at least in part, the source of his restlessness and anxiety (the contents of his gym bag include a bottle of vodka from which he takes generous swigs). At one point in Los Muertos Vargas is guided by a boy who wields his own machete, hacking away just to clear a path through the trees in front of him. It’s one reminder among many that you must constantly push back against the jungle if you want to survive in it—even more than you would in a tundra like Liverpool’s because a jungle is constantly growing. Though Vargas doesn’t betray any obvious form of panic, his trip through the jungle might easily be described in a series of increasingly desperate defensive actions: walking, paddling, pulling, swatting, slashing.
“Los Muertos is an open-ended horror film about an environment where violence is part and parcel of daily life—or where a man might simply be forced to kill his brothers to save them from the terminal agonies of starvation (the original motive in the Los Muertos script, according to the critic James Quandt’s thorough Artforum survey of the director’s work). We don’t know much in the traditional sense about Alonso’s characters, but we learn, gradually, that their behavior is conditioned to a large extent by the severe Argentinean landscapes we see them moving through. Their worlds are beautiful but unforgiving places that can pare down their agency to the basic rigors of work and survival—the title La Libertad might as well conclude with a question mark—and, as Los Muertos chillingly asserts, even turn killing into little more than a reflex."
whether or not he is a serial killer
Or whether it was in self defense. The killings didn’t look passion filled.
The implement shown in the film was a narrow spear used for hunting.
Maybe an argument got out of hand. Completely irrelevant, which the author gets to later.
there is something off-putting about the efficiency
Same with the bees, which the author skips over – which tells us that life in the jungle is a matter of efficiency and opportunity.
There is a noise that sounds like the machete being picked up before an unsettling, though none too loud, ripping sound.
Not there in my version – I actually replayed the end half dozen times – there was a muted conversation.
The author gets this right:
…despite its initial prison-film trappings, this is emphatically not a film about recidivism—this seems a foregone conclusion for Alonso’s other protagonists, who yearn to change, yet don’t appear capable of it—but about the dominion of the landscape.Their worlds are beautiful but unforgiving places that can pare down their agency to the basic rigors of work and survival.
Here we agree, but I went a step further – nature is beautiful = good = moral; thus, Vargas is adapting to the morality of the environment
he camera strays from him while he’s rowing downriver, drawing attention to the thick of the jungle on either side—but it never feels as if the film’s focus has shifted in these moments. Vargas is always adapting to the environment, so in that sense he seems to become a sort of mirror image of it.
Good piece.
Excellent stuff, Robert.
OK, I just watched this, and I’m not sure if I should post my thoughts here as Robert has some specific comments about the filmmaking, whereas I want to talk more generally about the film—specifically its larger meaning. (Oh, well, I guess I’ll post here.)
Robert said, We know the ‘about’ from that dialogue: the protagonist, Argentino Vargas, is leaving prison and making a journey ‘back’. The killing of his brothers is forgotten now. The idea is about the possibility that he can return both metaphysically and physically
Whoa, now. Your description only gets at the superficial level of a the film’s “aboutness,” imo. For example, people have mentioned the way the film convey’s man’s relationship with nature—which I wasn’t my first impression while watching the film, but might be what the film is about on a deeper level. While watching the film I thought it was going to be about not just a return, but a reunion or reconciliation with his daughter (the man prepares the sacrificial scape goat on his return)—similar to the film, The Return, only a more narratively stripped down version. But then the daughter is not there (which seems meaningful)—and then the final shot—which seems to the one of the most crucial shots in the entire film—at least with regard to what this film is really about. It’s the shot of the action figure (which the man drops after fiddling with it), what seems to be a toy unicycle and some young chickens running into the frame. I have no idea about the significance or meaning of the film, but my sense is that the interpretation of this scene is crucial. And this is what I want to discuss.
