,,,a Valparaiso

Joris Ivens, the great Dutch documentarian, made a...Valparaiso in 1963 with a class of film students at the University of Chile.  Chris Marker, an equally accomplished director of documentary films, supplies a suitably surrealist and enigmatic narration for the 29 minute movie that was shot in silent format.  The picture, of course, is far more sophisticated than a mere student film and, in fact, is an intriguing and dreamlike vision of a city that seems remarkably eccentric.  In some respects, the film is like Bunuel, a seemingly realistic portrait of a place that repeatedly slips into the fantastic.  Indeed, the movie reminds me of one of Calvino's "invisible cities" from the book of that name.  

Valparaiso is built on a steep hillside overlooking its harbor.  The city's oddly shaped buildings, many of them like thin slivers of pie, rise in a sheer steps over the crescent of the sea cupped in the harbor.  Thirty funicular rail cars run up and down the slopes, some of them rising like elevators on their rails leading to the hilltops.  There are forty or more separate hills that hover over the sea and each comprises its own village with its own name.  Long and elaborate stone steps crisscross on the hillsides, some of them dangerously steep with cliffs dropping off from their naked sides..  Alleys are like ladders.  People climb up and down these prisms of precipitous stairs -- the poor who live higher on the hills can't afford the fare to ride the funiculars up to the top of the bluffs.  On the heights, it is hot and water is scarce and the slums look cubist and sun-baked.  In the harbor, fishmongers pitch fish to sea lions that lunge up out of the water.  A wealthy woman in an elegant Parisian frock takes her pet penguin for a walk on a leash.  A one-legged man is seen laboriously ascending 121 steps.  Toward the end of the film, we see him again hopping on his crutch along one of the terraces.  Half-way through the film, Ivens reminds us that the port was a place frequented by pirates and has a bloody history. (Perhaps, the one-legged man invokes Long John Silver from Treasure Island).  At this point, the film becomes color and remains in that format until the end, showing us a kite festival in its last minutes, then, brightly painted ships gliding through the harbor, and, at last, the movie ends as it began with a montage of enormous waves beating on the shore.  (After this montage at the film's beginning, we saw big cargo ships like ghosts slipping through the mist establishing the city's fantastic and oneiric physiognomy.  There are all sorts of things in this movie:  a saloon where people are dancing to rock 'n roll, fire fighters battling blazes on the hilltops where there is no source of water (we see the fireman knock down a wall with his axe and plunge into the flames).  There are shots of people unloading cargo and carrying big enigmatic bundles up the immense zigzagging flights of steps.  Patterns of shadow cast by the sun turn the landscape into a mirage of black and white decorated by women's laundry hanging over deep fissures and chasms in the escarpment of vertical neighborhoods.  In India, there are beautiful edifices called "Step-wells" -- these are deep excavations lined with stone steps in diagonal Escher-like patterns descending to the pool of water far below the surface.  Valparaiso looks an Indian step-well oriented vertically against a pattern of balconies stacked one upon the other to the top of the hill.  I wonder if this is how the city still looks.  Ivens' film makes no political statement -- it is like a film recording of a dream.