The Nightingale 2018 - writer/director Jennifer Kent (see Part 1)
The Settlers 2023 - writer/director Felipe Gálvez Haberle, co-writers Antonia Girardi and Mariano Llinás
Genre: Anticolonial Western epic
De tarde en tarde en el Sur
me mira un rostro moreno,
trabajado por los años
y a la vez triste y sereno.
¿A qué cielo de tambores
y siestas largas se han ido?
Se los ha llevado el tiempo,
el tiempo, que es el olvido.
Through evenings in the South
by a dark face I'm seen,
worked over by the years
so sad and so serene.
To which heaven of drums,
long siestas did they depart?
Time took them from here,
time, which is to forget.
“Milonga of the Dark Ones”, Jorge Luis Borges (1965)
Roberto Matta, Hagámosnos la guerrilla interior para parir un hombre nuevo, 1970.
The strongest force in history is indifference. When conflict, struggle and coercion are happening to others, very few of us want to know anything about it. When it's happening to us, we want to know why nobody cares about our plight, but if we think back to better times, and the whispering grief from far-off lands that didn't disturb our sleep, we'll know the reason why. This mighty force is of course the force of inertia, of inaction.
Compared to indifference, the other two great historical impulses are just blips which barely register, unequal as they are. The strongest of these blips is the urge to dominate, to squeeze profit and prestige and satifaction, and even sexual gratification, out of those who are weaker. The very tiniest force in global history is resistance to coercion, the insurgents who risk all, and generally lose all, so that outsiders do not come to dominate and destroy their life.
America, which was created in rebellion against an overseas empire, now considers anticolonial insurgent to be an actual bad thing. Could it be that this is what they mean by American Exceptionalism? Is it true, O Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, that only the old periwigged gents of the slaveocracy and the New England mercantilists have the right to rise up against overseas overlords?
Because it seems that, if not carried out by this OG group of plucky rebels, or Mel Gibson LARPing as a Scot, or a galactic rebellion far far away, then the same old liberal mantra of "violence shall beget violence" has been employed to draw down state violence against all those who would be free, from Vietnam to South Africa to Palestine.
Too political? Don't worry about it, that's the last you'll hear from old miseryguts here on the woeful hypocrisy of the pinche gringo yanqui imperialista de mierda, or about the manufactured consent that's rapidly reaching its best-before date and starting to stink out the supermarket of ideas. I'll leave it to our friends from the other side, the bottom side or bum end of the planet, to tackle the job.
Patricia Israel and Alberto Pérez, “America Despierta” (1972)
Let us now praise famous southern-hemisphere Westerns. We can also avoid the confusion and ugliness that speaking of a ‘Southern-Western’ entails if we go ahead and directly call it the 'Southern'. It’s a salute to the Russian genre of the 'Eastern', which is a Western going the other way, into Siberia and the Central Asian deserts. Akira Kurosawa's Russian-language epic Dersu Uzala (1975) is a classic Eastern.
One of the things about the Western genre is how well it translates into other times and places almost without trying. We've already seen how it can stand very well for the Northwest Frontier of the Raj in Gunga Din (1939). We've seen how it tracks perfectly with Australia of the Outback. Kurosawa took the Western into the Samurai Era of Japan, and his stories would come bouncing back to the American Western, copied by John Sturges for The Magnificent Seven (1960) and by Sergio Leone for A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
The Western can go to Africa, as it did for Ken Annikin's The Hellions (1961), the Vincent Price vehicle The Jackal (1964), both made in apartheid-era South Africa. Or the most visceral African version of a Sergio Leone/Sam Peckinphah-style gritty Western, Cobra Verde (1987) by Werner Herzog and starring a fully-demented Klaus Kinski as a feared but destitute bandit employed as slave overseer turned outlaw warlord in West Africa.
Is Cobra Verde anticolonialist, or colonialist as f*ck, racist from top to toe? The answer is, it's the final one of the five Herzog/Kinski collaborations and therefore so far out of its mind that mere categorization in these terms is a waste of time. It is what it is, and whatever that is, it’s magnificent to look at.
The Western can (of course) make its way to space and become a sci-fi spectacular. There are too many examples of that to name, and posibly all space-colonist yarns are really log cabins from the Great Plains transplanted to a desert or jungle planet. It can even - hear me out here - don sandals and a headband, pick up a big sword, and be a fantasy tale-Western hybrid, as John Milius' Conan the Barbarian (1982) most definitely is.
And of course it can go south and become a Southern. The deserts of Mexico are already its natural home, and scarcely count, even for excursions as exotic as Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowski's "Acid Western" El Topo (1970) which is what a Sergio Leone picture would look like if hallucinogenic peyote grew in the deserts of Almería.
