campo (d. tiago hespanha)

Campo is a dreamy, immersive documentary which describes a world which the film’s texts, taken from the likes of Carl Sagan, suggests might be a simulacrum for the world itself, if not the universe. This world, the opening banner informs, is the site of the largest weapons training site in Western Europe, a place where NATO troops play their war games, blowing up doors, running through nightfields, shooting at targets. However, the film’s art is in the way it recognises that the military grandstanding is only part of this world. The natural world flourishes in an environment that cannot be inhabited by humans - the military are always transient, bivouacked in tents, on the point of moving on. There’s a neat juxtaposition of a bird watcher, whose notes detail another ‘campo’, that of the birds who squabble over their territories, cutting to soldiers admiring the manoeuvres of fighter planes, before segueing on to a group of model plane aficionados who also use the Campo. This sequence is typical of the film and its intention to highlight how the warlike element of the Campo merely co-exists with the other natural world elements. As such, the Campo contains multitudes, and the film seeks to honour all of this variety, from the birth of a lamb to the discovery of a dead pregnant sheep. It’s a cunning piece of filmmaking whose deceptive simplicity masks the profounder elements of its investigation into the condition of existence, something which a sequence with some amateur astronomers teases out. On a more technical level, it might be worth observing the film’s commitment to editing from light to dark; it has no fear of a jarring edit, for example cutting abruptly from nighttime military manoeuvres to the quiet calm of a wilderness morning. There is, natch, something biblical in this approach, and Hespanha’s film, with its nods to Guzman and Eisenstein, (perhaps) carries off its dry ambition with a masked aplomb.