A Film Canon

With Apocalypto, Mel Gibson continues his project of reviving the sword-and-sandal epic, this time through digital cinema. It makes sense, then, that the narrative is structured around a new aesthetic experience, or category - the sensation that Mayan tribesman Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) first feels when his village is pillaged, imprisoned and sacrificed by a neighboring tribe. Although this sensation is described as 'fear', it feels more like a new potential for movement, or energy - the movement that drives Jaguar Paw's escape and chase, which takes up the last third of the film, and is first apprehended in the exquisite opening scene, as a heightened visual awareness and immanence. Here, the extended stares between Jaguar Paw and another neighboring tribe set the scene for a series of progressively alien gazes -  those of the pillaging tribe, a jaguar, the eclipsing sun and, finally, the Spanish colonists, who arrive in the closing scene, with the about-to-be-colonised beach as apocalyptic eyelid. Concomitantly, Jaguar Paw becomes increasingly disembodied over the course of the chase, starting off as a fragment of sky or wind that has somehow become autonomous, and ending up as a mobile, transparent eyeball, cloaked in darkness. It feels as if Gibson is envisaging how a chase would feel to people for whom everything is already an iteration of the jungle, and then comparing that iteration to the ripple of eyes beneath eyelids that he finds so fascinating. It's this combination of disembodied action with dehumanised sight that breaks down proprioception in a way that is poetically digital, producing a vortical waterfall of sensation; or, as Jaguar Paw's father, Flint Sky, puts it, "a hole in the man, deep like a hunger he will never fill...what makes him sad, and what makes him want." Hence the recurrent, tumbling tracking-shot that offsets the film's two linear trajectories - towards and away from the sacrificial temple, the tallest structure the characters have ever seen - with a more perpendicular, and then a more oblique tension. In this way, Gibson makes a striking directorial decision - to translate the frenzied, kinetic montage typical of digital action cinema into internal montage, producing something like a sped-up, digitised version of Rashomon's lush tracking-shots, and pondering what happens when a digital tree falls in an analog forest, and nobody is around.