HAMACA PARAGUAYA

Paraguay, 2006, 78 minutes, Colour.
Georgina Genes, Ramon del Rio.
Directed by Paz Encina.

For serious and art cinema audiences, this is a cinema essay.

The setting is June 14th, 1935, during the Chaco war in Paraguay. An old couple venture out of the jungle into a clearing and set up a hammock. They wait and they talk. The director uses long takes, middle distance shots for most of the film – there are some close-ups, but few of them. The soundtrack is voiced over conversation between the two, the old woman doing most of the talking. They commune, they wait, they wonder about their son coming back from the war or if he is already dead.

It is hot. They wait for rain. While there is continual thunder, the storm does not break until the very end of the film when, with black screen, we hear the pouring rain.

The film is spoken in the Guarani language which means that the film is something of an ethnographical portrait and an anthropological study of people and attitudes in the jungle of the 1930s.

1. The impact of the film? An art film? A cinema essay? Ethnographical essay? Philosophical essay?

2. A Paraguayan production, the skills?

3. The setting, June 14th, 1935? The atmosphere of war in Paraguay? The old couple and their son having gone to war? Waiting for the rain to come? Waiting for the wind to come, for the heat to go? The dog incessantly barking – with a few stops? Eternal waiting?

4. The visual impact, the fixed camera, the medium shot – and long takes? The few close-ups of the man and the woman? The voice-over dialogue? The woman mainly talking? The use of Guarini(*?) language?

5. The sound engineering, the thunder, the black screen towards the end, the sound of the storm, the rain finally falling? The musical score in this context? Atmosphere?

6. The situation, the war, the comments? The displacement? Jungle, the heat, hoping for a storm? Where to put the hammock? Their sitting on the hammock, moving for food? Survival?

7. The approaching dark? The man and the woman, their story, the quality of their relationships, the optimism of the man, the hard-headed reality of the woman? Thinking their son was dead or not? The quality of the talk? The bonds between the two? What they revealed of each other?

8. The final impact – and the result for an audience patient enough to sit through and experience this particular day and its waiting?