In magical realist families, reality flickers. For as long as I can remember, certain relatives carried a frenetic charge, punctuating the usual banalities of the conversations of family get-togethers with warnings and premonitions or news from beyond. Our dead weren’t elsewhere (up above, down below, or wherever their corporal forms lay), but all around us, all the time – the spider that lives on your windowsill, the butterfly that lands on your hand, the angelic form sitting on your aunt’s sofa you’re told not to crowd. All symbols become manifest as the boundaries are blurred between living and dead, past and present and real and imagined – signifying the work of collective processing spanning generations.
Of course, much before magical realism was canonised in artistic forms, cultures the world over have always been involved in their own mythmaking in this way. But the language of magical realism was at first popularised as a literary genre to process the conflict-torn Latin America of the 1940s – by looking ahead to two upcoming examples, Andrea Arnold’s England-set Bird and Rungano Nyoni’s Zambia-set On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, it’s now clear that magical realism in art has since taken flight and gone global.
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The magic realist framework offers up an alternate system of reality that maps onto our existing one without displacing it – it treats magic as part of everyday life, accepted without question by its characters.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – the Colombian writer inarguably the most synonymous with the genre – believed that it was the gaze of the coloniser which makes the reality of the colonised unbelievable or fantastical. This genre, then, along with platforming marginalised perspectives, also challenges status quo ideas around knowledge.
Magic realism’s merits as a folkloric – and political – tool are often undersung or misunderstood as fantasy; but in blending the real with the magical, films like Bird and On Becoming A Guinea Fowl defamiliarise the everyday and render the extraordinary possible, inviting their characters (and their audiences) to view their world through a different lens.
In doing so, magical realism’s unique value is its ability to hold up a mirror to our world, urging us to question what we accept as real. In a contemporary cultural terrain where politics and media serve us uncertain truths all the time, magical realism gestures towards the very real dangers of tacit acceptance and asks us to look again.
The first time we see Franz Rogawlski as Bird, it feels like a dream. It’s early morning when Bailey (played by superb first-time actor Nykiya Adams) awakes in a field in Kent, having hidden there after a teenage vigilante act gone awry. It’s bucolic if not for the power lines flanking the edges. Bird is warm; Bailey is shaken. She is distrustful of people in general and, particularly of odd strangers like Bird enjoying the simple pleasure of the morning light. Bailey pulls out her phone to film Bird ostensibly for her safety, but it’s almost as if the recording will somehow corroborate the existence of the preternatural figure moving towards her.
Bailey lives with her single dad Bug (Barry Keoghan), in a colourfully worn-down squat, where his preoccupations sideline Bailey as she tries to gain a safe foothold of her own in an adult world, forced in between her father’s new fiancée or her mum’s (Jasmine Jobson) violently misogynist boyfriend.
There’s a lot of change afoot for them throughout: whether it’s Bailey getting her first period and experimenting with eyeliner, or even Bug’s attempt to harness the intoxicating powers of a poisonous (and expensive) toad he’s acquired. Bird, for his part, is looking for his estranged father. Bird takes her under his wing, so to speak, although the reciprocity between them speaks to a common understanding of what it feels like to grow and change, while alone and unseen.
Amongst Arnold’s oeuvre, the film bears many of the same touchstones of the social-realist milieus in which we usually find her characters. But here in Bird, the film’s ideas around belonging and identity take on a different form as Arnold turns to magical realism for the first time. In an intense third-act moment of protection, Bird transforms into something resembling his namesake. It’s a beautiful and messy turn that leaps out of the naturalism we’ve seen up until that moment; besides the injection of just-alright CGI, the heightened flutter of un-reality allows us to experience a profundity of feeling otherwise difficult to grasp through realism alone.
From one bird to another, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl also jumps the partition of realism to arrive at its own emotional truth. Shula (Susan Chardy) is home for her Uncle’s funeral, joining the group of women tasked with funeral preparations alongside their expected performance of ritualised grief and mourning. The scars of sexual abuse at the hands of the newly deceased begin to chafe, and Shula’s growing understanding compels her to find her voice so that the same pattern doesn’t repeat itself. Alas, it’s easier said than done given the (in this case, generational) impasse around complicit silence.
The guinea fowl is useful to all the animals in the animal kingdom, we learn, as it rings the alarm to signal danger for everyone. As Shula chips away at the cultural mores that have led to the burden of secrecy, the film’s triumphant final moments show Shula transformed – sounding the hopeful death knell for repressed collective trauma and its concomitant grief.
Both Bird and On Becoming A Guinea Fowl present an emotional overflow that can’t be addressed head-on, and in each instance, magical realism does the legwork to help us weather and process what feels unspeakable. The genre seeks to wedge a door open in accepted ‘rationality’, emphasising instead the validity and universal value found in individual or cultural memory and experience.
There was a time on X (Twitter) last year when I was briefly obsessed with a now-defunct Magical Realism bot that spit out a fresh logline every four hours: “At the stroke of midnight a giant tiger rises from the Mediterranean sea.” “An ancient Roman girl appears on a New York subway station platform, and laughs.” Considering our culture’s vexed relationship with truth, is it any surprise that we’re ever more drawn to a genre that combines reality with a little bit of magic? Magical realism can offer laughter, healing and new modes of knowing in a confounding world; to recite a well-worn Emily Dickinson quote in the 11th hour: ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.
