Der Perlmuttknopf

Dynamic and fertile southern environments, and the most rugged terrain and desert; Chile is a country of majestic and impenetrable dualities.

However the ambivalence, it ends and joins in a story, the story of a continent mirrored in a Patagonia fisherman. Like the shameless flow of a creek; like the noise of the woods it develops: from the first indigenous people, the learning about the benefits of water; then, a colonization, a change and oblivion. A river stops running but no one cares.

The great filmmaker Patricio Guzman proposes in "The pearl button" both a deep look and a break from Latin American history.

The deep look of natural environments, with a sublime photography, footage and effects team as unexpected as exceptional. The pause, asking questions everybody does -but silently-, in various creative forms; Is there a limit to cruelty? Why we look at stars? Can we be, contrary to what we have been, a great family?.

A documentary that, as the pearl button, transcend time.

Highly recommended.

I personally have a certain mistrust for the movies that attempt to affect the audience sentimentally; I do not favor my mind being taken hostage by the director through affection and tears which I think happened to some extent in Pearl Button. However this does not even slightly devalue this great work of art in my opinion.

The movie explores the astonishing world of the old natives and tries to visually find a language for the modern man to understand this lost world at least partially. It seems that a magnificent and unique world has been lost to us due to the arrogance of modernity, science and industrial age.The director tries to show the audience that this forgotten old world was not the world of mindless savages, as many want us to believe for glorifying the progress of capitalism and modernity.

I also love how the movie draws the absurdity of the brutal crimes happened by the hands of oppressors in the face of the vast universe.

Story of the Jemmy Button made a lot of sense to me as an immigrant and an Iranian. Jemmy Button lost his land, his freedom and his identity for some pearl buttons; when he returned to his land he was never able to be at peace with his new identity or his old ways of life again.

For a second I re-thought myself as the Jemmy Button of the modern era.

I felt that I was fooled by the shining pearl buttons which for me was the American Commercial Cinema, the Western false promises of corporate freedom, free market and the colorized advertisement of the American globalized consumerism and its ways of life. It seems that I and many like me are losing their sense of attachment with their ancestors and history. We are adapting this absurd but powerful consumerist identity that has no real value like the pearl buttons, but is very shiny.

"The Pearl Button," is the follow up work by renowned Chilean writer/director and documentarian, Patricio Guzman. Much like his mesmerizing 2010 documentary, "Nostalgia for the Light," "The Pearl Button," starts out showcasing the brilliance and natural beauty of the Chilean night sky. Only this time Guzman juxtaposes it against the cool, sensual freshness of the land's natural, cascading waterways. Gently, Guzman shifts gears and slips in interviews with the indigenous Chileans and learns of a cosmic edifying way of life through the eyes of the elder Kawesqars, the ancient water nomads of Patogonia. Romantic stories of 600 mile journeys along the coastal seascape in miniature paddle boats were relived as if they emanated from another time and space that couldn't exist today. And for all intents and purposes, it doesn't, except in the minds and lore of the elder Kawesqars. Due to modern shipping lanes and commercial fishing rights, the boat people are no longer allowed to freely travel. Many younger members would hardly know how. It seems the modern generation is so busy surviving that they have forgotten how to live.

The film comes in at a fast moving eight-two minutes. It is shot in color with minimal color correction that deftly enhances the strong cinematography provided by Katell Djian. Unsurprisingly, the look and feel of the shooting is similar to Nostalgia for the Light, as Djian worked both. Yet, there is more to both films than gorgeous night sky spectacles and rich, ripe waterways or vast, barren deserts. Both films call attention to the brutality of the Pinochet regime. Nostalgia for the Light, provides a beautiful segway into the search for disappeared bodies much like the Chilean government searches the sky for disappeared stars. In "The Pearl Button," Guzman connects the cosmos and the essence of life to water calling to mind that humans ultimately evolved from aquatic life forms. And, the aquatic life forms sprang forth from a cosmic impulse detonated from a massive energetic collision resulting in the first precursor of life, water, entering into the planetary environment. Water is the essence of life. And it remembers.

However, as colonialism began to encroach, a new way of life emerged that was far different that the life the cosmos had revealed. Here Guzman indulges himself in a little Chilean lore of the legend of Jemmy Button. Jemmy Button was the representation of an ordinary indigenous Chilean. He was taken under the protection of a British naval officer in exchange for a fancy pearl button. The officer took Jemmy back to Britain and learned Jemmy the ways of a British gentlemen. Jemmy attended the finest school and was dressed accordingly and even given a respectable haircut. After a year Jemmy was returned to his family and community. He never fit in again and lived the rest of his days as an outsider.

Much can be made of the plight of Jemmy Button as Guzman uncovers and delivers another horrifying example of Pinochet's brutal attack on dissidents. Unnervingly and in a manner akin to a medical coroner, a recreation of how a body, not necessarily a corpse, would be disposed of seemingly without a trace. True to most crimes, however, an error occurred in the process and a body washed a shore eventually revealing another episodic disappearance of dissidents. Most estimates agree that somewhere between 12,000 to 14,000 bodies were disposed into these once life giving waters. Nevertheless, Guzman finds optimism and hope for the future. During reclamation efforts, one of the instruments used to hasten the drowning and to keep the body submerged, was recovered without the typical barnacles attached. It was recovered with a pearl button attached.

Guzman, once again, proves himself a gifted, master storyteller with both earthly and cosmic sensibilities. Highly recommended.

Water is the source of everything; our lives, our history, it has power, it is capable of sustaining life or destroying it, it holds communication from outer space and it defines our future. It is also the longest border to Chile, contrastingly one of the driest places on earth. These aquatic holistic musings are the basis of Patricio Guzmán's latest part documentary, part spiritual investigation into what makes his homeland what it is.

The first thirty minutes or so of The Pearl Button is an account of what the ocean represents complemented with beautiful imagery of the sea and ice-caps with poetic portrayals of the Andes semi-submerged geography. Although charmingly romantic, a simmering sensation of art-house dread starts to accumulate as the brain begins to wonder whether another hour of this is possible to sit through without cracking open the wine. Luckily however, fascinating interviews with surviving members of the original indigenous Chilean tribes break up the daydream-like ocean fascinations as the movie establishes a structure.

The main turning point of the film is when Guzmán starts to document the arrival of Catholicism and the white Europeans to the country and their utter disregard for the indigenous people. 'Indian hunters' were paid ten shillings for every child's ear they could deliver from the tribes. The shift in focus is intentionally punitive and everything suddenly takes on a much solemner tone. Humanity's beauty and poetry is abruptly pivoted to humanity's cruelty and malice, the extremes visually harmonised to the oceans comparative calm and ferocity.

The title of the movie itself comes from the payment for which Jemmy Button, a native Yámana, received to travel to England as a freak show piece for a British naval captain. The concept of a tribesman travelling to London in the middle of the industrial revolution is so alien in today's world that it's almost impossible to contemplate or truly understand.

Guzmán's narration is almost hypnotic in its delivery and smartly complements both the holistic and the brutality of the story. Although the videography and cinematography are on occasion exquisite, there are times when Guzmán allows himself a little too much creative freedom and deviates into artful whimsy. These moments are relatively short however and manage to just about successfully weave into the documentary as a whole.

The Pearl Button feels like an odd film to sit through at times as you're not sure whether you're watching an art-house documentary about natures beauty or a harrowing critique of humanity's violence, but then that's the point. It leaves you scratching your head but is powerful enough to truly get under the skin.