Mariner of the Mountains (2022)
Aïnouz's journey from Brazil through the documentaryfictionethnographymemoir looking glass to Algeria
Country: Brazil (with an assist from Algeria)
Director: Karim Aïnouz
Time: 1 hour and 38 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Mubi (free w/subscription), Amazon (w/free Mubi trial)
What It Evokes: Traveling alone, rumination in unfamiliar spaces, paths not taken, visual ethnography
Any archive (photographic, written, material) tends to prioritize the exceptional—a fact that has long frustrated historians. Today, we primarily create visual archives of our lives, with perhaps our highest volume of production occurring during travel. This makes sense. Venturing to an unfamiliar space leads us to confront the exceptional. Of course, our memorialization of travel (the photos, the posts, the in-person regaling after the fact) offers only a partial picture of our experience, tending towards moments of excitement, novelty, encounter, happening, action. When traveling to well-known locales, we photograph ourselves at landmarks because it is expected and because it involves us within a ritual performance of travel easily understood by social counterparts—the Eiffel Tower becomes a metonym for Paris. (Naturally, there are variations on this theme and rejections of it.) Yet, whether we venture to famous destinations or places less frequently visited, travel always removes the routines and customs that structure and facilitate the smooth operation of our daily lives. This absence often forces forms of self-encounter: who are we without the practices and procedures of “normal” life? Traveling alone to alien spaces often generates an acute feeling of outsiderness, itself anchored in our anticipation of others’ perceptions. We are seen as a novelty, as an object of inquiry. This process inevitably recalibrates our sense of self. It’s a difficult thing to capture in a photo.
Karim Aïnouz’s “documentary” centers on his first trip to his father’s homeland, Algeria, in the wake of his Brazilian mother’s death. In the 1960s, his parents met as graduate students in the United States. Soon after his mother became pregnant, Aïnouz’s father returned to Algeria (putatively to assist with the country’s reconstruction following the 1954-1962 Algerian War of Independence, though the details remain somewhat sketchy). He married an Algerian and never saw Aïnouz’s mother again. Growing up in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza in the northern state of Ceará, Aïnouz’s interactions with his father comprised telephone calls and brief meetings in Paris beginning only in his later teenage years—a relationship founded in absence and abandonment. Following his mother’s death, Aïnouz traveled to Algeria with a camera, informing his father (who now lives in Paris) of the trip, but not inviting him. Instead, he made Mariner of the Mountains, a film about solitary travel in unfamiliar spaces and the things we can and cannot learn about others and ourselves in the process.
Aïnouz’s work of imaginative documentary leverages montage and short scenes from his time in Algiers and Tagmut Azuz, the Kabylia town in which his father grew up, paired with voice-over musings and observations spoken in Portuguese to his mother, Iracema. (Her name derives from an 1865 José de Alencar novel centered on a relationship between an indigenous woman and a Portuguese colonist who have the first “Brazilian” son in the state of Ceará, which perhaps functions as the movie’s central metaphor.) If the trip’s purpose is to understand his father and his choices, Aïnouz’s itinerary lacks any concrete plan geared towards these discoveries. He encounters various individuals, engaging in brief conversations that reveal only the barest hints of richer lives. In one choice scene, Aïnouz stumbles upon three young unemployed men sitting on an Algiers corniche. One of the men explains that he’s attempted to leave the country for Europe seven times, only to be deported back to Algeria on each occasion. Finally, he says that he wishes France had never left. (In part, the film emerges a memorial for the Algerian dreams never realized after independence.)
These brief interactions with local Algerians take on a certain power because so much remains left to the viewer to assemble. We’re party to mere seconds of lives, forced to imaginatively reconstruct the rest. This process is paralleled by Aïnouz’s attempts to work out (through imagination, archival footage, and the barest bits of information) his parents’ relationship, as well as his recognition that certain things about their feelings and choices (towards one another, towards the countries from which they came) will forever remain unknowable. This opacity grounds the film’s interest in different forms of dislocation: Aïnouz in Algeria, his father after having left home, his mother after her relationship dissolved.
The film’s breathtaking visuals (featuring many long shots with deep depths of field) create a sense of expansive geographical grandeur. Because the quite intimate narration does not always speak to the film’s images in obvious ways, their coterminous juxtaposition reinforces Aïnouz’s sense of outsiderness and incongruity, itself underlined by the fact that he is almost never shown in the film. The rather self-conscious “artistry” of the work explains why it has occasionally been labeled an “essay,” or why those who have written about it tend to qualify the “documentary” designation. (These are obviously neither stable, nor particularly precise, categories.) If we’re eager to fit it within a genealogy, then Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) feels like a clear influence. But it is perhaps best to think of Mariner of the Mountains as a strategically ecumenical piece of filmmaking, drawing from documentary, various strands of Latin American literature, ethnography, and memoir. It remains a deliberate construction, a film that can be at times quite slow and meandering, which for this Substack is really saying something. There are unquestionably moments when the meditative tips into the mannered. Yet, I’ve found certain images from this work have lingered—whatever its faults—since first having seen it. At its best, Mariner of the Mountains is a visually stunning piece of filmmaking that captures something deeply resonant and honest about traveling alone (whatever one’s particular purpose or aim), while simultaneously exploring the limits of our ability to comprehend others or ourselves.
Go Down The Brazil/Algeria Rabbit Hole With:
Gillo Pontecorvo — The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Héctor Babenco — Pixote (1980)