A Film Canon

The Mission's epic ambitions make most sense as a soundscape and, specifically, as a distinctively 80s exploration of the utopian potential of 'world' music. Surprisingly, the most iconic image in the film - a Jesuit priest, tied to a crucifix, floated over the Iguazu Falls - occurs at the beginning, its epic and eloquent vision of agency consummated and supervened leaving something of a narrative and character vacuum in the trajectory that follows. This vacuum is even more noticeable for the epic geometry of that trajectory - an eighteenth-century South American Jesuit priest (Jeremy Irons) and converted mercenary (Robert de Niro) as personifications of active and passive resistance to the colonial Church - and is most tangibly filled with Chris Menges' luscious cinematography. Yet the object of that cinematography is ultimately sound - most immediately in the central spectacle of the film, the Iguazu Falls, which fuses sound and sight into a single maelstrom; or, rather, figures sound as a synecdoche for visual sublimity, a substitute for everything that is too rapid, immense or concealed to admit of visualisation. Conversely, Menges and Joffé's fascination with the dark recesses and sensory horizons of the South American jungle finds its thematic counterpart in figures poised on the edge of blue-green sound, straining their ears for a mode of communication that supervenes cultural difference, and is only partly available in the diegesis, as the musicality of the Jesuitically converted indigenous voice. This musicality is expanded to non-diegetic and ecumenical parameters in Ennio Morricone's score - the aesthetic kernel of the film and, in a sense, the ultimate object of Menges' cinematography - which fuses indigenous, classical and synthesized technologies into the utopian sentimentality that distinguishes the Jesuit Reductions (at their best) from other evangelical projects and settlements. It's this attempt to aestheticise Jesuit asceticism for a contemporary audience that finally distinguishes the film from the nostalgic period piece it could have been, making it as anti-imperial,  in its way, as The Killing Fields.