Laura Marques’ Nebulae 2020 project Fogo vigiado embraces loners, romantics, dedicated conservationists and beatniks alike, focussing on the thousand-plus people who, every year, climb high towers to guard against forest fires across Portugal.
Every summer, around a thousand dedicated folk work as fire lookouts in towers scattered across Portugal, all set in an attitude of unwavering observation and prepared to give first warning in the event of danger.
Laura Marques’ 60-minute film, produced by Primeira Idade and currently at writing stage, will articulate her first-hand experience, alongside those of other lone watchers.
The role of guardian has a very particular romantic aura, she concedes. “The stories and poems of the Beat Generation authors who worked as fire lookouts, including Jack Kerouac (‘Lonesome Traveller’ and ‘Desolation Angels’) or Gary Snyder (‘Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems’) certainly have contributed to this construction. The absolute isolation from other people for months, the coexistence with natural phenomena in all their rawness or the view of untouched cliffs, forests and glaciers, are elements that would feed a poetic imagery,” she says.
But Marques’ film will more be a film about dedication, about waiting and watching 8 hours a day over a period of months, and the effect on those who observe. The film is also about that which is observed, ostensibly an artificial man-made construct of combustible eucalyptus and pine. This offers up an interesting paradox, the director observes. What is protected is also the main fuel for the fires that need to be tackled.
Marques adds that “the film will be built on two approaches: one more intensive, on the territory observable from a single fire lookout tower, and another more extensive, done from several towers.”
“For the first approach I will work on a tower, recording this experience over next summer (July 1-October 15 2021). As for the second approach, I will establish a collaboration with as many fire lookouts as possible. They will be sent a series of observation and listening exercises on the landscape, the results of which will be recorded either in writing or on video, through each person’s own cell phone camera.”
“In this sense, the perception of more or less subtle changes in the same landscape over time, the border between surveillance and contemplation, the (im)possibility of experiencing the sublime before this forest, the dimension of isolation, are aspects that will be explored.”
She adds: “The images shot by me will oscillate between static and hand-held camera shots, assuming the ambivalence between the analytical and vigilant gaze and the subjective, contemplative gaze.”
Marques is no stranger to documentaries set in the great outdoors. In 2018, after an extended period herding cattle in the Swiss Alps, she premiered her Cows and Queens at the Visions du Réel, where she received the Meta Cultural Foundation award. The same year, she received the Fundação INATEL award and an honourable mention in the Portuguese Competition of Doclisboa 2018.
