Third Text

ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric

‘Universe Memory’

David Martin-Jones

To cite this article: David Martin-Jones (2013) Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric
‘Universe Memory’, Third Text, 27:6, 707-722, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2013.857901

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.857901

Published online: 05 Dec 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1718

View related articles

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ctte20
 Third Text, 2013
Vol. 27, No. 6, 707– 722, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.857901

Archival Landscapes and a

Non-Anthropocentric
‘Universe Memory’
in Nostalgia de la luz/
Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

David Martin-Jones

Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) focuses on landscape

as a physical archive in order to explore the way in which film archives
history. This can be seen in the film’s construction of affective or ‘facei-
fied’ landscapes through which we can enter into the past. To draw out
this aspect of the documentary, my theoretical approach utilizes the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, specifically the concepts of the ‘crystal of
time’1 and the ‘any-space-whatever’.2 This remains a relatively unusual
philosophical lens through which to view a documentary, in particular
one about Latin America, yet it provides productive insights with
regard to the temporal dimension of the film’s exploration of the material
landscape and its role in the archiving of what can be usefully dubbed a
‘universe memory’. Thus, a Deleuzian approach provides insights into
the film’s examination of history conceived of as national (recent
Chilean history, including in particular the recent Pinochet dictatorship),
regional (Latin America’s history of colonial extermination of indigenous
1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: peoples and diasporic settlement) and global (the history of the world
The Time Image (1985), conceived of as a heritage of universal matter that stretches back
Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, trans, beyond human origins).
Continuum, London, 2005,
pp 66 –94
2. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: TEMPORAL LANDSCAPES: COSMOLOGICAL,
The Movement-Image
(1983), Hugh Tomlinson ANTIQUE, COLONIAL, NATIONAL, EXILIC. . .
and Barbara Habberjam,
trans, Continuum, London, Nostalgia for the Light is a documentary set in the Atacama Desert in
2005, pp 114 –126; and
Deleuze, Cinema 2, op cit, Chile. It contains two intertwined narratives. One details the activities
p5 of astronomers watching the heavens from the desert’s arid landscape,

# 2013 Third Text

708
3. Chris Darke, ‘Desert of the
Disappeared: Patricio
Guzmán on Nostalgia for
the Light’, Sight and Sound,
6 July 2012, http://www.bfi.
org.uk/news/sightsound/
patricio-guzman-extended-
interview, accessed 1
December 2012
its lack of humidity providing a night sky with the optimum clarity for
stargazing. The other explores the desert landscape for the traces of its
lost history, both as part of a nation called Chile and for thousands of
years beforehand. Thus the desert is first introduced as a landscape as
alien as that of the planet Mars before the documentary focuses on the
history contained within its barren expanse. In both aspects – looking
up to the sky, and down into the ground – the documentary meditates
on what it means to research the past.
On the one hand, astronomer Gaspar Galaz, who features as a
talking head throughout, explains his view that to scan the universe
through a telescope is to explore the past, because it is to examine
light that takes a long time to reach the Earth. In this respect he com-
pares astronomers to archaeologists, historians and geologists. Galaz
even extrapolates further, stating that due to the time it takes for light
to reach us, even from objects very near to us, we all exist in the past.
On the other hand, at ground level, the various people whose lives
cross the Atacama Desert are shown to belong to the past. They range
from people who inhabited the region ten thousand years ago, leaving
artefacts and physical remains, to former political prisoners of the Pino-
chet regime who were held captive in the desert, to the elderly women
(the Women of Calama) who routinely search the desert for fragments
of the remains of the disappeared (the political victims of the Pinochet
dictatorship from the 1970s and 1980s, executed and buried in the
desert).
Like many of Guzmán’s previous documentaries, including his
most famous three-part film La Batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile
(1975 – 1979), Nostalgia for the Light is a film about memory and
Chile’s historical past – for instance, demonstrating the role of Chileans
in remembering a past often obscured by the official history is integral to
the film. This is evident, for instance, in Guzmán’s trilogy, Chile, la
memoria obstinada/Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), Le Cas
Pinochet/The Pinochet Case (2001) and Salvador Allende (2004). Like
its predecessors, especially The Pinochet Case, Nostalgia for the Light
contains a focus on individual testimony, the hunt for remains of the
disappeared, and the need to consider how the past is archived. Yet
Nostalgia for the Light is in certain respects broader than many of
Guzmán’s previous films, especially in its emphasis on history, memory
and the archival nature of landscape.
This desire to speak to transnational concerns is perhaps not so
strange considering Guzmán’s background as an exilic film-maker
based in France. Indeed, when Guzmán’s project failed to receive
funding from French television due to his more diffuse approach to
his subject matter, the sources of funding he secured became more
diverse. Previous documentaries such as Salvador Allende were
backed by Canal + , but Guzmán struggled to convince television
executives of the viability of this project, which they felt lacked a
clear enough focus.3 Eventually, Nostalgia for the Light saw the light
of day as a French, German and Chilean co-production, with various
European funders involved – Fonds Sud Cinéma, Ministère de la
Culture et de la Communication CNC, Ministère des Affaires étrangères
et européennes, Région Île-de-France (France) and Televisión Española
TVE (Spain).

