In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, which she co-directed with Miguel Gomes, Fazendeiro took an unusual approach to that problem. It was ostensibly a film about another film project that was derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and she and Gomes chose to arrange that film in chapters which were then shown in reverse order. The pandemic and lockdown, of course, generated their own bizarre sense of temporality, a distended twilight zone in which days and weeks were lost, even as the hours and minutes seemed to interminably drag. So Tsugua became about the unmaking of a film as time seemed to wind itself backwards, a vain attempt at reclaiming the old normal.
The Seasons has a similar theoretical bent, although it takes a little while to see what Fazendeiro is up to. In simplest terms, The Seasons is a landscape film focusing on Alentejo, a rural region of Portugal. Proportionally, most of the film consists of slow 360° pans of farmland and hillsides, the camera gently prodding our curiosity as scenery rolls into the filmed image like a panorama. This gesture shows a certain affinity with experimental filmmaking, in particular the atmospheric structuralism of Michael Snow, Chantal Akerman, and especially Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. As the camera describes the landscape in which Fazendeiro has situated it, the viewer feels themselves mentally connecting what we are seeing now and what we have previously seen into a coherent picture of the land. (To quote Snow, “events take time. Events take space.”)
However, The Seasons is held together by a broader concept of human temporality. The film begins with a look at the fossilized remains of snakes, and at several points in the film Fazendeiro shows us an in-progress archeological dig. The fact that this process, with its cordoned-off area and tools of measurement, looks a lot like a film set goes some way toward explaining the underlying sedimentary layers of The Seasons. This is a film about incommensurable time frames, different ways in which the landscape endures, both in spite of and because of the various uses that people put it to. We see farmers herding goats, the stripping of cork trees, and abandoned orange groves. The title, of course, explicitly conjures our awareness of the natural cycles of time as experienced by humans, animals, and plants — periods of growth and decay, fields that bear fruit and at other times lay fallow.
But Fazendeiro also introduces historical, political, and folkloric time into the mix. At a couple of points during the film, we see groups of elderly residents of Alentejo, discussing their participation in a socialist agricultural collective. One woman sings a protest song, the gist of which is, if you reject collective farming, then go grovel before the landowners and see if they care. One man has a handwritten volume that contains notes, poems, and chronicles from the days of the commune, and they tell of how their project was destroyed by the rise of Salazar’s fascist government. At other moments, Fazendeiro dips into historical reenactment, with men in period costumes acting out both historical and mythic narratives from the 17th and 18th centuries. And all of this is staged within the landscape that The Seasons has inculcated us into. That is, we know we are seeing a fictive invocation of Alentejo’s past, enacted on the landscape whose contemporary existence is the formal foundation of the film.
Fazendeiro uses cinema as an instrument for excavating the various layers of history contained within any given landscape. A complex work of human geography, The Seasons demonstrates that the earth has been and continues to be a material coalescence of timelines that cannot be squared with one another, some of which are actually unavailable to human perception. Only by uncovering the artifacts of the past can we get a picture of geological time. And while rural life may be lived more in accordance with the natural cycles of the environment, this in no way represents an exemption from the movements of social and political time. It is no coincidence that Fazendeiro is examining Alentejo from the perspective of fascist control, and the periods before and after Salazar’s regime. Authoritarians cannot control the weather, the shifting of dirt and dust, or the life cycles of the animals. But this doesn’t mean that we can simply retreat into geological or mythic time. Our capacity to live both within and alongside nature is determined by our sociality, and that means that even the age-old shifting of the seasons is inseparable from questions of human freedom.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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