More-than-human worlds through the Neo-Western landscapes of Jauja and The Revenant

ABSTRACT

This article applies ideas from posthumanism and ecocriticism to a comparative study of Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. This comparison serves to explore the narrative and aesthetic strategies by which human-scale events are decentred and colonial histories revised when the sense of place understood in terms going beyond and recreating the human, structures the cinematic object. These two films represent encounters between European and American peoples, but perhaps more significantly they represent them within more-than-human worlds that destabilise the narratives of control underpinning colonialist world-making practices. There is, however, a difference between the impenetrability and inhospitality of Jauja’s Patagonia and The Revenant’s wintry but fragile sublimity. This article discusses the implications of these differences in terms of cinematic possibilities for the reimagining of the concrete landscapes of colonial frontiers to link colonial histories to the extractivist present and the different futures – both catastrophic and creative – it presages.

KEYWORDS:

• Neo-Western
• ecocinema
• Lisandro Alonso
• Alejandro González Iñárritu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Herzberg (2008, 45) particularly critiques the subordination of human subjectivity and relegation of Native people as mere obstacles to the frontier promise (Manifest Destiny) in the later sound Westerns of Cecil B. DeMille. Carter (2014) argues against uniform classifications based on a periodization of Westerns and identifies more ambivalent representations in so-called classic era Westerns as well. Yacavone (2018) has endeavoured to draw out these ambivalences in the work of John Ford, often charged with stereotypical representations.

2. Herzberg cites Dances with Wolves as a notable example.

3. The novel has only one older female character – the young Arikara woman Powaqa is another addition in the film version.

4. The bear, out of very comprehensible necessity, is CGI, and the horse carcass a constructed prop, though several real animals do appear in The Revenant, including in the directorial preference for including as much on-location sound as possible. The CGI for scenes of animal death is an important distinction, since De Luca 2015, 229) describes real animals – and their real deaths – in Lisandro Alonso’s work and cinema in general as ‘the harbingers par excellence of the real’.

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Jane Hanley

Jane Hanley lectures in Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Department of International Studies at Macquarie University. She coordinates Spanish language courses as well as teaching on topics related to travel and tourism, migration, past and present popular culture in Spain, and contemporary Mexico. Her research interests include travel writing, transnational cultural production, and gender in Spanish-language popular culture. Her current research project is on the influence of transnational mobility and networks in different genres.