SUNY series in Latin American Cinema

Carolyn Fornoff, Gisela Heffes, Carolyn Fornoff, Gisela Heffes

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438484051
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema brings together fourteen scholars to analyze Latin American cinema in dialogue with recent theories of posthumanism and ecocriticism. Together they grapple with how Latin American filmmakers have attempted to "push past the human, " and destabilize the myth of anthropocentric exceptionalism that has historically been privileged by cinema and has led to the current climate crisis. While some chapters question the very nature of this enterprise—whether cinema should or even could actualize such a maneuver beyond the human—others signal the ways in which the category of the "human" itself is interrogated by Latin American cinema, revealed to be a fiction that excludes more than it unifies. This volume explores how the moving image reinforces or contests the division between human and nonhuman, and troubles the settler epistemic partition of culture and nature that is at the core of the climate crisis. As the first volume to specifically address how such questions are staged by Latin American cinema, this book brings together analysis of films that respond to environmental degradation, as well as those that articulate a posthumanist ethos that blurs the line between species.

SCREENING THE PLURIVERSE

10

Human Rights at the End of the World

Patricio Guzmán and the “Imperative to Re-imagine the Planet”

FERNANDO J. ROSENBERG

In his magnum opus Altazor, a narrative poem set mostly in the cosmos where the titular protagonist is swept up by the winds of history, Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro writes: “And I can feel a telescope pointed at me like a revolver.”¹ Read as an impulse to map out emerging global trends in the fallout from World War I,² Huidobro seems to indicate with a sense of vanguardist urgency the need to supplement the celebrated surface of global flows with a sensibility to depths and heights where the war was also deployed. A telescope appears as a threat as long distances collapse too close to an objectified body that becomes petrified by a powerful technological gaze. Huidobro’s verse rehearses the modern trope of the weaponized camera, as technologies of image capturing are often paired to those of distant killing, in a genealogy reaching a contemporary situation that documentarian Harun Farocki described as “cameras circling the world to make it superfluous”—telescopes fused with cameras now detached from the earthly ground, which rather than threatening individual bodies make whole worlds irrelevant.³

Following Hannah Arendt, the so-called “conquest of space” realizes the detachment from both human-centered viewpoints and humanistic concerns that is proper to twentieth-century science at least since Einstein.⁴ This view from nowhere, the ideal observer “poised freely in space” very much like Huidobro’s Altazor, is science’s true “Archimedean point”; which “technicians,” according to Arendt, are tasked with bringing “down to earth.”⁵ Farocki’s insight regarding a present condition envelops filmmaking within technologies of global positioning and satellite imaging in a weaponized movement back to earth, which is clearly one possible development of modern science’s break away from anthropocentric perspectives.⁶ I show in this chapter a different possibility advanced by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán in the first two installments of his geographical trilogy, Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light, 2010) and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, 2015), which was followed by La cordillera de los sueños (The Cordillera of Dreams, 2019).⁷ The first two films of the trilogy (on which I base my argument) trace a continuity from colonial management of space that entailed the displacement and extermination of Indigenous populations, to the disposal of the bodies deep in the Chilean desert of the Pacific Ocean by the Chilean state during Pinochet’s dictatorship, in order to make them “disappear.” The reiteration of founding violence rendered the world superfluous, as the crushing and flattening of worldviews and alternative economies in favor of the instrumentalization of space and life matter have been essential operations in the constitution of colonial and postcolonial modernity. But, contrary to Farocki’s statement, Guzmán’s documentaries engage technologies of image capturing, including satellite images, at the level of its visual presentation and narrative reflection, to compose pictures of the world that point to a continuum between organic and nonorganic matter, between the human and the nonhuman, thus decentering anthropocentric perspectives but in order to repair and reimagine life in the planet.⁸

