Kent and Wonder discuss the poetic non-fiction film, Gaucho Gaucho, which traces a small community of Gauchos living with their horses and families against the backdrop of the vast plains of Argentina. Emerging themes include caring for the land, the passing on of traditions, and the care of large animals. Astrologically these things are related to the 4th house and the earth element as well as the 12th houses (large animals).
Distribution: Streaming on Jolt by Dec 1, 2024, more info
Directors: Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw
Run Time: 85 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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[00:00:13.476] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of documentaries from Sundance 2024. So this is the fourth of six in our section on Family, Land, and Ancestors. And today's episode, we're going to be diving into Gaucho Gaucho, which is a part of the US documentary competition. And it actually picked up a special jury award for sound. And the directors are Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw. So, Wonder, maybe you could read through the synopsis for Gaucho Gaucho.
[00:00:48.248] Wonder Bright: A celebration of a community of Argentine cowboys and cowgirls, known as gauchos, living beyond the boundaries of the modern world. Gaucho Gaucho paints an Argentinian Western with image and sound that reach an operatic beauty. Acclaimed photographers and now three-time Sundance-vetted filmmakers, Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck, return with another striking nonfiction work, after first taking audiences to the final stock car racetrack of Long Island with The Last Race, and the secret corners of the Italian countryside in search of white truffles with the Truffle Hunters. Their focus is now on the vast plains of Argentina, expressed in stunning black and white photography and a small community of gauchos who hold profound connections to the surrounding nature and their own traditions. As older generations dispense their wisdom, the film keeps its eye towards a new generation who continue to fight for their family's legacy in a modern world. And that synopsis comes to us by way of Sundance programmer Charlie Sextro.
[00:01:54.251] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, when I think about my experience of this film and some of the significations, one of the things that I have first on the list was Earth Element, just because it feels like such an experiential film. The experience of watching this is, it’s shot in beautiful black and white footage. You're in the countryside of Argentina and you're seeing this lifestyle of these gauchos, which are, I don't know if they're kind of equivalent to cowboys, or ranchers, or pastoralists. Wonder Bright: Cowboys. Kent Bye: Cowboys, yeah. So, you're seeing this way of life in this culture, all their practices and the way that they're transmitting the information to generation to generation, the way that they're stewarding the land, but you have these, like, still shots that let the scene play out over time, so a lot of these long durational takes with not a lot of editing within the context of a single scene, you're just getting, like, one little snapshot of this, and i think they were talking about in the Q&A, how they would shoot maybe one or two scenes a day, so it's just this long durational process of capturing all these moments that doesn't have any camera movement, and you're tracing a number of different characters throughout the course of their daily routines and trying to exhibit all the different dimensions of the gaucho culture. Yeah, I guess the other thing was the soundtrack for me was amazing. It felt, like, so many amazing songs. And I don't know if the special jury award was for the sound design or if it was just more of the overall sonic experience of this piece. But overall, this was a very experiential film in the sense of it's cultivating the sense of environmental presence and how these people are embodying their relationship to the earth.
[00:03:37.065] Wonder Bright: It's so interesting because as you were talking about it, I was like, was it black and white? Because to me, it's so sepia toned. I would have to actually look at a still from the film to know because I have this experience in my mind of it being very, like, just a classic, Western photo sepia tone and the way in which the camera is never moving. It's just always watching a sequence. It's sort of like watching an old timey photograph come to life because this community really is living with something that I would think of as the old ways, I guess. And every sequence is so lovingly filmed. That's how I would think of it. They're really thinking of it in terms of a cinematic universe. Like, how does this look first and foremost? And yet somehow it never stops feeling like it's a documentary, like we're watching something unfold. And yet every sequence has been carefully curated. In the Q&A they did mention that they would set the camera at the same location for long periods of time so that In much the same way that any reality TV series subject gets used to having a camera there, the people in this community would get used to having the cameras there, but the cameras were always stationary, so they might have felt even more relaxed around it because it wasn't necessarily associated with people pursuing them if they left the screen somehow. So despite the fact that it's got this very sort of staged, like, strong, firm, aesthetic approach, the action still feels very natural and very true to the people that are inhabiting the world that we're invited into.
