Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

El mar la mar with introduction and post-screening discussion with David Pendleton, Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki. Sunday September 17, 2017.

David Pendleton  0:00  

[AUDIO MISSING] –of the Harvard Film Archive. And it's a pleasure to welcome all of you to a very special evening, where we're presenting a new film fresh from the festival circuit, with both of its filmmakers here. And we're doing so under the rubric of a series, a monthly series that we started, called the Cinema of Resistance that was inspired by the last presidential election. And the series is meant to present films that deal, in various ways, with the multiple and overlapping crises that we're faced with since then.

Tonight's film is called El mar la mar. And we're very happy to have both Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki, the filmmakers, here. The relevance of this film's topic to this series will be immediately apparent. It was filmed in the Sonoran Desert. And it's a portrait of a landscape really, more than of a person or people. It's a portrait of the landscape through which migrants coming from Mexico and the rest of South and Central America attempt to cross over into the United States. It's a film that works a great deal with disjuncture between sound and image. There are things that we see, that we do not hear. There are people speaking, whom we do not see. In fact, the film eschews entirely the talking-head interview. In that sense, it can seem a bit more fragmentary than it is. It’s presented in three sections, including a long central section. The first section is completely silent. But then in the second section, really, the film overturns the usual journalistic documentary conventions by giving primacy to the soundtrack, I would argue, over the image track, as well as giving primacy to the landscape over the figures that pass through it. Although we do see traces. I mean, it's a film of fragments and traces, I would say. We do see the traces of the people who pass through it. But really what we get is a sense of the scale of the landscape as well as glimpses of the hardships and suffering that takes place there. Above all, I think it's an elemental film. It's a film about wind, sky, earth, fire and water.

I want to thank the Film Study Center for helping to make this screening possible. And now I'll bring up the filmmakers. J.P. Sniadecki, should be, hopefully, a familiar name to some of you by now. He graduated from the Sensory Ethnography Lab. He graduated from Harvard. And we've presented several of his films before. I think just about all of them, actually—at least all the future ones—Demolition, and the most recent film, The Iron Ministry, and he often works with collaborators. Véréna Paravel for Foreign Parts, Libbie Cohn for People's Park, and his co-author for this film, El mar la mar, is Joshua Bonnetta, whom we're happy to welcome you here for the very first time, someone who works in analog film and sound, someone for whom sound is very important to his work and makes nonfiction pieces and installations. They're both teaching now. They both have day jobs. Joshua Bonnetta at Ithaca, and J.P. at Northwestern University. They'll be joining us for a discussion after the film, so please stick around for that. But now please welcome up here Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki!

[APPLAUSE]

Joshua Bonnetta 4:33  

I thank you all for coming. Very honored to be here to present the work. I’d like to thank David and Jeremy and Haden for inviting the film, and we're not going to say much beforehand, but we're happy to stick around and hopefully have a dialogue afterwards. And thank you very much.

Oh, I'm– Oh my god! [LAUGHS] I'm Joshua Bonnetta. And this is J.P. Sniadecki. Sorry! [LAUGHS]

[APPLAUSE]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

David Pendleton  5:17  

Thank you very much, guys, for the film and for being here.

I was struck by the way that the film was able to do something that I really love when cinema can do it and it doesn't do it that often for me anymore: it forced me to really watch and look, to see what I'm seeing, or to recognize what I'm seeing or to find out if I can recognize what I’m seeing what I'm seeing, and the same thing with what we're hearing. And I think this is a product of certain of the reversals that you guys do. I mentioned– It's not so much a reversal to privilege the landscape over the people; I mean, there's a tradition of landscape film by now. Although it is still unusual, I think, for films that are about certain topics that we associate with people, with statistics, that sort of thing. But this disorientation and this demand of active watching and listening from my part, it’s not just that, but also the privileging of, as I see it, sound over image, as I mentioned before, but also darkness over light. It seems like it's a very dark movie, and I usually think of the desert as being this very bright place. So those are sort of like three different areas that overlap, or that I thought we could start by talking about if those were caught, if any of those was a conscious strategy on your parts, or how you came to those decisions. I mean, maybe we could just start by talking about one of those three, if you want to, start talking about a specific place, and then work outwards.

