Emily Naser-Hall
Cristóbal León and Joaquin Cociña’s The Wolf House (2018) commences with an illusion of pastoral ideal. Analog footage displays a table laden with honey-filled jars, the voices of children singing an off-key melody crafting an atmosphere of peacefulness. This honey, the voiceover narration explains, is the lifeblood of an enigmatic community known only as “the Colony,” an isolated community of German expatriates whom the narrator claims seek only to exist in harmony with the natural beauty of southern Chile. A montage shows footage of blond children in lederhosen, white women keeping house, and benevolent nurses tending to native Chilean peasants whom the narrator identifies as “our partners in hardship.” But the video soon takes a sharp turn. “The dark legend that has been created around us is mainly due to ignorance,” the narrator argues in practiced Spanish, his German accent thinly concealed. “They are ignorant, those who fear a community that remains isolated and pure.” The narrator then explains that the Colony has chosen to release footage “rescued from the vaults of our colony” to demonstrate the community’s purity and disprove the aforementioned dark legend. What follows, however, is over sixty minutes of nightmare fuel that utterly fails to counteract any rumors of the Colony’s insidiousness.
Figure 1. The Colony displays its prized honey.
León and Cociña may refer to their mysterious community simply as The Colony, but their film enfolds multiple colonial palimpsests through its implicit references to both the legacy of Spanish conquest and Chile’s twentieth-century experiences of authoritarian brutality. After World War II, when many former members of the Nazi Party fled to Argentina to escape prosecution, an enclave of Nazi sympathizers settled in nearby Chile, which already boasted a large German population and its own chapters of both the Nazi Party and Hitler Youth. A former army medic named Paul Schäfer founded an isolated community called Colonia Dignidad, which not only housed Nazis and perpetrated mystical religious rituals against its members—the details of which remain under investigation—but also became a site for the internment, torture, and murder of political dissidents during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The Wolf House unearths Chile’s troubling history with authoritarian violence and latent Nazism through the medium of stop-motion animation. The film is comprised of a single take, in which the animated characters and spaces continually morph and alter, forming into fullness only briefly until they degrade and reconstruct themselves. It depicts postcolonialism and state violence as processes of continual ongoingness—ebbing and swelling, but inescapable.
In 1965, Rocha published a short proclamation called “The Aesthetics of Hunger” in a book on film manifestos and global cinema cultures. Rocha argued that hunger constitutes the essence of Latin American society—both literal hunger and a kind of political and psychological hunger that results from generations of philosophical undernourishment and exploitation. Filmmakers made what he called “those ugly, sad films, those screaming, desperate films in which reason has not always prevailed” because this hunger will never be assuaged by anything less than full revolution (1995, 13). Hunger serves as the sole motivation in The Wolf House—hunger for freedom, for escape, for art, for the power of creation. The recovered animated film tells the story of Maria, a disobedient girl from the Colony who, after releasing three pigs from their pen, was sentenced to one hundred days and nights of silence. Enraged by the lack of justice, Maria flees the Colony and becomes lost in the woods, pursued by a wolf who never appears onscreen. Out of nowhere, a door appears. Maria enters and asks for help as a house begins forming around her. The house, then, is a product of two hungers: Maria’s hunger for freedom and her dangerous pursuit by a creature defined in folklore by its insatiable hunger.
Figure 2. Maria creates her safe house.
But Maria’s solace is itself a trap, a corruption of isolation’s safety that mirrors the evil of the C/colony. Nothing in the house remains stable, as the film’s single take consists entirely of the processes of creation, destruction, re-creation, re-destruction, and so on. The single take forces the audience to watch an experience made more nausea-inducing because the camera changes position in every frame. Post-industrial animation, as William Moritz claims, is comprised of individuated pictorial areas that function as “a closed system, which indicates the possibilities of seeing, experiencing, understanding the way in which things exist” (1996, 75). The Wolf House exposes these possibilities by demonstrating how the material figures onscreen come into being and, perhaps more importantly, unbeing. León and Cociña’s animation consists of multiple media, from hand-drawn illustrations to stop-motion with plush dolls to papier-mâché figures made of masking tape and plaster. Rather than appearing fully formed, however, Maria and her house are shaped onscreen by unseen hands. They are then dismantled, reformed in new positions or with more dimension, re-created for only a moment before they disintegrate again.
