New Moons: Helena Estrela

Helena Estrela shoots a kind of horizontal cinema. Outside of her work, I have never seen so many actors lying down. I’ll list the occasions. We first see the mysterious female protagonist of Bela Mandil (2018) sleeping on her back against rocky terrain, and she takes up this position two more times in the course of the film, once with her legs open, as if to receive something, in a dream of ultra-violence, and then again on the floor of a cave next to her lover, as both drowse in a rectangle of light. Both Transportation Procedures for Lovers (2021) and Sol e Sorte (2022) feature women lying down, mostly alone, but sometimes interrupted, while the subject of Dreams lies on her side with her head in the lap of another woman who strokes her hair. In Carta #6, another woman throws herself down on a couch. We only see her back, not her face. Other images of immobility abound. When Estrela’s characters move, they do so stiffly. If they stand, they rarely walk. If they look, they do so dreamily. Last of all, they do not speak, but declaim. For the most part, they speak to themselves. Subjects rarely share a frame. Limbs are often separated from their bodies and each other.

The effect created is dissociative, distancing. Sometimes it feels as if the whole world is on the verge of falling asleep, too, or as if it has already been broken down into the fragments of a dream. Of all Estrela’s films, Sol e Sorte conveys best the dreamer’s subjective violence. A woman lies in the grass and watches the sun sink in stages. Her eyes close and we see silver rings tumbling to the ground, a bright orange sky, green forest, blue sky, orange forest, deep indigo. Next a woman laughs as she slips the rings on her fingers. She twists them in order to see the different colours they take on as they adjust to the warmth of her skin. Fittingly, they are mood rings. This scene in particular feels like an inside joke. Estrela’s films explore the clash of mind and matter, and in them mind usually wins. The world outside bends to the whims of the dreamer or the drowsy observer. The nuclear orange forest of Sol e Sorte is preceded by the dead crimson dream of Bela Mandil. Even the extreme desires of Transportation Procedures for Lovers are never entirely rejected. Though FedEx cannot facilitate the transportation of people or of ‘souls singing in flame’, the silver earring of a wolf-turned-shepherd hanging from the ear of the woman who records their refusal on a postcard (for whom?) hints at the possibility of other mythic inversions. Later, a woman attempts to learn telepathy from WikiHow.

In circumstances like this speech can happen, but dialogue rarely. ‘Yesterday I dreamed that I woke up and couldn’t speak,’ a man reads from a letter in Transportation Procedures for Lovers. We do not know if it is addressed to him. The only conversation – in which a woman phones FedEx – that happens in this film may as well be automated. With the exception of Bela Mandil, nobody is caught talking to another person, or at least onscreen. In Platica de una Flor (2020), a man addresses an unseen or absent other, but his statement, which is repeated, is cryptic, completely hermetic. Near the end of Transportation, a woman’s voice dictating text in English is cut with a man’s voice reading aloud a search history. Voices may coincide but they do not exchange. The same is true for the supposed lovers of Bela Mandil. It never feels as if they are talking to one another, but reciting a speech each learned long ago, the dictates of an isolated, barricaded heart. They have eyes that can see the other, but which cannot recognise them. Though they might watch from their ramparts, they never descend from them. Save for Transportation’s one kiss, even a limited physical intimacy is prefaced by line drawings that might have been taken from other online tutorials.

What all this amounts to is a relentless insistence on our separation from ourselves and others, our inability to truly touch or hear or see. Perhaps more than anything else, Estrela’s filmic style reminds me of the technique of blason in Elizabethan poetry, its refusal to provide a complete or objective portrait of anything or anyone. Instead what we are given is explicitly coloured by individual feeling, and we are left to piece together what the poet, or filmmaker, has seen and interpreted for us, or even to try and build alongside them something that was never before glimpsed in its entirety, to try and see, and to see truly, against all the odds.