Tribeca Review: The Mist in the Palm Trees

The Mist in the Palm Trees is an aggressively unconventional, non-narrative film that at first blush seems to be a ramshackle biography of a fictional photographer-physicist named Santiago Bergson. Under that surface, though, The Mist in the Palm Trees is concerned above all else with memory, and the role images play in creating and maintaining it. Like Chris Marker's similarly-themed Sans soleil, the film is constructed from a combination of stills and moving images. While Marker’s work  featured images he himself created, The Mist in the Palm Trees is composed entirely of found footage, be it archival silent films or personal photographs from the 19th century. From these disparate sources, directors Carlos Molinero and Lola Salvador create a sense of life and loves for their character, thus creating a series of images that -- done over two years of editing -- casts doubt on the reliability of images in general.

Within the context of the film, images are present in three primary frameworks. The first framework is provided by Bergson himself, who narrates the segments representing his own memory. These sections of the film are dominated by his romance with Lucrezia, a woman whose photograph we see on-screen again and again. She is posing for his camera, nude but for a necklace, her body bent to one side as if she has just finished disrobing. Her eyes make contact with the camera’s lens, and she stares out at us with a quiet confidence; no matter whose eyes have access to her body, it suggests, she is equal to them all. Wherever Bergson went in the world, his life was dominated by this woman and his memories of her; those memories are represented primarily by sepia photographs and jerky, silent film footage of the distant past.

The second dominant framework belongs to Bergson’s daughter, who we see in footage that resembles the retrospective segments of traditional documentaries, when subjects return to places from their pasts, and explore familiar locations while discussing the effects of time’s passage. The daughter (played by several different women) discusses her life and that of her father in a voice-over, while footage that vaguely relates to her words is shown. The women on screen leaf through photo albums and visit locations seen in images from the Bergson segments, thus lending a (artificially constructed) sense of reality to his dreamlike, wistful words and memories.

The third framework is used only once, and is without a clear point-of-view. Instead of a voice-over, the film’s midsection is accompanied only by driving, electronic music, It presents, through more archival footage and the occasional intertitle, the impossible-seeming sequence of events that brought Bergson, a photographer and student of physics in Spain to France, Cuba, and finally the US, where he worked on the Manhattan Project. While all of the point of view-driven segments of the film are intriguing in their own right, it is this wordless sequence that is most powerful. The rapid editing of the footage combined with the surprisingly appropriate soundtrack calls to mind nothing less than the final section of Dziga Vertov’s stunning The Man with the Movie Camera; it is only here that the directors seem to have allowed themselves to experience the thrill of purely rhythmic editing, and the power it can wield over an audience.

In addition to the themes of memory and the (suspect) power of images, atomic energy is a constant presence in The Mist in the Palm Trees. Not only is it peppered with images of mushroom clouds, nuclear winds and solar flares, but the film itself is broken into six segments, five of which are named after the properties of quarks (Strangeness, Charm, Beauty, Truth, and Color). The combination of these themes with Molinero and Salvador’s decidedly unusual approach to the technical creation of their film makes it both memorable and, occasionally, difficult. On one hand, their refusal to spoon-feed ideas and conclusions to the audience is welcome, and long overdue -- it’s invigorating, these days, to encounter a film that demands engagement and challenges its viewers intellectually. On the other hand, though, instead of Bergson’s constant discussion of image manipulation, and how photographs affect what remains of his memory, it would have been nice had the filmmakers assumed their audience could deduce that theme, rather than feeling the need to articulate their questions through a narratorial mouthpiece. That small complain aside, however, The Mist of Palm Trees remains a brave, fascinating film, and a stunning achievement in research and editing as well.