But to see a true Southern you have to go to the southern hemisphere, to Australia, New Zealand or South America. It's in that latter continent that an iconic chunk of canonical Hollywood Western already takes place, the Bolivian finale of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1967), where the duo meet their end attempting to rob silver shipments. Ironically, being the gringos that they are, they have no idea where the place they meet their death is on a map, and obviously learn no Spanish in the short time allotted before their date with destiny.
The high plains of the pampas, further south, seem perfect for the realization of the Southern, a place where the gaucho already occupies the place of the cowboy. Gauchos are all but forgotten now, even in their native Cono Sur stomping ground, but when Rudie Valentino ruled the roost, the gaucho/cowboy was a potent figure in Hollywood.
Rudolph Valentino tangoes up a storm, from Four Horsem*n of the Apocalypse (1924)
One honourable mention must be made before we get on to the main event: Brazilian gaucho Southern The Killer (2017). It's a properly bleak drama, a spaghetti Western tribute which in the dubbed version is about as close to the Sergio Leone feel as anything made in the present day. Good-looking, full of action, tough as a gaucho's butt cheeks, the exception to the lament that they don't make 'em like that anymore. Arguably as good or even better than Tarantino Westerns of the same period, and unaccountably neglected.
But the war goes on; and we will have to bind up for years to come the many, sometimes ineffaceable, wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Felipe Gálvez' The Settlers, like The Nightingale before it, is unmistakeably a story about racial extermination. Just as in Tasmania, where the Black Wars of 1824-32 reduced the indigenous population from around 2,000 to fewer than 100, the Tierra del Fuego Massacres shown here reduced the Selk'nam population from about 4,000 to under 300. In both cases around 80% of the natives were killed, or died of starvation after being driven off their traditional hunting lands.
When Roger Ebert reviewed Aussie film The Proposition (2005), he stated that it was the closest cinematic realization he had seen to the Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian (1985), a gold standard for elegant art with a deeply pessimistic, almost antihumanist, philosophy, and an "existential western" with horrific violent action.
The novel’s central thesis seems to be that America, civilization in general, and most likely all of the universe, is built on War, in both the metaphysical and absolutely physical senses. The violence in McCarthy's book is not simply in the action, but in its extreme apocalyptic worldview.
The Settlers more literally conforms to the action of Blood Meridian, which follows a group of American mercenaries hired by Mexican authorities to annihilate Indians and bring back their scalps for bounty. Here brutal Scot MacLennan the “Red Pig” (Mark Stanley), Texas Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and the reluctant young half-blood - or mestizo - Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) are hired by a rancher to do exactly the same. He will pay them per ear taken from the corpse of a slain Indian.
So how does the film compare to the McCarthy classic? In a Village Voice review which describes the film as "a revisionist’s revisionist Western", Michael Atkinson notes the Blood Meridian parallels, but argues that
evoking McCarthy and his most violent book is a little misleading - most of what you might hear about The Settlers is about its brutality, but I found the movie almost strangely tasteful… [the violence conveyed] in an art-film’s-discreet-distance kind of way."
In the case of the movie, he argues, the sheer brutality of ethnic cleansing, of hands-on genocide, is not confronted (as it is repeatedly in The Nightingale), and instead the film concentrates on the other strand of what makes Blood Meridian so popular, the lyrical evocation of the beauties of a landscape as far from civilization as can be:
Gálvez is more interested in the stark ranginess of the landscape, and nailing down this time and place. At once both dogmatic and engagingly eccentric, The Settlers does smudge its evil-colonialist through line... Instead of ceaseless slaughter à la McCarthy, the film has a spare picaresque shape to it.
Michael Atkinson, “Felipe Gálvez’s 'The Settlers' Portrays Genocide Through an Art House Lens” Village Voice, January 12 2024
Though the description of the film is accurate, Atkinson misremembers Blood Meridian, which has a few striking set pieces of almost unbelievable brutality, but is very far indeed from "ceaseless slaughter". In general, the literary zeitgeist tends to exaggerate wildly the violence of McCarthy's novel, and there are much much worse around. Large swathes of the text are taken up by descriptions of the troop passing through meadows, forests, plains and deserts, and revelling in the texture and particularities of these places. Only Mexico's sun-scorched desert is missing from the film's exploration of landscape.
The central figure is similarly ambiguous in both stories. Cormac McCarthy's Kid is judged by Judge Holden as being uncommitted in his heart to the savagery he has undertaken along with the other Indian-Hunters: "You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen." Likewise, mestizo kid Segundo is judged from the beginning as an ambivalent figure by Texas Bill: "Half Indian, half white: you never know who they're gonna shoot."
Though Bill is an uncultured cowboy with little learning, unlike the tremendously erudite Judge Holden, it's noticeable that he is much given to judgement, talking almost constantly about how things are supposed to be: officers should have army units, they shouldn't eat fish but meat, they musn't leave traces, and so on and so forth. He's a judge with very little sense of what's really judicious. Just as The Kid in McCarthy comes to face off against the Judge but fails to kill him, so too Segundo on the first expedition to an Indian village has a clear shot at Bill but shoots wide.