Joshua Bonnetta  7:21  

Sure. Well, thank you all for staying and watching the film.

We were highly conscious of how this particular area is represented in cinema and in different forms of media. So one of the things that we consciously focused on is how we would use the sound in relation to image that was different, that would complicate that representation. It would have been very easy for us to use, for example, the traditional diegetic sound in a lot of these images and cut the images together in a way, using cutting on action and stuff like that, like you would in a traditional documentary. But one of the things that we were concerned with was this form of representation and interrogating that representation. Because we were shooting on 16 millimeter, which was so slow, that process afforded us the time to reflect on that and to talk about that, in these decisions. And I don't necessarily think that we kind of overprivileged the sound, but I like that that kind of comes across because it's nice that sound can come into the foreground. I think that there's a nice ebb and flow between between those and, you know, this usage of darkness in various instances really allowed us a chance to kind of let the sound stand on its own and, I feel, give more integrity to the stories and allow you to kind of project into those spaces. And the democracy of opening up those spaces was important to us.

David Pendleton  9:14  

The spaces in the desert or the spaces within the screen? The spaces within the image, you mean?

Joshua Bonnetta  9:25  

Both the spaces within this within the desert, but also the spaces, you know, the dark spaces where people are allowed. Their story is allowed to exist within that space and not in relation necessarily to the image always.

David Pendleton  9:41  

Well, I think that's why I thought of the film as privileging—not over privileging, and maybe “privilege” is the wrong word—but certainly the sound comes to the fore or one is more conscious of listening to a soundtrack in large part because of the disjuncture. Was that a conscious decision and was that made early on, not to ever have any sync dialogue, for instance? Or are there moments of sync that escaped my notice?

J.P. Sniadecki  10:16  

There's no sync in the entire film. But I think, when we speak about these passages of human voice that we hear in various stretches of black or combined with sort of minimalist image, we were really actually thinking about theatres like this, and all of you sitting in these spaces, and what it would be like for you to sit in the space with– I mean, there is image actually. We're shooting into the night, into a thunderstorm. It's just very lightly registered. But we were thinking about what would be conjured in your minds and in your imaginations and in your active participation with the film by removing that facial talking head moment, or any kind of indicator of that identity. Of course, there's also political reasons, or personal reasons for the people who share their stories with us, not to include those things. But I don't think we had that idea before we registered and recorded these conversations, these interviews, these monologues, these stories. That came up after we had concluded shooting. In fact, I think we tried putting voices over image in a more conventional kind of nonfiction film way. And I think we felt it was a kind of overload. We were, you know, maybe a little bit less able to take on so much at once. But we felt it was kind of an overload of things to put in, and there was a lot of competition between image and voice. So we felt the voice was strong enough to be on its own. And it also, of course, taps into these themes of darkness that you're talking about.

Joshua Bonnetta  12:00  

It was overload. But I also felt like, too, it narrowed things down too much, or, I don't know, I felt the decisions, we made opened it up a little bit more.

J.P. Sniadecki  12:09  

That's true, because if you put the image with the [voices, it] starts to create these sort of expected or consecrated meanings by these connections of image and voice that we wanted to avoid, so you’re right; it creates a more open-ended feel.

David Pendleton  12:23  

I'm glad I saw the film on the large screen here because during the dialogue with the two men who have survived in the desert, I noticed these flashes that I didn't notice watching a preview on a smaller screen. And then I started to think, “oh, are they just shooting into the night, or….?” Because you also include a lot of artifacting around the developing of the film, as if the film were hand-developed? And so I wasn't sure if it was that or if it was a flash of lightning, like off in the distance. And I'm wondering, too, about the decision to include a lot of like, little hairs and things like that got stamped into the image when you developed?

J.P. Sniadecki  13:12  

Well, we got rid of a few hairs that would have been really egregious for you guys to look at for periods of time. But there is a combination of hand-processing. Maybe Josh, you want to talk about that? We did shoot into the night, but there was hand-processing with titles and intertitles.

