A Poetic of Beauty : Nature , Memory and Resilience in El Botón de Nacar / The Pearl

Uno de los pilares de la historia del documental latinoamericano es sin duda el director chileno Patricio Guzmán. Durante más de cinco décadas de producción fílmica ha dado cuenta de la historia política de Chile, específicamente se ha ocupado del significado de la dictadura chilena para el pasado, presente y futuro del país, además de su relevancia en el contexto latinoamericano. Sus películas representan sin lugar a dudas uno de los testimonios más relevantes de la historia del continente en el siglo XX con cientos de horas de grabación de los momentos más álgidos en el proceso de transición violenta entre el gobierno de Allende y Pinochet. Su propuesta fílmica dará un giro radical en sus últimas dos producciones: Nostalgia de la Luz ([2010] 2011) y El Botón de Nácar (2015), las cuales hacen parte de una trilogía –la última película está en proceso de producción-. Su propuesta estética es revolucionaria en el sentido de que resignifica la relación entre memoria e historia estableciendo una conexión entre naturaleza, cosmología y memoria histórica. En esta trilogía se ocupa por separado en cada película del desierto, el mar y la montaña, llevando al espectador a una reflexión que, a través del lenguaje poético y un tono meditativo, propone una nueva mirada de la historia y la memoria. En este ensayo analizo tres elementos que definen su película El Botón de Nacar y que abren las posibilidades a un nuevo tipo de reflexión teórica sobre el género del documental: la relación entre naturaleza, narración e historia, la historia entendida como memoria genealógica y el nuevo tipo de estética visual que el director está proponiendo, a la que llamo “poesía de lo bello”.

For Guzmán, the documentary is not an individual project but instead is the product of a collective memory. For him, some want to deny the image evoked from that memory, maybe because they want to avoid the horror of looking at themselves in that "album". (2015) is the second film, after Nostalgia for the Light (2011), in Guzman's trilogy portraying the history of Chile, specifically the history of the years before and after the 1973 coup d´état. Even though he has dedicated his film production of almost 50 years to the coup d'état, this trilogy-which finishes with Cordillera, 2 where the protagonist is the Andes mountains-takes a very different approach than anything Guzmán has produced before. Guzmán says that he is looking for different and new narratives to tell the same story. Indeed, he is telling a much more complex story than the one he has been telling for the last five decades in his prolific film production. And yet very little in terms of scholarly production has been said about his last film: A Pearl Button. I argue that there are three elements that define his film and that opens the road to a new approach in filmmaking: a poetic language, the role of nature in the film and history as a genealogical memory. I propose analyzing his movie The Pearl Button by a new lens that include these three elements, what I call a "poetic of beauty". This kind of poetic has a purpose: creating resilience.

