Magic Realism, World Cinema, and the Avant-Garde by Felicity Gee

Author:Felicity Gee [Gee, Felicity]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Performing Arts, Film, General, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781315312798
Google: frQgEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-04-19T04:13:36+00:00

A marvellous revelation: ‘For the full experience of wonder […] The object must be unexpectedly, instantaneously seen for the first time’ (Fisher 1998, p.17). This literal eruption readies him for what is to follow, but it is only possible because his vantage point is from an aeroplane – enabling a manipulation of view that would be very much at home in Foto-Auge – the Orinoco yields to this gaze, despite its power to dominate the earth. This is the paradox of Carpenterian discourse. In the Fundación Alejo Carpentier archive is a large photo album labelled in gold ‘Escenario De Los Pasos Perdidos De Alejo Carpentier’, which contains 28 black and white photographs of his voyage on the Orinoco River (I have no idea whether Power ever received the negatives he desired). This fascinating object provides a marvellous link between the novel, the physical, and the mental quest into la selva. As one would expect from having read the novel, the photographs detail the force of the natural habitat – river, mountains, and plateaus – ‘Dos de las Más Singulares Mesetas De La Gran Sabana’ – the jungle and its tangled trees, and ‘the highest waterfall in the world’ – La Caída Del Angel – from ground and aerial perspectives. The habitat sustains people living in stone huts with thatched roofs, alongside the modern façade of a church with a hexagonal domed tower. The Indians appear in a number of the shots, dressed in loincloths, a young boy carrying a dead bird, and a portrait of Carpentier with Fray Diego De Valdearenas (the source for the novel’s Fray Pedro) captioned: ‘El Padre Valdearnas Prefigura Un Personaje De Los Pasos Perdidos’. Bright sunshine renders the tree trunks brilliant white, the high contrast creating striking and oblique juxtapositions within the landscape. The viewer sees Carpentier in a fishing boat on the river, just as we imagine the novel’s narrator looking for signs in the twisted roots of the banks, or Mexican artist Remedios Varo’s (1908–63) androgynous female explorer in Exploración de las Fuentes del río Orinoco (Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco, 1959), which seems to illustrate the central voyage of Carpentier’s novel. The figure, surrounded by tree trunks, floats in an amphibian boat, which is magically devised from a suit jacket and fishy gills. They stare with melancholy beyond the tree in the foreground, which opens into a small alcove where a three-legged table holds a small glass goblet fashioned as a fountain. Both Varo and Carpentier had travelled to Venezuela in 1948, a coincidence that has not been overlooked (Sanchez 2006). To consider these two works of art in one breath reveals the significance of the quest, for each was interested in dreams, the alchemical power of nature and the cosmos, and the traditions of oral and metaphysical histories. As with Carpentier’s descriptive prose, Varo seems to paint ‘with her gaze’ capturing the immediate reality before her, forming a ‘rare poetry […] enigmas […] They are not mysterious paintings, they are marvelous’ (Paz cited in Lozano 2000, p.

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