Joshua Bonnetta  13:31  

We just came up with the idea for the titles and the intertitles very late into the editing process. And the whole project was going back and forth between like American and Canadian, I'm like, project, pro-ject. But the whole pro-ject was a process-based way of working. So we hadn't pre-conceived everything beforehand; things were developing in-process. And with the intertitles, as we got to the end, you know, we had decided that we're going to use titles, and that just seemed that it suited the material, that they would be analog, and the film itself is so much about surface and physicality of the desert. And it seemed that that was a way that would best suit the material. And then the different kind of chemical variations and stuff like that—that was kind of a surprise in a way.

David Pendleton  14:25  

Are there questions? I have a lot of other questions, but I want to open it up if there are questions in the audience. Okay, here's one up here and then one in the back.

Audience 1  14:35  

I love the film. And we see a lot of the desert, but at the same time, it's difficult to put it all together. And I was wondering if you could talk about the process of becoming acquainted with the environment, how much time you spent there.

Joshua or J.P.

What was that?

David Pendleton 14:58  

He’s just talking about, you know, did the shooting happen all at one time? How much time?

Joshua Bonnetta  15:03  

As you mentioned before, so we both have day jobs. [LAUGHTER] And…

David Pendleton

[LAUGHS] I don't know why I said that!

Joshua Bonnetta  15:12  

And in some ways, I don't know, perhaps that helped us, you know, have more time to kind of think in between these spaces. But we're working around like an academic calendar over like three years. So we’d go at different times of the year. We're off on break and things like that. And the project just kind of built itself up from these different shoots. But initially, the whole film started with another project that we were working on, and this film unexpectedly fell out of that? I don't know if you want to talk about that?

J.P. Sniadecki  15:51  

Well, yeah, we started with another project. We were actually going to follow the trail of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont, who in the first half of 19th century, traveled through America and de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, the great work on political economy. And Gustave Beaumont wrote the lesser-known Marie, or Slavery in America [sic], which was about the legacy or the implications of slavery in American society. And we got to New Orleans, and we had to go west, for whatever reason. So we did the first little bit of the leg, and as we were heading west into Texas and getting closer to the border, we started to get drawn in, so we never had the intention to make a film about the borderlands, about the desert, about the Sonora. But we started to get pulled in and started talking to people, and then we traced the border from Texas to New Mexico, Arizona, and California. We went back to Marin County, where we were staying for a while, looked at the footage. We were really drawn to that stuff, and started doing research and getting to know people who are working in this Sonoran Desert area, because—I don't know if you've ever been there—but it's a completely captivating and dangerous and rugged place. A good stretch of it, just to the west of where we were mostly based, is called the Devil's Highway for this exact reason. And, we started to go back and go back and found ourselves sort of drawn into the Sonoran Desert. And that kind of taps into the title, El mar la mar, because you said, “How did we get acquainted to the desert? How did we encounter the desert?” Well, it's like being lost at sea. Josh always talks about how it's like a lot of noise at first when you're a Canadian and a Yankee, and you go down to the desert, and it's just this sort of indistinguishable sea of phenomena, and then begin to talk to people and learn about it, and it begins to be somewhat readable by signs and whatnot. But I think that we always kind of acknowledge that position as outsiders. The film is never fully immersive, even though we try to do moments where we evoke a kind of a sense of being there. We also do lots of things—maybe as David was talking about —to pull you out of that sort of seductive sense or that lulling of maybe you understand something. We’re kind of undercutting that, that total immersion, on many different levels, to remind you that you're sitting in a theater watching a movie, in this particular position. I don't know if I answered your question, then. That's how first began.

David Pendleton  18:30  

Hang on. There's a question back there. And then we'll go to the gentleman in the back and then the gentleman right there.

Audience 2  18:38  

At the beginning of the film, there’s a fire torch leading the way, and a little piece of fire fell off the end, and I found myself thinking, “Where is Smokey the Bear when you need him?” And then shortly thereafter, we saw an increasingly large fire out there. So my question is, were we meant to make the connection–

J.P. Sniadecki  19:09  

I just want to jump in real quick, and I don't know anything about this kind of stuff, like desert fires. The only thing I know but desert fires is the 9,000-acre desert fire that we encountered and the stories of fires in that region. But I will say that I've heard that actually we have too much Smokey the Bear. And the reason why we have these gigantic fires across the West is because we're so anti-fire that we don't allow for the natural course of fires to burn and allow new growth for forest to rejuvenate or the desert to rejuvenate, but that's an aside.

