Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel, these photographs of Paris taken by balloonist Nadar gave the world the perspective of birds and God for the first time. There are very few times in history that the world’s people could be said to be given an entirely different viewpoint on the world, but wonder and elation would soon become the humdrum of efficiency as farmers and landowners used this new technology to monitor crops and enforce borders. And, of course, no story of wondrous moments would be complete without military intelligence taking God’s powers for Old Testament-style punishment and surveillance. To this day, farmers proudly keep large photographic prints of their land in their offices, and civilians can enjoy the fruits of military labors with the satellite photography of Google Earth. The wonder is still there, but so is the feeling that this angle belongs to the birds and the military voyeurs.
Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias’ Pepe, a film about the hippos of Colombia, is indebted to this history of aerial photography and the uneasy feelings that come with it. The first time the hippos are glanced from above place them in the context of the rivers, tributaries, and desert stretches of Namibia, a country with few hippos outside the few that stick around for safaris full of tourists who damn better see a hippo while they’re in Africa, even if they picked the wrong side of the continent. The topography of these shots acts as impressionist brushstrokes that simultaneously hide and highlight the slippery-smooth, black-pink ovals that dip and swim and disappear one moment and emerge the next. The latter half of the movie follows the hippos to Colombia; the shots from above here take a darker tone as the work to find the hippos in these shots mimics the reconnaissance work that happened in this territory decades early. After all, this is the land of Pablo Escobar, whose purchase of African hippos in the 1970s led to a small population of the affectionately named “cocaine hippos” that still live along the Magdalena River. One of these hippos is Pepe, and he can talk.
Or, at least, he’s figuring out language, speaking bits of four languages from the regions he wanders. His ethereal voiceover intermittently interrupts a loose narrative — one of hippos wandering the safari land for the pleasure of a burgeoning tourism industry, of being shipped illegally to Colombia and insultingly classified as pigs to get past the police, of being enclosed in a makeshift zoo on Escobar’s estate, of the whispering of Pepe’s presence in the town of Puerto Triunfo, and of his eventual legendary status in the media and his capture and demise — with attempts to understand the Two-Legged that seem to hold his fate. Oscillating grunts turn into vowels, which Pepe transposes into emotions and questions for the Two-Legged, such as “what kind of river doesn’t have a middle?” during his Atlantic voyage or a small meditation that the “beautiful sleep” of death also awaits the soldiers that have killed him. The words are punctured and punctuated by the staccato grunts of the hippo itself, providing a rhythm that matches the streams as well as a fatalistic reminder that the Two-Legged cannot quite connect with Pepe’s pleas.
Just like his previous Cocote, De los Santos Arias mixes aspect ratios, color gradings, and film and digital photography to enhance Pepe’s dreamlike qualities. The black-and-white dunes of Namibia give way to grainy but colorful POV shots on the river; widescreen digital arrives near the end almost as a jump scare. The soft electronic soundtrack and Pepe’s poetic voiceover hint that this will not be a literal retelling of the cocaine hippos. Little moments with the Two-Legged afford the film some structure, such as distasteful disregard of African folklore from the safari guide or Magdalena Riverman Candelario’s (Jorge Puntillón García) flashlight-led adventure to prove the gigantic animal’s existence. But, though the film’s visual formats don’t always coalesce into great moments or meaningful observations, Pepe demands that we, like the river-horse of its title, merely follow along with its currents.
The most obvious comparisons to Pepe are the recent EO or its predecessor, Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar — two movies about the human condition told from the perspective of the non-humans who are perhaps better poised to understand it. Unlike those films’ donkeys, however, hippos are hardly barnyard animals or pets. They’re seen as actively hostile, something that might eat a child for instance, and are not wanted by the Colombians that now have to deal with the leftovers of Escobar’s eccentricities from Hacienda Nápoles. To be the homeless and nationless like the donkeys was to be a mere observer of all the world’s peoples and stories; the hippo is a much more apt metaphor for today’s displaced that aren’t trusted or wanted in their host nations but also can’t be further displaced or culled. When that final aerial shot centers Pepe’s body, surrounded by stoic soldiers, the whole history of military photography folds into it.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 5.
