Song Without A Name Film Difficulty Ranking: 3
Song Without a Name is a tragedy on many levels. Most immediately, there’s Georgina’s personal tragedy. Then there’s the tragedy of Peru in the 1980’s – oppressed by a military state. And in the background, there’s the tragedy of Peru’s indigenous population, that is being left behind. Song Without A Name is a brilliantly made black and white drama of one indigenous woman’s experience in a turbulent 1980’s Peru.
From: Peru, South America Watch: Trailer, FilmMovement Next: Dark Skull, El Dorado XXI, Roma
Setting the Scene
Song Without A Name opens with a montage of black and white news footage of armed civilians, protestors, and injured people being carried on stretchers. This footage is cut with sensational newspaper headlines indicating hyper inflation, power outages, and unemployment. They combine to quickly give us the context of the state of Peru in the late 1980’s, showing us the lack of law and economic control. This helps us to understand the things happening in the background of the film (like Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien or Roma), such as the military state, the curfews, and the Shining Path.
The Gradual Disappearance of Indigenous Culture
The film focuses on a pregnant indigenous woman, Georgina, that lives just outside the capital city of Lima. She’s still in touch with her culture, shown in the traditional music, dress, and ceremonies in the opening half of the movie. The indigenous culture she belongs to still seems out of reach of contemporary Peruvian society, as her village is completely isolated from the city in a barren deserted land.
She’s drawn into Lima everyday to sell potatoes, and within the city, she’s drawn to a clinic for pregnant women. It’s at the clinic that she’s cheated and later faces a complete lack of empathy from corruption addled bureaucracy. And from this point on, the presence of the indigenous ceremonies and traditional music and dress featured in the opening stars to take a back seat. This change, feels like an allegory to the demise of indigenous culture in Peru at the hands of the military state.
Style Used To Portray Marginalization
The black and white style of Song Without A Name is the most obvious stylistic effect used. It primarily gives the film a dated look, situating it in the past. But it also helps to obscure the characters, as in combination with the ever present mist, which blurs the black and white contrast, the characters become harder to distinguish. In these moments, the black and white film feels like it’s at the opposite end of the spectrum to the high contrast black and white film of Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela.
The lack of contrast is particularly noticeable at night when Georgina and her husband’s silhouettes are almost indistinguishable from the landscape. They pretty much blend into the background. As a result, it constructs them as people that aren’t quite visible in Peruvian society. As indigenous people, they’re marginalized by contemporary Peru. By day, the bright white mist hides their village and indigenous culture that is situated in a barren land on the outskirts of the city. By night, the darkness and lack of artificial light hides them.
The director also uses slow motion scenes to freeze the characters in time. It turns every move they make into something deliberate and measured, but slow. The shot mentioned above, of Georgina and her husband returning home after trying to find the clinic is one memorable example. They return in darkness, making them hard to distinguish, and the director starts to slow down their movement. As they’re slowed down, their figures become even more blurred and indistinguishable, turning them into what almost looks like rudimentary stick fires. In doing so, their characters are almost completely dissolved from the screen. Just as the black and white style hides them, the slow motion is used to emphasize their marginalization.
What to Watch Next
If you’re after more films about the Latin American indigenous experience, check out Dark Skull from Bolivia and El Dorado XXI from Peru. There’s also the sumptuous black and white colors to match Song Without A Name in Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma.
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