University of Cape Town – FAM3003S

Jacques De Villiers

7 October 2016

‘Particle Fever’:

The Logic of Cinematic Osmosis in Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015)

These two Proustian time-image documentaries can each stand alone but do fit together almost perfectly, like complementary episodes, when watched as a double-bill. This seems cannily intentional on Guzman’s part. At one point in Nostalgia he speculates through his voice-over that a determined enough investigation could potentially turn up the bodies of some of General Pinochet’s victims from the bottom of the sea, where they’d been made to disappear decades before without any hope of being traced. Near the end of The Pearl Button that search is actually carried out, and a few pearl-encrusted bones are returned to the light of day and the annals of common memory.[1]In this way, Guzman’s cinema starts with evidence of the imagined past and continually reaches for its material presence in the present.

Cinema itself, at least as an actual activity, is ineluctably attached to the present. No filmmaker can set out to film the past directly without being slightly mad. Even archival footage can only be included in its present material state, reflecting what a piece of the past looked like in the present in which it was uncovered by the filmmaker. Guzman takes these truths as the a priori foundations for his work, finding in the landscape, coastline and history of Chile some sort of cipher for his power of personal reflection. As in the work of Raoul Peck and Chris Marker, the sights and sounds of his films are enchained to his ruminations, and Cinema is shown to be a kind of lingering appraisal of the secret knowledge of places. In Nostalgia, the Atacama desert, despite its endless dry waste, somehow includes two proximate analogs to this technique: the astronomers gazing out interminably at the ever-approaching past that is starlight, and the families combing the endless floor for the final discovery of their lost loved ones. Looking both up and down, the human journey through this empty space is one of being dragged backwards into the future by the inexorable gravity of time, all the while glimpsing increasingly deeper into the simultaneously receding past.

In The Pearl Button it is instead the sea which substitutes for the galaxy as the primordial site of wonder. Just as life itself may have arrived on earth on a floating comet, it’s certain that the first Chileans arrived from the endless ocean to populate a seemingly barren expanse. Their near-annihilation as a culture rhymes, in Guzman’s mind, with the near-erasure of the Allende coup and the all-but-forgotten story of Jimmy Button, and by grouping these three stories together and amassing their little remaining debris, he hopes to bring into being a kind of holistic testament to the very space of his own childhood, viewing the countryside, the people and all the nation’s recovered skeletons as the actual unknown backdrop to the distant tranquility of his youth, showing up nostalgia as a complicated form of hypocrisy and ignorance.

In this, however, I feel Guzman doesn’t go far enough in his critique. By interlinking the plight of the early Chileans, the 60,000 killed in the 1973 coup and the solitary wonder of star- and ocean-gazing into one vast metaphor of proactive rememberance, he seems implicitly to depoliticize these events into merely being unforgettable disasters looked on now from the remove of an investigative lens. While it’s true that little can ever be done for the dead but the preservation of their memory, the initial reasons for the past’s ‘disappearances’ were primarily proposed futures that needed to be silenced and replaced. Salvador Allende, like Lumumba, was democratically elected on the choice of socialism over barbarism, but Pinochet and his American backers felt the latter would work better for their own interests. The objective view Guzman maintains via extreme long shots of Chile from Outer Space and lingering tilts down the rolled-out map of the country precisely negates this history of struggle. The circumstances have changed but the definitive point goes unmade: there was an alternative to terror which terror hastened to quell. This conclusion should not be ruminated upon so much as discussed openly. The past is lost but the future need not slip from our fingers either. Guzman settles instead for collecting pretty marbles and obscuring his frames in ephemeral dust.

[1]An implicit reference here to The Tempest (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) links this moment to the grounded eternity of poetry, showing up some part of reality that may remain deathless.