“Fire of the Wind” is a bold and inspiring debut

There is a sense of repetition in the artificial and intense diction with which Matthews bears witness to her cast, and this sense is reinforced by the pictorial compositions that frame the speakers. “Fire of Wind” is a film of images, and its attention to light and shadow, the texture of faces and tree bark, foliage and terrain, is among the most careful and daring I have ever seen. (Cinematography was done by Mateus and Vitor Carvalho.) Although “Fire of the Wind” is radically different from other films released recently, it nevertheless returns to a long tradition of political filmmaking. Mateus’s approach to having scripts delivered by non-professional actors finds its roots in the films of Jean-Marie Stroup and Danielle Huillet, while her understated, mythological exploration of the lives of poor people throughout history follows in the footsteps of Portuguese director Pedro Costa. (To accompany “Fire of Wind,” which opens at the Anthology Film Archives, Matthews programmed the film A series of related filmsincluding the figures of Costa, Stroop, and Heulett, and many other notable figures, such as Chantal Akerman, Manuel de Oliveira, and Robert Bresson.)

In Fire of the Wind, Matthews finds her own way through these powerful influences, including by locating her sense of physical drama amidst the abstract vectors of political and economic power amidst the beauty and allure of nature. While the workers, in the trees, remain still, the looming presence of the drifting bull gives the frozen stillness an unmistakable motive and makes the moments when people shift and even leap from branch to branch terrifyingly suspenseful. Eventually, the local population becomes active again at ground level: workers strike, paramilitaries roam the land with rifles, and a young soldier, wounded in the war, carries a weapon alone. This action is not just a set of plot mechanisms, but involves layers of time, where personal memories, public events, and shared experiences come alive in the place where they happened. At its most powerful and menacing, the film is full of mystery and wonder.

What makes Fire of the Wind superior to the kind of objectivity that is political filmmaking in the art-house mainstream—both here (e.g., Eddington) and internationally (e.g., the recent films of Radu Gude)—is its metapolitical core. For Mateus, as for the filmmakers in her personal pantheon, the conflicts at hand stem inextricably from local and national history but also from the depths of an ocean of experience, which can easily be dismissed as folklore, from which individual identity and collective identity emerge. In Fire of the Wind, as in the films in the Matthews anthology series, politics cannot be separated from aesthetics. These filmmakers strive for a comprehensive vision, one in which careful observation of social characteristics merges with the echoes and overtones of comprehensive forces at work in the crises of the moment.

This aesthetic is inherently political, a style designed to oppose not only systems of injustice and exploitation, but also the banality of mainstream political discourse and the reductive rhetoric of commercial cinema, which exploits and hollows it out, under the guise of addressing politics. The unity of style and content, between form and idea, is an artistic power but also an artistic and political danger. Sometimes even the most sophisticated and original cinematic styles, and the bold ideas that go with them, can become as routine and comfortable as the praise that welcomes them.

With this sense of perpetual dissent, a certain art-house aesthetic risks turning into a kind of political doctrine and turning critical judgment into a circularity: while advocates of a common political point of view endorse a style, enthusiasts of a style assume its politics, and filmmakers themselves are caught in a self-confirming circle of content and form. (This was true even for some of the filmmakers in Matthews’ choices.) The result may be a form of fan service as much as blockbuster adulation. Great political filmmakers, by confronting not only the complacency of popular political filmmaking but also the ideological comfort zone of arthouse audiences, are reviving their art. That’s why the challenging art in “Fire of Wind” — a bold first film that’s also Matthews’s personal reckoning with the cinematic traditions it inspires — left me impatient for what she’d do next. ♦