Alvarez’s film is one of those which you begin to enjoy far more the moment you step out of the cinema. This is not a back-handed compliment. There is a code (codigo) to watching cinema, and when a film wilfully disrespects that code, as a viewer we feel disorientated, unsure of ourselves. However, the act of breaking the code, of fucking with time, is something that a bold filmmaker is prepared to do in order to assault and reform perception. There were times, watching La Fundición del Tiempo, when I struggled with the lassitude, but within seconds of leaving the cinema, stepping out into the actuality of Bartolome Mitre, I was basking in it. A curious paradox, but an admirable one.
The film is split into two halves. One is set in Japan. It studies a tree doctor who saved some trees which had been half-carbonised by the nuclear bomb at Nagasaki. The doctor continues to grow trees from the fruit of those atomic trees. The second half occurs in Uruguay. It focuses on a man who tames wild horses. The process is documented in painstaking detail. We learn little about the man, but everything about the process, the way in which man brings nature to heel, with a mixture of cruelty and kindness. Alvarez’ camera lingers, frets, rides with the tamed horse, as it buckles and resists before it ultimately capitulates to man’s will.
The two halves are married by an extended, Reygadas-esque sequence of mist and white light. Images appear and fade away; a metaphor for the process of watching a film where the viewer’s engagement seems to drift in and out of focus. In that sense this is a profoundly meditational experience. Rather than seduce us with narrative and flow, the film challenges the viewer to reflect. The translated title of the film might be: The Casting of Time. Alvarez compels the viewer to question their relationship to time, as a viewer and as a human being.
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