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Reviewed by:
  • Haunted Land
  • Jennifer Schirmer
Haunted Land. Directed by Mary Ellen Davis. New York: The Cinema Guild, 2001. 74 minutes. Color. VHS. $350.00 purchase; $95.00 rental.

The construction and reconstruction of memory is an attempt to make sense of the past, and it is particularly important when it is an especially violent past. Haunted Land follows a massacre survivor, Mateo Pablo, from his snow-bound home in Canada to his return for the first time to the 1982 massacre site of Petanac in highland Guatemala. He travels with photographer Daniel Hernandez-Salazar and a forensic team, unearthing the remains of families in mass graves. Mary Ellen Sacrée guides us through the meticulous forensic reconstruction of what the corpses tell us: the separation of the women from the men, the killing of the children by blunt force, the raping, the machine-gunning, the grenade-throwing into the houses, and the burning of the entire village. Thirty-eight people were killed in all, many under the age of 12. There are survivors, too, who are photographed as another kind of witness, as evidence of the terror. Their still photographs, etched into our memories, bear witness to the transfer of the bones to the new cemetery and become art forms in themselves. Mateo Pablo lays a stone on the mass grave, as do the others, in solemn silence.

Haunted Land, as an artful depiction of a forensic project, maintains a constant tension: constructing the horror of the massacre through the corpse remains, yet fomenting an "observer's sense of helplessness" for us as well as the few existing survivors. Mateo speaks of being "haunted by the dead," by the violence. He asks, with a querulous voice, "Para que sufrio' tanta gente? Matar . . . por ciertos intereses." (For what reason did so many people suffer? To kill . . . for certain interests.) Despite these questions, no explanation is offered as to why the victims were killed and how it is that they were killed so violently. The massacre victim himself does not understand. Nor does the Shaman when speaking to the dead of the village: "I don't know why you lost your lives. . . . Please don't be angry [that we are moving your bones to a holy site from the mass grave]; it's not mischief to move your remains."

The question, "Why did this horror occur?" is left hanging in the air. The viewer is left with an underlying vision of the helplessness and despair of the indigenous community and naturally brutish armed forces that are beyond one's control. This is unfortunate: by essentializing and naturalizing the helpless victim and the brutal military, we are left with little understanding of why such violence occurs. It leaves us with a sense of helplessness rather than an understanding that might help us prevent [End Page 509] such violence from being repeated. There is also the unconscious racism of the ladino photographer who orders Indians about for his profiles with a curt "sit down!" or "come here!" What are we to make of this manifestation of the 500-year colonial attitude still alive and well: was the filmmaker conscious of this and allowed it to be expressed as part of the film? Or was this perceived as the photographer's right as part of the creative process? Whatever the reason, it is an unwitting continuation of an age-old sense of ladino privilege and a bit jarring in a movie that is otherwise so sympathetic to the indigenous population.

Haunted Land, nonetheless, is an excellent instrument for courses on Latin America and Human Rights for keeping an important memory alive and raising the critical question: Will Guatemala remain a land haunted by its past and fearful of its future, or will it be able to build a better society with that memory in mind?

Jennifer Schirmer
University of Oslo
Oslo, Norway
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