A Cinema of Slow Violence—Pablo Larraín's Post Mortem and Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven
Post Mortem, Pablo Larraín (2010)
In "Toward a Cinema of Slow Violence," Juan Llamas-Rodriguez posits an emergent category of cinema that makes visible the pervasive, quotidian forms of violence that provide the conditions for, and are often eclipsed by, sensational violent acts. Originally theorized by Rob Nixon in the context of environmental justice, slow violence is that which "occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all." Llamas-Rodriguez translates this concept to films that represent violence's less visible, less conspicuous forms. How can we begin to perceive the insidious effects of systemic violence—class conflict, political oppression, racial injustice—when we are so accustomed to spectacles of suffering, to brutality and gore in mainstream and arthouse media alike? What is at stake in a cinema of slow violence, Llamas-Rodriguez contends, is precisely this visibility—"how to devise a critical and spectatorial disposition toward cinematic figurations of violence that are not necessarily spectacular."
Read through this prism, Pablo Larraín's Post Mortem and Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven explore the contours of systemic violence in Latin America, and in doing so, offer "alternative ways of knowing about the region's traumatic past and present." In both films, violence appears in several forms and at disparate levels of visibility, the most obvious being what Slavoj Žižek labels "subjective violence"—that is, a violent act committed by a subject, or easily-identified individual. Yet the films' power as cultural artifacts resides not in their depicting these outbursts, but rather in their ability to reveal the entangled web of relations that enables such acts.
Post Mortem, Pablo Larraín (2010)
In Post Mortem, Pablo Larraín foregrounds the violence of collective oblivion in the wake of Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état. Despite taking place during one of the most turbulent periods in Chile's modern history, Post Mortem shows very little bloodshed—the extrajuidicial killings known to have occurred at the time are relegated to the space beyond the frame, registered predominately through extradiegetic sound. Glass shatters, women scream, shots are fired. The offscreen space hovers like a threat, the film's overwhelming atmosphere imbued with futility and dread. This immersive, sensorial anticipation of violence yet to come prefigures what is perhaps a more salient trauma of Pinochet's reign than the killing itself—the denial on behalf of the country's government that any killing occurred, rendering the deaths of thousands of the country's desaparecidos unmournable.
Yet Post Mortem only hints at this future—here we are still in the early stages of the coup and, importantly, we do see bodies. The film's protagonist is Mario, a civil servant who transcribes autopsy reports. As the film progresses, more and more corpses line the corridors and entrance halls of his workplace, conjuring the incremental stages of a coup that is never shown directly, but by means of its disturbances. More chilling than the images of tanks patrolling the streets, the cacophony of dissident outposts being raided offscreen, and the sight of bodies piling up in the city morgue, however, is the film's deeply ambiguous final sequence.
Here, Mario goes to visit his lover in the cellar where she has been hiding since her father and brother were arrested by junta forces some days prior. Mario moves an armoire being used to conceal a cellar door; Nancy is crouched inside with Víctor, a leftist organizer often seen with her family. They ask Mario if he could bring them something to eat, "lo que haya." Mario perfunctorily returns to his house across the street and fries some eggs; when he returns, Nancy thanks him and closes the door. In a static-frame, single-take sequence lasting over six minutes—by far the longest shot in the film—Mario replaces the armoire, then continues to assemble many more items rummaged from Nancy's destroyed home, creating a fortress of shattered furniture—a structure that would make it impossible for anyone to find them, but also impossible for them to leave.
Post Mortem, Pablo Larraín (2010)
Is Mario attempting to protect Nancy and Víctor, or kill them? This uncertainty opens up a space of possibility, facilitating certain resonances—the enormous mound of furniture, for example, calls forth images of bodies arriving at the morgue, so numerous that they are simply piled on top of each other. Yet what is striking about Post Mortem's denouement is its unspectacular nature, its ordinariness. There is nothing overtly violent about the way in which Mario entombs the two activists in their hiding place; it is Mario's vague, ambivalent approach to the task that unsettles us. Mario is as impassive here as he is at work, even when aberrations begin to arise.
Elaborating a cinema of slow violence, Llamas-Rodriguez cites Lauren Berlant's notion of 'crisis ordinariness,' a coping mechanism whereby a catastrophe is absorbed into the texture of everyday life. In Post Mortem, the scope of the coup and its consequences is so encompassing that it is no longer exceptional. One day, Mario is summoned to the director's office and briefed on a suspicious autopsy that will occur offsite. As he turns to leave, one of the military colonels interrupts him. "Señor Cornejo, congratulations," he says, "you now serve the Chilean army." Mario's vacant mien communicates a nation's paralysis—Salvador Allende, a democratically-elected president, has been removed from office and, as we learn in the next sequence, it is these same military officers who have killed him. Unable to fathom this deep, collective trauma, Mario chooses a course of inaction. As Llamas-Rodriguez notes, "there is no way out of this precarious life for the characters in this world—at least, no way that they can perceive or achieve. Acquiescing to the quotidian crisis is the only coping mechanism left to them."