4. Rob White, ‘After Effects:
Interview with Patricio
Guzmán’, Film Quarterly, 2
February 2012, http://www.
filmquarterly.org/2012/07/
after-effects-interview-with-
patricio-guzman/, accessed
20 October 2012
5. This translation is taken
from the subtitles on the
commercially available
DVD (New Wave Films,
2012).
709
Celestial landscapes: archiving ‘universe memory’ in Nostalgia for the Light, Atacama Pro-
ductions, Blinker Filmproduktion, Cronomedia, 2010
This address to concerns broader than Chilean national history per se
(even if the nation still provides the main focus for the film’s exploration
of the recent past) is particularly evident in the manner in which the
documentary is peppered with shots of galaxies, and planet surfaces.
These images function as celestial landscapes, which contrast with, and
are at times indiscernible from, those of the desert floor and other
mundane objects (particularly human bones), which are defamiliarized
by close-ups.
The opening, for instance, segues in precisely this manner from an old
German telescope that Guzmán credits for his personal interest in astron-
omy, and which is still operational in Santiago de Chile, to a domestic
setting evocative of his childhood. The montage moves us, via a
graphic match, from the cratered surface of the moon to the play of
light and shadow caused by the movement of the leaves of a tree situated
outside the window of a house that, although it is not precisely that of
Guzmán’s childhood, has retained sufficient period details in its interior
(furniture, now-dated appliances such as a cooker, radio and
sewing machine, etc) to remind him of his youth.4 On the voiceover he
describes this period of his life in a way that seems purposefully idyllic,
even Edenic:
These objects, which could have come from my childhood home, remind
me of that far-off moment when one thinks one has left childhood
behind. At that time, Chile was a haven of peace, isolated from the
world. Santiago slept in the foothills of the Cordillera, detached from
the rest of the world. I loved science-fiction stories, lunar eclipses, and
watching the sun through a piece of smoky glass . . . It was a simple
provincial life. Nothing ever happened. The Presidents of the Republic
walked unescorted through the streets. Only the present moment
existed.5
The voiceover continues to describe the manner in which his innocence
was shattered, as Chile was suddenly placed centre-stage during the
Cold War, and a ‘coup d’état swept away democracy, dreams and
710
6. Michael Chanan, The
Politics of Documentary,
British Film Institute,
London, 2007, p 243
7. Ibid, p 246
8. David Martin-Jones and
Marı́a Soledad Montañez,
‘Personal Museums of
Memory: The Recovery of
Lost (National) Histories in
the Uruguayan
Documentaries Al pie del
árbol blanco and El cı́rculo’,
Latin American
Perspectives, vol 40, no 1,
2013, pp 73 –87
9. White, op cit
science’. As Guzmán relates this personal story, the house evocative of his
childhood is gradually obscured by dust, blowing across the screen,
reflecting light back at the camera in twinkling patterns against a black
backdrop, and described as ‘star dust’ by Guzmán’s voiceover. This
recourse to the personal is worthy of more detailed consideration.
Recent work on documentary has acknowledged that a shift has taken
place in the political approach of the medium since the 1970s. For
instance, in The Politics of Documentary (2007), Michael Chanan
argues that documentary has followed the ‘passage from a politics of
class to the identity politics and social movements that followed the fem-
inist turn of the 70s’,6 its new focus enabling ‘the embodiment through
the camera-eye of the personal as political’.7 Indeed, this use of the per-
sonal as a ‘way in’ to the more broadly political has already been observed
at work in contemporary Latin American documentaries that deal with
attempts to recover the recent historical past from its eradication by
Cold War dictatorships.8 Yet, in Nostalgia for the Light, the personal
is not shown to open up onto the national so much as it is eclipsed by a
much larger non-anthropocentric force: the matter that constructs the
universe. This is the stardust that will reappear at several points during
the film, an effect created when dust and powdered glass was disturbed
by Guzmán’s crew in a disused observatory.9 Guzmán’s idyllic reminis-
cence of childhood, then, is shown to be nostalgia for a ‘present
moment’ without past, which only exists – as it were – in a state akin
to that of a childhood in a provincial town when the past is not yet
known. Whilst Guzmán’s previous films were directly concerned with
both archiving and bringing back to light Chile’s recently disappeared
past, in Nostalgia for the Light, memory, of which Chile’s past is a
part, is considered to be a much larger phenomenon that stretches from
the transnational movements of diasporas and exiles in the present
through to the nomadic, pre-national movements of prehistoric humans
across the Atacama Desert, and back even further to the origins of life
on Earth in the Big Bang. It is not simply that the personal extends
into the political in terms of a collective or national identity, but into a
universal (in the literal sense) concern with history, and humanity’s
place within it. This is the broadest meaning of the ‘nostalgia’ of the
film’s title.
Thus, the remainder of the film contrasts such nostalgia with a time
when existence seemed coexistent with light, to the process of uncovering
a past that is conceived of as light appearing belatedly after it has jour-
neyed to reach us from the past. In so doing, Nostalgia for the Light
notes the need to focus as much on the history of the planet as we do
on the stars above, to realize the past below our feet whose ‘voice’ also
comes to us from afar. In this respect, the film’s treatment of the land-
scape is key, because through the material landscape the theme of archiv-
ing and time emerges.
Soon after Guzmán’s evocation of childhood, the documentary intro-
duces us to the landscape of the Atacama Desert and its myriad layers of
history. On the voiceover, over a montage of striking images from the
desert, Guzmán states:
I imagine that man will soon walk on Mars. This ground beneath my feet
bears the strongest resemblance to that faraway world. There is nothing.
No insects, no animals, no birds. And yet it is full of history. For ten
 711

