Does visual poetry count as an argument about anything

Maureen Fazendeiro's The Seasons arrives as a formally exquisite alternative to doomsday environmentalism. The positioning is exact: lyrical where apocalyptic documentaries are urgent, fragmented where they build narrative momentum, patient where they demand moral verdict. The film studies Alentejo, a rural region in southern Portugal, weaving historical and geographical threads through landscape sequences that reward attention without insisting on plot. The Guardian review notes this refreshing restraint. Also flags an unresolved question: does the film argue anything beyond visual poetry?

That uncertainty contains a buried assumption — that formal restraint and argumentative substance are separable things. They are not. When Hollis Frampton made Nostalgia in 1971, he abandoned conventional documentary narration entirely, letting landscape and text alone carry meaning. When Michael Snow made La Région Centrale, he built a thesis through nothing but camera movement and space. Critics initially read these works as non-argumentative, purely formal investigations. They were wrong. The argument had simply migrated. These filmmakers were making claims about perception itself, about what the human eye can bear to see, about rhythm and duration and the relationship between memory and land. The form was the argument.

The Seasons appears to do the same work. By refusing to resolve Alentejo's history into coherent narrative, Fazendeiro makes a specific claim: that Portuguese rural identity cannot be synthesized into a single story. By moving between registers — landscape, archive, myth. She argues that place is fundamentally layered, that seeing deeply requires holding contradiction. By asking the viewer to sit with visual fragments without neat causal logic, she makes a thesis about what knowledge of landscape actually looks like. It is not information delivered. It is perception earned.

What reads as evasion of argument is actually argument about how meaning gets made. The review's doubt reflects a critical habit older than cinema itself: assuming that form without explicit thesis is somehow less rigorous than form explicitly serving one. The structuralists of the 1960s-70s eventually forced a recognition that this was backwards. Formal choice always argues. It simply argues through texture, duration, and visual syntax rather than voice-over and plot.

This matters beyond film criticism because the same tension runs through any work demanding sustained attention without immediate payoff. When you spend time on a practice that produces no quantifiable output, you are making an argument about what attention itself is worth. When you sit with an unfamiliar idea without rushing to comprehend it, you are claiming something about how understanding actually grows. Formal lyricism. Whether in film, in practice, in thought. Is never a retreat from stakes. It is a choice about what stakes matter.