Silvestre Pantaleón directed by Roberto Olivares Ruiz and Jonathan D. Amith, and: 10th Parallel directed by Silvio Da-Rin (review)

Silvestre Pantaleón is set in the village of San Agustín Oapan in Guerrero, Mexico. The documentary film opens with the 80 year-old titular protagonist sitting at a long table in the home of a curandero, or folk healer. Silvestre tells the curandero his chief ailments, which are joint stiffness, numbness of the limbs, and general body pain. The curandero then lays tarot cards into four even rows on the table. “The cards reveal that you were once frightened by the river, and were thrown by a donkey,” the curandero discloses. “And be aware that the cemetery’s dead are doing you harm.” But Silvestre cannot afford the curandero’s intricate healing ritual that he hopes can restore him. Silvestre leaves discouraged, lamenting to no one in particular, “I just don’t feel well, my whole body aches. Without money, who is going to retrieve my soul?” Shortly after his tarot card reading, Silvestre visits the home of a man who asks him to weave a rope from the fiber of the maguey plant (Agave spp.). The rope will be used to secure a statue of a saint during an upcoming procession. Silvestre tells him it will cost eight dollars. “But it’s for a saint!” exclaims the man. “How much are you really going to charge?” Silvestre is browbeaten into accepting six dollars for the work. Early on in the film, then, the organizing narrative is established: besieged by physical ailments, Silvestre is compelled to weave a rope to earn money to pay the curandero and hopefully regain his health.

Much of the film’s running time documents the steps in making the maguey rope: first, finding suitable maguey plants and hacking away their wide leaves with machetes; slicing the leaves length-wise into strips and soaking the strips in a river for nine days; laying the strips over a stone on the riverbank to beat them with a wooden club so as to loosens their fibers; and finally spinning the washed and dried fibers into a rope. In pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, cloth and rope were woven from maguey fibers at the household level (Carpenter et al. 2012). Similarly, at various steps Silvestre receives help from his wife, daughter, and son-in-law. It may very well be that the laborious and time-consuming process being filmed is rooted in antiquity. As the action transitions from one location to another, the cinematography captures the reality of this vast and semi-arid landscape. Other scenes of social interaction and human-environment interaction filmed at various locations around San Augustín Oapan offer viewers a filmic representation of the place-making process (Pink 2007).

Intercut among the steps of rope-making are scenes of unstudied elegance: children standing in waist-high river water casting fishing nets as far as they are able; women collecting river water in oversized clay pots and then carrying the pots slung over their shoulders back up the riverbank; Silvestre sitting alone under a shade tree with his stiff legs outstretched before him. The film portrays such ordinary activities with stark regard and so manages to reveal the basic reality of daily life in San Augustín Oapan. In this sense, Silvestre Pantaleón is a field study, a videographic geography that documents a people’s way of life in a particular time and place (Garrett 2011). The film is also a contribution to ethnographic cinema because all the dialogue is in Oapan Nahuatl, a rare tonal variant of Nahuatl unique to this village.

After receiving payment for the rope, Silvestre asks the curandero to perform the healing ritual. During the daytime the curandero makes offerings...