Demythologizing Colonial Conquest

Frann Michel

Magellan (2025)
Written and directed by Lav Diaz
Produced by Joaquim Sapinho and Marta Alves
Starring Gael García Bernal, Amado Arjay Babon, Ângela Azevedo.

THE LATEST FEATURE by Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz concerns the titular 16th-century Portuguese explorer famous for his project of circumnavigating the globe.

Magellan opens with an unmoving long shot of an Indigenous woman gathering from a river in a green jungle. The water flows past her; she takes a step; she bends and gathers. Then she glances up at the camera, looks stunned.

She backs away, still looking at the camera, stumbles, falls, drops what she’s been holding, and finally turns and runs away, leaving the frame while the camera remains still before cutting for the first time.

This opening shot is both an acknowledgement of the camera as colonizer and a revelation that the style of this film will reject the conventions of mainstream commercial movies, offering instead what’s known as Slow Cinema and a demythologizing of the story of European imperialism.

The film moves from Ferdinand Magellan’s participation in the 1511 capture of Malacca, on the southwestern coast of the Malay Peninsula, where he buys an enslaved man he names Enrique, to scenes of his marriage in Portugal, his gaining of funds for another voyage from Spain in 1518, the conflicts and miseries of that trip, the conversion of natives of Cebu to Christianity, and his death at the hands of those natives.

Every shot is gorgeous. Episodes in Lisbon and Spain offer richly opulent clothing and settings of painterly tableaux reminiscent of Raphael or Holbein — the era of oil painting first devoted to representing the riches generated by European powers’ seizure of the wealth of the globe for their ruling and rising classes.

We don’t see the battles for conquest in Malacca and Cebu. Rather than action scenes, we have tableaux of consequences: not battles, but bodies in the aftermath, in the foreground, midground, background, lying inert, sometimes as other characters move through the landscape of death.

Scenes of battle are exciting, thrilling, fun — so much so that some critics have argued there is no such thing as an antiwar film, because to dramatize such an event is to endorse it. Yet the quiet images of the wounded, dead, and dying invite us to appreciate some of the pain of war and conquest.

Slow Cinema

Slow Cinema is one of the names given to films generally characterized by long takes, deep focus, unmoving camera, long running times, attention to the mundane rather than the eventful, and a downplaying of action and plot in favor of character, setting, and mood. Other directors associated with Slow Cinema include Chantal Akerman, Béla Tarr, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Some viewers have objected that works of Slow Cinema (or related groupings of Contemplative Cinema, Transcendental Cinema, slow film) are pretentious art cinema, elitist exercises in audience endurance. Indeed some films by Diaz and others working in the style run upwards of seven hours long, though Magellan comes in well under three.

But where popular movies work to direct and control the viewer’s attention, taking us out of ourselves, Slow Cinema fosters reflection and exploration. It can be a meditative antidote to the frenetic, frantic pace of life in the digital age and to the fire hose of disasters we are confronting.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze distinguished between cinema of the “movement-image” and cinema of the “time-image.”

The movement-image emphasizes action, and is characteristic of mainstream popular narrative cinema, based on a mechanical concept of time, engaging the spectator’s sensory-motor mechanism, reinforcing conventional ways of seeing and thinking. In cinema of the movement-image, the viewer’s attention is clearly directed, and narrative can rely on familiar tropes and expectations.

In contrast, some filmmakers resisted this with what Deleuze calls a cinema of the time-image, in which shots are longer, cuts less frequent, and the viewer is invited to explore the image and experience its presence. He saw this as challenging the viewer’s conventional sense of time and self, and he found examples of it in the long takes and deep focus of Citizen Kane (1941) and Italian neorealism.

In the conventional grammar of continuity editing developed in the 20th century we might, for instance, cut from someone looking to what they are looking at, cut from wide shots to close-ups of important details.

As filmmakers developed this grammar of editing and as viewers came to know it, cuts became more frequent and shots shorter. For example, where Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) has an average shot length of 13 seconds, according to the database at Cinemetrics, many popular films released in 2001 (e.g., The Fellowship of the Ring, Mulholland Drive) have an average shot length under seven seconds. The opening shot of Magellan is more than half a minute long, and not the film’s longest.

In a 2019 interview later published in Offscreen, Diaz discusses “Malay time” when “Filipinos hang out,” sitting under a tree or on a beach all day:  “Part of my cinema is to reclaim this kind of perspective. . . . reclaiming what we’ve lost . . . . a responsibility to understand that we have this, before Islam and Christians came to our shores and converted us and changed our mindset.”