Modern faces: the past regards us from the desert landscape in Nostalgia for the Light,
Atacama Productions, Blinker Filmproduktion, Cronomedia, 2010

thousand years this region has been a transit route. Rivers of stone provide
natural paths. The caravans of llamas and men came and went between
the high plains and the sea. It is a condemned land, permeated with salt,
where human remains are mummified and objects frozen in time. The
air, transparent, thin, allows us to read this vast open book of memory,
page after page.
In this opening, then, there is a very literal evocation of landscape as
archive (‘page after page’), which is explored in more detail thereafter.
We are told that there are meteorites below the surface. We see the rem-
nants of petrified fish and molluscs amidst the dunes, which are depicted
in close succession with the ruins of a Native American fortress. We are
introduced to rock carvings by archaeologist Lautaro Núñez, significantly
of faces, from ‘pre-Columbian shepherds’ who used the desert as a transit
route over a thousand years ago. Núñez notes the layered nature of this
landscape by observing how the modern road they drive down is laid
directly atop a prehistoric one. Later, we are shown bodies of people
from ten thousand years ago, remarkably preserved by the salt in the
earth, whose remains are archived incredibly carefully in white sheeting,
in what appear to be air-controlled conditions, stacked up in racks. In
addition, we learn that from the bodies of the disappeared that they
have uncovered there are as-yet unidentified remains whose bones and
effects are similarly archived, although with less delicacy, in stacks of
cardboard boxes. Nevertheless, in both instances the effect is the same,
of remains dug up from the desert whose existence is a matter for archiv-
ing (the boxes of the remains of the disappeared are archived in a moving
stack familiar to many libraries), and this is the case whether they are
ancient or modern dead. The desert also contains a top layer of dead,
the nineteenth-century graveyard containing the remains of dead
miners, exposed to the elements. At surface level we also learn at some
length about Chacabuco, a Pinochet-era concentration camp in the
desert, which was itself a former nineteenth-century mining complex,
later fortified by the military so that the former workers’ homes could
712

Above: Ancient faces: the past regards us from the desert landscape in Nostalgia for the
Light, Atacama Productions, Blinker Filmproduktion, Cronomedia, 2010; below: Archiving
matters: surfacing the desert’s secrets, in Nostalgia for the Light, Atacama Productions,
Blinker Filmproduktion, Cronomedia, 2010

serve as prisons. Finally, perched atop these layers upon layers of history
are the astronomers, in the latest hi-tech observatories, funded by the
international scientific community, searching the sky for the universe’s
past, the place from which the very matter from which humans
are constructed originates. (The ALMA – Atacama Large Millimeter/
Sub-millimeter Array – radio telescope, for instance, is being built
with multi-national funding to register the energy produced during the
Big Bang.)
The desert landscape, then, is introduced as a giant archive constituted
of the same matter as the entire universe. Guzmán introduces this relation
between the celestial and the earthly early on in the film, when he men-
tions that he considers ‘our roots’ to be ‘up above, beyond the light’. Fur-
thermore, towards the end we are pointedly informed by scientist George