David Pendleton  19:43  

Fire suppression. A long history of fire suppression has built up, yes. Stuff that can burn. But do you want to talk about the presence of fire or fires and/or how you decided to make that shot the opening shot of the central section of the film? Or did it just sort of evolve?

Joshua Bonnetta  20:04  

I'm gonna answer the last part of your question, though, first. So it's supposed to be ambiguous. We had a lot of conversation about whether you were supposed to directly connect that shot to the larger fire. And they're actually from two different places, I don't know, a year apart or something like that? So it's kind of supposed to be in between.

J.P. Sniadecki  20:28  

Yeah, I mean, do people claim that fires are set by various people traversing that landscape, or using that landscape for a particular...? You know, there are claims like that, but there's also desert fires that just happen.

David Pendleton  20:46  

Well, from lightning strikes too.

There was a question from a gentleman in the back, then one down here, and then we'll go start going to the people in the middle.

Audience 3  21:00  

I’m curious about how you found some of those landscapes and how much scouting was required. You know, I have spent a fair amount of time out there, and some of those places I recognize myself. And I know, it's not easy to find some of those really stunning vistas. And what was it like traveling there? Did you get in dune buggies and ATVs and go into the desert? How far in did you go? I guess, is my question.

Joshua Bonnetta  21:34  

Too far in some instances. But it was all sorts of different ways. And a lot of it came through getting to know the people that live down there. And after spending some time there, and building up a rapport, having them take us out to some of these places that are just not accessible, or would be dangerous, I think, to try to access them without the proper vehicle, or even just a knowledge of the roads. Like a lot of this stuff is off the map. And so it was a different combination of that, and some hiking. We spent some time hiking with various Samaritan groups and had people from the town– We were mostly based out of one place, so we had some really good people take us out into these places on multiple occasions, and we would always have gear with us so there wasn't really an instance where we were scouting something beforehand. It was something that was evolving in process. So if we encountered something, that's how we would work generally from there.

J.P. Sniadecki  22:51  

And a lot of people were really generous. We thank them, but we'd like to thank them again for their time and the generosity to take us to places. You know, it was very much following different kinds of itineraries, or different kinds of knowledges of the landscape. As Josh said, it was actually a lot of time hiking. This is our first time working together, but we both in our practices do a lot of time sort of walking, whether we're recording sound or shooting film, or whatever. So that was a big part of it. And I do think, though, that actually, one thing that we had to be careful of is that finding the vistas in Arizona is actually quite easy. Because it's like super gorgeous everywhere. What was actually, I think, more complicated was getting these particular shrines and particular paths that are being employed at certain times, then being abandoned and what that means to hit them at particular times of their sort of life in their trajectory and evolution as pathways, was maybe more complicated than finding vistas.

David Pendleton  24:02  

I understand why we don't see people who are making the passing, but I'm wondering about were you ever tempted to follow along with the Samaritans and film some of them doing what they do or maybe some of the people that we see in the film? Or are these Samaritans members of that rescue group? Or was it trying to keep it more abstract than that?

Joshua Bonnetta  24:30  

We filmed with some of the Samaritans and there are parts of it in the film. And we filmed a lot of it that we didn't use, because it became too specific, I think. But it was more the time spent hiking those trails and hearing the stories and encountering those spaces and those different landscapes that, I think, was the most valuable part of that experience.

J.P. Sniadecki  25:02  

We did hike with water and food along the trails and carrying cameras. But we were sort of conscious of people's need to move through the land rather than us ask them to be a part of our film in those particular moments. And there are certain people who were—as you saw at the end or heard at the end—the two brothers who actually showed up at our doorstep, one the last days of our filming, who did want to spend time and talk because they were in a kind of a difficult situation. And, they wanted to bring their story. And so we were very open to that. But like, as Josh says, it's very much about particularities of situations and feeling out the dynamics, what people wanted and felt comfortable being involved in at the time. We even went hiking with vigilantes, actually, the Arizona border recon people, so we were like, [DEEPENS VOICE] playing both sides.

David Pendleton  26:06  

Are those the people we see in the camo gear?

J.P. Sniadecki

With the guns? Yeah.

David Pendleton 26:12  

There was a question...

