Abstract
In the essayistic mode, the performance of selfhood frequently questions the logic of subjectivity and its relation with the world. Taking up this core property of the essay film, this chapter explores its potential to further ecocritical approaches in film studies. It asks how grappling with non-human themes and aesthetics might further complicate and rethink not just the sovereign subject in documentary, but the status of the human more fundamentally. These questions are taken up through a close reading of Patricio Guzmán's The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar, Chile, 2015), a film that examines post-dictatorship Chile by criss-crossing multiple spheres of interest, including the events of the military dictatorship, cultures and the impact of colonialism, astronomy, Chilean natural geography, with water as structuring concern across all.
Keywords: essay film, water, non-human, memory, humanism, cosmopolitics
Near the beginning of his essay ‘On Repentance’, Michel de Montaigne contemplates the interaction between the subjective experience of time passing and the inevitable flux of the world:
Now, though the features of my picture alter and change, ‘tis not, however, unlike: the world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both by the public motion and their own. Even constancy itself is no other but a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my object; ‘tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness […].
Montaigne's sixteenth-century essay brings into focus one of the central propositions of the essayistic form, demonstrating Timothy Corrigan's point that ‘the essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity’. In the essay film, the performance of selfhood, whether as embodied narrator, diarist, archivist, or sojourner functions as a hinge that links fragments of external reality, narrative, and a direct appeal to the viewing subject. Montaigne's words are significant for my purposes, moreover, because they express not only the encounter between self and public, but also between self and the materiality, conditionality, and planetary magnitude of the natural world.