Insistencia y expresión de la memoria una lectura desde Merleau-Ponty a partir de Nostalgias de la luz

Abstract

The historical entourage, as Merleau-Ponty calls it, is made up of both private and public history: neither is mere deterministic imposition or mere arbitrary construction, but rather an open and dynamic symbolic field. For Merleau-Ponty, in both cases we have a symbolic set whose meaning is presented as écart(divergence). In its dialectic, activity and passivity are necessary to knit this individual and public entourage, but always intersubjective. At the center of this ontological approach is memory and the truth of the past. We propose to apply this framework to Patricio Guzmán's latest film trilogy (‘Nostalgia for the Light’, ‘The Pearl Button’, ‘The Cordillera of Dreams’, released between 2010-2019, but especially the first film cited) to analyze the way he has to approach the memory of the Chilean eventinsistently as Guzmán calls the coup d'état and the subsequent dictatorship in his country. Today, we can say that amnesia has been dialectically resignified in living memory in the popular explosion of 2019. Despite the fact that they are films located and rooted in a soil and a homeland (a terreas a perceptual field, says Merleau-Ponty in Passivity), events are shared in a history and geopolitics common to those of us who live in the south of the south. His own style of filming is a way of being an exiled body that sinks back into the desert, the water and the mountains of the south, but his way of being that body is closely, savagely, related to ours, trans-Andean.