Audience 4  26:16  

First of all, thank you for sharing the film. It’s sort of related to what you were just talking about. But I was wondering about the voices and the people that were included in the film and your process behind finding those people and selecting the material for that. Like part of the deprivation that we felt during those scenes of darkness with the voices just made them have so much gravity and so much concrete meaning in every word. So I was curious about it, there weren't quite enough different people for it to be just a mosaic, but it wasn't specific enough for them to be characters that you sort of recognize. So I wonder what your approach was to finding people, and then what to include out of the stuff that you recorded, perhaps of their stories, like how did you approach the people themselves?

Joshua Bonnetta  27:14  

We spent a lot of time down there and we would just talk to people. Most people don't want to talk to you, or be recorded. Not that they don't want to talk to you, but they don't want to be recorded.

J.P. Sniadecki  27:25  

They thought we were FBI agents for a while.

Joshua Bonnetta   27:29  

Yeah. [LAUGHS] But, so we would try to interview as many different people as we could, but we weren't very successful with that.

J.P. Sniadecki 27:41  

We also weren’t very pushy. We weren't like finding and investigating and digging people out. We should admit that. We were kind of like allowing people to share stories, and then we were like, “Hey, can we record that?”

Joshua Bonnetta  27:52  

I think people are very wary of journalists interviewing and documenting people in this area, and so it wasn't easy. So it was through people vouching for us. And one of the things I guess we haven't mentioned yet is we owe a great deal of debt to anthropologist Jason De León, who wrote this book, The Land of Open Graves, where he has been documenting the migration, I guess, for like the last twelve years or something like that? Or he spent twelve years on this particular project. And he vouched for us in a lot of instances, and that kind of opened so many doors for us. I think, if it wasn't for him and his work, I don't think we would have gotten very far. But even with that, it was still very difficult. And then, in terms of the editing process and sorting that, it was just trying to strike a balance and give as many voices as we could space and open up to be more plural, and try not to have it be one-sided.

J.P. Sniadecki  28:58  

Yeah, I think that you were saying earlier about like surfaces or like textures? So maybe not surface, but texture, like to bring the voices and the stories that are shared out of overwhelming reductive ideological frameworks and trying to get down to the texture of the experience. And as you were saying, the kind of concreteness of the words, like the production of images, the production of a kind of felt experiential quality was also a guiding force of how we were editing the voices and choosing the stories.

David Pendleton  29:39  

Hang on. There was a question in the middle. Perhaps it was you. And then there was another one a little bit over, but Amanda is going to pass a microphone down to you.

Audience 5  29:53  

I was just really curious about the faces because you're so–

David Pendleton  30:02  

Actually, John, can you turn up the audience mics a little bit, possibly? But go ahead, go ahead. You're asking about the faces?

Audience 5   30:14  

Yes, you see two faces in the film. And we're very conscious of them, because you're not seeing the faces of the people that are speaking. So I was just really curious about who they were and why you made the decision to show these two men.

David Pendlton  30:34  

I think there may be a couple more faces, but I think she's thinking of the guy in the Johnny Guitar sequence...

Audience 5   30:42  

The Johnny Guitar, and then there's another man with long hair...

David Pendleton  30:45  

With the beard. He looks sort of like a hippie desert dweller.

J.P. Sniadecki  30:48  

Sundog!

David Pendleton

Ah.

[LAUGHTER]

J.P. Sniadecki

Sundog and Paco. You see Peter's face. You see Sheila's face, I guess it's not a—what’s that word?—frontal images, like close up. It's sort of from the profile.

Joshua Bonnetta  31:08  

I mean, those choices, we filmed a lot of different close-ups and things and some of them—just for kind of more sensitive reasons—didn't decide to show them. But the ones that we did choose, I think everybody kind of represents a different part of the community in relation to what's going on. So one person is a smuggler. One person is a hippie from this commune that moved out there in the 70s. Another person is kind of part of the punk rock, DIY, Samaritan group. Another person's a cowboy. Yeah, so we were just conscious of trying to represent all of these different areas. We had worked with a firefighter, like first responder and stuff like that, but some of it just doesn't work out. I mean, that's kind of the nature of this project is like, you know, you can wish for all these different things, but not all of it works out. And, especially with shooting film, in this instance, too, you don't exactly know what you're gonna get till you get back, and some of it works, and some of it didn't.

