Abstract
This essay examines three films that express a particular affinity with fire: Ircaema: Uma Transa Amazônica (1974), O que arde (2019) and Huachicolero (2019). While focusing on disparate socio-political settings, all three share an improvised, amateur style, utilizing raw and vulnerable filmmaking, involving risks for the cast and crew. Each film’s arc of fire has its own tempo unique to a time and a place, constructing an idiosyncratic representation of a novel fire regime, characterizing flames in terms of pattern, frequency and intensity. The protagonists in all three films possess forms of pyrophilia as they negotiate life on the screen burning in front of our eyes. The fires these films show us are the feral spawn of extractive economic practices at the core of modernity: logging, monoculture farming and oil extraction. In this regard, the wildfires analyzed here do not carry out a vital metabolic function for biomes but rather harm or possibly erase ecosystems and the biodiversity they sustain. In turn, such pyrotechnics have enabled different forms of fugitivity, insofar as the protagonists in these films are in flight from their own entanglement within these combustible landscapes.