Stones Have Laws

Art­ful ethnog­ra­phy meets a cheeky apolo­gia for colo­nial­ist activ­i­ties of the past in Dutch film­mak­ers Lon­nie van Brum­me­len and Siebren de Haan intrigu­ing­ly titled Stones Have Laws. The name alludes to the qua­si-mys­ti­cal lifestyle of the Suri­namese Maroon tribe, who imbue all man­ner of flo­ra, fau­na and fea­tures of the nat­ur­al land­scape with a humane ener­gy and untapped wis­dom. We know this because the film com­pris­es of con­ver­sa­tions and mono­logues from var­i­ous, uniden­ti­fied tribes­peo­ple which shed light on the way they func­tion as a com­pact soci­ety based near the north­ern tip of the South Amer­i­can continent.

We also learn that the dia­logue in the film is actu­al­ly being deliv­ered as a script, which was for­mu­lat­ed from con­ver­sa­tions between the film­mak­ers and sub­jects before cam­eras start­ed to roll. So you have a com­plex exam­ple of for­mal quick­step­ping as the film attempts to give some amount of sub­tle polit­i­cal lever­age to the peo­ple in front of the lens. It’s a hybrid doc­u­men­tary fic­tion about a peo­ple whose own iden­ti­ty is sub­ject to the pull of var­i­ous cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal influ­ences from across the globe.

In terms of tem­po, Stones Have Laws takes its good sweet time, and per­haps requires a cer­tain amount of patience to tap into its lack­adaisi­cal rhythms. Often, the dia­logue comes from a fig­ure off cam­era, as the image cap­tures the mist rolling over a lake or a small cloud con­nect­ing with the canopy of the adjoin­ing jun­gle. Water is a key motif, as the tribe rely on a riv­er which not only pro­vides sus­te­nance, but is also a key ele­ment of cul­tur­al rit­u­als which involve aggres­sive­ly spray­ing a mouth­ful of water over the back of a compatriot.

The Maroon are actu­al­ly escaped slaves orig­i­nal­ly from Africa, and the film allows the sub­jects to present this hybrid ances­try through their var­i­ous tra­vails. There’s also a focus on how mech­a­nised indus­try is start­ing to encroach, not mere­ly in the dress and speech pat­terns, but in their tools – fol­low­ing the mas­sive exer­tion under­tak­en to cut down a tree with a hand-tooled axe, they whip out a chain­saw to fin­ish the job. These lit­tle jokey anachro­nisms, how­ev­er, a few and far between, as this is for the large part a seri­ous explo­ration into the nature of repa­ra­tion and how the west look at and learn about cul­tures born out of colo­nial­ist aggression.