J.P. Sniadecki  32:29  

And the people that you see are people who, first of all, are okay with being seen, like they agreed to it. And, they're beautiful. I think everyone we filmed was beautiful, but they're like, really beautiful. And then the other reason is that these are people who live there. They’re residents of that particular area that we were moving through quite a bit. And so, you know, I felt like they had less of a sort of sensitive scenario than other folks.

David Pendleton  33:03  

I was struck by the way that the people who are migrating through are represented by traces mostly and/or by their voices. And if you want to privilege the visual over the sound, you would say that their voice is a trace. And that was one of the things that when I said that the film makes me think about what I'm watching, I'm realizing, “oh, well, I can watch this guy soaking in this lake or whatever it was because obviously, he lives there, or he owns land there or whatever.” Like he's trying not to be noticed. And so they formed this presence against which I think the absence of the people passing through are more deeply felt, from my perspective.

There was a question over…? Yeah, that's you! Thank you for being so patient. Jeremy will pass the mic. I want to thank Jeremy too, by the way, who was instrumental in organizing this series, and who was supposed to be the fourth person up here, but he's given up his seat to pass the audience mic, but he might chip in.

J.P. Sniadecki  34:08  

And we're also really, really grateful to be a part of this series. And thank you so much for making the series.

Audience 6  34:15  

I was wondering what the thinking was behind dividing the film into three parts and how you envisioned them operating within the film as a whole.

Joshua Bonnetta  34:27  

We had initially cut it as one long piece and then the way that we would edit, you know, obviously we were not editing in this like linear way; we kind of build things out in these little constellations. And also, initially, we thought it was going to be an installation piece. I mean, it still is, but it's just really hard to get this type of work installed. But we have some upcoming versions of it that will be that. So we were thinking about it as multi-channel, and we were building these constellations of images and sound out from one another. So the middle piece actually came first. And then as we were watching it back over and over again, just within the process of editing, we realized that they were like three discrete parts… very near the end, I think. Then we were like, we have to shoot titles and figure all of this out for a screening in like a month.

David Pendleton  35:30  

Can you talk a little bit about those titles being in Spanish and not translated? And that decision? Also, “Rio” is not really about—well, maybe that's along the Rio Grande—but then “Costa,” I guess, is “Coast” and it's not about an ocean, although, as you pointed out, the desert is kind of the ocean of the film.

J.P. Sniadecki  35:53  

Well, okay... Everyone's really into this thing about the Spanish not being translated. I don't know, I feel like if you don't understand it, you can just Google it.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  36:05  

Sure. Right, I didn't mean it as a criticism.

J.P. Sniadecki  36:07  

No, no, no, I know you don't mean as a criticism. I mean, I could say that it's like a political move to not have to translate everything. But it's also like an aesthetic that we're not projecting this– There's enough subtitles in the film, and enough video projected onto this analog form that I felt we didn't necessarily need to put that on there. But, I think we also just felt like those were the titles of those pieces; it wasn't needing to have this translation. And “Rio” is not along the Rio Grande, although we did spend a lot of time along the Rio Grande. And “Costas” is about reaching the other shore, and about the Mediterranean Sea. And “Tormenta,” of course, is “Storm,” which we can talk more about maybe when we get to that particular part, if we want to talk about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Audience 7  37:21  

Going on the theme of the cinema of resistance, I think there's this tendency when you're pretty far from the border, or you're in an academic space like this to either overestimate or underestimate the relevance or importance of the election and Trump. But, you know, this took about two or three years to film, but I'm assuming at least some of it overlapped the election season and everything that happened. So I guess I'm wondering whether you felt any of that sort of presence with any of the people that you talk to or any of the things that you saw down there, or if that had any impact on the editing of the film or at all.

Joshua Bonnetta

So we started this film in the pre-Trump era. That didn't even seem like a possibility, at least from my perspective. And it was edited during the election. And it was very interesting to see the context of your images, changing day to day.

