In her short film perfectly a strangeness, Alison McAlpine wanted to explore “what a story could be without dialogue, just sound and music.”
Beginning with the gentle clippity-clops of three mild-mannered donkeys, Palaye, Ruperto, and Palomo, perfectly a strangeness seemingly captures a day in the life of La Silla Observatory in Chile. McAlpine and her director of photography, Nicolas Canniccioni, quietly observe these equine as they mill about. The film team focuses their lens on the directional behaviour of the donkeys’ ears and eyes, which McAlpine equates with the image of galaxies.
Speaking with McAlpine over Zoom, the filmmaker recalls that the inspiration for perfectly a strangeness derived from an unused shot from her 2017 feature film Cielo, which observed an observatory in the Atacama Desert. “A family of donkeys [was] standing, just looking at us, and there were these observatory domes in the background,” says McAlpine. “I was fascinated by that shot. There were these billion dollar observatories, over 3000 metres, and these donkeys — it was a juxtaposition I found interesting.”
As the camera pulls back from our donkey friends, the expanse of Atacama Desert reveals itself. A land that holds millennia of history and culture, most of it forgotten to time, perfectly a strangeness finds that contrast McAlpine describes, with the imposing telescopes towering over the sands of time.
The environment put McAlpine in mind of folklore she learned in Scotland while teaching poetry surrounding the Ring of Brodgar, a stone circle in Orkney made up of “massive, huge rocks [in] the middle of nowhere,” she describes. “The local legend was that these rocks came to life and danced [at night], and then when dawn rose, they became rocks again.”
McAlpine likens this Scottish folklore to the bleeding heat of an afternoon in the desert coupled with a muted silence when the scientists slept and machines turned off. “Yet,” you sense that they’re alive,” she observes of the machines. “And then, of course, the sun goes down and night comes, and they come to life.”
In the early moments of the film, as the sun pours across the space, McAlpine allows the gentle humming of resting telescopes to coalesce with the playful, but peaceful, sounds of Palaye, Ruperto, and Palomo. Ben Grossman’s score sits timid and restrained in these moments, as if playing with the donkeys instead of punctuating their movements. But when night falls and the domes open in tandem with the sky, a grand composition takes over the film, signalling the awakening of the nocturnal industrial structures.
“It was really amazing to work with a composer like Ben who works with instruments that many people won’t know,” shares McAlpine. “I wanted a sense of improvisation, and not [someone] wearing this hat of ‘I’m a composer in the film.’ For me, the music was the soul of the observatory.”
In opposition to the warm and dry exterior, McAlpine takes us into the “guts and power of the more modern observatory,” swinging us through the sterile corridors as Grossman’s music invites us to acknowledge the grandeur the buzzing technology brings to our naked eyes. And as quickly as the sun sets and night falla, another day turns over in Atacama. The sound of the donkeys’ reliably paced steps grounds us back to Earth as they take their position at the foot of La Silla.
In just 15 minutes, and without a word uttered, McAlpine’s film reminds us that, like those who came before us, our existence is fleeting and ultimately worn away, and in the same breath exists the impossibility of discovering the secrets of our universe. However, for all the morbidity, there’s genuine joy and beauty to be found in the contradictions of the past and the present, the modern and the bygone — a perfectly struck imbalance that can feel rather strange.
