“Not Made For Human Eyes”: On History and Art in La Chimera and Dahomey
Charlie Brownlee
Mati Diop’s Dahomey and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera explore our relationship to the past, present, and future through ancient works of art.
A young boy gazes up at the sculpture towering above him. A girl glares intently into the display case. A security guard stares, bemused, at the statue in the glass box. Towards the end of Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey (2024), visitors at a museum in Abomey, Benin gather to view an exhibition of ancient artifacts from the former Kingdom of Dahomey, recently transported from France and installed in a mandated act of repatriation. The camera frames the museumgoers within the geometric shapes and patterns of the artwork — they appear confined, trying to connect with historical artifacts presented as their own, but which belonged to a kingdom destroyed by a colonial empire.
Dahomey documents the return of 26 artifacts, stolen from the Kingdom of Dahomey during France’s imperial conquest (and subsequent destruction) of the region in the late 19th century, to the current-day Republic of Benin. Diop’s film charts the journey from the perspective of the 26th artifact in the collection: a statue of King Ghézo, who ruled Dahomey for over forty years in the first half of the 19th century. This fictionalized narration, powerfully written and voiced by Haitian novelist and poet Makenzy Orcel in the statue’s native Fon, transforms the film into a dreamlike meditation on repatriation, culture, history, and memory. These voice-overs punctuate Dahomey’s documentary style, revealing a side of the complex political and cultural discussion of repatriation that often goes unconsidered: the stolen works of art themselves, ripped from their original context and put on display.
Diop wasn’t the only filmmaker in 2024 who focused on the international art trade to explore broader themes of history and the effects of capitalist interest on our relationship to the past. The Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher similarly instills character within ancient works of art in La Chimera, released in North America last year. A sun-drenched drama, the film traces the exploits of rugged English archeologist Arthur (played by an endearing Josh O’Connor) as he stumbles across Tuscany, raiding tombs while desperately searching for his recently deceased lover, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello). Two of the best films released last year, Dahomey and La Chimera explore humanity’s relationship to its past by giving character and agency to historical artifacts which are stolen, sold, and transferred across the international art circuit. In doing so, they exemplify cinema’s ability to inject meaning into the inanimate. Whereas Dahomey approaches the subject on a broad cultural scale, reflecting on national relationships to history through ancient works of art, La Chimera focuses more on the personal level, exploring the relationship between Arthur and the ancient objects he pilfers from long-forgotten Etruscan tombs. Both films deconstruct claims of ownership over objects whose origins have been obscured by history and myth, suggesting that works of art have lives and agency of their own right, beyond the spectator’s view and outside of the framework of capitalism.
At the beginning of Dahomey, the camera travels through the quiet archives of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. In the pitch-dark of the storage rooms, the deep voice of the statue of King Ghézo, distorted by time, emerges: “I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls. Cut off from the land of my birth as if I were dead.” Placed in the museum, stripped from its original context and meaning, the statue has gradually become a fixture of the physical space of the museum, representing France’s history rather than the statue’s own cultural origins. “There are thousands of us in this night. We all bear the same scars. Uprooted. Ripped out. The spoils of massive plundering.”
In the daylight hours of the museum, the statue is rendered mute as museum workers and historians study, measure, and prepare it for shipment. Despite the lack of narration in these scenes, where the only sounds are the ambient audio of the museum space and the workers moving around, the film continues to anchor itself to the perspective of the statue. Diop places the camera inside the shipping crate along with the statue, effectively sealing the running camera within the crate during transportation. One by one, as the nails are drilled into the wood and all light is sealed out, so too are we enveloped in darkness. An effective shot, it gives the impression of being buried alive. I’m reminded of Logistics (2012), the video project by Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson, which traces the production of a pedometer in real-time from its manufacturing plant in Shenzen, China to a shipping crate across the sea and finally to a retail store in Stockholm. Known for being one of the longest works of visual media ever, coming in at a runtime of over thirty-five days, Logistics is effective in its personification of the pedometer; we experience the real-time movement of the object as it travels to its destination. Our own experience as viewers (in the case of Logistics, primarily boredom) is projected onto the “experience” of the physical object at the center of the film, thus personifying the item and expanding its significance beyond that of a lifeless, flat object. Like Logistics, our experience as a viewer is deeply tied to the experience of the statue of King Ghézo in Dahomey.