León and Cociña’s film, like Rocha’s aesthetic of hunger, is therefore a constant process of exploration, a kind of visual and sonic thinking-through. It is itself a revolution that simultaneously recalls the colonial violence that shaped its conditions of production—a revolution without reconciliation. The most noble cultural manifestation of hunger, Rocha argues, is violence. Latin American political cinema portrays violence as normal behavior for people who are starving. Violence is not primitive, but in fact the only logical or reasoned reaction to centuries of misery and literal and figurative starvation. Maria’s powers of creation, the film soon reveals, are not entirely benevolent, but are instead a product of her own inculcation in Chile’s and the Colony’s colonial authoritarianism. Maria recalls being lost in the forest, when “all of a sudden my eyes closed” and she saw animals jumping into a hole in a tree. She realized that the tree was eating the animals, but the animals rejoiced in sacrificing themselves. After being consumed, the animals were transformed, Maria recalls, into flowers. The tree thanked Maria for bringing the animals and bestowed upon her the gift of creation. The house that grants her safety, then, only exists because Maria committed an act of violence; her creation depends on destruction, her own beauty on violence.
Figure 3. Ana and Pedro are in a constant state of becoming and un-becoming.
Because a concept necessarily incorporates its inverse, violence incorporates love. This love, however, is a brutal kind, a love of action and transformation. Two pigs join Maria inside the Wolf House. Lonely, Maria transforms the pigs into dark-haired children, a young boy named Pedro and a teenaged girl named Ana. The children’s continuous transformation charts their enforced move from abjection to incorporation, a strategy that Walescka Pino-Ojeda and Mariana Ortega Breña identify as a critical form in post-dictatorship Chilean cinema (2009, 134). In one scene, Pedro sits naked on a toilet in a dirty bathroom. Maria slides into the room, and the plaster models shift so Pedro becomes clothed and the toilet changes into a chair. Maria loves her children, but her love forces her to commit terrible acts of violence because this is the love that the Colony has taught her. Her love, furthermore, reflects colonial attitudes toward racialized beauty. She often refers to native Chileans as “dark-skinned children” and forces Ana and Pedro to consume the Colony’s honey to become beautiful, after which both children shed their dark hair and eyes for the blond hair and blue eyes of the Aryan ideal.
Maria’s attempts to perfect her children, however, backfire. The violence that the Colony inflicted upon her, which she then inflicts upon Ana and Pedro, proves cyclical, generational, and recursive—and therefore inescapable. When Maria’s powers of creation falter and the family goes hungry, the children, with whom Maria has shared her generative abilities, create structures of captivity to take revenge upon their mother. A bed with restraints forms onscreen, Maria’s body coming into existence already shackled, as the children prepare to consume her. The little pigs have become, through their hunger and the ongoingness of colonial brutality, the big bad wolves, now no longer outside but always already inside the house. Maria’s salvation arrives in the form of the original wolf, who uses his own destructive powers to transform the children into trees and free Maria. Convinced that she cannot survive on her own, Maria willingly returns to the Colony where, the narrator/wolf claims, “she was able to recover her vitality and helpful spirit.”
Figure 4. The children turn their powers of creation on their mother.
The film ends where it began—with Maria at the Colony and the dark legend reinforced. The stop-motion animation vanishes, replaced by stark chalk drawings of trees, as the narrator addresses the audience: “And you, little pig, now that you have seen our dreams and your reflection on the water, do you want me to take care of you?” In a 1971 lecture at Columbia University, Rocha expands on his aesthetics of hunger and violence by articulating what he calls the aesthetics of dream. He argues that the worst enemy of revolutionary art is mediocrity, that what revolutionary art should be doing is throwing itself into new and brutally beautiful spaces. The Wolf House exemplifies the glory and the ugliness of dreaming when those dreams arise from foundations of violence. In the intricate and gorgeous horror of its ever-shifting animation, the film exposes the processes by which hunger, violence, and dreaming become made, unmade, and remade as unavoidable, merciless, and yet somehow bewitchingly alluring.
Check out the trailer for The Wolf House:
The Wolf House is available for streaming on Kanopy.
Works Cited
León, Cristóbal and Joaquin Cociña, dirs. The Wolf House. 2018, Santiago, Chile: Globo Rojo Films.
Moritz, William. 1996. “Animation in the Post-Industrial Era.” In The Oxford History of World Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Oxford University Press.
Pino-Ojeda, Walescka and Mariana Ortega Breña. 2009. “Latent Image: Chilean Cinema and the Abject.” Latin America Perspectives 36 (5): 133-146.
Rocha, Glauber. “Aesthetic of Dream.” Paper presented at Columbia University, New York City, NY, January 1971.
Rocha, Glauber. 1965, 1995. “An Esthetic of Hunger,” translated by Randal Johnson and Burnes Hollyman. In Brazilian Cinema, edited by Randal Johnson and Robert Stam. Columbia University Press.
Emily Naser-Hall is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Graduate Program Director at Western Carolina University. Her research focuses on cultural and legal narratives of sexuality, femininity, and privacy post-1945 American literature and film. She has published on the works of Shirley Jackson, Gothic domesticity, sexuality, and gendered labor, with a forthcoming project on the Gothic frontier in American folk horror. She has previously written for Horror Homeroom on top 10 movies about the horrors of settler colonialism and on Midsommar and ‘the revenge of the research subject.’
