Constelaciones de la memoria: Sobre Nostalgia de la Luz [2010] y El Botón de Nácar [2015] de Patricio Guzmán

Abstract

Nostalgia de la Luz [2010] and El Boton de nacar [2015] are part of a trilogy made by the documentalist Patricio Guzman. In these two films the author proposes a reflection on Chile's historical and political memory. The singular of his proposal are the apparently dissimilar elements that participate in the dialogue. This is how the indigenous peoples of southern Chile and the disappeared of the Pinochet dictatorship get involved in the same plot with the Atacama Desert, astronomy, women seeking Calama, water and mother-of-pearl buttons, among other projections of the history. The result: A time's tissue, a possible relationship with it, with everything that implies thinking .history, science, ethics, territories, relationships. or as a thought of the unthinkable. What elements paint the images of the real that Guzman proposes? What is the power of these images? If we think of them as a vortex that interrupts the flow of the torrent of images-movement, where it rotate our relationship with the world? What does it imply to believe in the unthinkable? What does it mean to imagine chaos? In order to test some possible answers and thus to give an account of certain aspects of the real problem in the contemporary documentary, I propose the analysis of these two films in three vertices: 1) belief, 2) imagination and 3) the time, considering that these trace a cartography of the memory that the two films of Guzman visualize.