The Natural and Unnatural Histories of Patricio Guzmán

The opening moments of The Pearl Button, the 2015 film from Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, frame a small block of quartz in close-up. The director's voice-over draws attention to a droplet of water encased inside the mineral unearthed in the Atacama Desert. The trapped water is an estimated three thousand years old. Guzmán offers no commentary beyond these factual observations before the opening credits appear, but this brief prologue introduces the film's extended attention to traces of the past as they are preserved by nonhuman nature. The difficulty and necessity of engaging with the past is a longstanding concern of Guzmán's exilic documentary filmmaking. In films such as Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), The Pinochet Case (2001), and Salvador Allende (2004), Guzmán returns to the democratic election of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970 and his subsequent overthrow in a United States–financed coup d'état in 1973, which installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. These historical events also provide the basis for the director's three-part The Battle of Chile (1975–79), a documentation of Allende's nationalization agenda and the internal strife resulting from it. Guzmán's postdictatorship documentaries confront the national trauma of the Pinochet regime, and they emphasize the importance of sustaining collective memory in the face of its erasure. Accordingly, Guzmán draws on various strategies of remembrance, including personal testimony from survivors and historical records via photography and film. The Pearl Button and the film that preceded it, Nostalgia for the Light (2011), extend Guzmán's cinematic engagement with the fragments of memory to the historical traces preserved by natural elements. These elements—for Guzmán, primarily earth and water—function as historical agents, and his films consider how nonhuman nature shapes the legibility of the past. In this regard, Guzmán's block of quartz is a media object—that is, an act of mediation that encloses, and thereby transmits, a trace of the past. Mediation is not an operation unique to technological media, as the natural elements, in their ceaseless interactions, continually mediate (act as a medium) for each other. As Sean Cubitt Notes, while human communication marks out meaningful distinctions within this "background hum," mediation itself "precedes the separation of the human and the environmental," which is to say, "precedes all separations, all distinctions, all thingliness, objects, and objectivity."¹ Guzmán's block of quartz is itself an inscription of the past, an impression formed by the interaction of natural elements, and the political project of his recent documentaries is rooted in their attentiveness to and exploration of these nonhuman modes of mediation.

Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed that from the vantage point of the climate crisis, the separation between human history and natural history is an untenable divide.² The recognition that humanity acts as a geological force dispels the assumption that the environment is too large in scale and changes at a pace too slowly for human actions to affect it. Natural history is not the stable backdrop to human events. The entanglement of natural history and human history, rather, bridges the gap between temporal scales, placing, as Chakrabarty writes, "the geological now of the Anthropocene," designating a new geological epoch that acknowledges humanity's climatic influences, in contact "with the now of human history."³ Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button confront the problem of scale in narrating history. Of the former film, Nilo Couret argues that it understands nostalgia as a movement across time scales. "Toggling between the human, the geologic, and the cosmic," Nostalgia for the Light mediates historical events by emplotting them along spatiotemporal coordinates that traverse these scales.⁴ Couret writes, "Guzmán alternates between the small detail that unfolds in time and the unfathomable vastness enfolding in time, carrying an event forward and backward in a string of possible and impossible connections across space and time."⁵ Like Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button places the national history of Chile in relation to nonhuman temporal and spatial dimensions. The Pinochet...