Cocote (Grasshopper Film, 2017)
The national cinemas of Latin America have obtained considerable acclaim in the western world, particularly over the past few decades. Most of this attention has been paid to films from Mexico and South America, which have earned their rightful places in the expanding international canon. But much of this popular discourse has failed to embrace the Caribbean, whose rich literary tradition of a mulatto aesthetic — one including such formidable names as Jamaica Kincaid, Aime Cesaire, and Derek Walcott — has carried over into the realm of filmmaking. Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s latest film, Cocote, is a masterpiece of this regional tradition, a stunning mixed-media portrait of communal ties and postcolonial culture that doubles as a suspenseful tale of revenge.
Cocote (Grasshopper Film, 2017)
Alberto (Vicente Santos) works as a gardener for an affluent family in the Dominican Republic. In the film’s opening scene, he asks his boss for a few days off to return home for an important visit, and he is given the weekend for his trip. The reason for Alberto’s homecoming is the murder of his father, which occurred as a grisly beheading at the hands of a prominent police officer named Martinez (Pepe Sierra). A devout Evangelical Christian, Alberto, with bible in hand, intends to mourn his father in his own way. But he is faced with the traditions and rituals of his family and friends, who practice an indigenous religion. During these rituals, he is presented with a terrifying dilemma — his mother Patria (Yuberbi de la Rosa) and childhood friend Karina (Judith Rodriguez Perez) ask that he murder Martinez in an act of vengeance, his familial ties hanging in the balance if he does not carry out the order.
Cocote (Grasshopper Film, 2017)
Arias directs Cocote with a unique approach to form, combining a five-chapter scripted narrative with moments out of an ethnographic documentary. The central revenge plot is tightly constructed, with theatrically trained actors portraying the main characters. With the rest of the cast rounded out by local, nonprofessional performers, Arias throws the audience a curveball by intercutting documentary footage of the mourning rituals into the narrative. These take place in near-real time, with the professional actors included amongst the unstaged proceedings. For added effect, the film plays with timelines, shooting on a number of digital and celluloid formats with alternating 1.37:1 and 2.35:1 aspect ratios. It’s a glorious middle finger to the age-old structures of western filmmaking, which emphasize continuity, even when life is far from clear. These radical experiments in narrative form also serve to parallel the conflicts between Alberto’s Christian beliefs and the traditions of his family. As a result, Cocote shares much in common with Haitian writer C.L.R. James’s play Toussaint Louverture, which took a similar semi-documentary approach to one man’s struggle with his community, along with the cross-cultural influences that pull him in separate directions, forcing him to pick sides.
Santos gives an incredible performance as Alberto, carrying the weight of these oppositional forces throughout his body, even when Arias refuses to show his face. He exemplifies what Cocote is at its core — a film about the inescapability of our histories, along with the collective memories that inform them. Arias’s structure resembles a memory, an ouroboros chasing after a man on the run, sinking its teeth into his principled transgressions. The last chapter of the film, titled “Circularity,” concludes beautifully, composing the film’s final passages in long, steady 360-degree pans that finally show the violence that has haunted the shifting edges of the frame.
Cocote (Grasshopper Film, 2017)
Bringing it all together is Arias’s focus on ritual. In the film’s fourth section, “Repetition,” the bulk of the mourning rituals repeat themselves, an endless cycle of grief that extends far beyond the close-knit kinships at its center. The film’s title, which roughly translates to “neck,” corresponds to the animals that take part in these rituals, feeding their participants. But humans, being the animals we are, also feed these activities with their own blood, sweat, and tears. It’s this attention to ritual that makes Cocote flow from one scene to the next, like an oral folk tale passed on from generation to generation, with its own second- and thirdhand observations and peculiarities.
Among narrative and ethnographic filmmakers alike, Arias is one of the few to truly understand that filmmaking and filmgoing are, themselves, rituals. Both are group activities, taking place in their own slightly varied participatory structures, in which communities come together to vent their conditions of livelihood in ecstatic displays of emotion. The camera and the screen, in the right hands, are liminal spaces, zones of safety for this form of expression. Cocote uses cinema, a ritual that has defined popular culture for the past century, to vividly illustrate the trials and tribulations of a vibrant culture, one most likely unfamiliar to western audiences. But it isn’t made for our gaze. It’s made for the Dominican people, and herein lies its power. This is no data set. This is no case study. It’s what film — and anthropology — should be: a storytelling tool to explore one’s own place in a perpetually confounding, contradictory world.
Reference
Rapold, Nicolas. Interview: Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias. Film Comment, 28 Aug. 2017, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/locarno-interview-nelson-carlo-de-los-santos-arias/. Accessed 30 July 2018.
Author Biography
Evan Amaral is a writer and ethnographic filmmaker based in Atlanta, GA. He is currently working on his BA in film/media studies and anthropology at Emory University. His work has appeared in The Emory Wheel, Vague Visages, and Film Matters. He also programs for the Emory Cinematheque and serves as the editor-in-chief of the undergraduate journal Anthropos.
Film Details
Cocote (2017)
Dominican Republic
Director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias
Runtime 106 minutes
