The Fire Within Us: Küme Pewma Wenüy

(2020)

Küme Pewma Wenüy, an 8 minute poetry film by Cristián Tàpies, opens with the title The Spirit of Matter. We see time-lapse footage of clouds, stars, water. The sped-up footage reveals the power in the elements of water, air, and earth, allowing us to see them as constantly in dynamic transition. In most sequences the element of fire appears as a snow-capped volcano looming in the distance, sometimes emitting red-tinged smoke, a force of transformative violence, waiting for its moment. Shots of fire shooting out of the volcano alternate with the eerie calm of the full moon, rising in the night sky.

Over these images we read superimposed text from the poem Circulo by Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf. The Mapuche are an indigenous people of Chile and Argentina, who have been engaged in a resistance movement to protect their culture and their rights, as well as the ecosystem. The text appears in both Mapuche and Spanish. (There is an English translation in the closed captions.)

“We are apprentices in this world of the visible, ignorant of the energy that inhabits and moves us,” writes Chihuailaf. The subtle, evocative poem explores this idea, that we do not fully understand the forces that move through us, even when we consciously dedicate ourselves to serving those forces. We see men at a nighttime ceremony, tending a fire, attempting to channel the spirit and power of the volcano.

In the second half of the film, when the fire of the mountain finally erupts, it is not in the form of lava but in the fires set by indigenous protestors, fighting to protect the earth. We see burning barricades thrown up on the roads and in the streets. These protestors, serving the needs of the earth, may not fully understand the forces that they are serving any more than a shaman in a fire ceremony understands the power he is summoning.

This sequence brought me back to an experience I had in late 1989, attending several planning meetings of the AIDS activist group ACT UP New York, in preparation for the “Stop The Church” action against the Catholic church and its opposition to AIDS education and condom distribution. Watching some ACT UP members speaking at the meeting, I could feel that they were not in control of their own words. Rather, I could actually sense a force, a rage built up over 2,000 years in which the Church had forced gay people to live hidden, ashamed, and terrified. I felt this force rising up and sweeping along everyone in the room, whether they liked it or not. It was, in fact, quite like being part of a volcanic eruption, which only intensified in the massive street action. This was my first experience of seeing how people are “ignorant of the energy that inhabits and moves us.”

The closing section tells the story (in superimposed text) of Santiago Maldonado, a Mapuche activist who disappeared during a repression by the Argentinian authorities in 2017. They sought to arrest him after he led a protest against the eviction of the Mapuche from an area which was being claimed by the clothing company Benetton. He was missing for 78 days before his body was found. The text is shown over an aerial shot of the mountain, traversed by smoke, the power of the volcano temporarily quieted, latent, but always ready to rise again. Tàpies is able to use a beautifully poetic sequence of images to explore and expand on the political dimensions in Chihuailaf’s poem, and by extension, the unity of the Mapuche earth-centered religion with their activism. It’s a striking example of the synthesizing power of the art of cinema at its finest.

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