Gods of Mexico Review: Helmut Dosantos’s Invigorating Portrait of Ancient Customs

Central to Helmut Dosantos’s documentary Gods of Mexico is the tension between geological, mythic, and historical time. As announced in its subtitle, the film aims to present “a portrait of a nation through its lands and peoples.” To realize this integrative vision of the interplay between human beings and their environment, Dosantos borrows as much from the static mediums of landscape and portraiture photography as he does from the moving image. The result is as captivating as it is formally invigorating.

Dosantos arranges Gods of Mexico in the form of a poem, drawing out the distinct temporal rhythms which are its core theme in a three-part structure. The opening segment, titled “White,” and the closing one, titled “Black,” are shot in color and follow labor processes of a divergent character. Subdivided into shorter snippets named after figures in Indigenous mythology and sorted by cardinal direction, a series of black-and-white “portraits” is sandwiched in between. The outer segments frame the inner one’s facsimile of still photography, so that the film unfolds in a pattern of rhythms: movement, stillness, movement.

“White” follows the methodical labor of those working the terraced salt pans of Mexico’s rural south. Throughout, Dosantos’s often-static camerawork emphasizes the austere geometries of desert landscapes, with some shots, empty of people, distinguishable from a photograph only when the wind stirs the branches of a tree. In others, human beings are tiny figures moving on foot or riding donkeys across a stillness so vast it engulfs them.

This carefully orchestrated tension between human activity and that of geology, so slow as to seem inert, shows the influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectical montage. The pace fluctuates as Dosantos captures the rhythms of salt extraction, which have a ritualistic yet mathematical precision. Despite the use of flatbed pickups, this form of labor may be in essence unchanged from ancient times. By and large, there’s no music or dialogue, only the noises produced by what’s happening in the frame, or just outside it. Enrico Ascoli’s sound design turns the repeated thuds of a pick-axe or the caterwaul of cayotes into an ambient music.

Gods of Mexico’s middle section inverts the rhythms of the first. Highly staged, with figures holding hieratic poses in traditional clothing, including masks and body paint, movement now derives more from the landscape or from animals than the subjects who move only inadvertently. The tone here is more mythological, devoid of activity and seemingly outside of time. In one portrait, a woman holding a pair of giant candles sits side-saddle on a donkey straddling a creek bed. The water trickles toward the camera, the donkey shifts nervously, and the candleflames flicker, but the woman herself does not budge. In another, an otherwise motionless man puffs on a long-stemmed tobacco pipe with an altar of feathers at his feet.

If the segments that bookend it recall Godfrey Reggio’s The Qatsi Trilogy, here the almost painterly compositions are more reminiscent of Sergei Parajanov’s Color of Pomegranates. The sound design shifts, too, increasingly abstract so as to underpin the mythic or geologic tone, as braying donkeys give way to whale song and underwater echoes invoke a long-since vanished inland sea, as the camera slowly zooms in to the center a volcanic crater.

The frenetic momentum of history asserts itself in “Black,” which follows the chaotic activity of miners in the north of the country. Deep underground, with the camera often placed in some chasm at an oblique angle to the action and most of the frame shrouded in darkness, spatial orientation drops away. Any intent behind much of the miners’ activity is lost, as the viewer never learns what it is that they’re mining for. This form of labor, driven by machinery and dynamite, has fallen drastically out of step with that of the landscape, but for all that, the miners find ways to reintroduce human rhythms by, for instance, dancing on their breaks.

If Gods of Mexico harkens back to certain traditions of visual representation, Donsantos’s counterintuitive recombination of what would seem to be mutually exclusive inspirations, each with its own temporal framework, allows him to offer for our contemplation a vision uniquely his own. Without the need for explanation, argument, even music, the powers of the moving and static image interfuse in this arresting document of Mexico’s ethnogeographic multiplicity—a layering of temporalities that, despite being at odds with one other, are nevertheless coeval.