pives-1 Reviews

Jackal of Nahueltoro (1969)

A Powerful Memory

[8/10 · 26 January 2007]

This movie has haunted me for over 30 years--since the one and only time I have seen it. The images that I recall were black & white in a straightforward documentary style, but much stronger than most due to its unflinching eye. The camera watches a grindingly poor Chilean "indio" meet a destitute widow and her several small children who have been evicted from their hut and cast into the street. Later, in a drunken rage at his own inability--and what seems to be his recognition that they will come to nothing better--he brutally murders them (the title is from a tabloid headline, I think). While awaiting execution he is cleaned-up, learns to read, and begins to have an inkling of consciousness of the world beyond. And that is the supremely powerful and heartbreaking irony: he has become the opposite of "The Jackal of Nahueltoro"--a good citizen.

I almost never run into anyone who has ever seen or even heard of this film, but in its own small way, it is a masterpiece.

El Sur (1983)

A lyrical intensity

[16 September 2001]

I feel compelled to relate this as it has been at least ten years since I saw this film (in a student union theater) and it still has a powerful hold on my memory. I have been unable to find it on video, so my recollections are fragmentary.

I was so impressed, involved, and moved by this tale that I left the cinema feeling as if I were floating just above the pavement. One is quietly and adroitly drawn in by the mystery that the young daughter in 1950s Spain senses in her father. The political dimension is brilliantly nuanced, carefully alluded to without speechifying. The wondrous cinematography captures light so deftly at times that it is almost luminous: late afternoon sunlight across a room, snow slowly falling (viewed through a window), a rain soaked street at night. As the daughter grows to adolescence the enigma of her reticent father begins to clear. It may not sound like much in my words, but from wool Victor Erice has spun gold.