Costa da Morte, Lois Patiño, España, 2013

In everyday life, our optical behavior rarely imitates the panoramic of cinema. Maybe that’s the reason we don’t see many panoramic shots as central shots in films. The panoramic shot is often employed to show the dimension of a battle, to pinpoint a location, or to use a (beautiful) landscape as a transition shot between two scenes. In Costa da Morte, except for three medium shots, the panoramic pervades through the mise en scene. Is this a reinvention of cinema’s vision? Is it the stimulation, on behalf of a cinematographic figure, of a different circuit of the brain for processing the input of light?

The conception of landscape in Patiño’s cinema is here at its most refined. In his first feature film he chooses a coastal city in Galicia to take his method to the extreme and makes an unexpected decision: to give a substantial position to the spoken word. What is interesting here is his democratic ingenuity: the discourse of the film is the landscape; sometimes men tell stories of shipwrecks and wars, they rehearse comical genealogies of the names of the surrounding mountains, they remember anecdotes. But Costa da Morte is that which speaks through them, because we always see these men as part of the landscape. Men are landscapes: their discourses belong to the geography and are born from it. This implies an extraordinary work of disjunction between what is heard and what is seen. Human figure turns diffuse, and words are detached from the mouth.

The intelligent sensitivity of this recording is flawless: a crane lifts a pile of logs; the following frames show their origin, then a fire; to film the landscape within time and to find the difference in duration. Who could forget those beautiful shots, at the beginning and at the end, of the sea collectors? In times where perceptual experience gets confused with the anabolic reality of 3D, Patiño’s film purifies the retina of its viewer.

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