A Second Look: Lisandro Alonso, director of few words

The films of Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso take the form of silent, solitary journeys. His fourth feature, “Liverpool” (2008), which Kino International is releasing on DVD this week, both revisits and expands on the template of his previous films, which have sent reticent loners on rugged treks through desolate landscapes.

Here, the protagonist is a merchant sailor named Farrel (Juan Fernández), a stoic man with an air of inscrutability and a vodka bottle in his duffel bag. Granted shore leave in Ushuaia — the southernmost city in the world — he ventures inland, hitchhiking into the frigid mountains of Tierra del Fuego. His destination is a logging camp, where his ailing, long-unseen mother lives and where a sad, murky family history lies in wait.

At 35, with a striking (and strikingly coherent) body of work to his name, Alonso is a major figure in international art cinema — all four of his films have been shown at the Cannes Film Festival — but he remains too little known in the United States. “Liverpool,” which failed to secure an American theatrical distributor, opened in several cities last year thanks to a touring program organized by the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle.

Alonso’s first feature, “La Libertad” (2001), is a groundbreaking work in many ways, a film that doesn’t simply blur the distinctions between documentary and fiction but creates and inhabits a space in between. It follows a single day in the life of Misael, a young woodcutter in the pampas. Alonso was 25 and just out of film school when he met Misael, and the film is based on months of closely observing his subject’s daily routines.

Using long takes that are at once uninflected and hyper-attentive, “La Libertad” chronicles the stark facts and repetitive actions of Misael’s isolated existence. He searches for trees and chops wood, pauses to defecate or eat, prepares and transports the logs for sale, returns to his camp to build a fire and cook his dinner, a freshly killed armadillo.

Coming full circle with an extended shot of Misael staring into the camera, “La Libertad” — as the title suggests — crystallizes a question about this man’s life: Is the daily cycle a burden or a kind of freedom? The title could equally apply to Alonso’s conception, clear even in this first film, of an anti-dramatic, materialist cinema, fully in-the-moment and liberated from the confining traditional notions of fiction and reality.

“Los Muertos” (2004), available on DVD through Facets Video, lays the groundwork for “Liverpool.” A story of an enigmatic journey that also happens to be an inexorable homecoming, it observes a middle-aged man named Vargas (a non-actor who shares the name of his character) on the last two days of a long prison sentence and on his first two days of freedom, as he reacquaints himself with the natural world in all its beauty and brutality. (The trajectory is echoed in “Liverpool,” which progresses from the enclosed space of a hulking freighter to a snowy wilderness at the edge of the world.)

The opening sequence — a one-take shot that slithers through the lushest of jungles, revealing two dead bodies and a glimpse of a man’s arm wielding a machete — casts a pall over Vargas’ trancelike journey into the backwoods and then upriver. From virtuosic opening to unnervingly ambiguous finale, the film sustains a subtle atmosphere of dread, using an opaque character and ominous ellipses to create suspense. (For all the formal rigor of his films, Alonso also has a playful side: His hourlong 2006 film, “Fantasma,” is a very different kind of landscape movie, in which the lead actor of “Los Muertos” makes his way through the mazelike interiors of a Buenos Aires theater — where “Los Muertos” is playing.)

“Liverpool” repeats Alonso’s signature themes and motifs — a streamlined narrative, an unhurried pace, withheld back story, a tactile sense of place — but takes the additional step of moving its taciturn protagonist into tentative contact with others, damaged as those relationships may be.

The fictional scenarios of Alonso’s movies are, to an extent, pretexts that allow him to film specific people in specific settings. (Fernández, the lead in “Liverpool,” is yet another non-actor, a snow-plow driver the filmmaker met while traveling through Tierra del Fuego.) With his insistent focus on men who don’t say much in stories that barely exist, Alonso is often called a minimalist. But his films are maximal in their effect, in the way they capture places and presences: the sensation of being in the world and of encountering people in it.

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