The political documentaries of acclaimed Chilean director Patricio Guzmán culminate in the latest trilogy which considers the majesty of nature against the violence of history.
Patricio Guzmán’s debut documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile (1975, 1976 and 1979) was a landmark portrayal of the left-wing Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) government. This coalition government in Chile, led by Salvador Allende between 1970-1973, ended abruptly after a military coup on 11 September, 1973. Guzmán made the film as an act of political commitment, shooting on the streets, in the countryside and in the factories, capturing the enthusiasm of the left as well as the attempts of the right to shut down the government. As the title of the first part of that trilogy expressed – The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie – Guzmán was aware of the proximity of the coup, but was powerless to stop it. Not even through his films. Released in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s violent dictatorship, The Battle of Chile nevertheless became a masterpiece of the documentary genre. However, its warning was not able to stop the tyranny.
Three decades later, Guzmán is in the midst of creating another powerful trilogy. After years of dictatorship which was then succeeded by democratic administrations, the director turns his sights yet again to the people executed, disappeared and tortured by Pinochet’s regime in Chile. This time they act as a departure point to ask: how has Chile historically oppressed those who, at some point, were considered dirty, disposable enemies?
Nostalgia for the Light (2012) initiated this quest in the Atacama Desert, a region expressing the harsh ironies of Chile itself. Today it is home to monumental telescopes that observe remote stars, but which are incapable of locating the bones of the buried in the driest desert of the world.
Released earlier this year, The Pearl Button moves these ironies to the pristine waters of southern Patagonia. The documentary entwines two stories: one about the extermination of indigenous people in the 19th-century – the Kawéskar, Selknam, Aoniken, Hausch and Yamana – by settlers, and the other about people tortured, killed and dumped into the sea in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup. In both cases, the sea expresses an irony. Water, the source of life, is a monumental graveyard for peoples, cultures, dreams and remains.
One of these remains helps Guzmán connect the extermination of indigenous people and the killing of left-wing partisans after 1973: a pearl button. He traces the story of a young Yamana taken by an English sailor to Europe to be “civilised” in exchange for a pearl button. After a year, the boy, nicknamed Jemmy Button, was returned to his people with his life and identity forever distorted. Almost two centuries later, another pearl button expressed a difficult story. Attached to a rail, a little flat and shiny button is the last remaining evidence of those dumped by the military into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
Referencing both episodes, Guzmán knits together a brilliant film that is an essay and a poem, a journey through fjords, channels, islands and people – people like Cristina Calderón, the last Yamana woman alive. She provides one of the most memorable moments of the film when Guzmán asks her to translate some words from Spanish to her language, and she has problems with two particular words in her response: “police” and “god”. These concepts simply do not exist in her culture. The settlers brought them to the land.
The Pearl Button is an important work, but lacks something for those who have followed Guzmán’s other movies. Unlike Nostalgia for the Light, the second film of the trilogy seems to miss contemporary elements that could help untangle Guzmán’s questions regarding Chile’s long history of violence. I am talking, for instance, about the privatisation of water in Chile and the appropriation of the sea by seven of the wealthiest families in the country.
Perhaps the director thought that the core of his argument would not have changed with new information. And he might be right. As a whole, The Pearl Button concludes that violence has always been present in history, not as a consequence of nature – as the lens shows in all its majesty – but by the action of men, which means that it can be changed. In this regard, the second part of the trilogy – the third of which will explore Chile’s vast mountain range – serves as a warning for current and future generations. Unlike The Battle of Chile, Guzmán’s newest trilogy is in a position to send a message, to re-route a historical path that has taken away so much and so many – the many thousands of people whose bodies still lie somewhere in the country between the desert, the sea, the mountains and a perennial impunity.