Early on in Under the Flags, the Sun, a banner hoisted by loyalists to Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner reads, “The 20th century, with God and Stroessner!” Within the context of the tyrant’s first electoral win, the slogan betrays a tragicomic faith in the leader’s cosmopolitanism and strength of character, a belief that the administration would propel the “backward” countryside into the pleasures of modernity and capitalist statehood. Considered in a post-Stroessner Paraguay, after decades of political corruption, agrarian poaching, catastrophic deforestation, political repression, and sanctioned torture campaigns rivaling the Pinochet regime, the phrase is more accusatory, the clauses switched. Stroessner becomes the platonic amalgamation of the post-war era; a lingering illness of intense persuasion, advancing through all arteries of the society it occupies. It is no accident, then, that Juanjo Pereira’s film presents itself not only as an essential document of Paraguayan history, but of the 20th century at large.
Pereira’s documentary is as unique as the challenges its subject proposes. Alfredo Stroessner took office in 1954, after a string of highly publicized political embarrassments and upheavals in the Paraguayan government, and continued in the position until his overthrow in 1989. Of those 34 years, much of the tumult went unreported, evidenced by the off-kilter collage Pereira stitched together in order to represent the period. The time from Stroessner’s rise to power up until the late ‘60s is gleaned only from propaganda reels: rousing electoral rallies, gilded victory parties, and side-eyed displays of wanton nationalism. The torture, exiles, and reckless land reform go almost entirely unreported until halfway into the film. It’s as if they never happened, or were only rumored about by old paranoiacs and soft-voiced canaries. Local legends thwarted by the oligarchs’ orchestrated jubilation but never convincingly, never entirely banishing the fears lurking just below the surface.
Normally, one could expect some diegetic hand to aid audience understanding, and to some extent, Pereira will highlight visual imperfections and idiosyncrasies to expose the inherent incompleteness of the material, but he will not be caught red-handed. There is no narration, save a few French and English educational announcers from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Aside from interspersed documents unclassified for the screen, there is very little in the way of intertitles. There is very little, too, to suggest the undercurrent of rebellion readily apparent in almost every popular history of the country, as early as the late ‘50s. The first half of the film, then, is thoroughly, irrevocably incomplete. Destroyed, banished, and bare. One goes into this world — for non-Latin Americans, almost certainly unknown as it is — clueless and ill-fitted, and as the curtains are drawn, exposing the horrid and ridiculous center, your paltry skills are useless to survive it unscathed. The tortures and disappearances of important people do not end in death or exile, but in darkness.
However, the film does not hide behind its incompleteness. Instead, Pereira embraces it. As foreign and continental news outlets become more interested in the Paraguayan peoples’ plight, the footage gains a terrible clarity. As the world “catches up” on the national situation, the audience, too, is given first glimpse of the offenses that were simply alluded to. Police violence, torture, and the destruction of natural wonders are suddenly portrayed in graphic technicolor. Blood pools drying in cobblestone cracks and massive floodings in protected forests are cut among gaudy receptions and the pinning of medals on Stroessner’s lapel. Information funnels in with disturbing chronology, charting both the escalation of repression and the evolution of the global media apparatus. The film becomes hallucinatory, ribald. Pereira’s editing becomes ecstatic and thorny, right up until the film’s climax, when Stroessner’s offices are raided, and the extent of his crimes finally realized.
In a clip describing one of Stroessner’s “Colorado Party” stump speeches, a crowd of locusts, or perhaps lightning bugs or cicadas, pillories the cameras, lights, and sound equipment. They buzz about the hair of attendees, sear their feet on the stage lights, and otherwise aggravate the cameramen into meaty jolts and shocks. The sound of their purring is unusually clear, especially considering the very few legible soundbites of the speakers or audience. Though the natural annoyance has a rather obvious metaphorical conclusion from the start, the scene lingers so long, far beyond its use as a description of Stroessner’s rise, the sheer miracle of the footage’s survival is felt deeper than its educational significance. Another sequence, shot well into the seventies, again marvels in an irrelevant, but deeply moving tactile experience: a few Indigenous elders are filmed on the street, smiling and silent. They are given various orders by crewmen. Look one way, then the other, face the camera, go away. Again, the scene is included as symbolic evidence of the very real cruelties and repression against the Indigenous population of Paraguay. But within the context of a necessarily incomplete film, it wields a contrary importance. The fact that these small, disordered moments survive after decades of fascist rule seems an essential point of defiance, shining ephemera in an ocean of murky blackness. As the tides of modernity rise higher and higher, the old ways of living torn away from the lands of their birth, a careful eye must seek out those stubborn elements that seem unable to die, cannot be moved, and cannot be forgotten.
DIRECTOR: Juanjo Pereira; DISTRIBUTOR: Icarus Films; IN THEATERS: November 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
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