A convergence of bodies in the Anthropocene: post-dictatorship memory in Patricio Guzmán’s triptych (2010-2020)
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Date
2024
Authors
Helin-Long, Sara
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University College Cork
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Abstract
This thesis focuses on the most recent filmic triptych (Chauvin and Wilson, 2020) by Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán: Nostalgia de la luz (2010), El botón de nácar (2015), and La cordillera de los sueños (2020). The three documentaries engage with the intentional acts of violence committed during the Pinochet dictatorship on three natural landscapes (the Atacama Desert, the Patagonian waterways, and the Andes mountains). It argues that, when read together, the documentaries lend themselves to an interdisciplinary analysis of how we might remember state violence committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in natural landscapes. It develops a filmic analysis that argues for the dictatorship memories as remembered in/by these landscapes by contextualizing the documentaries with recent Chilean socio-political history (Chapter 1) and establishing a framework of the convergence of Environmental Humanities – specifically in relation to its current interest in the Anthropocene - and Memory Studies (Chapter 2). For now, I note an understanding of the Anthropocene as a geological and social time where human actions have irrevocably altered and affected the earth’s composition. In Chapter 3 (Nostalgia de la luz), Chapter 4 (El botón de nácar), and Chapter 5 (La cordillera de los sueños), The thesis situates Guzmán’s reflections on the dictatorship within the deeper ecological and cultural histories of the three natural landscapes within three core tenants of anthropogenic readings on Memory Studies: the body, time, and space. The chapters include ethnographic research- carried out between February and March 2023- of the three landscapes to provide a bridge between the visual/narrative landscapes found in the documentaries and those encountered by the researcher. The thesis grounds the filmic analysis of the documentaries’ visual, textual, and cinematographic aspects in the three landscapes’ additional past and present violent environmental and social realities, therefore calling on an anthropogenic reading of memory in the filmic and non-filmic landscapes. Thus, it offers a new way to conceptualize the relationship between filmic bodies (human and non-human) and contends that this is only possible through the deep consideration of natural landscapes found in Guzmán’s work, which expands the bodily, spatial, and temporal boundaries of who and where remembers.
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Keywords
Memory Studies , Ecocriticism , Chile , Documentary film , Latin American Studies
Citation
Helin-Long, S. 2024. A convergence of bodies in the Anthropocene: post-dictatorship memory in Patricio Guzmán’s triptych (2010-2020). PhD Thesis, University College Cork.