Borges, always he, in his story The Ethnographer imagined the story of a man of science who, after having lived and dreamed in the heart of the Western tribes, after having known the mystery of their shamans, gave up, given the incomprehension of the Academia, from the perhaps futile effort to explain what was learned.
When recounting the experience, the secret vanishes and with it the sense of what was lived.
"The secret, moreover, is not worth what the paths that led me to it are worth.
You have to walk those paths "
, concludes Borges through the scientist's mouth (or the other way around).
Who knows if
Manuel H. Martín
thought of the sad hero of the Argentine when he considered retelling the story a thousand times told, with or without an anniversary by means of
Juan Sebastián Elcano
, the man who made the Earth exclaim of admiration that of
«Primus circumdedisti me»
(You were the first to turn me around).
That was the inscription on his shield.
The longest journey
It is the documentary film that, after being screened at the Seminci in Valladolid, will return to the cinema at the Seville Festival on the 8th at the same time that it opens, pandemic through, on the Filmin platform.
The finding consists in that together with the usual documentary tools, the film adds animation not so much as a simple explanatory resource, but also as an expressive way to get as close as possible to one of the most decisive, brutal and overwhelming experiences of the history of mankind.
“If you analyze the raw data of the adventure, you
can only conclude that it was a failure.
A ship of the five that sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda returned;
only 35 crew members were left alive of the 239 who left ... And yet despite everything, the feat remains a collective and tremendously luminous achievement despite all the darkness, "says the director, taking a second and adding : «That's what animation does.
Give light and meaning to what is already known.
An image from 'The longest journey', by Manuel H. Martín.
It is not the first time that Martín insists on something similar.
His previous film,
20 years of darkness,
used a similar resource to narrate, through the biography of the mayor of Mijas,
the tragedy that the so-called moles lived during the Civil War.
We are talking about the documentary that guided the steps of the film
The Infinite Trench
.
“In that other case,” says the director, “everything was much darker.
It was exactly the same as a survival story, but the plot itself forced the shades of gray.
The result, far from any hint of frivolity or empty didacticism, manages to bring, in a graphic and strange way, the experience itself, the path that the
Borgian
ethnographer had to walk
.
The longest journey,
moreover, neither adds nor takes away from the official historiography.
Everything begins on September 20, 1519 and ends on September 6, 1522. In between, the uprising of
Juan de Cartagena
at the gates of the Strait;
the death of
Magellan
at the Battle of Mactan;
the Trinity waterway in the Moluccas; and, of course, the eternal navigation of Victory across the Indian Ocean, around Africa and heading home beyond the Azores.
Not Jason's ship Argos.
"We have discovered and rounded all the roundness of the world,"
wrote the hero.
And alongside him, in parallel, another much more modern story sneaks into the film that suddenly serves to understand everything even if only a little.
The conquest of the Moon
in the middle of the 20th century dialogues with that of Elcano's adventure.
And it does it from you to you, from fear to fear, from passion to passion, from geostrategic interests to the Cold War.
«The resource of animation allowed us to bring the adventure from the 16th century closer to the other, to the contemporary one, without any cracks being felt or seen.
At the end of the day, the two companies are united by what is typical of any endeavor that has always been initiated by human beings:
the fear of the unknown and the curiosity that impels them to overcome it, ”
explains Martín.
And, indeed, it is striking how unoriginal we can be.
If then, with the Treaty of Tordesillas as a witness to a tense peace, it was two world powers that competed (Portugal and Spain) to dominate the world, after the Second World War, the same.
The protagonists change (now it is the United States and the Soviet Union) and the objective (now it is outer space), but the rest is the same contradiction.
The longest journey endeavors to demonstrate and show the absurd paradox of a rivalry that, while encouraging competition, limits the chances of success due to this ridiculous commitment to war.
And so.
«I imagine», continues the director, «that what moves us is always survival.
Then and now that we live against a pandemic.
This too is a journey into the unknown.
What happens in the future depends on our ability to learn from the past. "Be that as it may, and to go back to the beginning, you have to walk that path.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
movies
culture
history
science
Discovery of America
CineBartolomé Aragón, the eternal and "highly unlikely" suspect in Unamuno's death
Culture José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes: "I should not encourage or recommend going to the bulls"
CineBorat returns with the best motion of censure for the worst possible year
See links of interest
Last News
English translator
TV programming
Quixote
Movies TV
Topics
UD Logroñés - Alcorcón
Sporting de Gijón - Castellón
Fulham - West Bromwich Albion
TSG Hoffenheim - 1. FC Union Berlin
Lokomotiv - Atlético de Madrid, live