By renewing a sensitivity to nonhuman worlds and incorporating non-Western epistemes and poetics that either defy logocentric perspectives or push them past their limitations, Guzmán’s latest work responds to what I call, borrowing from cultural critic Gayatri Spivak, the “imperative to re-imagine the planet.”⁹ Although none of the variables associated with a planetary emergency (such as climate change, toxicity, ocean acidification, habitat loss and rapid extinction) is taken into explicit account, I submit that they respond to a paradigm change propelled by this emergency and haunted by its implications. Guzmán’s trajectory, culminating in these films, turns from the human rights abuses of Pinochet’s regime (the overriding concern of his previous films) to an attention to the environmental assumptions of modernity, to which both the notions of humanity and rights are foundational. I find Spivak’s phrase compelling for conceptualizing these documentaries. An “imperative” speaks of a responsibility, but it also implies a mandate, and therefore an authority (also assumed in the legal construct of human rights). Second, the idea of reimagining highlights the role of an imagination that is both aesthetic and scientific, forging new ways to conceive human habitation. And third, as we will see, “the planet” suggests a level of estrangement from the more commonly conjured-up imagination of the world (of human habitation) and the globe (“globalization” glorifying the sphere of communication and exchange), thus taking, I would suggest, the universalistic appeal of human rights to a different level and imbuing it with a materialistic concern, with the matter of life. Engaging with the planet gestures toward matters that are simultaneously more alien and more intimate to the “universal human.”¹⁰

Before I examine these documentaries, it is important to briefly introduce relevant aspects of Guzmán’s trajectory. The 1973 military coup against democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende occupies an inaugural place, as does his concern with the social process in the dictatorship’s aftermath through the 1990s. His seminal film from the 1970s, La Batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile, 1975), records with revolutionary urgency the popular support and violent opposition that Allende’s government confronted in its attempt to create democratic socialism without dismantling traditional state institutions.¹¹ The first part of the film, titled the “La insurrección de la burguesía” (“Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie”), famously opens with footage of the end of this process: the government palace burning under air bombardment, marking the termination of the history in the making that the small film crew, guerrilla style, had set out to depict. It ends with footage recovered from the camera of a cameraman filmed as he was shot to death—the revelatory power of the camera defeated in its duel against the gun—by a military squad in the streets of Santiago, days before the air strike. What these two moving images incidentally depict is the closure, at the national level, of narrative strategies of an era of political films that relied on the power of denunciation, direct testimony, and witnessing. Guzmán’s later films Memoria obstinada (Obstinate Memory, 1997)¹² and El caso Pinochet (The Pinochet Case, 2001)¹³ reopened these possibilities, grounded now in the pivotal political strategies of human rights as a discourse that legitimized the transition to democratic governance. Testimony and witnessing are rearticulated in the project of collective memory and judicial prosecutions against former officials who committed human rights abuses. If these films signal the end of an era of political filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s, they also accompany the rise of human rights activism, borrowing from judicial discourse its language, logic, and sense of process.¹⁴

Notions of rights, of the universal human, and of nature are inextricably enmeshed at the inception of the modern/colonial world.¹⁵ When Brazilian avant-gardist cultural critic Oswald de Andrade famously affirmed in 1928 that “Without us, Europe wouldn’t even have its meager declaration of the rights of man,”¹⁶ he not only inverts the colonial mapping, but points to the extraction of labor and resources as the cornerstone of European world-making. Whereas the European idea of rights originated in the dissemination of entitlements beyond the noble class, the rights of Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas were conceptualized as “natural rights” endowed by God, warrantor of the order of an immutable Nature, to all humanity—thus sealing the right to conquest by rendering the whole world ecumenical. While traces of this “inalienable” human Nature are latent in the modern idea of “dignity” central to the human rights ethos, the “natural” condition of nonhuman nature has lost its immanence, its immutability, its eternal and transcendental status. Human rights partake of the modern ideal of the infinite expansive potential of humans realized in unbounded freedom—an ideal that is not only resource intensive but also has been historically tied to forms of coloniality or, more precisely, to destroying worlds for the extraction of value. The noble ideal that the 1948 Declaration articulates as “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”¹⁷ might be inextricably indebted to the assumption of an “ever-expandable frontier of new land or resources … [an] assumption, long disguised by the free gift of fossil fuels,” as Timothy Clark has expressed.¹⁸ Needless to say, the transcendental assumption of a “free gift” for humanity occludes the fact that both human and environmental costs have been always unevenly distributed. Contemporary concern for the nonhuman as a supplement to the human rights narrative (e.g., animal rights, rights of natural entities) cannot leave the idea of humanity unchanged, as it registers our own dependence on the web of life that had been obscured by dreams of sovereign mastery of an externalized “nature,” by the abstraction of universal humanism, and by the disembodied idealism of the cosmopolitan ethos.

