“Fire of Wind” Is a Bold and Inspired Début

There is a sense of replay in the heightened and artificial diction with which Mateus has her cast bear witness, and this sense is enhanced by the painterly compositions that frame the speakers. “Fire of Wind” is a movie of images, and its attention to light and shadow, to the texture of faces and of tree bark, of foliage and terrain, is among the most careful and most daring that I’ve ever seen. (Mateus and Vítor Carvalho did the cinematography.) Although “Fire of Wind” is drastically different from other films in recent release, it nonetheless harks back to a venerable tradition in political filmmaking. Mateus’s approach to the declamation of text by nonprofessional actors finds its roots in movies by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, while her mythic, loamy exploration of the lives of the poor through history follows in the footsteps of the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. (To accompany “Fire of Wind,” which is opening at Anthology Film Archives, Mateus has programmed a series of related movies, including ones by Costa, Straub and Huillet, and many other notables, such as Chantal Akerman, Manoel de Oliveira, and Robert Bresson.)

In “Fire of Wind,” Mateus finds her own way through these mighty influences, including by locating her own sense of physical drama amid the abstract vectors of political and economic power amid the beauty and the lure of nature. While the workers, in the trees, stay still, the bull’s looming, drifting presence gives frozen stillness an unambiguous motive and makes moments when people shift and even leap from branch to branch terrifyingly suspenseful. Eventually the locals get active again at ground level: the workers go on strike, paramilitaries wander the grounds with rifles in hand, and one young soldier, wounded in war, bears arms alone. This action is no mere set of plot mechanisms but involves a layering of time, in which personal memories, public events, and shared experiences come to life in the place where they happened. The movie, at its most vigorous and most menacing, is also illuminated with mystery and wonder.

What makes “Fire of Wind” superior to the kind of topicality that passes for political filmmaking in the art-house mainstream—whether here (such as “Eddington”) or internationally (for instance, recent films by Radu Jude)—is its metapolitical essence. For Mateus, as for filmmakers in her personal pantheon, conflicts at hand stem inextricably from local and national history and also from oceanic depths of experience, too easily dismissed as folklore, from which individual identity and group identification emerge. In “Fire of Wind” as in the films in Mateus’s Anthology series, politics and aesthetics are inseparable. These filmmakers strive for a comprehensive vision, in which fine-grained observation of social specifics fuses with echoes and overtones of overarching powers at work in crises of the moment.

This aesthetic is inherently political—a mode devised in opposition not only to regimes of injustice and exploitation but also to the banality of mainstream political discourse and to the reductive rhetoric of commercial cinema, which, in the guise of treating politics, exploits it and hollows it out. This unity of style and substance, of form and idea, is an artistic strength but also an artistic and political danger. Sometimes even the most sophisticated and original of cinematic methods, and the bold ideas that go with them, risk becoming as routine and as comfortable as the praise that greets them.

With this sense of permanent opposition, a particular art-house aesthetic risks becoming a kind of political credo and turning critical judgment circular: as defenders of a shared political viewpoint endorse a style, enthusiasts for a style assume its politics, and the filmmakers themselves get caught in a self-confirming circuit of content and form. (This has been true even for some of the filmmakers in Mateus’s selections.) The result may be as much a form of fan service as are the blandishments of blockbusters. Great political filmmakers, by confronting not only the complacencies of popular political filmmaking but the doctrinal comfort zone of the art-house audience, revitalize their own art. That’s why the challenging artistry of “Fire of Wind”—an audacious first feature that is also Mateus’s personal reckoning with the cinematic tradition that inspires her—has me impatient for what she’ll do next. ♦