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| A still from "The Pearl Button" of the Humboldt Current, which marks an area of low salinity ocean that flows along the west coast of South America and that marks a unique ecosystem. (Courtesy of distributor, Kino Lorber Pictures). |
If there were a poet laureate of Chile’s Atacama Desert, it would be documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. In Nostalgia for the Light (2011), Guzmán probed that high, arid land, famous for its observatories, and its spectacular views of the Milky Way, for evidence of crimes that are the subject of all of his documentaries. They were committed during the sixteen years of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime. In his latest documentary, The Pearl Button, the writer-director becomes the bard of oceans, and in his sublime narrative voice, ruminates on their depths as the repository for human history.
The Pearl Button is comprised of several storylines that arise from
that quotidian object. One button represents the only piece of evidence in a
murder case that will never be brought to trial. It was discovered off the
Pacific coast of Chile, not far from the Atacama Trench, annealed to a railroad
tie. These wooden ties weighed down the bodies of Pinochet-era victims dropped
from helicopters. Guzmán re-enacts that chilling crime and imagines the body
and mind of the “disappeared” person now flowing in oceanic memory, along with
countless others who suffered the same fate.
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| Writer-director Patricio Guzman on his epic voyage along Chile's Pacific coast during production of his sublime documentary, "The Pearl Button." (Courtesy of Kino Lorber Pictures.) |
During production on The
Pearl Button, the 74 year old writer-director embarked on a sea journey
along Chile’s 2,600-mile coastline, mostly inaccessible by land or air. Along
the way, he discovered another narrative thread: the story of Jemmy Button, an
indigenous 19th-century man who was paid one pearl button to travel to England
in order to be “civilized.” Button later returned to his coastal community,
among many other nomadic aboriginal locations in what is now Southern Chile and
its archipelago. Europeans eventually decimated the native peoples, although
some escaped. Guzmán speaks to a few of their descendants, including the last
Kawésqar speaker. Once ocean nomads, they are now prevented by the Chilean
government from putting to sea in their traditional canoes.
Guzmán’s expedition, past
mountains, verdant islands, and glaciers—beautifully photographed and
skillfully edited—led him to wonder at the indifference of Chileans to their
natural environment. His conclusion is that the “disappeared” are there, as is
the history of colonization and genocide. Whether Guzmán is gazing at the
Atacama Desert or the ocean, he sees the primacy of place in the act of
remembering—and the ease with which his fellow Chileans forget their past. Then
he turns to those for whom the past is present: The aboriginal people in The
Pearl Button, Gabriela, Cristina, and Martin, and a Chilean musicologist, a
painter, and a poet, all represent the last living memory of different but
equally horrific events and, ironically, of life-giving oceans. The
musicologist, for instance, striving to capture flowing, rippling, and surging
waters, produces astonishing didgeridoo-like vocalizations, and Martin makes
small, exquisite, built-to-scale canoes.
Guzmán survived imprisonment
in Santiago’s infamous National Stadium after the 1973 coup d’etat that brought
Pinochet to power. He says in The Pearl Button that he also escaped the
ocean wave under which his beloved boyhood friend “disappeared.” That
recollection suggests the voyage undertaken for the documentary represents a
tenuous reconciliation with the past, or at least with the sea, despite the
crimes that the filmmaker chronicles there. In the end, Guzmán concludes that
from our bodies, to the sea, to a vaporous nebula with 120 million times the
water in the Earth’s oceans, water is not just the common element of every
living organism, it is what links humanity to the cosmos. Water is memory.
Maria Garcia, October 19, 2015 (Please respect copyright and credit any quotes taken from this review. Thank you.)
Maria Garcia, October 19, 2015 (Please respect copyright and credit any quotes taken from this review. Thank you.)
