Volume 116: Personal and Political: The Films of Natalia Almada
The Voice of Energy Vol. 116
Remember me?
It's been... some time since I've put together a newsletter for you wonderful people. Not for lack of trying. Just for lack of time and energy.
In the months since I last sent out a missive, I got a healthy amount of writing work, including a weekly column in Willamette Week covering live music and some bylines in Uncut. Oh, and yes, I opened a record / book store with some friends. That has been a full-time commitment, leaving me little space for extracurricular writing and film analysis.
As things have started to settle down a bit, I thought I would get myself back into this work. My hope is to present these on the regular. To give myself a project to work on and excuse to watch all these movies I get emailed about. As I've talked about in the past, I have a tendency to let work like this die on the vine and I really don't want that to happen with this.
But enough about me. Let's get into the heart of this week's newsletter, a review of a recently released DVD set compiling the films of Mexican-American director Natalia Almada.
Personal and Political: The Films of Natalia Almada (2023, Icarus Films)
The combination of capitalist demands and our hyperspeed culture has, among so many other issues, resulted in a strange need to canonize artists as soon as they make anything of note / renown. The deluxe edition of an album is issued a mere six months after the original version hit the streets. The director's cut of a film is rushed into the streaming universe or onto physical discs before viewers have had a chance to absorb the version that was first released into theaters / online.
Then there's the case of a retrospective release like Personal and Political: The Films of Natalia Almada. The five-disc set, available now via Icarus Films, collects the work that the Mexican-American filmmaker has made to date. Its intent, I'm assuming, is simple celebration. Here is an artist who has accumulated a host of prizes, from a MacArthur Genius Grant to a McDowell Fellowship. Almada's work deserves to be this easily accessible and readily available. Yet a release like this set draws a much-too firm line in the sand. Almada is not yet out of her 40s and, as this collection bears out, is truly hitting her stride as a filmmaker. It feels dismissive of her continued progress to break up her still growing filmography in MCU-like phases like this.
From another angle, Personal and Political could be viewed as a promotional tool for Almada's future directorial efforts. Watching these five features and one short film in chronological order allows us to see her grow as a filmmaker as she gains skills and begins to let the vision and voices of collaborators influence her work.
According to interviews with Almada, she never intended to make a career out of making movies. Her first film, the powerful 2001 short All Water Has A Perfect Memory, was borne out of her MFA studies in photography and was constructed using audio recordings her family members made for her discussing the drowning of Almada's eldest sister. With no formal training in documentary filmmaking, she was afforded "a lot of freedom to define what film meant to me," as she told pInternational Documentary Association earlier this year. Hence, Water has a formlessness and a fluidity that mirrors how our mind constantly recontextualizes our past experiences. Our memories of events never stay in one fixed emotional zone.
Almada works best in this more freeform mode where images and audio unspool at a natural, unhurried pace. That has especially marked her two most recent films, 2021's Users and, to date, her lone fiction work, 2016's Todo Lo Demás. The latter is the director’s most affecting film yet. It is an ode to the millions of middle-aged women who have become almost invisible in the eyes of the world. Played with quiet grace underpinned by a deep-seated longing by the great Adriana Barazza, the main character shuffles through life from her small apartment to her thankless office job. She sticks to a Jeanne Dielmann-like routine, breaking only to visit a swimming pool that she’s too afraid to use or, in one heartbreaking scene, swaying to a romantic ballad as she clutches a pillow to her chest. Much like Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, there’s no grand drama or moment of violence couched as character building. The story plays out for a patient and beautifully-realized 98 minutes before quietly fading away.
Users is far more personal for Almada as she explores the relationship humans have with technology, in particular how it feels to watch her young children interact with various screens and computers. It becomes an elegant ode to motherhood and our stewardship of the planet and what gets gained and lost in our continued reliance on machines to supposedly simplify our lives.
These aren’t novel concerns by any means, nor does Almada offer up pat solutions for our collective fate. She presents the reality and asks her own questions while leaving viewers to ponder their own answers and letting them react to the beautiful shots of nature and the unease of watching a child playing a videogame or staring goggle-eyed at images that only they can see. Users is also one of the first films that Almada let the camera move around, as suggested by her cinematographer on the project, Bennett Cerf, rather than holding static shots for extended periods of time. It was a canny move that adds to the feeling of disconnect within the film. We become like ghosts, desperate to reach out and dip our fingers into the ocean or run our hands across the top of the rows and rows of lush green plants growing in a laboratory setting.
Releasing this collection now makes sound commercial sense even if it does feel a bit like eulogizing an artist who is still very much alive and has many years of filmmaking ahead of her. Almada nabbed her second Documentary Directing Award at Sundance in 2021 for Users and there’s a healthy push on right now to get that same film nominated for an Oscar. It simply feels far too soon. Watching these films in chronological order, it becomes clear how much Almada is gaining strength as a storyteller as the scope of her work grows and she welcomes collaborators into her widening orbit. Save the retrospective for the end of her career. I just want to see what comes next.
Felt good to get that done. Would like to thank Megan Burbank for inspiring me to pick this project back up. You should check out her newsletter Burbank Industries which follows her reporting from the front lines of the fight for abortion rights in her home state of Washington.
Back again next week? The good lord willing and the creek don't rise.
If you're in the neighborhood, stop by the shop. I'm there on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Artwork for this edition of The Voice of Energy is by Emily Kam Kngwarray. An exhibition of her work will be on display at the National Gallery of Art in Canberra, Australia beginning December 2.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.