El Mar La Mar (2017): Experimental cinema in one of Earth’s most hostile landscapes (Review)

The title of Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki’s experimental documentary, El Mar La Mar, released on Blu-Ray by Second Run, refers to a passage in Anabasis by Xenophon of Athens. A chronicle of the victorious campaign of ten thousand Greek mercenaries to secure the Persian throne for their employer Cyrus the Younger, its most famous moment comes when the soldiers reach the top of the Turkish mountain now known as Madur. Spotting the Black Sea on the horizon, they cried “The sea! The sea!”, realising they were in sight of home. Bonnetta and Sniadecki’s translation of the phrase into Spanish is a first clue to their subject matter. The voyagers they’re chronicling are not soldiers, there are far more than ten thousand of them, and they’re not looking for their old home but a new one. The film is an attempt to evoke the journey of Mexican immigrants into the United States.

The first point Bonnetta and Sniadecki make is that crossing the US-Mexico border involves far more than just walking over a line on a map. It’s a simple point, but one that rarely makes it into debates on immigration. Any immigrant headed for either California or Arizona will have to cross the Sonoran desert, one of the most inhospitable landscapes on Earth. The task is so difficult that regular patrols are sent out to recover the bodies of those who couldn’t make it; El Mar La Mar alludes to this with indirect yet chilling shots of shoes and water vessels abandoned in the middle of the desert, bleached by the relentless sun.

These shots – and the whole structure of the film, which is told in chapters – reminded me of the grislier scenes of parched animal carcasses in Werner Herzog’s desert-set films like Fata Morgana and Cobra Verde. Yet Bonnetta and Sniadecki are, I think, trying to avoid something Herzog regularly does. At the Berlin Film Festival screening of Herzog’s 1992 Gulf War documentary Lessons of Darkness, the director was accused of having turned the destruction of Kuwait into an aesthetic spectacle with slo-mo and opera. There are some scenes in El Mar La Mar that recall Lessons of Darkness, like the hauntingly beautiful scenes of California wildfires at night. Mostly, Bonnetta and Sniadecki’s ethics are more aligned with Claude Lanzmann, who famously refused the lure of archive footage or re-enactment in his Holocaust documentaries. The point is that some atrocities should remain beyond visualisation out of respect for the dead, an ethos El Mar La Mar puts into practice by regularly cutting to a black screen overlaid with voiceover.

I’ve read some reviews from people who saw El Mar La Mar in a cinema and found this to be a truly overwhelming experience. It’s easy to see why. Imagine the absolute, enveloping blackness of the cinema space during these scenes, listening to the often deeply disturbing testimony and found audio on the soundtrack. At home, the experience is diminished. Second Run have done their utmost, securing a director-approved transfer that preserves the flickers and film grain that play across the frame even when there’s supposedly nothing on screen. It’s just that the fundamental question you’d ask of a documentary that isn’t interested in the visual – why didn’t you write a book, or make a podcast? – is harder to answer in a home environment.

In between these challenging stretches, there are incredible visual coups in El Mar La Mar. The film opens with a flickering, experimental evocation of the border fence, and there are desert vistas beautiful enough to suggest Bonnetta and Sniadecki could have easily made a landscape film in the manner of James Benning if they’d wanted to. When you’re talking about James Benning as the more commercial alternative, it’s clear that the film won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it has a cumulative power that can’t be denied. J.P. Sniadecki is affiliated with the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, which has previously produced experimental documentaries by Lucien Castiang-Taylor, the director of Sweetgrass, Leviathan and Caniba. Castiang-Taylor is prone to giving interviews where he lauds himself for creating something superior to traditional documentary forms without, in my eyes, really demonstrating that superiority within the films themselves. On this evidence, Sniadecki is talented enough to let the film do the talking – or rather, leaving that to the audio interviews.

For all it didn’t fully convert me, El Mar La Mar can sit alongside Second Run’s previous releases of work by Albert Serra, Pedro Costa, Raed Andoni and Kevin Jerome Everson as evidence of their laudably democratic belief that the non-festival-going public should get the chance to judge new avant-garde cinema. There is simply no way that any other label would release this, and perhaps this is why I wasn’t disappointed that the extras weren’t as numerous as previous Second Run Blu-Rays: the film is the bonus. Perhaps it’s also because the extras that are there are of such a high quality, with Gareth Evans giving an in-depth video appreciation of the film, and an impassioned booklet by Patrick Gamble.

Graham’s Archive: El Mar la Mar