What colonizers and capitalists label “laziness or indolence,” Diaz frames as a rootedness in place and in pre-conquest, pre-conversion culture. In an interview accompanying the release of Magellan on the Criterion Channel, Diaz comments, “The Malay way of life is rooted in nature. There is more room for waiting. More room for thought.”

Miseries of Conquest

Magellan invites us to think about many things: the beauty of the natural world, the miseries of colonial conquest, the mythologizing of imperialism.

Most of the film is set outdoors, in jungles, on riverbanks, on beaches, at sea.  Even many of the European sequences have exterior settings, as when Portuguese women widowed by the conquest of Malacca approach Magellan on a dramatic rocky beach to beg for news of their men who have not returned.

Conquest seems miserable for all involved. There are multiple scenes of a European picking his way through a field of bodies to retrieve a wounded soldier. Sometimes the miserable bodies are those of sick sailors: the long journey south of the Americas and across the unexpectedly expansive Pacific leads to starvation and scurvy as well as conflict among the crew.

Magellan (who apparently remained healthy thanks to pickled quince) puts down a mutiny, leaving some of the mutineers marooned ashore in Patagonia. He orders the execution of a crew member caught engaging in sodomy.

Magellan’s enforcement of Christian rules is harsh when they arrive on land as well. Humabon, a chief of Cebu, has a sick child who recovers from illness after Magellan provides prayer, quince, and a statue of the child Jesus, and so the community accepts Christian baptism. But Magellan then orders his soldiers to destroy the carved antios figures of ancestor spirits, and we see the Cebuanos weeping over the piles of burning statues.

Sometimes the inert bodies we see are drunken Europeans. The leader of the Malacca expedition, an intoxicated Afonso de Albuquerque, rants about displacing Arab, Indian, Chinese and rival European traders. Portugal will supplant the power of Venice, suffocate and strangle their competitors, and bring about the end of Islam and the triumph of Christianity.

Then he abruptly falls over, unconscious. The listening soldiers laugh. These are not dignified, noble conquerors.

But of course the misery of conquest could be profitable for some. Magellan and his astronomer friend with whom he plans the circumnavigation of the globe try out arguments that might win them funding for the expedition, laughing in special delight at the point that it will feed the king’s greed.

Magellan later growls angrily to him about having killed people for God and King and Portugal. But their contract with the Spanish court allowed them personally to keep twenty percent of the profits made, as well as the right to run the government of any land they conquered.

That financial point is not included in the film, but perhaps Diaz assumes it is common knowledge in the Philippines, where Magellan’s history is a familiar point of reference.

Who Was Lapu-lapu?

The film has been criticized by some for taking a revisionist stance not only to Magellan, but also to Lapu-lapu, the Indigenous leader of the battle that killed him and much of his crew, thereby helping to stave off colonization of the Philippines for another 40 years.

Magellan suggests that Lapu-lapu was himself a mythical figure, a bogey invented as part of the native plan to defeat the Spanish conquistadors.

Diaz has argued that there is no reliable historical evidence of Lapu-lapu, since the only contemporaneous record of him is the diary of one of Magellan’s sailors, Antonio Pigafetta, who never actually saw him. In short, Diaz refuses to rebut myths of the heroic European explorer with a parallel story of the heroic resistance leader.

This may also be because of the uses to which the figure of Lapu-lapu has been put by violent and repressive nationalist forces. Lapulapu (as the Duterte government in 2021 officially decreed it should be spelled) or Lapu-lapu (as the subtitles spell it in Magellan) is the namesake of a major city (Lapu-Lapu), honored with countless monuments, and pictured on currency and on the official seal of the Philippine National Police.

The Philippine National Police have been associated with thousands of killings and other crimes against humanity in connection with the “war on drugs” waged under Rodrigo Duterte, for which that former head of state was arrested in 2025 and charged by the International Criminal Court. Duterte claimed that his so-called war on drugs justified the mass killings of civilians.

Legacy of Killing

As for Magellan, he rationalized his conquest as part of spreading Christianity. He is remembered for having discovered the Strait of Magellan and credited with masterminding the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe.

He is less often remembered, so far, as a murderer, a slaver and a dupe. In a Reddit AskMeAnything thread, Diaz said that the modern Magellan is Elon Musk.

The film ends with the enslaved man Magellan had named Enrique telling us, in voice over, that four days after Magellan’s death, Humabon held a feast and massacred most of Magellan’s remaining men, and Enrique helped.

He says (according to the English subtitles), “I was an accomplice to the violence that happened. But I had to do it. I did it for my freedom.” He is not looking at the camera; he is looking ahead.

July-August 2026, ATC 243