10. David Martin-Jones,
Deleuze, Cinema and
National Identity:
Narrative Time in National
Contexts, Edinburgh
University Press,
Edinburgh, 2006, pp 50 –
81; David Martin-Jones,
Deleuze and World
Cinemas, Continuum,
London, 2011, pp 23– 27
11. Please see http://
deleuzecinema.com/books
for details of the majority
of these works.
12. Marı́a Belén Ciancio,
‘Labyrinths and Lines of
Memory in Documentary
Film: Memoria del saqueo
and Los rubios from a
Philosophical Perspective’,
Latin American
Perspectives, vol 40, no 1,
2013, pp 101 –113, p 103
13. See for instance, Marı́a
Belén Ciancio, ‘Entre films,
trance y filosofı́a: Gilles
Deleuze y el Nuevo Cine
Latinoamericano’/
‘Between Films, Trance
and Philosophy: Gilles
Deleuze and the New Latin
American Cinema’,
Secuencias: Revista de
Historia de Cine, vol 31, no
4, 2010, pp 49 – 62; David
Martin-Jones, ‘O
“opsigno” de Gilles
Deleuze em Machuca
(2004): Cinema e história
após a ditadura militar’/
‘Gilles Deleuze’s “opsign”,
in Machuca (2004):
Cinema and History after
Military Rule’, in Antonio
Carlos Amorim, Silvio
Gallo, Wenceslao
Machado de Oliveira Jr,
eds, Conexões: Deleuze e
Imagem e Pensamento e
. . ., DP et Alii, Rio de
Janeiro, 2010, pp 33 –48;
Martin-Jones, Deleuze and
World Cinemas, op cit,
pp 67 –99; Gerard Dapena,
‘Bodies so Close and Yet so
Far: Seeing Julian
Hernández’s El Cielo
Dividido through Gilles
Deleuze’s Film Theory’, in
Nayibe Bermúdez Barrios,
ed, Latin American
Cinemas: Local Views and
Transnational
Connections, University of
Calgary Press, Calgary,
2011, pp 125 –147; Paul A
713
Preston that the calcium in our bones ‘was made shortly after the Big
Bang’ and that accordingly:
We live among the trees but we also live among the stars. We live among
the galaxies. We are part of the universe. The calcium in my bones was
there from the beginning.
The matter in the landscape, then, from meteorites to the bones of the
dead, is part of a giant archive, which, at its broadest limit, encompasses
the universe. To understand how this archive enables our entrance into
time, I now introduce Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema.
(CRYSTALLINE) ‘UNIVERSE MEMORY’
Due to the influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy on Deleuze’s
interpretation of cinema,10 in particular Matter and Memory (1896),
Deleuze’s Cinema books (1983 and 1985) are influential texts for grasp-
ing how memory and time function in cinema. They have already inspired
well over twenty books with a very specific focus on the implications of
Deleuze’s work for film research. With knowledge of his ideas widespread
within the discipline, countless more have utilized Deleuze’s concepts to
explore films in different ways.11 However, very little work using
Deleuze’s ideas has engaged with documentary, and, as Marı́a Belén
Ciancio notes, the absence of coverage of Latin American documentary
within the Cinema books renders his analysis incomplete.12 In order to
add to the growing body of work and thereby rectify this situation
somewhat,13 I will focus on two of his key concepts, which are useful
for unlocking the functioning of time in Nostalgia for the Light,
the crystal of time and the any-space-whatever, commencing with the
crystal.
Deleuze’s crystal of time is especially useful for understanding how
film explores the passing of time, which is an integral part of Nostalgia
for the Light’s investigation of how landscapes function as archives of
history. Deleuze builds upon Bergson’s understanding of time, of a
virtual past and an actual present. The virtual past consists of stored
layers of time that are created each time the present moment passes.
Inherently divisive, time splits perpetually into a present that passes and
a past that is preserved, thereby creating the stored layers of the virtual
past.14 Crystal images are those that capture this particular division of
time, showing the moment in which this splitting occurs and in which
the two sides (virtual past that is preserved/actual present that passes)
are momentarily indiscernible. At their most literal, crystal images
include things as simple as mirror images in which the smallest ‘internal
circuit’ of time is captured on film:
Oblique mirrors, concave and convex mirrors and Venetian mirrors are
inseparable from a circuit . . . This circuit itself is an exchange: the
mirror image is virtual in relation to an actual character that the mirror
catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character
with only a virtuality and pushes him back out-of-field . . . The actual
image and its virtual image thus constitute the smallest internal
circuit . . . Distinct, but indiscernible, such are the actual and the virtual
which are in continual exchange.15
714
Schroeder Rodriguez,
‘After New Latin American
Cinema’, Cinema Journal,
vol 51, no 2, 2012,
pp 87 –112.
14. Deleuze, Cinema 2, op cit,
p 80
15. Ibid, p 68
16. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on
Cinema, Routledge,
New York, 2003,
pp 132 –133
17. Bergson’s model of time
becomes a modified entity
in the course of Cinema 2,
including the additions of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s
eternal return and Jorge
Luis Borges’s labyrinth of
time, which are mapped
onto Bergson’s initial
framework. See Gilles
Deleuze, Cinema 2, op cit,
pp 122 –150.
18. Deleuze, Cinema 2, op cit,
p 95
19. Ibid, p 114
20. Ibid, p 115
21. The concept of ‘post-
memory’ was formulated
by Marianne Hirsch in
relation to family
photographs, including
those of family members
lost in the Holocaust, but
has since been constructive
in reconsidering attempts
to reconstruct memory in
the light of political
disappearances in
twentieth-century Latin
America. Marianne Hirsch,
Family Frames:
Photography, Narrative,
and Postmemory, Harvard
University Press,
Cambridge, 1997, p 22.
Yet this is not to simplistically equate crystal images with shots of charac-
ters in mirrors. Ronald Bogue notes that Deleuze means, rather:
. . . a particular vision of the world-as-reflection, as infinite mirrorings . . .
More than a mere theme, the world-as-reflection is a way of seeing and one
that issues from a particular conception of time.16
The role of the crystal image will become clearer shortly, when I analyse
the conclusion of the film. At this stage it is sufficient to note that the
crystal is a key indicator of time’s storage as a layered past, capturing
the ‘smallest internal circuit’ of time.
In addition to crystal images, Deleuze identifies various other types of
time-images that explore time in a variety of ways.17 For instance, some
films delve into the past through flashback, thereby exploring the myriad
virtual layers of past times. This is seen in films such as Citizen Kane
(Orson Welles, 1941), Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959),
La jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Otto e mezzo/812 (Federico Fellini,
1963), and so on. In the play of flashback in these kinds of films,
Deleuze sees evidence for our existence within what he variously
describes as a ‘world-memory’,18 ‘memory-world’19 or ‘memory-ages-
of-the-world’20 to identify different versions of the same idea: that the
virtual movements of time’s various layers encompass us. In this way
the Bergsonian model of time is developed beyond an exploration of indi-
vidual memory, to encompass the far messier multi-layering of time
encountered when various people remember the same event, differently.
This idea of time explains the way in which we exist in time, in a giant
virtual memory bank, which shifts and turns around us. Linking these
two ideas together, in films that express this virtual, forever-shifting, tem-
poral ‘world memory’ bank in which we exist, it is not uncommon to
encounter crystal images. After all, the crystal ultimately lies at the foun-
dation of the temporal model of time as a series of layers, providing the
‘internal circuit’ from which all layers are formed.
Deleuze’s work is illuminating for Nostalgia for the Light because it
enables a greater understanding of how history is created in contexts
where various virtual layers of the past have been forgotten or deliber-
ately obscured. In the Chilean context, and as is evident in the documen-
tary’s emphasis on the women searching for the bodies of their loved
ones, the most pertinent such layer is the recent past, which obscures
the fate of the disappeared. However, as Núñez points out in the docu-
mentary, there are other unknown expanses of Chile’s past, such as the
fates of the saltpetre miners in the nineteenth century, or of the Native
Americans eradicated by European settlers. As the numerous layers
archived in the landscape demonstrate, the film is concerned with
various lacunas in memory, be they national or otherwise. Thus there
are lost histories to be uncovered in the prehistoric past (from meteorites
to immaculately preserved corpses of ‘men of antiquity’), the colonial past
and the national past. The latter category alone includes at least three dis-
tinct lost pasts: the miners, whose working lives (Guzmán asserts on the
voiceover) were akin to conditions of enslavement, and who were them-
selves diasporic Europeans who had severed links with their countries of
origins and national pasts; the disappeared, whose whereabouts in the
desert, or elsewhere, are unknown; and the most recent generation of Chi-
leans, some of whom live in conditions of ‘post-memory’.21 Again, this
 715

