‘Eureka’ is a challenging, poetic film of Native life

-- Part of Oklahoma City Museum of Art's Art-House Expanded series


At nearly the exact midpoint of Argentine writer/director Lisandro Alonso’s “Eureka,” an aging Native elder in the cold South Dakotan winter offers the simple wisdom: “Space, not time. Time is a fiction invented by man.”

If there’s a central thesis or an encompassing theme to this poetic, tonal, deliberately challenging film, that’s surely it.

“Eureka” is something of a puzzle, a series of segments and often long, meditative scenes that viewers will be able to unpack and unravel for themselves when it runs this weekend, October 11th and 12th at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s Sam Noble Theater.

It’s a film obsessed with time, but not with the temporal theatrics and nesting doll pace of Christopher Nolan or the ticking clock suspense of Hitchcock.

No, Alonso’s film is concerned only with the true experience of time and its effects on our minds and our histories.

There’s arguably no way to accurately describe the plot or to distill the events down easily into a simple summary. Rather there are three stories – maybe four – with only tenuous, mysterious threads of time to link them.

It’s a violent, boxy, black-and-white, “Old Hollywood” style western in a Native-occupied border town. Then it’s a languid, hyper-real slice of marginalized modern life on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Then it’s the Brazillian woods and rivers of the 1970s, with the Native forest people butting up against the greed and violence that define greater society.

And yet, there may only be one story, just the single continuing experience of the Native peoples across the Americas in the last hundred years.

Indigenous Americans have long been relegated to cinematic set dressing, manipulated into exploitable labor, and buried under the poverty and disenfranchisement designed to keep them isolated.

So perhaps “Eureka” is telling only that one, single story unbound entirely from the unnecessary “invention” of time. 

Throughout, Alonso’s cuts and camera remain concerned purely with “space, not time.”

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Real life Native American police officer Alaina Clifford stars in “Eureka”

Much of the film’s runtime is spent with characters simply waiting in real time, sitting in a hallway chair waiting and listening, sitting by a window watching for someone, sitting in a police cruiser waiting for a radioed response.

These scenes – often long, unbroken, single shots – can last for minutes, lingering in spaces and becoming hypnotic, even antagonistic, forcing us to release our hold on time and to simply exist in these same frustrating liminal spaces as the characters.

Most of the time, you’re not even sure what they’re waiting for. 

Posters and cast lists will make a lot of the presence of “Lord of the Rings” star Viggo Mortensen, but while he opens the film with power and vengeful command, don’t expect more than maybe fifteen minutes of him on screen.

Much more time is spent with the rainforest community of 70s Brazil and the present-day residents of Pine Ridge, where Alonso cast non-professional actors like real-life Native police officer Alaina Clifford and first-timer Sadie LaPointe, both from the real Pine Ridge Reservation area.

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“Eureka”

The film’s look and cinematography shift and flow with the changing settings and sentiments, opening with a stunningly authentic recreation of 40s and 50s black-and-white westerns, then transitioning in a single cut to a sadly authentic and blunt look at modern reservation life.

When the focus shifts again – this time more gracefully, patiently – into the rainforests, the photography becomes lush, natural, full of water and greenery.

It’s little surprise that the film credits two separate cinematographers – Mauro Herce and Timo Salminen –  but their eyes and visions combined have produced something gorgeous and rich in nearly every shot.

The brief, fleeting moments when the story brushes up against something spiritual and maybe even magical are presented only with restraint and quiet beauty, a testament to Alonso and the talents of Herce and Salminen.

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“Eureka”

It’s those moments that tie these tales together, offering a spiritual thread to bind these lost, longing people that find themselves pulled inescapably toward the cycles of violence spun up by colonialism and capitalism.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that the struggle to find a way out of the cycle is itself enough to be worthy of transcendence.

“Eureka” offers psychological meditations, mythical transitions, actors in multiple roles, overlapping names, hidden meanings, and varying forms of reality in its quiet, artfully mysterious, and dreamlike two-and-a-half hours.

But ultimately, it’s simply about those sad cycles of tragedy, the infinitely connected cultures and peoples trapped in them, and the unanswerable questions left over when they’ve disappeared.

“Eureka” screens at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s Sam Noble Theater Friday, October 11th, and Saturday, October 12th as part of their Art-House Expanded series.

For showtimes, tickets, and more information, visit okcmoa.com.


Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.


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Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.