A Trilogy for the Defeated: Nonhuman Affect of Landscapes and Objects in Patricio Guzmán's Post-Transitional Documentaries

Abstract

Abstract: Given the combative drafting process of a new Chilean constitution under the government of left-wing president-elect Gabriel Boric, this paper retrospectively analyzes three documentaries by Patricio Guzmán over the past decade—Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button, The Cordillera of Dreams—to argue that they represent a post-transitional trilogy that departs from Guzmán's previous works during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and transition to democracy. Taking heed of Chile's extended cartography of disappearance of both indigenous minorities and political dissidents, this study steers away from human-centric critique of documentary historiography, instead delving into Guzmán's chronotopic presentations of two nonhuman actors: grand landscapes on the macroscale and small objects at the microscale. This paper demonstrates how their affective materiality, by running through and across human and nonhuman bodies, leads to excavations below History's surface, conjuring up small histories of the abovementioned two categories of los vencidos obliterated from postcolonial-ethnocentric and neoliberal-authoritarian imageries. Relying on non-representational methodology and theory of haptic visuality—respectively these destabilize human/landscape and human/thing dichotomies while converging on nonhuman affect—it proposes that it is through evocation of sensations that Guzmán's post-transitional aesthetics form diligent inquiries into the palimpsest of Chile's collective and individual counter-memories.