The Language of the film: A New Kind of Poetic Approach
Patricio Guzmán´s trilogy, The Battle of Chile (1975Chile ( -1979, and most of his film productions are related to a very specific period in the history of the country, mainly the "Popular Unity" period of Salvador Allende´s democratically elected government overthrown by the coup of General Augusto Pinochet´s army in "a poetic of beauty". The poetic approach develop by A Pearl Button is completely entangled with the political. But in this film the political message and the search for the ones responsible for the atrocities during the Pinochet years is secondary, the form, the images, the sounds, the pace creates a visual composition that seduces the viewer and goes beyond a pure political rational discourse. Nevertheless there is a critique of the abuse of power that characterizes crucial moments in the history of Chile. The fourth fundamental tendency of the documentary explained by Renov is to express. Even tough in his film Guzmán creates a poetics of storytelling where the four elements appeared, the fourth one is the one that in this case encapsulates this film. "Moreover, the ability to evoke emotional response or induce pleasure in the spectator by formal means, to generate lyric power through shadings of sound and image in a manner exclusive of verbalization, or to engage with the musical or poetic qualities of language itself must not be seen as mere distractions from the main event (35)." For Renov though, the expressive dimension enhanced the communicative aim. But what Guzmán is doing in his film is far more radical, there is still a message to communicate but meaning is produce by the spectator, by being exposed to a visual composition that appeals to emotions, sensations, sounds, images and a poetic language.
I believe the director set the tone when he opens the second movie of the trilogy with the phrase of the poet, Raúl Zurita 6 : Todos somos amigos de una sola agua. We are all friends of the same water. Is not a coincidence that Guzmán chose a poet to narrate some of the film's main episodes. The poetic language used by Zuritá combined with the poetic narration by the director himself resonates well with the breathtaking images of nature that, at the end of the movie, become the real protagonists, over and above the political history. Being friends of the same water means that there is an element that connects everything in the movie, an element essential for life-the same water that acted as an "accomplice" of the military regime "hiding" the bodies that were tortured and killed. The sea took Guzmán´s first "desaparecido," a childhood friend who drowned in the same water that will bring back some of the other "desaparecidos" decades later. Telling that story Guzmán intertwines his personal story with the larger story he tells.
The sea was a cemetery, as the movie says, but the water also brought the bodies back and by doing so offered the opportunity of redemption. The presence of the actual body allows the families and the nation to give some kind of closure to the search of the "desaparecidos", even though that search actually will never had an end. Is impossible to find everybody and bring back all the bodies, sometimes only the objects can be witnesses of what happened. Here is where the pearl button is relevant, as the trace of the life of one of the victims.
On the other hand, the relevance of water in this documentary has another dimension, the narrator explains that as has been research by scientists, is very possible water makes life in the planet possible. According to one of the theories about the presence of water in planet earth, water could have been brought from the stars or other planets. The credibility of that theory is not the point here but instead its relevance for the argument the film is making. That argument has to do with a genealogical memory, meaning a memory that connects different episodes in the history of Chile as part of one big narrative that has to do with the origin of the cosmos and the millenary life of celestial bodies. If water is what makes human existence possible and it was brought from the stars, water is what connects humans with the big story of the universe.
"Everything is alive and has its spirit… Everything sounds… The universe is moving", this kind of statements set the tone of the film, intimate and personal, is attained through a voiceover -the narrator is Guzmán himself-that at first is exquisite and at some point becomes tedious. There is an obvious intention to force the spectator to take the time to observe, feel, hear and almost touch the elements, like water, and the objects, like the pearl button. The pace is slow and meditative.
The script is full of metaphors, emphasis and different playful ways in which he uses the language.
Besides the poetic language in the script of the film and the poetic images, Since water is the protagonist in The Pearl Button, as light and the desert were in Nostalgia for the Light, the film reflects on the importance of the sound that water makes. Everything that moves has a sound, and when water moves it makes not just one sound, but a complex collection of sounds that produce a symphony, as will be shown by the musician and anthropologist Claudio Mercado in the film, when he uses his voice to imitate the sound of the water. In this scene the narrator explains that Claudio learned from the natives the language of water, they believe the water is alive and has its own spirit. There are close-ups of drops of water, rivers and waterfalls and finally a long scene where, almost like an ancestral ritual, Mercado uses his voice to produce the "song" of the water, a complex and multiple ensemble of sounds with a multiple scale of tonalities that very rarely the spectator has been exposed to. He insists in the necessity of really listen, not just hearing.
Something so familiar as the sound of water becomes strange and almost sub-real.
In a subtle way during the film water becomes an entity that has its own ways. This "personification" of water will open the path for several stories that come later: the story of the natives of the Patagonia region, nomadic populations that lived ten thousand years ago and that travelled from island to island "living in the water"; the story of the "civilization" and extermination in the nineteenth century of the natives that lived in that region; and the story of the bodies that were thrown in the sea by the Pinochet regime to hide the torturing of thousands of people. Water is thus a metaphor that Guzmán uses to refer to the flow of time. The water has memory and it is the water that brings back a pearl button that was attached to the clothes of one of the victims of the Pinochet regime. Is the thread of water that allows the connection of events and the tracing of memory.
Nature is, at the end, the only "entity" that can save Chilean society, and "humanity". Trough this romantic vision of nature, Guzmán reminds the viewer that water is a natural resource crucial for life; in that sense, its presence represents the presence of hope and resilience. The movement of water also has a meaning, water flows and that sense of constant movement allows life to continue, metaphorically brings a possibility of continuity even though it is hard to leave the past behind. What is at stake in the Pearl Button, different from his first trilogy, The Battle of Chile, is what I call a poetic of beauty that intertwines politics, social justice and the environment trough an exploration of the senses.