Once again in the darkness, the statue muses on its repatriation as plane engines rumble underneath. It understands that in being chosen to return to Benin, it has come to represent the victims of an entire history of imperial conquest; its voice speaks for thousands of works of art stripped of their purpose and meaning, buried alive in storage facilities. The statue reflects on its nonconsensual status as a mere symbol for repatriation; it can feel “the full weight of a past of which I am the trance, the trace.” In the confines of the shipping crate, anxiety creeps in. “I’m torn between the fear of not being recognized by anyone and not recognizing anything.” When the artifacts arrive in Benin’s capital city of Abomey, they’re greeted with a parade in the streets — a celebration quickly contrasted by the stillness of the new museum they now call home. Despite the geographical change, this new museum space is as sterile and silent as the Musée du quai Branly back in Paris. At night, the artifacts’ new home takes on an eerily quiet atmosphere. A security camera silently watches. The block colors of Benin’s flag flaps in the nighttime air. A guard strolls the grounds, checking his phone. The statue of King Ghézo surveys the land he once called home: “Everything is so strange. Far removed from the country I saw in my dreams.” The statue dreams of the only thing it can recognize: the local flora, whose leaves are illuminated in a kaleidoscopic sequence of intimate close-ups. It longs to be free of the museum space, an artificial environment constructed for display which separates the artifacts from their homeland.
In the morning, the artifacts are moved by hand, carried in their crates by a mass of workers up marble steps and into the display room, where they’re gently propped up in glass cases. Diop’s camera begins to wander here — as it often does in these scenes of installation and transportation — to the workers, silently gazing on at the ancient masterpieces. They are the real first visitors to the newly installed exhibition. They’re followed by political and cultural figures arriving at the official celebratory opening of the exhibit, welcoming the newly repatriated artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey back to their homeland. “Is this the end of the journey?” the statue of King Ghézo asks, the night before the exhibition is installed. Not quite. The second half of the film is primarily dedicated to documenting a debate among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi surrounding the implications of the repatriation. Is this a genuine celebration of history? An apology? Or simply a meaningless political gesture? Diop’s camera assumes a fly-on-the-wall perspective as the discussion develops, allowing the students to voice their own opinions on the matter, but in its own way, the film is engaged in an internal debate similar to the one circulating among the students. How should it depict the process of repatriation? How should it film these objects and give them a voice? What should our relationship to these artifacts look like?
Diop considers the perspective of ancient artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey as they are shipped to modern-day Benin.
La Chimera is certainly interested in the latter of these questions. We first meet Arthur, the bumbling English archeologist at the center of the film, as he’s newly released from prison, serving time for his illicit line of work: stealing ancient artifacts. With his gentle demeanor and sullied linen suit, Arthur is a man trapped between the scared and the profane. He is endowed with an ability to “read” the earth: he can sense the presence of long-forgotten treasures buried beneath the surface. With dowsing rod in hand, he finds himself “lost in his chimeras” — dreamlike visions of the spiritual world. Arthur has built his life on exploiting his ability for profit, raiding tombs with his merry band of tombaroli, or grave robbers, and pilfering artwork originally intended to accompany the dead on their journey out of the physical world. Arthur and the tombaroli are presented as the film’s heroes, running across the Tuscan countryside robbing tombs and evading the law. However, as the weight of Arthur’s grief grows heavier, the acquisitive reality of the crew’s exploitation sets in for him. Rohrwacher is quick to remind us that the tombaroli are “just a drop in the ocean” of the art world, as a local troubadour sings during a musical interlude. Petty crooks working for the larger system of illegal art trading, their sacrilege is simply a means to an end for high-end art dealers like the elusive Sportaco (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s sister) to sell off consecrated goods to naive art collectors.
Rohrwacher’s film is drenched in a dreamy atmosphere, with sequences shot on lush 35mm, Super 16 and 16mm by the brilliant cinematographer Hélène Louvart. Yet Arthur’s supernatural sense is more than just a support for the film’s ethereal mood — it serves as a direct through line which connects him to the soul of his dearly departed Beniamina, and transforms the film into a suggestion of alternative ways of viewing our relationship to the past and present. Haunted by visions of his lost love, Arthur is searching for something deeper than mere desecration — he’s looking for a thread that will guide him out of this world and back to his beloved. Our Orpheus balances his time between the tombaroli and visiting Beniamina’s mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini), a vocal teacher who can’t seem to accept her daughter’s death. Flora’s maternal relationship with Arthur is contrasted by her constant patronizing of her student, the soft-spoken singer Italia (Carol Duarte) — yet it’s Italia who forms an instant connection with Arthur that eventually proves to transcend the material world of Arthur’s grave robbing. Theirs is a spiritual connection, one that offers a source of grounded hope for a future against Arthur’s anguishing search for the past.
