Vila Amaury was a city built in 1959 in Brazil by the workers employed to construct the new capital Brasília, to house them and their families. Assembled from the discarded materials found on the nearby construction sites, it grew rapidly until it was submerged one year later, by the artificial lake created to alter the region’s dry climate. This story doesn’t appear in AFTERWATER, but it is where the film started. While diving in the shallow waters of Lago Paranoá, where the remains of the city can still be found, I made images that found their way into a couple of my previous projects. The people that saw them then shared stories of their own in turn, about other lakes they knew that were also hiding ruins beneath their surfaces. The shape of the film to come began to emerge, lake by lake.
G. Evelyn Hutchinson was an ecologist, zoologist, and biologist. He established a whole new academic discipline, that of limnology, which is dedicated to the physical, biological, and chemical characteristics of lakes and other inland bodies of water. His key work to this end is called “A Treatise on Limnology”, which was published across four volumes between 1957 and 1993, and in which he writes: “Lakes seem, on the scale of years or of human life spans, permanent features of landscapes, but they are geologically transitory, usually born of catastrophes, to mature and to die quietly and imperceptibly.’’
How does one imagine something at once near and out of reach, in thrall to the elements, the surface of its water offering nothing but a clear mirror?
Encountering Hutchinson’s work transformed what had begun as a film about submerged settlements and drowned histories into one about lakes themselves, both as biotopes and as repositories of imagination. How does one imagine something at once near and out of reach, in thrall to the elements, the surface of its water offering nothing but a clear mirror? Fictions overflowed. There was Miguel de Unamunos’s 1931 “nivola", “San Manuel Bueno, mártir” that describes a fictional village on the edge of a lake, inspired by Lago de Sanabria in Zamora, which they say holds a submerged town in which all the problems and crises that govern life on the surface no longer apply. There was also Theodor Fontane’s novel “Der Stechlin”written between 1895 and 1897, impossible to separate from the Brandenburg lake of the same name. There were Slavic folk tales about water spirits, the poems of Wislawa Szymborska, and the writings of Anna Tsing.
With these different currents pulling in all directions, the idea took hold to make a film as fluid as water itself, to begin one story and make it flow seamlessly into another, drifting out ever further as parallels, rhymes, and echoes appear. I saw cinema as a tool to capture a multiplicity of species, languages, materials, temporalities and ways of being together. Shifting from present to past to future, from digital to celluloid to analogue video, from community to community and body to body, floating through a certain type of landscape: a reflective surface onto which one projects images and stories. On it, by its side, and around it we gathered friends—including one from my previous films—alongside actors from an entirely different cinematic universe and performers from the world of dance, uncertain if what we were making was narrative, experimental, or something else entirely. These were liquid images. Springing from the experience of floating in cold water and that feeling of being touched by everything, this is a film that forages for links between what we are, what we have forgotten, and what we can’t yet see.
These were liquid images.
As we were finishing the film in March of 2020, I went dancing a couple of days before the spread of the Covid-19 would make it impossible to do so for years to come. As I was surrounded with thousands of spinning bodies, enveloped in steamy air, weary, but oblivious of what laid in front of us, a thought crossed my mind: time is a riddle, and the answer is now. After this last dance, it seemed that everything but time stopped. When I think about AFTERWATER now, it appears as if not coming from some other time, but being about time itself, about water and time, the feeling that we’re running out of water and that we’re running out of time. Where to go to? What to do?
Dane Komljen
Works Cited:
G. E. Hutchinson: “A Treatise on Limnology. Volume I: Geography, Physics and Chemistry”, John Wiley and Sons: New York: 1957.
