Four radial lines draw the first take of SE HACE CAMINO AL ANDAR (The Path Is Made by Walking): in the background is the hazy and indistinct horizon; in parallel, the main road and its stiff and objective route; perpendicular to these, coming towards us, the winding ways of the dirt road; and, finally, shining in solar splendor and flanking the dirt ground, the voluminous bulk of the cornfield, the utter unknown. With precision, the opening image of Paula Gaitán’s newest film brings in the routes and, above all, their deviations. Path and pause, flow and interruption.
Because she knows that editing is music, Gaitán’s recent work—nothing less than two feature films and two short films in two years!—has been investigating the organic rhythms of the images that generate her narratives. While É ROCHA E RIO, NEGRO LEO (2019) and LUZ NOS TRÓPICOS (2020) are both riverine films where the flow—of water, of thought in the first, and forest in the latter—conducts the times, the constants, and the visual outbursts, her two 2021 short films invent singular repetition and difference games. Gaitán experiments with unique rhythms because they are intrinsic to the images and characters she films. In OSTINATO (2021), it is the dissonance of Arrigo Barnabé—an outstanding personality in Brazilian avant-garde music—that guides the film through ideas, music, and the dialogue between filmmaker and character.
In SE HACE CAMINO AL ANDAR (2021), this play between repetition and difference is even more explicit. It is the relationship between body and space that sets the tone. The movements of a wandering body—which sometimes fires like an arrow towards the target, sometimes drifts in the wind of native chants—surprise the camera, rendering its organic rhythm in the scenery. This body that walks at the pace of mere chance also seems to respond to an ancestral call. As in LUZ NOS TRÓPICOS, in which the indigenous character receives an elusive signal from the wind, from the river, from the music of the land, here it can be a hissing hum or a telluric percussion that makes him deviate from the road and into the green ocean of the cornfield.
A green shift, paraphrasing the title of Cildo Meireles’s iconic work, “Red Shift” (in Portuguese “Desvio para o Vermelho”), which references the cosmological phenomenon of redshifting: the expanding space in its path stretches the light that travels to Earth from distant galaxies. Expansion of space and modification of matter. Is it not the body, in SE HACE CAMINO AL ANDAR, that modifies space through its unpredictability?
The transgressive power of Gaitán’s film lies in these shifts, as in the direct fury with which the character faces an insect-like tractor in the first minutes of the film, but it also goes further. It is, above all, in the bold recklessness with which the character’s movements disrupt the landscapes, whether road or plantation, scrawling the leading lines in the film frame, inventing a rhythm that has the imprecision of freedom. A rhythm, as Arrigo Barnabé says in OSTINATO, impossible to be whistled by dictators. And it is at this rate that Gaitán has built her work over the years, listening to dissonant calls, risking green shifts, red shifts, freedom shifts. Unfolding ways by walking.
Juliana Costa is a film critic and journalist based in Brazil