Through the world of La Chimera, Rohrwacher paints a detailed landscape of Italy and its people, caught between ancient history and modern industrialization, and gradually losing contact with tradition. This dilemma is represented particularly well in a scene at an outdoor dance where Arthur’s divining sense leads him to encounter his biggest find yet: a perfectly preserved Etruscan tomb buried beneath a newly constructed seaside power plant. Here is where Italia challenges Arthur’s sacrilege: “Those things aren’t made for human eyes, but those of souls.” His friends laugh at the statement, but Arthur does not. In this landscape, where modern industry and capitalism have buried sacredness, his exploitation of his own spiritual abilities begins to break down. For a brief moment, the film gives us a glimpse of that sacredness. The camera moves within the tomb, buried among the artifacts. We find ourselves aligned with the objects in a similar way to how Dahomey connects us to the statue of King Ghézo. Just as the process of repatriation is shown from the perspective of the statue in Diop’s film, the act of sacrilege in La Chimera is depicted from the side of the works of art. Furthermore, by viewing the works of art in this context, we’re allowed to understand them in a way the tombaroli never can: as quiet, forgotten masterpieces, undisturbed except for the muffled sound of Arthur and the tombaroli breaking the seal. A final blow, and the cover is removed. Air rushes into the tomb; the stones sweat. It’s here that Arthur finds his chimera — his love returned to him not in flesh, but in the cold, sculpted stone of a statue, rising out of the darkness as if waiting for him for thousands of years. From the moment it’s illuminated by candlelight, there’s an immediate connection between the statue and Arthur’s grief. It’s an unmistakable stand-in for his Beniamina. When his fellow tombaroli break off the statue’s head to transport it, Arthur lunges at them. It’s through Arthur and his emotional journey that we come to understand the statue as more than just an object, but a symbol of love and loss that has traveled across time to find him, only to be decapitated by a few men looking to sell it off.
La Chimera is fiction, but the world of the tombaroli is not. Rohrwacher, who grew up in the village of Castel Giorgio in rural Umbria, remembers hearing stories when she was a child of the adventures of the local grave robbers, swept up by la grande razzia — a craze in the 1980s that saw regular people digging for old Etruscan goods and selling them off. Ancient artifacts, undisturbed for thousands of years, were coveted by anyone who could find them. “They were seen as sacred objects, not things to be sold. Then all of a sudden people started looting the tombs and temples,” she says. For Rohrwacher, this moment marked a shift in the population’s attitude towards ancient artifacts and history. “The tombaroli were a local phenomenon. But on a wider level, they represent the moment where capitalism becomes a part of us all.”
As a filmmaker, Rohrwacher has been acutely focused on the clash between modern capitalism and sacred history, often illustrating this dynamic through characters caught between both worlds. In 2018’s Happy as Lazzaro, the pure-hearted kindness of a young boy (Adriano Tardiolo) renders him seemingly immortal. He wakes up after a decades-long sleep without aging a day, journeying to find his family of sharecroppers who moved to the industrialized city. While Lazzaro’s subservience leaves him blind to other’s misuse of him, his generous heart has granted him a spiritual power that transcends time. In both Happy as Lazzaro and La Chimera, interior spiritual powers pour out into daily life, illuminating the world and our relationship to the past. “The past must be a living thing,” Rohrwacher says. “Normally if we look at the past we find either the glorification or the destruction of the past. We can only see our personal history as part of the history of humanity.” The hazy visions of Arthur’s chimeras collapse distinctions between the past and present. Arthur’s ability is less of a superpower and more of a certain way of understanding the world that grounds oneself both firmly in the present and the past. The past is not literally alive for Arthur — his love is gone, and will never return. But through works of art, like the ancient statue that calls out to him, the past comes back in different shape and form. My favorite scene of La Chimera happens near the end of the film. Arthur reconnects with Italia, who has created a beautiful communal home within a local abandoned train station for herself and the local women and children to live in. Out of the discarded past, something new emerges.
In La Chimera, Arthur’s (Josh O’Connor) ability to “read” the earth spiritually connects him to the past and the artwork he steals.
Dahomey and La Chimera pose the same question: how can we possibly bear the weight of the past? Conclusions arrive in different forms, explored by the filmmakers through their own approach to narrative, whether it be fiction or non-fiction (or somewhere in between). Both filmmakers are well aware that questions such as this one are precisely what drive and shape our understanding of the past, far more than any answer could.
Rather than focusing on the past, Diop chooses to end Dahomey by focusing on the present and suggesting possibilities for the future. The film’s final scene provides us with the last thoughts of the statue of King Ghézo — the past seemingly affirming its own understanding of itself: “I’ll no longer mull over my incarceration in the caverns of the civilized world . . . I never left. I am here. I won’t forget. There is nothing to repair.” As the statue muses, footage of Abomey and its people at nighttime are shown while Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt’s hypnotic electronic score swells. A man hauls a food cart down the street. A billboard advertising skin cream looms behind a street lamp. Outside of a club, a woman sleeps soundly in a chair. History continues onward. The people become living reflections of the ancient artifacts, and of the past itself. The past remains alive in that which is not on display for all to see.
Through the character of Arthur and his mystical connection to the sacred, Rohrwacher suggests an alternate way of seeing the world: one that views art and historical artifacts not as commodities to be bought and sold for profit or ownership, but reflections of our own pasts that can help us understand ourselves in the present. In a pivotal scene near the end of La Chimera, Arthur looks into the eyes of the statue’s stone head — an object buried for thousands of years that has now assumed the role of his lost love — with sympathy: “You’re not meant for human eyes.” With one swift movement, Arthur accepts exactly what Dahomey conveys: that the past cannot be priced, bought, stolen, or traded — it exists solely within us and through us.