A Meditative Militancy

In Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd’s filmography, Lost Land (Territoire perdu) is the last chapter in a trilogy that began with Drowned in oblivion (Le Cercle des noyés) and The Dormants. Those three films are anchored in the Sahel landscape, as well as the filmmaker’s personal life. But they’re connected by a reflection on a history that urgency and immediacy have abandoned, by a poetics of humanity — the dignity of living and surviving, of knowing how to die —and finally by stylistics and a vocabulary that creates “signs,” as Roland Barthes would say.

Bearing witness to the world presupposes a gaze and a memory, once you leave behind the world of information, news and front-page headlines.  Who remembers the Oualata prison near the Mauritania border?  Who still talks about the Sahrawi people, trapped in the sands between Algeria and Morocco ? Or the Polisario struggle that’s dragged on since 1975 ?  Or that 2,500-kilometer-long wall that merges with the dunes, yet is guarded by sentries as fixed as rocks — a forgotten illustration of the “Tartars’ Desert”?

Camels as “incipit,” the first image, first sequence, introducing a still trembling and open story.  Penned in, shackled, they go in circles on the sands and in the winds.  Like the men who are also prisoners, they are nomads condemned to immobility, chased off their land when Morocco demanded possession of the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony.

The long story of exile and loss isn’t going to convey any informative antecedents, any ideological stands.  Just voice-over narratives.  Stories of flight and death, of interminable waiting.  Factual, discrete, terse accounts, like bones.  Coming from both sides of the wall — halted or persecuted lives.  It’s not about a stream of words but sequences that share their tragedy with the omnipresent wind, the conductor of a resonant score, a recitative in two voices.

Shot in black-and-white, Lost Land is built on contrasts — contrasts that convey zones of emotional or reflective resonance, not unexpected forms or narratives.  Shots steeped in a blinding light, the obscurity of tents; empty images of a stony grayish desert, alien to the esthetic sweep of the dunes.  And on this landscape with a lost horizon, given over to the void and the hostile, men and women, closely scrutinized, faces in close-up, a long litany of unsmiling images, impassive, arrested in a sleepwalker’s present.  Young soldiers held in the absurdity of a war without combat; elderly men seized in the folds of their wrinkles or their turbans, skin and fabric indistinguishable; crouching women, the Fates, without cursing, yet guardians of the missing.

Fragmented by words that trace themes and form chapters and carry violence in their very meaning — “the camps,” “the wall,” “the resistance” — Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd’s film speaks of the misfortune and injustice of a world and, in the same way that it explores the very nature of cinema, speaks about “Here and elsewhere.”

Jacqueline Aubenas