It Is Night In America (Ana Vaz, 2022) (Patreon)

In her longest film to date, Brazilian experimentalist Ana Vaz turns her attention to habitat encroachment in the city of Brasilia. It is an interesting choice for a first feature, since most of her previous films engage in somewhat more complicated cultural and political histories. Apiyemiyekî? (2020), for example, is about the Brazilian government's genocide against an indigenous tribe for the sake of building a motorway, and the work of latter-day archeologists to excavate the remains of that decimated people. Other films, such as Occidente (2015), There is Land! (2016), and Atomic Garden (2018), are wider ranging, despite their brevity, exploring topics such as Portuguese colonialism and ecological disaster through intellectual montage and poetic allusion.

This approach is not necessarily absent from It Is Night In America, although the film finds Vaz working is somewhat less ambiguous register. Following an extended opening shot from a city rooftop, a circular pan that gains speed until it is but a blur of light and velocity, the film alternates between patient observation of various creatures and audio documentation of people calling the authorities to help them deal with unwanted or potentially dangerous fauna. It is fairly evident, of course, that the people living on the city's outskirts are the invaders, but the animals in question have no hotline to call for their removal.

Vaz's animal footage is mostly shot in the Brasilia Zoo, much of it at dusk. Caging these creatures within the city limits for the curiosity of the human population is of course a key part of the "civilization" process. Zoos are a mid-19th century invention, their establishment a direct outgrowth of colonialism. Exotic beasts were captured and brought back to the Continent as examples of the spoils that awaited the intrepid explorer, and often these menageries were acquired at the same time as enslaved "natives." Vaz shows that, in a sense, the zoo is part of the founding notion of a metropolis, a place where wildlife is maintained apart from human business.

There have been a number of avant-garde films that have considered the relationship between animals and humans. Chris Marker's work often used animals (cats, owls) as emblems of those aspects of the human spirit that capitalism could not assimilate. Other filmmakers, such as Denis Côte, Nicolas Philibert, and Ray Birdwhistell (Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos), have used the situation to establish parallels between looking at caged animals and existing within the iron cage of Western culture. Perhaps the best example is Bill Viola's feature-length video work I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, which gazes into the eyes of various species in search of epistemological insights, supposing that we humans might share the animals' lack of self-awareness.

By contrast, Vaz's film is doggedly materialist. It tends to refuse metaphor, instead treating the relationship between caged animals and their wild, unpredictable brethren as an essentially political conflict, one of territory either claimed or lost. The fact that Brasilia's citizens must call on the Military Police to exercise animal control functions is an irony Vaz certainly expects us to notice. It Is Night In America's title may have some specific meaning in Portuguese that I am not aware of, but on its face it suggests a dark underside to Ronald Reagan's promise of order and stability, the so-called "city on the hill."

In the simplest terms, ecological encroachment is just business as usual, the way that the very notions of "city" or "nation" come into being. So the often romanticized animal kingdom is always already a part of culture and politics. They need not represent anything other than themselves. Still, it's hard not to extrapolate outward from the animals' situation in Brasilia, to consider the rogue animals as in some ways homologous to the city's homeless population, or the military's function in managing Brazil under Bolsonaro. In this respect, It Is Night In America is a work that both invites and resists metaphor.