Magellan (Lav Diaz)

The Other Side of Conquest

Amir Siadat

Conquering and superior peoples, when turning their victories into epic tales, generally need the appeal of mainstream cinema — and sometimes a wide screen to hold crowds and battles. But the new historical film by Lav Diaz about Ferdinand Magellan seems to go in the exact opposite direction; aside from the fact that its square frame limits space for ado and spectacle, it seeks, through stillness, quiet, and silence, to achieve an alternative approach — one that carries the perspective of the inferior. Using the voyages of the famous Portuguese navigator as a starting point, the film illuminates a corner of colonial history — but from an unusual perspective, through a camera that seems determined to scrub the traces of colonialism from its own aesthetics, in a way that recalls Lucrecia Martel’s Zama. Magellan’s extreme realism stubbornly resists the usual pomp and spectacle of epic cinema. At two and a half hours, it might seem short by Lav Diaz’s standards (though he promises a nine-hour version is on the way!), yet, like most of his films, it unfolds with painstaking slowness, and the world it seeks to conjure emerges only through patient endurance. Lav Diaz doesn’t indulge in explaining every detail of history, so viewers unfamiliar with the background might leave unsure about the full scope of Magellan’s ten-year voyage — from conquering a state in Malaysia to fighting on one of the Philippine islands. Yet, in my view, the film succeeds in giving us just enough taste of the turmoil, suffering, and slow death of Magellan’s lost sailors to make the audience recoil from the adventures that the powerful celebrate. Magellan’s camera shies away from staring at violence, killing, and torture. Its location on the ship is such that the mast of the ship hides the body being whipped; it shows the axe raised for a beheading but closes its eye at the moment it falls; it refuses to dwell on domination and struggle of bodies, yet lingers over the conquerors wandering among the corpses. I will remember Magellan’s voyage not for its major events or story twists, but for the humid jungles and windy coasts of Southeast Asia, the creaking planks of the ship, and a few shots or tableaux carrying the grandeur of past centuries’ art, which briefly caress the rough skin of reality before vanishing like a fleeting illusion.