Different from his other films, with a meditative and more essayistic style,
A Pearl Button is a sensorial experience, one where the exposure to close ups and panoramic views takes the viewer on a journey where colors, shapes and sounds are at the center. In broader terms we can say that A Pearl Button is about the importance of water in Chile. The movie starts with a close-up of a quartz that is more than 3000 years old. This scene is a long shot that has a black background and almost no sound. The director takes its time and wants the viewer to do the same, to see and not just watch, get immerse in the pace of the film and really observe the details of the material and the shape. At first it could appear like a gigantic ice mountain, and then we discover its real size. A drop of water is trapped inside this quartz, a thought that will lead us to the story of the film.
This long shot of the quartz where a simple object is transformed in a "sacred" object wants to play with the meaning of objects and how our mind label those objects, something so familiar becomes unfamiliar, eternal, infinite, an element of outer space. The language of the poet is present, not only in the words chosen by the narrator, but also present in the images of the glaciers, the sea, the water, the rivers, and the fascination he shows with different types of objects, natural or hand made.  Guzmán shows how the victims of the military junta were systematically tortured, killed and transformed in disposable bodies to be dropped in the sea. These vulnerable human bodies were used to ratify and maintain the power of the Chilean state. 8 It appeared that the sea and the water were the best allies of the state but in the end the water betrayed the state. The bodies of thousands became disposable the moment the state threw them in the sea, there they were part of nature, became one with nature, but they didn´t disappear, they came back through vestiges in the enormous pieces of wood to which they were chained. A systematic practice of the state transformed the victims bodies in disposable bodies, bodies that need it to be disappear in order to erase the evidence that can tie the crimes to the government.
It was a secret state practice that was promoted by the government, at the time, and accepted by a large part of society.
The bodies of the natives from Patagonia were also disposable. In the mind of the colonizers they needed to be civilized, but the physical differences between culture and the physical bodies of the colonizer and the colonized made them become disposable, they were call "monsters," their differences became monstrosities. The bodies of those who disappeared under the military dictatorship were also disposable bodies by being taken into airplanes and thrown into the sea.
The state ordered those actions and in that sense promoted a type of bio political regime that will not affect the whole population but that will "attack" those that were seen as a threat to the power of the state. The water literally and metaphorically brings back the bodies and allows the memory to be recovered.

Conclusion
Those bodies that the Pinochet regime thought would be disposable and disappear at the bottom of the sea came back. It seems water is not an accomplice after all and brought back the remains of the victims of the dictatorship. The bodies disappeared but some of the objects prevailed and carried the stories of those bodies. Through those objects the lives of the victims came to the surface and their individual stories became part of a broader national story.
Beauty and resilience take a central role in his production. It seems that at biocolonialism uses/used exploitative practices by seeking vulnerable human bodies as natural resources to be consumed for the profit and pleasures of those with greater social and economic power, as evidenced by the transnational organ trade and the testing of pharmaceuticals. the end, after all the violence, the killings and the pain it is possible to bounce back from adversity. Resilience is a topic that recently has been discussed with more interest in fields like psychology, science, psychiatry, medicine and anthropology. 9 However, it is a concept that has not been at the center of discussion of interdisciplinary studies and that needs to be evaluated in the to remember is not only that they recognize the past, and in this case a violent past, it is part of their history and their own particular stories but how that history and those stories are part of the history of humanity, the planet and the entire galaxy.
Resilience has a place in the impermanent character of everything and everyone.
Everything is futile but not in vain. A meditation about beauty can heal the old scars.
In A Pearl Button, Guzmán´s approach is determined by nature, history and poetic language. The movie emphasizes the disposable character of the bodies of the victims of the Pinochet regime that were thrown in the sea to delete the evidence that can bring the perpetrators to justice in the future. One way or the other, the water will bring them back. Although the flesh may not be there anymore, the viewer discovers that bones and objects from the victims might be brought back by the sea. The flow of the water is a reminder of history as a full circle of beginnings and endings, and in that sense the possibility of resilience when humans are confronted with adversity. The genealogical approach that Guzmán proposes in this movie, which entangles micro histories with the macro history of the cosmos,