category-within-a-category includes both children of the disappeared

such as the astronomer Valentina Rodrı́guez (who was raised by her
grandparents) and returning exiles born in Europe such as the young
engineer Victor González, who (born in Germany when his parents
were in exile from the Pinochet regime) describes himself as: ‘a child of
exile. I am from nowhere. I’m not from Chile, nor am I from the
country where I was born.’ Thus, González recognizes that he has no
(or at least, not one) informing (national) memory.
This notion of occluded memory is most forcibly explored in the film’s
final words, again spoken by Guzmán on voiceover. It is also here that the
crystal appears. It is noticeable that the narrative shifts at this point back
from the Atacama Desert to Santiago de Chile, the site of Guzmán’s child-
hood. It is with an evocation of this location that the film starts, and its
reappearance returns us thus to the nation, even if it is now a nation
whose history and prehistory is, we have seen, complex and multi-
layered. Guzmán states:
I am convinced that memory has a gravitational force. It is constantly
attracting us. Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile
present moment. Those who have none don’t live anywhere. Each night,
slowly, impassively, the centre of the galaxy passes over Santiago.
This scene provides the crystal image that explains so much of the empha-
sis on archival landscapes throughout the film. The words are spoken over
a panoramic image of Santiago de Chile as a nightscape of shimmering
neon lights against a black backdrop. It is as though the city were reflect-
ing back to the universe its own glittering firmament, as seen in so many
impressive shots of the cosmos scattered throughout the film. The city
becomes a star-scape, crystallizing with the universe. In such a crystalline
structure, the virtual and the actual facets of the crystal are either cosmos
and Earth, or Earth and cosmos, depending on how you conceive of it.
The indiscernibility of these two sides, as they reflect each other, makes
sense of the two related narratives of the film. For this reason, what
may seem to be intertwining, intersecting or even parallel narratives in
Nostalgia for the Light are actually crystalline facets of the same story.
One is a search into the past through astronomy, looking up into the
sky through telescopes, the other a search into the past through archaeol-
ogy (looking into the ground for buried histories). In both instances, the
landscape – whether the cosmos or the Earth – is the virtual past as
archive through which we search. In short, below is the past, above is
the past: a crystal.
Other crystalline aspects proliferate throughout the film, demonstrat-
ing the reflective nature of the two stories of seeking out the past. For
instance, a telling comparison is drawn between bones and stars. The
small bone fragments discovered due to the remarkable patience of the
women who search the desert floor (these fragments are all that
remains of operations conducted by the military using large mechanical
diggers to disinter the bodies of the disappeared and dispose of them
once again, most likely in the sea) are visible because of their calcination
in the unrelenting desert sun. They are brighter points of whiteness amidst
the red landscape, like tiny stars in the vastness of the universe. Galaz, for
his part, when contemplating what he would do if the Atacama Desert
where he works contained the remains of a loved one, suggests that he
716
22. Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-
Image: A Deleuzian Film-
Philosophy of Digital
Screen Culture, Stanford
University Press, Stanford,
2012, p 230
23. Patrick Blaines,
‘Representing Absences in
the Postdictatorial
Documentary Cinema of
Patricio Guzmán’, Latin
American Perspectives, vol
40, no 1, 2013, pp 114 –
130, p 128
would transpose his search for them to the stars, an equally vast land-
scape: ‘I would imagine my father or mother in space, lost in the galaxy
somewhere. I would look for them through the telescopes.’ Again, one
of the women searching the desert for the remains of a loved one,
Violeta Berrı́os, expresses her wish that the astronomer’s telescopes
could look into the ground. This image is matched in the very last shot
of the documentary, which I will discuss in the conclusion, in which
she looks through one of the telescopes, guided by Galaz, to see the
moon. Yet again, Guzmán toys with this idea of a crystalline Earth/
cosmos when, in a standout montage, he makes imperceptible shifts in
the edit from stellar landscapes to close-ups of bones, ending with a
slight downwards pan, which reveals that what we took to be the land-
scape of a planet, seen through a telescope, is in fact the dome of a
human skull in close-up.
The crystalline structure of the narrative indicates that the archive we
are searching through in Nostalgia for the Light is less a ‘world memory’
than it is, we might say, a ‘universe memory’. In The Neuro-Image
(2012), Patricia Pisters explicitly foregrounds the political meaning of
Deleuze’s conceptualization of time as world memory, emphasizing the
importance of the time-image in postcolonial films and in particular the
archival life of a touchstone film such as La battaglia di Algeri/The
Battle of Algiers (1966). Charting the influence and reworking of this
film in various later works, Pisters’ work demonstrates ‘how a single
film can turn into a transnational memory, part of a collective open
archive’.22 In Nostalgia for the Light, by contrast, the crystal of Earth
(Chile, Atacama Desert, Santiago de Chile) and the cosmos emphasizes
that the nation’s history exists at the meeting point of the two, the
layers of history it archives in the Atacama Desert belonging as much
to the universe as they do the nation. The crystal of Earth/cosmos is
the foundation of a gigantic universe memory, or universe archive.
ENTERING THE ARCHIVE, ENTERING TIME:
AFFECTIVE LANDSCAPES
What remains is to explore how the film permits access to the material
archive of the desert, and how this entrance is demonstrated to give
access to the past. Here, Deleuze’s notion of the any-space-whatever is
of paramount importance. Surveying Guzmán’s oeuvre, Patrick Blaines
helpfully notes that Nostalgia for the Light demonstrates ‘stylistic com-
monality’ with ‘Guzmán’s previous work in the use of physical objects
and places as memory anchors’.23 In this instance, an emphasis on the
materiality of the archive can be uncovered at both the level of film
form (the insertion of archival footage and the creation of new archival
documentary images testifying to present-day activities that are in the
process of passing – literally in the case of the now ageing women who
continue to search in the desert) and through the film’s construction of
affective landscapes (depictions of bodies as repositories of time, in par-
ticular, bodies merging with landscapes as they give oral testimonies
that demonstrate the histories encased in these landscapes). In both
instances the film shows that entering the archive involves a material
encounter with the past.
 717