@ Jazz gets at the superficial level of a the film’s aboutness,
Yes, I kept the ‘about’ minimal, which seemed appropriate as I try to explain the ‘about’ through the ‘how’.
man’s relationship with nature…..might be what the film is about on a deeper level.
Yes, and then, what is Alonsos saying about that relationship through the imagery?:
Vargas is depicted in the nature panoramas on the left side or the lower left of the frame. He is a single human form in a potentially “lesser” relationship to nature. The eye does a balancing act – it wants Vargas to be the center-of-influence, but Alonso’s framing has given Vargas a very low psychological value. This might explain why some feel the jungle is threatening. For some, however, a balance is achieved.
my sense is that the interpretation of this scene is crucial. And this is what I want to discuss.
In the final scene, Director Lisandro Alonso brings the visual, aural, and temporal together at once. The camera angle slowly lowers until the child’s toy is center frame; we faintly hear an untranslated conversation; leaf shadows sway in the light. His journey completed and the dead forgotten, Argentino Vargas has returned.
Indeed there are many interpretations to the ending, some rather bizarre.
I can’t believe I missed this thread the first time around. Nice job, Peabody.
Mercer’s take is ridiculous.
but there is something off-putting about the efficiency with which he removes its innards and scrubs down the emptied inside of its body.
WTF? It’s called “field dressing” and I can do it nearly as efficiently as Vargas. Thus, I must be a serial killer, too.
yeah, that was bizarre. In fact I went back and listened for this and it wasn’t in my version:
There is a noise that sounds like the machete being picked up before an unsettling, though none too loud, ripping sound.
That sound is not there. I had a serial killer for a gardener when I lived in El Salvador. He mowed my yard with a machete, so ruthless were his slashing skills.
Jerry sounds like he’s lived an insane life.
For those interested in Alonso may I suggest Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May? This is an interesting article on the ties between the two filmmakers. Here’s an excerpt (the second shot) from the film… and if you want to see the whole thing PM me.
My version was Netflix, so I couldn’t be sure but that would skew the entire film and be opposed to what we are told outright in the dialog.
A case of materialistic misinterpretation I presume…
Jerry sounds like he’s lived an insane life.
Longevity will give one that aura….
I’d laugh at that Robert, but since I think I’m on the wrong side of Jerryy in that regard it would be too painful. Glad to see this thread resurrected anyway, since it’s a particularly useful one. Still haven’t seen the film though…
I checked out three different versions of the film. There is a breakage sound (not a knife slashing through flesh sound, as I know what that sounds like- this is more like someone stepping on leaves or sticks or something) followed by items being placed or moved on a wooden table. Are the sounds interpretable as Vargas slashing his grandson and laying down his machete? I guess so. Does this interpretation follow anything that goes on before? Absolutely not. I watched the entire film again (because I can’t watch one scene from this amazing film without doing so). Alonso shoots with absolute clarity. He picks non-actors and films them in their surroundings for more absolute clarity. There is no sleight of hand- only empathy. If the viewer feels alienation at Vargas’s quick and expert food kill and wants to relate it to the violent tragedy in Vargas’s past, then that speaks of the viewer’s psychology. Vargas still has to eat, no matter if it offends the viewer’s amateur psychoanalytic abilities. Maybe that’s why I love the film so much- subjective interpretation in the face of such moral clarity is a fool’s game.
Which version is it? how can you tell which, by the minutes?
He could have been teaching the kid how to use it – is he going to kill the kid and wait for the mother to return – it portends another episode.
I’m sorry- not version, but digital transfers. I wanted to make sure the Kino dvd I have wasn’t somehow missing a soundtrack layer or something so I tracked down an online upload from Argentina and another from Europe.
So there are other versions – how strange is that?
Are they director’s cuts? doctored?
This sounds like a case for Rossi…
It could just be in the quality of the audio transfers—that the sound is not audible in the one you watched.
No no no Robert- I misspoke- I tracked down three different “transfers”- I’m sure they were all the same cut. Although I’m laughing at the idea of a three-hour “director’s cut” of Los Muertos.
