The first thing we see is a woman standing naked in a river, gathering something to put into a large pot. Something appears just out of frame, and she retreats in abject fear, dropping her pot and leaving as quickly as she can.
We know, since she appears to be indigenous to wherever this is, and since this movie is called Magellan, that she would be right to be afraid, given the misery that’s about to come her way. Or do we know that? When I was in school, I remember learning Ferdinand Magellan was the first person to circumnavigate the world, even though he didn’t actually do that because he was killed on the island of Cebu before he could get all the way around. I don’t remember a lot about the murder and devastation Magellan left in his wake, but we’ve opened our eyes a lot more in the past few decades. And one of the remarkable things about Filipino director Lav Diaz’s film is that it depicts Magellan’s acts such that we understand the horror of what he did, but it also foregrounds the lives and actions of the Indigenous people in the places he arrives, especially that of the famed Enrique of Malacca, who Magellan bought and enslaved and kept with him until his own death.
The movie is long, about two hours and 45 minutes, but even though it consists of almost entirely static shots, no music, and long, long stretches on Magellan’s ship as he and his dying crew sail for years, it rarely feels overly slow. Diaz’s sense of composition is astounding, his images are gorgeous, and he often makes us feel as if we are there, in these places, in the 16th century, with pounding rain on a jungle river and piles of dead bodies. Gael Garcia Bernal plays Magellan, and the explorer’s cruelty is not presented gratuitously, but it’s inescapable, as it dominates so much of what Magellan does, certainly including the people who inhabit these places, but also in how he tries to extort a priest for information even during his own confession, all while, apparently, believing himself to be pious. Death is constantly present, with Portuguese women standing on the beach staring at the sea waiting for their husbands who will never return, and the women of Cebu sending the bodies of their children into the ocean after they died from illness. And Magellan is both surrounded by this death and a bringer of it, at one point shouting that he will bring the wrath of God, which can’t be a coincidental echo of the director Werner Herzog’s great film about a mad conquistador.
By the time Magellan meets his demise, we’ve seen enough of what he’s done to understand genocide is not just limited to the murder of people, but it also includes the destruction of culture. And while we may or may not feel that Magellan got what was coming to him, we do remember what that one guy said about reaping and sowing.
Magellan is available on VOD.