So initially, one of the things that we were focusing on in this project was this idea of looking at this, US border policy—begins 1994: “Prevention Through Deterrence”—where fortifications and security are built up in these ports of entry, where people are able to kind of cross, not easily but more easily, and they're very binational and you can kind of move. It was more amorphous. And Prevention Through Deterrence builds up security in these areas, and then kind of like funnels people through the desert to these very harsh regions that are really inhospitable, very dangerous. And so that's what we were exploring and looking at initially was the Sonoran Desert. And Jason De León's work talks about this; it's almost utilized like a machine for processing death. People are funneled through these areas and his book goes into that in great detail. So we were focusing on that and then with the election coming, the context completely changes and conversations around the wall and the border completely change, because I mean, there already is a wall there. The biome is the wall. It also, you know, kind of erases everything as well within this area. So that’s what initially we were focused on. Of course, the context changes while we're in the editing process. And in regards to the later part of your question, whether we were encountering people having these different conversations around that, I don't recall that while we were shooting, I mean, it didn't really seem so much like it would be a possibility, really.

Audience 8  40:48  

Thank you very much. It's a wonderful movie. I'm struck by how aesthetically beautiful—for a subject on resistance—this movie is. And I want to just talk about the first part that completely for me seems impressionist, like if it was a painting of impressionists—Seurat, Monet, Manet—at great speed; sometimes it stops, sometimes it speeds up, and to look at it in regard to sound and it seems like that speed and impressionistic aspect shifts to the sound later with the imagery, with the photography. How do you feel about that? I mean, was it a conscious choice? Does it make sense to you?

J.P. Sniadecki 41:45  

It makes a lot of sense to me, what you just said, in terms of the shift from this, sort of more—if we can call it—impressionistic, or abstract, or… I don’t know the word to use. I go back to “texture” all the time.

Joshua Bonnetta

Visual music.

J.P. Sniadecki

Visual music. We then shift to sort of musique concrète and more abstract uses of field recordings later on. Disorientation, defamiliarization of known entities that starts off with the visual field and then moves into the sonic field and then sort of vacillates and oscillates and permutates throughout the film.

Audience 9  42:38  

Hi. Can you talk about the poem in the third part of the film? I know J.P., it sounds like you want to talk about it, or you're hinting that you're ready to talk about it. And then also, the other use of I guess, poetry, which is the use of the Johnny Guitar song and the decision to use that. And then another question, which is specifically for J.P.: compared to the other films of yours I've seen, this seems to be much more open-ended in terms of the locale, like you've done things in People's Park or on a site in Queens or in trains, sohow do you deal with the much more open parameters of creating a film like this?

J.P. Sniadecki  43:19  

I think we should begin with Johnny Guitar.

Joshua Bonnetta  43:23  

I can do Johnny Guitar, and you can do Sor Juana.

J.P. Sniadecki   43:26  

We can do Sor Juana together, but you can do Johnny Guitar.

Joshua Bonnetta  43:30  

So, we had mentioned earlier, we are thinking about different ideas of representation, how you represent these spaces. So that wasn't just limited to a contemporary idea of this area; we were looking at it through representation in cinema history. So we did a lot of research on different films that were filmed in the Sonoran Desert. And Nicolas Ray’s Johnny Guitar was filmed in the northern part of the Sonoran Desert. And it's one of the first revisionist Westerns, and one of the things we wanted to do is kind of flirt with this complexity of representation of this particular locale. And so we kind of like rather indulgently did that by using Johnny Guitar in that space to kind of play with the overly romantic idea of this landscape in the Western but also, this revisionist piece that's kind of interrogating a lot of these traditional ways of how it is represented. And you know, there's different moments in that throughout the film that are kind of different nods to representations of these areas in cinema history. There's a few of them. And... Sor Juana?

J.P. Sniadecki  44:46  

I think you should start with Sor Juana because you found the pesos.

Joshua Bonnetta  44:50  

Okay, so those shots came from a staging ground, where people get picked up, right near the border. It was the first time I'd been to the border. And I remember we were there, and J.P. was like, “This is the border,” and I was like, “Really?” And it was just these Normandy fences, which are this relic of the Second World War. They're almost like an iron train track thing used to stop, I guess, amphibious vehicles from advancing on the beaches. And then there's a highway going by, like, really busy. And it's just like, very limited border security in this place. And on the ground in these different places were SIM cards and IDs and all this stuff. And then we found this peso rolled up inside of a hole in the sand. I mean, it looked contrived. We were like, super worried about that. And when we were watching the rushes, both of us have a mutual friend, a filmmaker, Nicolás Pereda–

J.P. Sniadecki  46:07  

A friend of HFA, too.

