Prisioneros de la tierra: Tropical Oppression

Soffici put that training to good use between 1937 and 1942, when he revolutionized Argentine cinema with a series of films that offered eloquent mora denunciations of social injustice in the countryside. These films reflected the influence of FORJA, a group of young intellectuals from the Radical Party with which the director was loosely associated. The forjistas attacked the nation’s political and economic elites for allowing Argentina to be colonized by foreign capital. They hoped to build a new national culture that was free of foreign dependency and that championed the interests of the poor. Soffici’s film Kilómetro 111 (1938), for example, explores the struggles of a group of wheat farmers victimized by cruel landowners and a British railroad company. But it was with Prisioneros de la tierra that Soffici made his most powerful political and cinematic statement.

The story of the film was drawn from the work of Horacio Quiroga, a canonical if somewhat idiosyncratic figure in Latin American literature. Born in Uruguay in 1878, Quiroga spent most of his adult life in Argentina, much of it in Misiones, where he experimented with cultivating yerba maté, among various other projects. In his literary endeavors, Quiroga was a practitioner of naturalism, which sought to expose the roots of social ills in human nature and the natural world. Yet he also included among his influences such overtly colonial authors as Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad.

For all its social realism, though, Prisioneros de la tierra doesn’t belong entirely to any one genre. Alongside his concern for the plight of the workers, Soffici offers a nightmarish portrait of the power of the natural world; the film’s characters are, as its title would have it, prisoners of a savage jungle that resists human efforts at conquest. The mensús suffer from malaria and other tropical diseases, and even the educated Europeans seem destined to succumb to their surroundings: the company doctor has been rendered incompetent by alcoholism after too many years in the jungle, and Köhner, the evil plantation boss, pines morosely for his German homeland. The film’s hybridity is also apparent in the range of acting styles on display, as well as in its cinematography. Whereas Magaña and Francisco Petrone deliver realist portrayals of Podeley and Köhner, respectively, Raúl de Lange is completely over-the-top as the decrepit doctor. Similarly, scenes of outdoor work and drunken revelry are filmed with documentary detachment, but in several nighttime scenes, the cinematographer Pablo Tabernero produces a play of shadows that vividly expresses the feeling of being trapped in the oppressive jungle environment.

Finally, and typical of the Argentine cinema of this period, Prisioneros de la tierra is also a melodrama. The central plot concerns a love triangle between Podeley, Köhner, and Andrea (“Chinita”), the doctor’s daughter, played by Galvé as a classic melodramatic ingenue. After Köhner cruelly cheats Podeley out of his wages and prevents him from escaping with his beloved, the mensú leads a workers’ uprising and beats the foreman to death with a bullwhip. But true to the logic of melodrama, it is a capricious twist of fate that determines the film’s ultimate tragedy: in a fit of delirium tremens, the doctor accidentally kills his own daughter. When Podeley finds out, he insists on attending her funeral, resulting in his entirely foreseeable execution by Köhner’s men.

Critics have suggested that Soffici’s film bears some resemblance to the Hollywood social-problem films of the same period, and there is no question that the director was attentive to North American trends. But it is worth noting that Prisioneros de la tierra preceded by one year the release of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, the American film to which it has most often been compared. In any case, local influences may have been more decisive. Beyond Quiroga’s naturalism and Rivera’s depiction of the jungle, the film also owes a debt to criollismo, Argentina’s popular cult of the gaucho, the fiercely independent cowboy of the Pampas. In dime novels and popular plays of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, local authors celebrated the legendary exploits of brave gauchos who resisted their oppression by the forces of the state. Much like the mensú Podeley, gaucho heroes such as Juan Moreira often started out as peaceful, hardworking ranch hands but, after suffering mistreatment, ended up exacting violent revenge against their enemies.

Prisioneros de la tierra was immediately celebrated by Argentine film critics, who tended to emphasize its authenticity rather than its social critique. The 1930s was a period of rising nationalist anxiety in Argentina. Intellectuals who were alarmed by the massive immigration of preceding decades and influenced to varying extents by the rise of fascism in Europe published a raft of essays on Argentine national identity, while the forjistas began to articulate a nationalism of the left. In this context, film critics worried that Argentine cinema was too beholden to Hollywood models. In Soffici’s film, these critics found just what they were looking for; in its setting and its story, Prisioneros de la tierra struck them as deeply and honestly Argentine. For the writer Francisco Madrid, it represented the arrival of “an Argentine cinema, not a gauchesque one; a national cinema, not a nationalist one; a characteristic cinema, not an artificial one.”

For modern viewers, the film’s resistance to simplistic moralism may seem most striking. Jorge Luis Borges, who occasionally wrote film reviews for the literary journal Sur, celebrated this aspect. Describing the extended graphic violence of the scene in which Podeley murders Köhner, Borges wrote: “In similar scenes in other pictures, brutal people are tasked to perform brutal acts; in Prisioneros de la tierra, it is the hero who must perform it, and he is almost intolerably efficient.” For Borges, moral ambiguity lifted the film above melodrama and deepened its power.

Soffici’s career behind the camera extended for over two decades after Prisioneros de la tierra; he directed at least forty films (he continued to act as well). Although his output in the forties and fifties was dominated by formulaic genre pieces, he did produce other important works, including Barrio gris (1954), a gritty depiction of the lives of the urban poor that was influenced by Italian neorealism, and Rosaura a las diez (1958), a Rashomon-like crime story. Nevertheless, Prisioneros de la tierra remains easily his most celebrated and influential film and one of the high points of Argentine cinema.