But most driven by hate toward the kid Segundo's ambivalence is MacLennan, who rages at his "judging eyes": "You watch me with those eyes one more time and I will extinguish your f*cking flame." This is followed abruptly by the kiss of death, a bizarre and threatening moment, and the order to go and rape the maimed native woman they hold captive, so that Segundo no longer has the moral high ground to judge him from. Clearly the theme of judgement, and actions with and without judgement, weigh heavy on the story and its murderous characters, just as they do in Blood Meridian.
The film will play, as does McCarthy's book, on what the ambivalent attitude of the protagonist really means. We don't see Segundo killing a native during the raid, but he takes part in the expedition and helps the others do so. He commits one killing that we see, which could possibly be considered an act of mercy, and later confesses to a larger number that “we” did. He doesn't kill the killers when he has the opportunity, and thus indirectly condemns the village to death.
Segundo's passive approach in the face of slaughter gains nothing for anyone, just as the Kid's secret reservations about his murderous work changes the outcome not at all, and only provokes the unending quest for vengeance from the Judge. Meanwhile Segundo is plagued by visions of a monster or god that may be his judge or his destiny.
Narratively, this film has the same "spare picareseque shape" as Blood Meridian, the same terseness of dialogue and mestizo mixing of English and Spanish language. It even follows the exact same structure of a main narrative followed by an extended epilogue many years later. The film, like the novel, absorbs many literary influences, not least McCarthy's novel itself in a self-sustaining loop of reference.
But it begins, in a very Godardian way, with an extremely ironic citation from Thomas More's original utopian fiction, Utopia (1516): "Now your sheep are, they say, so voracious and savage, that they will devour even men." The sheep, shown as radiant innocent creatures grazing on the plain, will indirectly cause the genocide of a whole people, as Señor Menéndez seeks to clear the natives out of the way.
The cinematography is absolutely magnificent, the natural lighting and heightened contrast a welcome respite from the Netflix-standard low-contrast pastel shading. The mid-range colour saturation goes superbly with the contrast, and the chromatic aberration - a blurring and prismatic fracturing of colour at the edge of the frame - is a nice touch, perhaps taken from certain scenes of The Assassination of Jesse James... (2007). Here the effect is made constant but quite subtle, presumably to suggest the same retrospective passage of time. Again, this cinematic tweak complements the visual style perfectly.
Since the landscape is in fact a central player in the drama, it's a pity that the film isn't shot in full widescreen. Other art-house films of recent years have preferred the boxier academy ratio, even if wide shots of extensive vistas are important, such as Godland (2022), while others with an emphasis on expansive landscape stay widescreen, such as The Promised Land (2023) and The Northman (2022). While there's no hard-and-fast rule, I feel that the widescreen ratio is really the way to go if a sense of vast space is desired, and very little is as wide-open as these Tierra del Fuego plains. Yet the aspect here is midway between the 4:3 academy ratio and the fullscreen.
The music by previously unknown composer Harry Allouche is an updating - with a synth flavour at certain moments - of Ennio Morricone-style spaghetti themes at the beginning of the film, as if to ease us into a genre Western. It modulates to much more angular jagged sound as the film goes on and the trauma grows, much like Mica Levi’s music in its art-horror impact.
Because of its release in the same year, this movie will naturally bear comparison also to Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, which also charts the attempted extinction of a Native American people. What they do have in common is that despite whatever racial animus the dominant characters have against the natives, and there's plenty, their primary motivation in seeking their murder is economic. But really, other than that bare exposé of similar capitalist-colonialist intent, the similarities are not so great.
The Settlers roams around a vast landscape in pursuit of a simple plan of racial extermination, meeting people who come and go like wisps, while Killers stays in one place to follow a byzantine conspiracy to murder certain members of a tribe, and all the characters have their place in this intricate plot.
So The Settlers is, like Blood Meridian, a story about genocide, a crime against humanity, and the judgement that will or won't await those who commit those crimes, or those who order those acts to be committed, or the rest of us who stand by and watch while they go on.
It is permitted to call this story one of genocide, and apparently that isn't anti-Chilean. Blood Meridian has also been called a story of genocide, and it seems that isn’t either anti-American or anti-Mexican. As with the Tasmanian story of The Nightingale and The Black War, which can also correctly be described as a genocide without somehow being thereby anti-Australian. Some may disagree in all cases, but those that use the dread g-word are not branded as criminals and summarily shut down. Such is the nature of a liberal-democratic state at the service of the cruelest, most militarized form of settler colonialism.
Which brings us back to indifference, domination, and resistance: the gold, silver and bronze medallists of internatonal relations and world history. But indifference, though so much more powerful, is so much harder to make a film about than the other two. There’s cinematic spice in domination and resistance, just ask Mel Gibson. But indifference is so… indifferent to cinematic treatment. Perhaps only The Zone of Interest (2023) has really got to grips with it in film.