[00:05:41.284] Kent Bye: Yeah. And this piece we have it under the (section) Family, Land, and Ancestors. And I feel like a big theme of this is seeing how knowledge is being transferred in a oral transmission and the elders who are teaching the younger generation, whether it's the mechanics of how to sharpen a knife, or in this father / son relationship, or there's this other female gaucha who is learning how to ride these horses and getting information around how to take care of the horses. And so we see this fundamental relationship between humans and the land around us, and this very specific cultural tradition of the gauchos and how they maintain these relationships to the land. And so I feel like it's a bit of a snapshot for looking at different dimensions of how they entertain themselves - and maybe more of a 5th House expression, or how they're connected to the earth - and more of a 4th House connection, or their faith with being connected to the church, and more of a 9th House - or a 6th House or 12th House expression of how they're taking care of these animals who are helping to provide their livelihood. Yeah, lots of different contextual dimensions that we're being exposed to and something that, again, is very sparse and we're kind of jumping in between these different characters across these different contexts. But I get this other signification of Saturn, the traditions and the structures and the elders who are responsible for passing on this information, but also this Saturnian nature of very minimalistic constrained aesthetic for how we're just kind of watching these scenes unfold in front of us in a way that gives us this whole experience of time. So yeah, I placed it with Saturn as a big signification, but also with the earth element that I mentioned before, where we have this whole experiential dimension of allowing these durational takes to happen, to really meditate on our relationship of not only these gauchos and their relationship to the earth around them, but also each of our relationships to the earth around us.
[00:07:48.360] Wonder Bright: Did they actually use the word gaucha to speak about the young teenage girl who was training with her father?
[00:07:56.262] Kent Bye: I don't know. I have to look it up, but
[00:07:59.014] Wonder Bright: I'm going to look it up right now if that's OK. I think it's a sort of - I was really intrigued when you used that. This film felt very patriarchal. So it was interesting that one of the main protagonists we followed was this young girl who's following in her father's footsteps, when it didn't feel like there was a real context for the women in the film at all. We have one sequence where we watch women making, I think they might have been empanadas, some sort of pastry together, where the camera lingers on them for a period of time. And then we see women at the table eating with the men, but the women are totally not the focus of the film. The focus of the film is on the action of the gauchos and the women are very much supporting players. So the young girl who is studying the art of gauchos, studying the life of gauchos, who wants to be one, I'm just intrigued at the idea because, you know, we don't in English, we don't have that distinction of feminine words or masculine words. And I'm just interested whether or not if that actually happened in the film. OK, I'm just looking it up right now. So when I look it up, it just redirects to gaucho. Obviously, in the absence of having a Spanish speaking person to help us with this, we're not going to get to the etymology of it. But I think it pulls on a thread of something that I had real questions about and curiosity about while I was watching this movie, because obviously, the action is really focused on the interaction and the lifestyle that emerges from these people who are living with these horses in the way that they're living with them. And it is arguably just an artifact of who is doing that, that the focus is on the men in the film. And yet it was this interesting thing for me because, you know, certainly in the description of the film, it's all about this community. And when the filmmakers were talking about it, they were talking about a community, but it's really about the men and this young woman, like her conversations with other women are all about like either her clothes and whether or not they're like going to fit her or whether or not she should be.
[00:10:19.358] Kent Bye: Well, part of the clothes was that she was at the school and she was wearing her gaucho outfit and she was supposed to be wearing her school uniform.
[00:10:27.569] Wonder Bright: And then there's another one where she's getting fitted for her gaucho uniform that she'll be wearing at the rodeo or whatever. I'm not sure what the word was that they would use for that, basically where she was going to perform and compete against other gauchos. And then there's one conversation that she has with, maybe her sister, who has just had a newborn where she's trying to articulate why she wants to be a gaucho instead of pursuing a more, you know, feminine life, essentially. And so for me, just as a woman, I was so curious about the women in the film, because what we were seeing was, like, an unexamined experience of a young girl trying to fold into this very patriarchal culture. And it was very clear that her father was extremely proud of her. He tells her, in one sequence when they're sitting across from one another at the table. But it isn't really a conversation about a community to my mind. It's a conversation about an ancestral way of life that is passed down from father to son through the generations. And the young woman that we're following is an exception to the rule rather than like the rule itself. So it was interesting because It's beyond the purview of the film to address. And yet, because of the inclusion of this young girl, it became for me like a lingering question that I ended up having throughout the course of the film, where I really wanted to know more about the food, for instance. But maybe that's just because I'm always hungry. I don't know.
