This Documentary Uses Drone Footage in a Way I’ve Never Seen Before

There’s a moment in John Wilson’s new documentary, The History of Concrete, in which the filmmaker, not wanting to have to travel all the way to Brownsville, Texas, just to shoot the first-ever 3-D-printed Starbucks franchise, hires a local videographer to do it instead. When he gets the footage back, he discovers it’s heavy with drone shots of the squat gray cube, an approach he hadn’t requested and that makes the building look like a sensibly dressed office worker who has been yanked from their cubicle and thrust into a fashion shoot where they’re being ordered to vamp. In addition to being a sign of what a lot of buildings will look like in the future, Wilson speculates bemusedly in voice-over, what we’re watching is probably an indication that “most documentaries will look like this too.” He’s not wrong, though the concern comes a little late. My colleague Bilge Ebiri was bemoaning the “dronepocalypse” six years ago, pointing out how gliding midair photography has become an epidemic in nonfiction films and that “even when such footage is used well, or interestingly, it can still contribute to an overall sense that the technique has become something of a cliché.”

Drone footage has, in the years since, gotten only more ubiquitous, which is what makes the incisive way it’s deployed in the new documentary Our Land all the more remarkable. Our Land is a bracing film about the murder of Chuschagasta leader Javier Chocobar, whose community has been trying for years to exert its Indigenous land rights; he was killed in 2009 in a skirmish with three armed men trying to survey the area for mining efforts. But it’s also the first nonfiction feature from the great Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, whose scripted work has delved into class and colonial history by couching itself in the feverish subjectivity of the well off. Working in documentary, she takes a different angle to the subject of power by showcasing the ways that history, and therefore what is considered accepted fact, gets created by those in power. The defendants in the case, three men who have leveraged their connections to area officials to claim ownership of the Chuschagastans’ land, have on their side shaky camcorder footage of the skirmish they claim clearly exonerates them, as well as a national record that insists the Indigenous populations were effectively wiped out and therefore conveniently do not need to be acknowledged in the present day.

The Chuschagastans, meanwhile, have their own personal records, unfolded in faded photographs and family histories that attest to their living on and working the land for generations. And there with her own cameras is Martel, who pointedly includes shots of drones buzzing overhead before she ever includes the footage they produce. One reason drones have proved so irresistible to documentarians is that they offer an aerial perspective that used to be out of reach because helicopters are for Hollywood budgets and crane shots are antithetical to capturing action on the fly. But there’s an innate slickness to drone footage that can turn a shot of, say, a South Texas Starbucks into a joke, and there’s a mechanical quality to the way drones glide through the air that, even if controlled by a human, feels impersonal — a view from nowhere. Martel turns that eerie impassivity into an asset by treating the drone’s perspective as a kind of God’s-eye view of a conflict in which one side is trying to win by way of the inexorable, self-reinforcing power of bureaucracy and paperwork. During the long-in-coming 2018 trial that forms the spine of Our Land, a surveyor testifies on behalf of the defendants, claiming ignorance about the proximity of the Chuschagastan compound. Then there’s a shot in which the hovering camera takes in the site of Chocobar’s killing and then turns spookily and abruptly in midair to show just how close the house is.

That unnatural quality of drone footage, its ability to pull up off the ground and pivot as if you’re fiddling with Google Earth, is something Martel turns into an asset throughout the film, which actually starts from space, zooming into Tucumán Province from the perspective of an orbiting satellite. Our Land pulls back metaphorically as well to a damning survey of Argentina’s history of exploiting while simultaneously erasing its Indigenous population — to the point where one of the families asserting ownership of the Chuschagastan land demontrates its claim by citing the illegal rent it collected from people it also insists no longer existed by that time. Martel doesn’t erase the robotic nature of the devices she uses to capture this conflict from on high, frequently including the propellers’ buzzing sounds even as she showcases the Chuschagastans’ lives in their valley — following a runner on a grueling trek up a hilltop and peeking in on a couple planning their future together on the location of their eventual house before pulling back to allow them privacy.

The drones, for all their lofty capabilities, are still being directed by Martel, who doesn’t want to erase herself and her own limitations as an author from the film, either. The best shot in Our Land, which manages to cast a spectacularly wide narrative net before pulling back for a rare instance of justice being done, involves a drone hovering high above the disputed area, taking in its beauty as, in voice-over, an interviewee talks about how the Indigenous population was labeled “peons” and “gauchos” to elide their origins and erase their ties to the land. Then a bird hits the drone, causing it to tumble out of the sky and crash to the ground, a reminder that there’s no such thing as an omniscient perspective — just a filmmaker trying to get outside the constructs of history using the tools at hand, however imperfect.