First, how does the film’s form contribute to the archive as a material
entity? Amidst the narrative of the impossibility of retrieving the bodies
of many of the disappeared, who have most likely been disinterred by
the military and dumped in the sea, Guzmán inserts photographs of
the nineteenth-century miners and the disappeared, along with archival
footage of the recovery of several bodies from a mass grave in Pisagüa in
1990, also used in The Pinochet Case. Following Malin Wahlberg in
Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (2008), a rare instance
of a Deleuzian analysis of documentary, this archiving through
documentary can be considered ‘manifest in both a material and a
symbolic sense’. Of the material aspect of archival footage Wahlberg
continues:
Here, the compiled material is not offered as a mere trace of the past but as
a trace of another trace. The sociocultural and historical context, from
where this documentary ready-made is taken and, still clings to the
inserted fragment.24

Thus, this footage is not solely an archived image, but an archived trace of
the material past. This footage also cues us to realize the archiving that is
going on when, shortly afterwards, Guzmán films the team of six women
who search the section of the desert in which he is filming. They are not
only depicted in their patient search of the immense desert floor with only
hand trowels. In addition, in standout images they are shown as a group,
in tableau, amidst the vastness of the desert landscape. Like similar
tableaux of the survivors of torture in The Pinochet Case, these images
seem intended to memorialize the history of their search amongst the
past, these researchers amidst the desert’s barren top layers of the land-
scape’s vast archive. These documentary images capture the presence of
these women in the actual present as it passes and simultaneously con-
structs the archived layer of past on which these old women will soon,
or indeed now do, exist. Again, Wahlberg’s words are useful in under-
standing the materiality of this process, the tableaux demonstrating ‘the
testimonial function and historical value of the moving picture as
archive memory’.25 Their image, archived in this documentary, now
retains the material trace of the ‘sociocultural and historical context’ in
which their search takes place.
In addition to the materiality of these archival images (inserted
archival footage, and archival footage caught in the process of being
constructed as virtual layer of the past respectively), in the film’s
content the personal story of one of the women, Berrı́os, told in more
detail, provides a further way of understanding the material archive of
the landscape.
Berrı́os is framed against a distinctive backdrop of desert rock.
Through choice of location and framing, her form blends with the
landscape to suggest that her story belongs to the desert, and speaks
from the landscape’s historical archive. Berrı́os is filmed in medium
24. Malin Wahlberg, shot, seated cross-legged on the ground. She is interviewed about her
Documentary Time: Film continual search for her lost loved one, Mario. Behind her the uneven
and Phenomenology,
University of Minnesota
desert landscape closely frames her body so that no horizon is visible
Press, Minneapolis, 2008, above her head. The pink hue of the rock blends with Berrı́os’s tanned
p 42 face and her pink shirt, as a result of which she seems to blend in with
25. Ibid, p xiv the colour palette of the shot.
718

Violeta Berrı́os gives voice to the faceified desert landscape in Nostalgia for the Light, Atacama Productions, Blinker Film-
produktion, Cronomedia, 2010

