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six Just as the photographs of Jean-Marie Simon cut to the heart of Guatemala’s dark reality, so too do three features by documentary filmmaker Mary Ellen Davis. Her Maya trilogy spans a decade of faltering transition from war to peace. In The Devil’s Dream (1992), Tierra Madre (1996), and Haunted Land (2002), Davis contemplates a deeply troubled past and tries to imagine how Guatemala might one day be anything other than its tortured, unresolved self. A staunch believer in narrative, Davis informs the viewer by the trust she places in having her protagonists tell stories. She seldom resorts to off-screen voiceovers, restricting them mostly to the questions we hear her ask quietly while on location. We are made to feel at all times part of an intimate conversation . One watches without the sense of intrusion that often pervades the documentary genre. Davis takes care not to rush her subjects. Instead, she lets them present us with information in a layered, cumulative fashion. She insists that the viewer, like herself and her crew in the field, be patient, observant, and discerning, above all else disposed to mull things over before reaching a conclusion. The viewer, in short, is forced to think, not remain passive and inert as words, sounds, and images are articulated and screened. The Devil’s Dream, operating on two very different but powerfully connected levels, is perhaps the most challenging of the three films to watch. At one level, Davis utilizes footage of “The Dance of the Twenty-Four Devils,” a popular drama enacted on the streets of Ciudad Vieja, to create a vast, symbolic allegory: having declared war on humanity, the Devils form a pact with Death and seek to capture human souls with the avowed goal of bringing to an end the human species. As the Dance of Death unfolds—kitschy folkloric music accompanies campy theatrical performances—the iniquities of everyday life in Guatemala are interspersed in a series of grounded, self-contained vignettes: the assassination of José María Ixcayá, once an active member of a native rights association; the migration of entire Maya families from their devils And Angels devils and angels 3 homes in the mountains down to lowland plantations, where they work in the scorching heat for starvation wages; the concern of Maya mothers that the children they bring into the world, destined to be inadequately fed and thus prone to constant sickness, will not survive infancy; and the massacre perpetrated at Santiago Atitlán by government soldiers stationed there on December 2, 1990. Almost everywhere Davis looks, she observes a military presence: parading from the presidential balcony, grim-faced and sun-glassed, dressed in camouflage or cloaked in medals; overseeing with macho pride the Miss Guatemala beauty pageant; patrolling a fairground, guns at the ready, during a village fiesta; and blocking roads so that a demonstration planned by striking workers will at least be disrupted, if not abandoned altogether before violence erupts. A fragment of conversation in The Devil’s Dream furnishes Davis with the subject matter she pursues at length in Tierra Madre: native views of the relationship in Guatemala between land and life, especially how Maya values in this regard are at odds with non-Maya ones. At one juncture in The Devil’s Dream, Rosalina Tuyuc, a leading figure in the widows’ rights group cOnavigua, puts it thus: “Without land there is no life.” This point of view, and the deeply rooted beliefs that anchor it, are developed in Tierra Madre by a number of individuals, among them a Maya Catholic priest, Darío Caal Xí, and a Ladino lawyer, Fredy Ochaeta.We listen to Caal speak as the lens of Guillermo Escalón, Davis’s cameraman for all three films, pans the landscape and captures bits and pieces of Guatemala’s haunting beauty: The earth is our mother. She gives life to humanity. The land belongs to God. It belongs to the people. We don’t view the land as private property. We understand land as a divinity and as a mother. The earth divinity— tierra madre, madre tierra—is also bonded to human kind. The land nourishes humanity. The land allows us to live, to survive. Caal, a Q’eqchi’ Maya, stresses the spiritual, collective dimension of land/life relations. The perception of land as community, not commodity, ties together people living off the land, linking them back to their ancestors ’ past and forward to their offsprings’ future. It is a relationship...

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