Filming as listening

The ground of a swampy area, on the bank of a river. On top of the damp sand, pebbles and sticks accumulate. The textures are imprecise, but the focus is on a nest holding four eggs at the bottom of the shot. The framing remains still for several minutes. There is no cut. But our hand and our words hesitate to describe the prologue of Eami as a “static shot”. The borders do not move nor is there any interruption, yet from the start the shot is constantly changing, rejecting any notion of fixedness. The wind blows bringing with it leaves, feathers, dust and smoke, wave upon wave. The sound is a symphony of noise, of fire and air, animals and machines, nights and days, suggesting presences in all directions. The colours range from daybreak blue to twilight yellow, from grey to fire-red, as if a single period could contain the most disparate of times.

In the middle of this incessantly shifting image and sound, a woman’s voice narrates the origin myth of the Ayoreo people, up to a point of rupture. There was once a breath, from which was born the wind, and from that wind there came a song, and from that song burst forth all of nature’s inhabitants. There was a time when the whole world was Ayoreo. Until one day there appeared a strange sound, heartless men and women — the coñone — and all those who lived in the forest had to run away. The mountain turned to fire and ashes, and now the survivors walk the land without respite. In these myriad visual and sonic events, which appear in sequence or intertwined, temporalities condense and overflow the space-time of a single shot in a film. What Paz Encina proposes, here in the prologue and throughout the rest of the film, is a refusal of form based on linearity and chronology, and an embrace of forms derived from myth. And myth is condensation, but also transformation. Eami is boiling lava: in it are deposited the millennial sediments of an ancestral tale — which, nevertheless, boils. Fertile like those eggs, its form continually embraces a kind of permanent indeterminacy.

The word “eami” means forest, but also world. Our protagonist is a bird who narrates in the Ayoreo language using an adult woman’s voice, but she is also an Indigenous girl with an angelic voice — who, in turn, is called Eami. We see her for the first time being cared for by a shaman. Perhaps in a trance, perhaps a spirit untethered from a body, she traverses the land in search of her lost friends, as the film gathers together glimmers: a house battered by the wind, lived in by a white woman; hunters toting guns; fragments of a landscape now devastated, now exuberant; Indigenous people captured or dispersed across the land, trying to escape imminent disaster.

What we see in these fragmented scenes, however, is barely half of the experience of this film. Since Hamaca Paraguaya (2006), Paz Encina has proven to be one of the great sound designers for film of our times, and Eami is another strong step in that direction. For each rigorously sculpted image, a thousand sonic shifts destabilise the surroundings. Besides the narration, the soundtrack is composed of a multitude of animals we never see, the incessant sound of trees battered by the wind, and also Indigenous voices who, in documentary tone, give substance to the story. Every now and then the sounds of our bird-protagonist’s wings pass by, from one ear to the other, like a prophecy or statement from hell. Indeterminate, errant, the sound surrounds us and forces us to imagine.

And as it is sound’s nature to waver, to disperse, the director composes every image like someone who listens, much more than like someone who sees: every shot in Eami has an erratic quality, hesitant, between watchfulness and dream, figuration and trance. Just as the virtuous cycle of Indigenous life — marked by harmony between humans, fauna and flora — has been interrupted by the vicious cycle of white invasion, which over repeated incursions has devastated the land, so is Eami made from the superimposition of those very cycles: to this transmutation of Indigenous cosmology into cinematic form, producing a tessitura free of dichotomies, clear borders or obvious teleology, is added the hellish return of devastation, which gnaws at the film from the inside. Eami is a film of irresolute apparitions and unsuspected resonances. Our eyes will never be sure of what they are seeing. Our ears will never be spared. Rightly so.