‘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.

Relating through the coast – Poetic documentary film and archipelagic thinking

“…Phillippa Lovatt's article "The Acoustics of the Archipelagic Imagination in Southeast Asian Artists ' Film" (2021) understands the multiplicitous quality of sound through archipelagic thinking to explore sound art and its political meaning in film. Research within the academy has tended to use archipelagic thinking as a method to analyse films from a single geographical region (Zahlten 2018;DeGuzman 2019;Merchant 2022). Choosing smaller and more intimate decolonial methodologies such as archipelagic thinking helps re-frame our gaze, challenging global visions preoccupied with colonial scales that aim to "conquer" -this is the strive to think of relation as the sum of vast multiple parts, not a homogenising imperial whole.…”