The Pearl Button

Patri­cio Guzmán’s cin­e­ma trav­els through time and space with the seam­less ease of a whis­per. Human­ist and his­tor­i­cal, inter­galac­tic and ele­men­tal, his films are decep­tive­ly dense. One moment could be mired in the trau­ma of Chile’s dic­ta­to­r­i­al Pinochet era, and the next ascend­ing to the heav­ens or dip­ping under­neath the water’s sur­face. Mal­leabil­i­ty remains a cru­cial com­po­nent for a film­mak­er work­ing so thor­ough­ly in the cross sec­tion between nation­al his­to­ry and per­son­al memory.

After spend­ing Nos­tal­gia for the Light stargaz­ing with astronomers and scour­ing the Ata­ca­ma Desert look­ing for the bones of Chile’s ​“dis­ap­peared,” Guzmán ven­tures into the lush and iso­lat­ed ter­rain of West­ern Patag­o­nia in The Pearl But­ton to exam­ine the region’s rela­tion­ship with water and its vio­lent his­to­ry involv­ing dis­placed indige­nous tribes. Strik­ing aer­i­al shots help con­tex­tu­alise the scope of mas­sive estu­ar­ies and island chains that reach end­less­ly out­ward for thou­sands of miles. Archival pho­tographs of Patagonia’s native tribes segue into a greater dis­cus­sion about mankind’s destruc­tive rela­tion­ship with Earth.

Guzmán’s calm voiceover often pro­vides a lyri­cal com­pli­ment to the potent imagery. Ear­ly in the film he remem­bers hear­ing rain­drops on a zinc roof while vis­it­ing the area many decades before as a child. ​“That sound has fol­lowed me my entire life,” he says. The past can­not be shak­en, only re-exam­ined and restored with hopes of bet­ter under­stand­ing what lies beneath.

The Pearl But­ton also con­fronts what it means to be Chilean. Guzmán pos­es this ques­tion to the last liv­ing descen­dants of the Patag­o­nia tribes as well as a selec­tion of poets, engi­neers, astronomers and artists. Their knot­ty answers are organ­i­cal­ly tied to the com­pro­mise of human rights and dig­ni­ty that has come to define Chilean ​“progress”.

Not much dif­fer­en­ti­ates the bar­bar­ic acts of set­tlers dec­i­mat­ing native tribes in the 1880s and Pinochet’s mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship that came to pow­er through a vio­lent coup d’état in the 1970s. The lat­ter pro­duced a myr­i­ad of hor­rors, includ­ing the mass exe­cu­tion of aca­d­e­mics, edu­ca­tors, and polit­i­cal allies of deposed Pres­i­dent Sal­vador Allende. One par­tic­u­lar­ly grue­some trend involved attach­ing steel rails to bod­ies and drop­ping them by heli­copter into the ocean.

When Guzmán decides to recon­struct the last moments of one such vic­tim, he’s com­bat­ting the impuni­ty revolv­ing around Pinochet’s actions ​“so the dead can fin­ish dying.” The Pearl But­ton inter­twines mul­ti­ple sto­ries hop­ing to rec­on­cile long-ges­tat­ing pain with the habit of turn­ing a blind eye to gov­ern­ment wrong­do­ing. Guzmán’s deep con­nec­tion with the envi­ron­ment tem­pers any heavy-hand­ed­ness, as for him it’s about phys­i­cal details and hum­bling wonder.

A 3,000-year-old droplet of water lies dor­mant in a gor­geous piece of quartz. The film’s open­ing image remains a stag­ger­ing time cap­sule of endurance, but also embod­ies the lay­ered tex­ture of time peri­ods in sus­pend­ed over­lap. There are sim­i­lar­ly impres­sive the­mat­ic mark­ers through­out The Pearl But­ton, includ­ing a map of Chile made by artist Emma Malig on warped card­board. If ​“water has its own lan­guage,” as anthro­pol­o­gist Clau­dio Mer­ca­do says, so too does Guzmán as a film­mak­er. His work speaks to the past and present, the liv­ing and the dead with equal resolve, lin­ger­ing on the seem­ing­ly small details of mem­o­ry that allude to so much more.