Joshua Bonnetta  46:09  

Yeah. And he was like, “Do you know guys who that is? This is very important. You should look into this.” He had made a piece about Sor Juana and his mom had written an opera about her. And so that's how it began. And then we read the dream, and that's how we decided to use the text at the very end. It's actually Nico’s sister who reads the part at the end, so it really kind of came out of his recognition of that.

David Pendleton  46:45  

And Claribel in the back.

Audience 10  46:56  

You’ve already said that you're going to basically just use this film for an installation probably in museums and galleries. But nothing more beyond that in action politically? Especially what's going on with Trump trying to put the wall up or saying that, the rhetoric for fear, putting that fear in people? That's one point. That's one question.

The other one is, would you be willing to collaborate with other groups on removing Confederate monuments maybe? I don't know, because I'm looking at it from the year of 2017, which is just recent. So this is something that's going on now. And it's very contemporary, and you know, so… That's it.

J.P. Sniadecki  48:00  

We'll show this film anywhere anyone wants to show it. I think everybody can see this film, but I don't control that. We don't control that. Like, we're not saying that this should just be in a gallery or museum or at the Harvard Film Archive. We're happy to show it anywhere. In fact, we were just talking to some friends who do some programming around the various states of Mexico. And she's like, “Just give me that DCP! And I'll just show it around” the various places she knows. And that sounds really exciting to me, but we don't think too much about distribution, I guess, or do we? I don't really think too much about distribution. I can't speak for Josh.

Joshua Bonnetta  48:35  

I mean, well just to come back to the museum gallery thing for a second. This is an amazing space that you guys have, and you can obviously have a discourse and a dialogue around it, but the cinema theater is something that's waning. And I think that the gallery and the museum is kind of an accessible place, and it's kind of one of the more emerging places for social discourse around this type of work. So I don't think that that's a negative thing; I think it's expanding as cinema kind of changes and moves into these different spaces. And so if it can exist in a space like that, and kind of reach people and open up a dialogue in that area, I think it's a good thing. And in some ways, I think it's kind of more democratic in a way than the theater because there's not like a [?rake?] with like, somebody preaching to you or we're being interrogated. And, as far as distribution goes—which J.P. has been mentioning—we've been screening it wherever we can, sharing it with whoever hass asked for it. Different academics have asked for access to write on it and other filmmakers, other people have contacted us, and so we're distributing things. We've been more grassroots about it. Just recently, we got a distributor who's going to start working towards… You know, Cinema Guild is distributing the film now, so hopefully they’ll start to take over this with more of a vision than what we've been doing. We haven't been able to reach as many people as we'd like.

J.P. Sniadecki  50:11  

We have day jobs.

David Pendleton  50:16  

Okay. Maybe that should be the end of the conversation? Jeremy, did you want to add anything? Alright. Alright. Well, thank you all for staying and for your questions. And thank you to Joshua. And thank you to J.P.

[APPLAUSE]

©Harvard Film Archive

Shot over several years in the Sonoran Desert near the US/Mexico border, Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki’s intensely complex and transcendent El mar la mar weaves together oral histories of desert border stories with hand-processed, grainy 16mm images of the flora, fauna and those who trespass the mysterious terrain, riddled with items its travelers have left behind. A sonically rich soundtrack adds another, sometimes eerie, dimension; the call of birds and other nocturnal noises invisibly populate the austere landscape. Over a black screen, people speak of their intense, mythic experiences in the desert: a man tells of a fifteen-foot-tall monster said to haunt the region, while a border patrolman spins a similarly bizarre tale of man versus beast. The majority of El mar la mar occurs in darkness—often with only traces of light outlining the figures moving in the night—leaving exposed the sharp edges of a fatally inscribed line. Emerging from the ethos of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, Sniadecki’s attentive documentary approach conspires supernaturally with Bonnetta’s meditations on the materiality of film. Their stunning collaboration is a mystical, folktale-like atmosphere dense with the remains of desire, memories and ghosts. – BG