La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus (2012)
La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus (2012)
In the vastness of the American material abundance there is always the nagging but too rarely addressed question of what happens to the things we toss aside and replace with the newer and the brighter. This film doesn’t concern our garbage, per se, but how others recycle what we put out of our minds. This documentary was built around what much of us would look upon as a mere anecdote, not even worthy of a three-minute news feature on TV – America’s yellow school busses, one of the most iconic vehicles of our landscape, generally have a prescribed service life of 150,000 miles or so. After they are taken out of service, as they are often still in excellent condition and are sold at auction. The buyers are frequently Latin American, and they drive them south, sometimes for weeks. This film focuses on those that make it to Guatemala, where, as elsewhere, they are put into service in ad hoc public transportation “systems.” The title comes from their nickname, “las camionetas,” or “chicken buses.”
This is a remarkably self-assured work from first-time filmmaker like Mark Kendall. He’s got an ideological point to make regarding the uneven relationship between the USA and its impoverished neighbors to the south but is mature enough to let that take a backseat (pardon the pun) to a more meditative narratives concerning the human relationship with that which our clever hands create, and how our lives are shaped by our own objects. Since the vast majority of the humans in this film are delegated to the margins, and the objects are cast-offs that require a new industrious to resurrect them, making this meditation is all the more poignant.
Kendall avoids narration and mostly talking-head interviews, but instead creates the convincing illusion that he simply recorded what he saw and applied only the minimum of influence of how it unfolded as it happens. As a result, his truths feel as if we have discovered them for ourselves, not spoon-fed to us.
The film’s imagery is hyper-conscious of influence of Catholicism on Guatemala, making this metaphorically a death and resurrections story. These busses clearly didn’t go to Heaven, Guatemala’s violence and lawless pervades the film; on the other hand, Kendall has great affection and respect for the people he encounters on this journey to a materialistic version of the afterlife, so this is no Hell either. Think of it more like a Purgatory of hard-working people and machines awaiting Globalism to finally deliver on its promises of economic stability and rule of law.
The first of our common-man heroes is the guy who spends his life driving back and forth between bus auctions in the U.S. and Guatemala. His car goes north for the fifteen-day journey, then he drives the bus back the same grueling trek, his car towed behind. The farther south he goes, the worse to roads get. He is surprisingly comfortable with the American border guards in Texas, but when he crosses the border into Mexico, he says the authorities and corrupt, and he fears for his life.
The busses are then refurbished by artisans in fierce competition to create the most beautiful, eye-pooping designs. They are unsubtly compared to those who decorate churches to express the glory of God, and infuse the lifeless buses with new, celebratory spirit bright colors, racing stripes, starbursts, sylph-symbols, and lots of chrome.
The resurrected bus then is put into service for a man who has a religious ceremony performed to bless its potential to better the lot of his family, the unregulated independent bus services pay far better than the sub-subsistence local farming, or the emigration forced on so many of his neighbors by endemic poverty. But the promise of a future comes at a daily cost -- Guatemala is dominated by petty, viciously violent, barely organized, crime. Drivers who fail to cooperate with gangsters or get confused about which gangsters are in charge this month, wind up dead far too often; 30 bus drivers were killed by gangs of extortionists in the course of single year, and the former Chief of Police is a fugitive from the state’s nominal justice system.
The one bus provides us with a vivid slice of Guatemala’s cake, we see layer after layer of the political, cultural, religious, and family life of that troubled nation.
Another virtue of that it is filled with stunning landscapes and explosive color we associate with the better-heeled and more experienced filmmakers. Kendal finds visual richness in the impoverished landscape, and the refurbished busses are exceptionally beautiful -- the end points of the various acts in the narrative are marked by the camera lingering on their glory, captured well enough that I don’t think I could get even tired of looking at them.
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