[00:12:14.463] Kent Bye: Yeah. And most of the characters that are featured in this film are men, I think every other protagonist in this film that we're following. There's one man who's got this interaction with these condors and these birds. There's another really energetic, fiery guy who ends up being, like, a DJ, but also commentating at the rodeo and a trio of men who are going out and doing different tasks with their herd. There's a young boy and another young boy who are going off on different adventures together. And then there's a father-son relationship where we're seeing the father teaching his son all these different aspects from the gaucho culture over time. But yeah, you're correct to say that there's only one female protagonist in this piece and that everything else is centered around the men. There are a couple of wives that appear a couple of times, but they're really not given much of a narrative thread. We're not following them across different scenes. They're just there in conversation with the other men. Yeah, and I guess as we think about this film of Gaucho Gaucho, who do you prescribe this film to?
[00:13:18.554] Wonder Bright: To me, this feels like a really strong 4th House expression. The thing to me that is the most striking is the passing down of a way of life that is so outside of how our modern culture, especially if you live in any kind of urbanized area, which in North America at this point, like, fewer and fewer of us don't live in an urbanized area. One of the things that's the most striking about it is an opportunity to think about how the 4th House might once have been, you know, like an increasingly urbanized landscape where everybody's living in cities and we've all got iPads and we're getting farther and farther away from the land and direct contact with animals that we raise, that we take care of, that take care of us. This film has this beautiful way of calling to life a way of life that is imperiled, is dwindling, I'm sure. And it's really amazing to watch these traditions passed on. It's a really beautiful film for that. So anyone who's interested in how those traditions get passed on through generational oral and physical teaching, this is the film for you. It's really beautiful. As long as you don't need to know how the empanadas get made.
[00:14:49.704] Kent Bye: Yeah. And when I think about this film and what to bear witness to, I think that female character to me is actually one of the more compelling characters in the story, just because she is going outside of the normal structures of that society in the way that she's often the only female who's doing a lot of these different activities, and there's a way in which the signification of animals are usually put into like the 6th House and or 12th House but 6th House in the way that they can actually have a wild nature to them, and they can actually do harm to you, and I feel like there's these moments where she gets bucked off one of the horses and breaks one of her limbs, and then she's on crutches and so you see this perseverance that she has to continue to come back, and to go on, despite all the threats to her life or her safety. All these broken bones that she's going off and sneaking and doing it. And yeah, I guess the other really compelling character to me is this other commentator guy who ends up being in these different scenes across all these different things that he's doing. And there's this moment where he's talking to the priest and the priest is really trying to press him. Like, who do you want to be? What do you want your legacy to be? And he's just basically like, Saying he just wants to be himself, like his name, his identity, and not anything that he's doing, and so there's this really interesting interaction where the priest is trying to get him to be really contemplative about the deeper structures of his life and his legacy and he's just, like, “nah, I'm just gonna continue to do my thing”, and you see him throughout the course of this being a narrator in certain moments where he's the one who's calling, and narrating what's happening when the different riders are trying to ride these horses. And so there's some interaction between these two main characters because he's narrating what's happening as she's going off and doing something that is quite unique in that culture. So yeah, that's what I'm going to be taking away from the film is that character.
[00:16:45.919] Wonder Bright: Gosh, what do I want to bear witness to? I want to bear witness to a way of life captured as it's really imperiled and threatened on the earth. And especially the way that this way of life includes a slower pace of human development in a way that is really good for the human mind, I think. I'm just thinking now about the father teaching his young son how to sharpen a knife. You know, in my experience, most American parents are not going to be teaching their six or seven year old child how to use a knife. And it does require a certain kind of patience and interest from both parties. You have to be very patient with the young child. And then the child has to be really interested in that. And you both have to have time for one another. And we don't have that kind of time with our children to teach them how to work with knives, or we don't make the time. You know, it's just the nine to five work day, rat race life of your average American bear. It just doesn't include that kind of attention to passing on a tradition that includes the necessity of keeping a knife sharp. And there was just something so rich in that scene of what was passing between the father and son around listening to one another, being present and learning how to handle a sharp blade and learning that a sharp blade needs to stay sharp in order to be safe. There's just a whole world in that single moment that to me is rare and precious and I am really glad I got to witness it.
[00:18:48.041] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, that was Gaucho Gaucho that was premiering at Sundance 2024. And that's all that we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, please do, tell your friends, spread the word and consider signing up to the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
