‘Collecting What the Sea Gives Back’: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film

Abstract

This article proposes a new mode of understanding the entanglement of ecological and postcolonial questions in contemporary Chilean filmmaking, through the lens of directorial subjectivity. Both Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017), and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán, 2015) contest hegemonic structures of belonging by constructing an alternative ‘oceanic archive’. Yet where Guzmán's metaphorical meditations on indigenous connections to the ocean risk collapsing into romanticism and replicating colonial visuality, Panizza's reflexive conception of filmmaking as a situated and embodied practice facilitates a subtler understanding of cinema's political engagement in this sphere.