[ad_1]
This film about a flute player and farmer named Jose Perez Lopez from Zinacantan in Chiapas, Mexico, abounds with beautifully shot footage of people playing music, embroidering, participating in daily community rituals, and tending to their flower crops in polytunnels—pretty normal everyday things. It feels a little more elevated because it gives a glimpse into the lives of Mayan descendants who practice ancestor worship and polytheistic beliefs, but also have shrines of Catholic saints. The film’s website has convenient part of the text regarding Bats’i son ta Sots’leb, the traditional music of Zinakantan described in fascinating musicological detail.
It’s a shame that this kind of explanatory background is nowhere to be found in the film. In fact, the subtitles and dialogue never even give the names of the people we watch most of the time. You can only tell that the old man’s name is Jose and the woman who laughs at him for drinking so much is Elvia Perez Suarez, probably his wife, and that they also live with a hard-working younger man named Esteban Perez Perez (probably Jose and Elvia’s son) and some even younger children: Esteban’s children? Random kids from next door? Who knows, because this strictly stylized film is determined to adhere to a high art documentary aesthetic in which nothing is explained, nothing is contextualized, and there is no idea what point or purpose it all serves, other than a little digital tourism to a remote corner on the earth.
Also, to heighten the sense of high seriousness, the montage consists of long shots seemingly randomly tacked together with little to no variation in tempo as we watch the subjects engage in banal conversations and go about their business. The film only really comes to life when the music plays, and there is a bit of insight provided by the voice-overs of José himself explaining how he was actually told he should become a flutist by a visitor from his ancestors in a dream. But the filmmakers don’t delve deeper than that; the studied air of folkloric artlessness feels somewhat pretentious and dismissive of its subjects, who present themselves as mystical native others through the camera’s macroscopic lens.
[ad_2]
