Der Wal / The Whale

14.13 HDV

Celia Caturelli: Script, camera, editing and direction

2013

“The Whale” is a film essay about Mexico City. It references the Biblical story in “The Book of Jonah” and works with documentary images as well as photographs of X-rays and uses effect that to counter the naturalism of the images. The film begins with a quick highway drive through the megalopolis Mexico City. From the highway the trip continues further over the city: images taken from a helicopter show the endlessness of the megalopolis as a sea of grid, patterns and convoluted structures, a kaleidoscope of crystalline structures that dissolve into water: from up in the air we land on water, in Xochimilco, where once the Aztecs founded their city.

The sea into which Jonah is thrown is an old oil painting that I found in a street market; the wind (not only present in the Biblical text but also in Mexico City) is shown through the Mexican flags fluttering in the wind or the shadow of trees that move on the ground.

When the big fish swallows Jonah, X-ray images appear in the film: the city is transformed into a huge animal. The drive through the city continues, but now we are in the belly of a beast of the belly of the city. Next to street scenes and car drives we see the bones of a spinal column or the shadows of an inner organ, the eye-sockets of a skull… the trip continues on with the text until the big fish spits out Jonah onto land: a wide and very straight and empty street in the middle of the city. „The Whale“ raises the question of survival in the heart of a megalopolis like Mexico City from a very personal perspective.