One should really start at the end. Tell how, in a slow rise of intensity, then in crude violence, a first cow, soon followed by the entire herd, clambers painfully on to the ferry, surrounded by the barking of dogs and the shouts of the cowherds. This Dantesque scene, oppressive in the extreme, is the brilliant counterpoint of a story which indulges in the contemplation of a universe that is quasi-inviolate, traversed by ancestral voices.
Tierra de Agua by Carlos Klein is an incantation extolling a particularly wild and little-known region of Chile. Nevertheless, people have lived there for a long time, as these magnificent pictures filmed in 1943 bear witness, and perhaps since even longer ago. The old man questioned by his daughter testifies to this bygone era of conquest when herds of cattle seemed plentiful and life more intense. Today, a bridge is going to link this end of the world to civilization. But isn’t it already too late? At the end of the film, the eldest inhabitants seem to abandon this territory forgotten by their fellow men.
Working on the hypnotic slowness of the rhythm and the bewitching beauty of its pictures, lulled by chants of a strange profundity, Tierra de Agua blends three periods which incesantly intermingle and live together: that of time immemorial, of the recent conquest by man, and of an uncertain future. It is an ode to a mystic earth that marries sky and water, clouds and vapours, and which predatory man and the domestic animal will never inhabit save as stowaways.
Bertrand Bacque from Visions du Réel (translated from french). See original text.
...Last but not least, Tierra de Agua (Land of Water), by chilean Carlos Klein, has been a consequent moment of this festival. There are mixed together several series of pictures, old and recent ones, colored and black and white ; all in their own ways talk of an andean
vale, far south on the borders of Patagonia, and they interweave in a visual dialogue that not one quotation troubles. Far from the paradigmatic heap used by Guo to show the urban frenzy, Klein procedes by syntagmatic simplification to grasp his subject. This valley, we will never know its name : the man, who is supposed to tell its story, has lost his memories. The pictures witness through a gap of fifty years a wonderful likeness of the land and one cannot even say History stutters here: it seems it never attempted to pass over the first word. Violence is not missing, but it has no hegemonic will for a principle –rather the simple natural of immemorial gestures, and their performing is no longer a question as their outward eternity puts them before any moral division of good and evil. Klein shows us a world whose animality is almost edenic, a land in ille tempore, preceding the fault, motionless and because of this sacred, strictly speaking “put aside”.
The direction is in unison with the subject. The movie does not only represent but it actualizes this permanence in the time of the screening. This is enforced by a derealising and fictionalizing sound track, giving the frames an intermediate (and intermediary) status. The will of the author seems to be initiatory more than documentary: this country, that two ferrymen on the river forbid us to trespass, the director opens its doors to us (as he has seen and transmuted it) ; he even offers us the beast and the officiants of the purifying sacrifice. Omnipresent water is like the tool of an imposed baptism (the “original innocence” again) and, in endless shots, reminds us by and by of Andreï Tarkovski’s Stalker. This Carlos Klein’s second film has great beauty and spiritual strength. Not eluding one of the shelves inherent to his project, he wraps and assimilates them. The result grows extensively, fragile and lively as a
moss.
Stéphane Pichelin on Festival des 3 Continets (translated from french).