The landscape behind her is a striated section, in which layers of the

past are visible. The effect of this closely framing background, which
places Berrı́os literally within the ground, suggests on one level that her
life has become one with her search for graves. However, it equally
emphasizes her role as a voice that speaks from and for the desert. In par-
ticular, Berrı́os’s seventy-year-old face, which is extremely animated at
points as she expresses the anguish she feels at never having recovered
Mario’s body, the darker sunken cavities of her face (eye sockets, nostrils)
and those created by the folds of skin on her neck, echo the pitted and
pockmarked cavities in the rock wall behind her. There is a strong
sense here that the landscape speaks through Berrı́os, whose emotional
strength is apparent, the affective landscape appearing as a face talking
of the occluded past whose secret it keeps.
To comprehend what is at stake in Nostalgia for the Light’s use of the
desert in this moment, it is useful to introduce Deleuze’s concept of the
any-space-whatever. Any-space-whatevers are affective spaces that
provide the entrances to time in Deleuze’s formation of cinema. In
Cinema 1, Deleuze spends two chapters outlining the role of the affec-
tion-image in movement-image cinema. Initially, he focuses on how
images can be faceified, when objects or places take on the quality (in
simple terms, a reflective surface with the ability to martial several fea-
tures to express a single affect) or power (again, to simplify, the micro-
26. Deleuze, Cinema 1, op cit, movements of different features that shift expression from one quality
p 90 to another) of the face. Such an image is faceified in that: ‘it looks at us
27. David N Rodowick, Gilles . . . even if it does not resemble a face’.26 The ‘emergence of any-space-
Deleuze’s Time Machine, whatever in the affection-image’, David N Rodowick notes, is one of
Duke University Press,
Durham, North Carolina, the ‘harbingers of time’ found in the movement-image, and it points
1997, p 73 towards the potential of the time-image to emerge.27

28. Martin-Jones, Deleuze,
Cinema and National
Identity, op cit, p 57
29. Deleuze, Cinema 2, op cit,
p 46
30. Deleuze, Cinema 1, op cit,
p 98
31. Ibid, p 106
32. Ibid, p 113
33. Ibid, p 123
34. Deleuze, Cinema 2, op cit,
p 56
719
In its simplest form, however, the close-up of the face, which is most
likely to lead only to a subjective flashback, or what Deleuze dubs after
Bergson a ‘recollection-image’, does not break the movement-image’s
sensory-motor continuum. We are not, therefore, adrift in the world
memory in quite the same unmoored way that we experience in the
time-image.28 As Deleuze notes, this conventional use of the close-up is
clearly signalled by formal devices – such as a dissolve on a facial
close-up – that scream at us ‘watch out! recollection’.29 Rather, it is
when the affection-image becomes abstracted or disconnected from its
spatial-temporal coordinates that it becomes an entity in its own
right.30 In this way spaces can become any-space-whatever, with the
(virtual) potential for conjunction with any other space:
The pure affect, the pure expressed of the state of things in fact relates to a
face which expresses it (or to several faces, or to equivalents, or to prop-
ositions). It is the face – or the equivalent which gathers and expresses
the affect as a complex entity, and secures the virtual conjunctions
between singular points of this entity.31
With this in mind the film’s depiction of the desert landscape appears pre-
cisely to express its capacity, as an any-space-whatever, to archive uni-
verse memory. In the early montage sequences the Atacama Desert is
introduced in all its weird and wonderful rock, sand and salt formations,
from its isolated rocks to its mountain ranges, its hard-backed, dry and
flat-ridged surfaces to its wind-blown dunes, its ruined fortresses and
thousand-year-old carvings to its high-tech observatories. In these
sequences the desert is rendered precisely as any-space-whatever:
. . . a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that
is, the principle of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts,
so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space
of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible.32
Indeed, the any-space-whatever’s capacity for virtual conjunction, so
clearly visible in Nostalgia for the Light’s montage of the Atacama
Desert, is not solely a spatial potential for disconnection and reconnec-
tion. It is also temporal.
Evoking precisely the various archival layers of the world memory
found in the Atacama Desert, Deleuze describes the any-space-whatever as:
. . . an amorphous set which has eliminated that which happened and
acted in it . . . the amorphous set in fact is a collection of locations or pos-
itions that coexist independently of the temporal order which moves from
one part to the other, independently of the connections and orientations
which the vanished characters and situations gave to them.33
The temporal aspect of the potential for virtual conjunction of the any-
space-whatever, then, is evident in its prefiguring of the appearance of
the ‘movement of world’34 (which emerges most clearly in the time-
image) that characterizes the virtual shifts through layers of the past
found in the world-memory. Berrı́os’s testimony, then, gives voice to
the faceified landscape, the any-space-whatever of the desert whose
virtual layers attest to the archival nature of matter, in time, and the
potential for virtual conjunction in new formations throughout the ages
past and to come.
720

It is not only the composition of the shot that causes this effect.
Berrı́os’s story appears as though spoken by the landscape precisely
because Berrı́os has physically become a part of the landscape
through her repetitive actions in that space. Of her perpetual searching
she says:
I no longer count the times Vicky [Saavedra] and I have gone into the
desert. We set out full of hope and return with our heads hanging. But
we always pick ourselves up, give ourselves a shake and set off again the
next day even more hopeful and more impatient to find them.

