Director: Rodolfo Pérez-Luna
Writer: Rodolfo Pérez-Luna
Running time: 12mins
The first two months of 2023 saw a series of wildfires ravage Chile. By early February, the outbreaks had escalated into at least 406 individual blazes, several dozen of which were classified as “red alert fires”. The resulting catastrophe burned across more than a million acres of bush and forest, and resulted in the loss of 24 lives.
One year later, poet Rodolfo Pérez-Luna sought to summarise the madness and abject horror of the events, with the release of Humarola Tragacielo. Billed as a “multimedia poem” by Pérez-Luna’s release notes, the short film (which is currently available for free on YouTube) sees him narrate his own poem over imagery of creaking, ashen trees; distant walls of fire snaking across hillsides after dark; and amber clouds looming menacingly over Gran Concepción – Chile’s third-largest urban area.
Pérez-Luna deserves credit for his words – because at various points, the poem conjures up metaphorical hellscapes more lucid and disturbing than any of the visuals he makes use of. The poem’s name itself translates as Sky-swallowing smokestack – and this is more than matched in the verses which follow. “Gloomy petals rain down”as “oppressors of breath”; while “cannibalistic bonfires clash over the rooftops” – something which “opens a wound” that rips right across the country. For all the visceral descriptions of the devastation, however, there is something lacking in the film’s delivery of them; most conspicuously in the narration of Pérez-Luna himself.
Pérez-Luna’s vocal performance carries all the emotional weight of an airport announcement, a cadence defined by a single repeated peak-and-trough – up at the start, and down at the end – without any further character or intonation. In some of the less disciplined tracts of the writing, this is especially problematic. Pérez-Luna has a predisposition to lapsing into long lists of things (the kinds of environment caught in the huge area of the blaze; the kinds of animals harmed by the fire, the kinds of trees which are being burned), which viewers will struggle not to simply tune out of, as they are lulled to a vacant stare by his lethargic vocal performance.
At the same time, the poem at the heart of Humarola Tagacielo suffers from some rather uninspiring audio-visual mixing. Most of the images we are shown are static stock photographs of the fires, available for free use via a Creative Commons license – but are so distant and non-descript that they offer next to nothing in terms of complimenting Pérez-Luna’s prose. Clearly this is something he recognised somewhere down the line, because he has attempted to bring them ‘to life’ by inserting plug-in effects of billowing smoke or falling ash in several of the frames. But rather than breathing some energy into proceedings, those jarring additions tend to underline just how stationary everything is.
In an ideal world, here, the filmmaker would have gone and gathered their own original moving images to help illustrate things. It need not be the most stunning footage possible – especially not when the unfolding drama is so colossal anyway – so even just iPhone movies would be an improvement on the flaccid imagery on display here.
Admittedly, in the case of Chile’s huge wildfires, this was an extremely dangerous situation, and I don’t think any film is worth being cooked alive for. The thing is, that does not get our poet off the hook, either. He could have taken the time to head to the afflicted areas after the fires had burnt out, and captured a first-hand view of the world the disaster left behind – which would have given his words more importance when describing what was once there, and more impact when they contrast with the ashes that are gathered there instead. It would also have given him the opportunity to gather more natural ambience to soundtrack his film with – rather than the trite (and slightly cheap) stock sound effect of a crackling fire which plays over most of it, making this feel as menacing as a YouTube atmosphere video.
There are neat touches which Pérez-Luna and audio-visual producer Diego Silva add to help frame the piece. With the poem presented as a travel-diary, seemingly from the perspective of the fire, bookending proceedings with the opening and closing of a scorched, leather tome is an effective visual aid to help us understand that. But as a whole, the multi-media experience as a whole ends up feeling like an antithetical millstone around the poem – one which often seems to make it more difficult to engage with the writing of Pérez-Luna, than if we were to read it ourselves.