Robert W Peabody III
When I want to know what a film is ‘about’ thematically or message-wise, I study the dialogue. When I want to know the ‘how’ of a film, I study the visuals.
The joy of art lies in its showing how something takes on meaning – not by referring to already established and acquired ideas but by the temporal or spatial arrangements of elements – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The ‘about’ of a film is roughly equivalent to ideas and the ‘how’ is roughly equivalent to the arrangements of elements. Although the three elements of film – aural, temporal, and visual – produce the totality of a film, I am interested here in exemplifying the visual – the way in which the visual elements work to form their own totality of meaning exclusive of the temporal and aural.
Visual meaning is sought in the mise-en-scene. The visual relationships form the ‘how’ of the film and are the way meaning is communicated. The relationships between the visual elements within a single frame have an allegorical power dynamic that express meaning.
I have chosen Lisandro Alonso’s film Los Muertos as the film example, because of the sparse dialogue.
The About
00:32:48 —> 00:32:49
Chamorro, man at Lavalle: They told me that you were in jail.
00:32:49 —> 00:32:53
Argentino Vargas: No, I don`t remember anymore. It`s over. It`s all forgotten now.
00:33:18 —> 00:33:21
Chamorro, man at Lavalle: She told me that you were in jail….that you have killed your brothers.
00:33:21 —> 00:33:23
Argentino Vargas: Yes, yes but I forget it. It`s all over…
00:33:46 —> 00:33:54
Chamorro, man at Lavalle: And now you`re going back to the isles… You`re going to see Maria.
We know the ‘about’ from that dialogue: the protagonist, Argentino Vargas, is leaving prison and making a journey ‘back’. The killing of his brothers is forgotten now. The idea is about the possibility that he can return both metaphysically and physically.
The How
How Vargas makes his metaphysical and physical return is communicated visually. The many methods of reading cinematic visuals provide a fresh insight into a film, making for a more meaningful viewing experience. Rudolf Arnheim’s book The Power of the Center gives us a convention for reading the following frames from Los Muertos.
Within a frame there is sought a center-of-influence. If there is a human form within the frame, the eye will go there with the intent of establishing that human form as the center-of-influence – think of that propensity as the herding instinct – our eye wants to be with that other human.
When a film frame is divided into quadrants, a psychological value can be assigned to each of the quadrants. The left-hand side is psychologically weak. The lower left is usually an entry point to a scene. This is not where one puts the center-of-influence, unless you want to diminish its power.
Here we see the protagonist, Argentino Vargas in prison:
Notice Vargas is framed lower left. Not only is he assigned a lower value, but he is separated from a very robust human activity in the background of the frame. There is a power dynamic at work in the relationship between Vargas and that activity.
Here we see Vargas as he journeys along the river:
Vargas is depicted in the nature panoramas on the left side or the lower left of the frame. He is a single human form in a potentially “lesser” relationship to nature. The eye does a balancing act – it wants Vargas to be the center-of-influence, but Alonso’s framing has given Vargas a very low psychological value. This might explain why some feel the jungle is threatening. For some, however, a balance is achieved.
The grandson:
The grandson is center frame until he climbs the tree and picks the fruit. As he eats, he is placed left-side; given the lower psychological value. We see that human existence in the jungle is an existence shared with nature – there is an implied morality to that framing, a quid pro quo.
The above three frames show us the possibility, the how of Vargas’ return: he separates from group life; he is in balance with his surroundings; he re-assumes the implied morality of his people through their quid-pro-quo relationship with nature.
The final scene:
In the final scene, Director Lisandro Alonso brings the visual, aural, and temporal together at once. The camera angle slowly lowers until the child’s toy is center frame; we faintly hear an untranslated conversation; leaf shadows sway in the light. His journey completed and the dead forgotten, Argentino Vargas has returned.