A sequence of rituals play out throughout Helmut Dosantos’ practically wordless documentary “Gods of Mexico.” Honing in on Indigenous communities and their labor in Mexico regardless of the shadow of the nation’s creeping modernization, Dosantos’s breathtaking movie remembers the work of Ron Fricke and Godfrey Reggio in its emphasis on the juxtaposition between static imagery and the syncopated rhythms of guide labor. Extremely formal in its building, “Gods of Mexico” eschews context for a completely immersive expertise that’s finally hypnotic, even when its total message typically will get muddled within the course of.
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Dosantos splits his movie into two sections: “White,” which follows employees within the South’s salt pans in crisp black-and-white cinematography and “Black,” which turns to the North’s underground mines and is offered in shade. In between these bookends are a number of posed photographs of sugar cane, tobacco, and henequen farmers, fisherman, and numerous different employees in conventional garments, physique paint, and masks. Thus, the movie toggles between motion and stasis, seemingly juxtaposing cultural rituals and traditions of labor within the course of.
In all of those sections, Dosantos foregrounds Enrico Ascoli’s sound design. Wind swirls across the movie’s topics and the sounds of scraping rakes and pick-axes present a percussive and ambient rating as everybody goes about their work. Additional, the traditional rituals of the White part are positioned in opposition to the Black part’s newer strategies of mining, which highlights using dynamite and different more moderen expertise. However what these sections imply is finally left as much as the viewer, as Dosantos merely locations occupations and cultures beside one another. The director trusts that the distinction between outdated and new strategies, black and white, will result in some kind of revelation about, maybe, the encroachment of modernity and the pitfalls of homogeneity. However Dosantos backgrounds these thematic pursuits in a movie extra occupied with presenting rigorously cultivated aesthetic portraits of a civilization at the moment in flux.
Like Reggio or Fricke’s work, “Gods of Mexico” typically looks like a screensaver that’s intensely lovely to have a look at, however opaque concerning the conclusions one ought to draw from it. This primarily derives from Dosantos’s determination to keep away from contextual readability. Who these individuals are and what these rituals imply isn’t as essential to him because the collective aesthetic that they create. This strategy creates a paradox of types. All of those various cultures and other people aren’t individualized and even named, however as a substitute create an oddly unified message about cultural variety.
Additional, the viewers’s mileage could differ on the juxtaposition between the rhythmic labor and extremely choreographed reside images. The center part of “Gods Of Mexico” typically drags. However these lingering questions appear baked into the movie’s premise and counsel a connection between the performative facets of the rituals portrayed and the naturalism throughout the work that these communities do to outlive.
“Gods Of Mexico” is a movie much less occupied with breaking down its conceptual framework — and even pushing ahead a completely realized thesis — than it’s about making a structured cinematic expertise. On that entrance, the movie proves a whole success. It’s stunningly lovely, with Dosantos’s cinematography zooming out and in of the salt pans to showcase the repetition of packaging salt or, within the latter part, following extractions from a mine. Every shot might work as a standalone {photograph}, with the landscapes virtually swallowing the folks working inside them. That visible majesty makes for a movie each extremely structured however a bit thematically jumbled ultimately, however “Gods Of Mexico” can be by no means something lower than visually and sonically participating. [B+]