Guzmán’s documentaries reassert the imperative contained in human rights and social memory paradigms now articulated with the effort to re-imagine the planet. The dictatorship and its aftermath of confronting the trauma of the disappeared continue to be central to the trilogy, but testimony, mourning, and memory are now not only arranged into new ensembles, or called to perform a different task, but also disseminated through nonhuman worlds. These films are reflections on specific territories: the Atacama desert in Nostalgia, the ocean and the archipelagos of the southern Chilean coast in Pearl Button, and the Andean mountain range in the last installment of the trilogy The Cordillera of Dreams. While these geographies are integral parts of Chilean national imaginary and have been spaces of colonial exploration and transnational capital since its inception,¹⁹ they also have been, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey points out, “extraterritorial spaces that render an anticipation of the ‘ends of earth.’ ”²⁰ These spaces have haunted the colonial imagination by challenging its ambition of dominance, as nature was conceived as both radically other and yet entirely at the colonizer’s disposal. Following DeLoughrey, sea-level rise makes “the largest space on earth … suddenly not so external and alien to human experience,” as the warming climate and deforestation bring the desert closer.²¹ By introducing a reflective, meditative treatment of different elements of the Chilean landscape that suggest a sense of the “ends of earth” (spaces beyond human reach or mastery), Guzmán appeals to our collective experience of a crisis that pushes the human closer to the planetary. However, these films reframe this contemporary sensibility by aligning it with the threshold between life, survival, and death, common to both the first peoples of the Americas and the disappeared of the dictatorships (some of whose bodies were buried or sunk, discarded into the ocean or the desert), suggesting an intimate relation between the memory and vestiges of these experiences and the imperative to re-imagine the planet.

Nostalgia for the Light revolves around the unlikely convergence in the desert of a quasi-geological juxtaposition of temporal layers. A landscape dotted with astronomical radars coexists with well-preserved pre-Columbian inscriptions and mummies. Concentration camps for political prisoners recycle barracks built for miners and salt-field workers. The afterlife of this infrastructure left behind by Chile’s main extractive commodities that officiated as points of entry into world capitalism also coexists with traces of mass graves for the dictatorship’s disappeared (whose remains were later scattered in the desert to further erase any evidence). We are also introduced to female relatives of the disappeared, known as las mujeres de Calama (an enclave for the mining industry, the city of Calama neighbored a secret detention camp during the dictatorship), who have not relinquished the search for bone fragments in the open desert.²² Whereas in La batalla de Chile Atacama had appeared as mere background, as a test ground for the struggling socialist project to win the support of miners (of Chuquicamata and El Teniente open pit mega mining operations, as essential for the economy and national imaginary as for the construction of a new working-class consciousness), no political or economic value is extracted in Nostalgia. Rather, the focus is on what survives or endures harsh desert conditions against all odds. The experience of observing the starry sky is a main narrative element—an activity not exclusive to astronomers, but taken up by political prisoners confined to the detention camp through makeshift telescopes, along with long-extinct Indigenous peoples with the naked eye, all encompassed in a long history of studying the cosmos. The stars, as an astronomer interviewed in the film asserts, share their chemical composition with bones, so the film establishes a parallel between astronomers and archeologists, political prisoners and relatives of the disappeared, all united in the search for material traces in the sky and in the soil. The camera eye focuses on the barren land, on the sky above, and on the astronomical observatory connecting both—intimately connecting the cosmos with bodily remains both human and nonhuman, distancing from the world to make it matter again, reverting Farocki’s dictum.

Shifting focus from the desert’s dry soil and atmosphe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Latin American Cinema Beyond the Human
• Genre Beyond the Human
• Encountering Difference
• Screening the Pluriverse
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover