Water/Wind/Women

In this video essay, I compare two debut films, Facing the Wind, by Meritxell Colell (2018), and The Water, by Elena López Riera (2022), in order to expose the convergences between both directors with an emphasis on issues related to violence, care work and nature. The video essay is divided in three parts (water, wind, women) that progressively introduce the aforementioned issues. 

In the first section, WATER, the emphasis is placed on environmental violence, depicted by the archival images used in López Riera’s film, as well as on Ana’s grandmother’s past of gender violence. Likewise, in WIND, this element is used by Colell to materialize the hostility of the rural environment in which the story takes place, a small town in Burgos, a province in “emptied Spain”. The visual and audio presence of the water and the wind is stressed throughout the video to submerge the viewer in the same atmosphere as the main characters. These effects come together in the last part, WOMEN, combined with close ups of the women in these stories as they carry out manual work related to the land to show the final convergence between women and nature. 

Another important aspect that is included in each part is care work, generally done by women (Herrero, 2020) and that like nature, is in crisis. Colell’s “slow cinema” uses rhythms that invite the viewer to observe and analyze the images; it respects the real time that care work and domestic work take as seen in scenes where Mónica helps her mother to shower, to cook, or when she hangs the laundry. These scenes resist the increasing pace of commercial cinema that ends up being “dehumanizing, repetitive and monotonous” (De Luca and Barradas Jorge, 2016, p.9). In The Water, the quotidian scenes shared between Ana and her grandmother make care work and intergenerational relationships visible. Putting  the scenes that explore these links in dialogue, the multi-screen technique is used to visualize the different generations of women in the same space.

In both films, natural elements are used as non-human agents capable of exerting a violent force over the subjects and their environments albeit non-destructive towards the main characters. The relational ethic with which the wind and the water are presented to Mónica and Ana confirm them as post-human subjects in that they are “embodied and embedded, relational and affective collaborative entities” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 46). On the one hand, Colell reveals to us the cutting effect of the wind in the filmic rhythm and combines it with the expressiveness of the protagonist. The wind exerts a power over Mónica, pushing her and helping her in the process of mourning her father’s death and in trying to understand and recover the relationship with her mother. This relationship –between Mónica and the wind– reaches its cathartic moment at the end when she lets herself go dancing in the mountains. In Ana’s case, she is attracted to the river, which according to a legend takes with it the women “who have the water inside of them”. In the film, the consequences of the floods are exhibited through a combination of original and archival footage, showing how the water sweeps everything away: cars piled up, streets completely submerged, people being evacuated. However, the final scene shows Ana floating in the polluted waters of Segura River, at peace, in a symbiotic relationship. The expressiveness of both Ana and Mónica can be interpreted as an unmarked, hard emotion which breaks with the cliché of the sentimental woman (Campbell, 1994) and which denotes a new “emotional orientation” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 4). If, as Sara Ahmed affirms, emotion is “reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous” (2014, p. 3) and is manifested through the surface of bodies, we can interpret the hostility of the natural elements in both films as a manifestation of the protagonists’ emotions, confirming once again the interdependence between these subjects. 

The shared vision of Colell and López Riera relies on the decentralization of the focus in the human and in the search for a convergence between nature and the main characters. Mónica and Ana reveal themselves as part of a “transversal ensemble” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 163) that connect both women with the natural elements that give name to the films. Following this ecofeminist and posthumanist perspective, we could argue that the otherizing processes that women go through in patriarchal societies are projected onto nature in these films “perceived like woman as an adjunct to the male self rather than as a genuine other” (Plumwood, 2001, p. 15). These subjects, then, can be seen as examples of resistance to a climate and care work crisis that reacts in a hostile way to the unsustainability and unequal distribution of responsibilities in society. 

Bibliography

Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion (NED-New edition, 2). Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09x4q

Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Polity Press. https://rosibraidotti.com/publications/posthuman-knowledge/

Campbell, S. (1994). Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression. Hypatia, 9(3), 46–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810188 

Colell, M. (directora y guionista). (2018). Con el viento [Drama]. Filmin. https://www.filmin.es/player?type=film&mediaId=38719 

De Luca, T., & Barradas Jorge, N. (2016). Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas. In T. de Luca & Barradas Jorge, N. (Eds.), Slow Cinema (pp. 1–22). Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09wrj.8 

Herrero, Y. (2010). Hacia una necesaria reformulación del trabajo. Ecología Política, 40, 17–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41420375 

López Riera, E. (directora y guionista). (2022). El Agua [Película]. Alina Film, Les films du Worso, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse.   

Plumwood, V. (2001). Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 12(4), 3–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/104557501101245225