Battle in Heaven, Carlos Reygadas (2005)
Acquiescing to crisis, until it is no longer possible to do so, characterizes the trajectory of the protagonist in Battle in Heaven as well. Carlos Reygadas's second film examines the unlikely bond between Marcos, a chauffeur, and Ana, a general's daughter, based on an exchange of secrets. We first meet Ana at the airport, where Marcos has been sent to retrieve her—as Marcos pushes a cart with her luggage, and Ana walks ahead, long-lens cinematography set to blight her image communicates an irreconcilable distance between the two: a gulf, an inability to see. Rather than going home, Ana instructs Marcos to drive her to the "boutique," code for a high-class brothel where she spends most her time—an activity seemingly motivated by boredom rather than economic necessity. Meanwhile, Marcos' precarious economic status has led him and his wife to kidnap an infant child for ransom, a plot gone horribly wrong when the child mysteriously dies on their watch. Battle in Heaven begins with the revelation of this secret, which Marcos willfully confesses as soon as Ana seems to notice that something is awry.
Overcome with guilt and existential dread, Marcos finally decides to turn himself into the police. Before doing so, he visits Ana, who is slumbering at her boyfriend Jaime's house. Jaime stands in the kitchen, in his underwear, cutting up a watermelon with a large knife as Marcos waits by the window. Ana rises and sends Jaime to buy a newspaper so she can speak with Marcos in private. "You won't mind us being separated, Ana?" he asks, referring to the fact that they have recently slept together. "No, Marcos. I'll keep you in my heart." Marcos leaves and pauses in the hallway; urine runs down his leg and pools on the tile floor below. Almost mechanically, he re-enters the apartment, grabs the knife from the kitchen, and stabs Ana in the chest.
How can we account for this seemingly senseless act of violence? A surface-level reading might conclude that Marcos is manifesting the rage of a spurned lover; or perhaps he has decided to kill the only witness who can confirm his culpability. And yet, there appears to be a more complex dynamic at work. In his book Violence, Žižek develops a taxonomy of violence that seeks to distinguish the spectacular, subjective forms of violence that dominate mainstream media culture from their supposedly neutral backdrop, which harbors its own forms of objective violence. Rather than fixating on sensational acts, Žižek encourages us to "learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible 'subjective violence'… to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts."
Some time prior, Marcos is seen standing outside his employer's home on a pristine street of Polanco, a well-to-do neighborhood of Mexico City. A sedan comes careening down the street, drives up and over a grass-covered median, and comes to stop in the driveway. Passengers tumble onto the pavement, cigarettes in hand, as little girls giddy from regaling through morning gossip in kitten heels. Most of the party-goers head inside, but two stay behind and relieve themselves in the trunk of the car. The little girls watch like sentinels—"cuidado!" they alert, as the housekeeper Toñita comes outside to greet them. When Toñita reaches into the trunk and picks up the urine-soaked suitcase, the children say nothing.
These contrasting scenes of urination make plain the asymmetric power relations that govern Mexican society. In the first instance, an entitled white male pees in the trunk of an expensive sedan, with the joke inevitably falling upon a brown female domestic worker, who has little choice but to acquiesce to this insult. While there is nothing overtly violent about their exchange, it registers as a micro-aggression to the audience, a manner of asserting one's position of power over another in unspoken hierarchies of gender, class, and race. Much like Mario in Post Mortem, Marcos stands by watching the scene unfold, impassively—it is nothing new to him, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet Toñita is his proxy; Marcos is also brown, lower-class, and dependent upon this family for income. Part of his job is ignoring these micro-aggressions as well.
How can one begin to process the pervasive, accumulative violence of racial and class difference? Unlike that involving his employer's son—which confirms authority, a position in a hierarchy—Marcos's urination scene reinforces our understanding of his complete lack of power. This is the ostensibly neutral background from which Marcos's act of direct, physical violence erupts. Llamas-Rodriguez elaborates, "nothing here is sensational enough to command attention, yet everywhere one looks, there are residues of the toll that the economic, political, and social transformations of the last two decades have taken on the most disenfranchised communities in Mexico."
Battle in Heaven, Carlos Reygadas (2005)