Thus, Berrı́os is shown to be a physical repository of the past, of memories

of searching the desert that have been stored up through repetition. This is
precisely what Bergson described in Matter and Memory as the storing up
of pasts through repeated habitual actions,35 which in turn informs
Deleuze’s discussion of the distinction between the sensory-motor
regime of the movement-image and the virtual movements of world of
the time-image. Through Berrı́os the landscape speaks its oral testimony,
of its secrets and lacunas (eg where is Mario?), but also of its desire to
archive, to record collective history. As Berrı́os cries in her most emotion-
al moment: ‘Some people must wonder why we want bones. I want them.
I want them. And many of the women want them too.’ Here, in addition
to her personal need, Berrı́os functions to give a voice to the landscape.
Berrı́os ties the desert’s wish for bones back to the documentary’s con-
struction of a ‘universe memory’ that archives matter, the calcium in
these bones being, after all, the same as that which was formed shortly
after the Big Bang.
Berrı́os’s oral testimony is given such import by the documentary
because of Guzmán’s view on the official, written history of Chile’s
recent history:

The official Chilean historical record in regard to the 1973 coup d’état is a
disaster. For nearly forty years now there has been denial of memory (like
there was in Spain too after Franco’s death). Nothing seems to alter in the
government’s account. Some of us want to work with memory and there
are many of us, including new historians of Chile, but we work in soli-
tude . . . Chilean civilians have been responsible for new history books,
but without official assistance of any kind. Memory has begun to be recup-
erated by NGOs, honest journalists and judges, families of the disappeared
and victims. But the state hasn’t had a part in it. The government is still
living in a cave.36
Berrı́os in particular states precisely her inability to trust official pro-
nouncements as to the whereabouts of Mario, having learned, she
states, not to believe what she is told by government: ‘I find it hard to
believe what I am told. They taught me not to believe.’ Her personal tes-
timony, then, demonstrates how entrance to the universe archive is
offered by human bodies, which are physical repositories of memory
just as is the landscape. Berrı́os is the most apparent example, but her
35. Henri Bergson, Matter and faceification of, and enunciation on behalf of, the landscape also
Memory (1896), Nancy mirrors the literal carvings of faces on rocks left behind by pre-modern
Margaret Paul and W Scott people living in the region, the placing of pictures of faces of the disap-
Palmer, trans, Zone, New
York, 1988, pp 77 –131 peared on the desert floor, and Guzmán’s use of cinematography to con-
36. White, op cit
flate planetary landscapes with a human skull.
 721

A second example occurs in Miguel Lawner, a former prisoner of the

dictatorship who was held in the Atacama Desert. Miguel is described by
Guzmán as ‘the architect of memory’. Miguel retains the memory of his
imprisonment in his body, a physical memory created through habit.
He paces out distances in the present, to demonstrate how he physically
stored the dimensions of his prison in the past. Whilst a prisoner,
Miguel drew each night the conditions the prisoners lived in. Each
morning he discarded his drawings secretly. On his release Miguel was
able to recall, from these repeated, habitual gestures, and draw once
more the prison in remarkable detail. He is a physical repository of
memory, demonstrated not only by his ability to measure distances
with his body, but also through the reiteration of pencil strokes as he
draws and redraws the camps. His memory is also accessed through the
habitual depositing of memory in his body, enabling him to re-create
the past he spent in the prison as drawings, representations of the past
that are added to the other layers of history archived in Guzmán’s docu-
mentary.

STARDUST MEMORIES

The documentary’s exploration of both the desert and film as material

archives of the universe memory finds its culmination in the scene that
precedes the final crystal of Santiago de Chile/cosmos. Throughout, the
theme of archiving has been evident in numerous ways. The use of
footage of archives to stand in place of the disappeared was a technique
very evident in The Pinochet Case and in Nostalgia for the Light it takes
on added dimensions. For instance, in addition to the different layers of
time found in the landscape, there are several shots of archived bodies
(both of ‘men of antiquity’ and the disappeared in cardboard boxes),
and Núñez, when not speaking in the desert itself, is shot in an interior
setting in a frame also composed of boxes, presumably containing his
research into the past. Against such a backdrop, when Núñez speaks of
the need to delve into the past, like Berrı́os he also appears to speak for
the archive that lies behind him, this time boxes containing the past,
rather than stratified layers of the desert. Finally, however, it is when
the search of the cosmos and the search of the desert are brought into
contact that the universe memory most clearly expresses its role in
archiving matter, as astronomer Galaz, Berrı́os and her friend and
fellow searcher Vicky Saavedra are depicted looking at the moon
through a telescope.
In a remarkable image, Guzmán overlays all three with the sparkling
dust that first appears early on in the film to obliterate the idyllic memory
of his childhood home. This dust recurs on occasion throughout the film,
representing the matter that will ultimately bury all humans, stratifying
them within the landscape, archiving them within the universe memory.
As when Berrı́os was shown sitting as though entombed within the
desert, here again there is a sense that she, Saavedra and Galaz are
already in some way buried or encased within matter. This time the
image is clearer, however, in that whilst exploring the cosmos they are
not physically buried under their grief for their missing loved ones, but
rather are living as part of the universe as a giant archive or memory.
722

Their existence is already under erasure in a sense, as their lives partici-

pate in the process of the constant and perpetual division of time that con-
structs the archive of time.
The dust begins to appear as Saavedra first looks through the tele-
scope. Guzmán notes in interview that Berrı́os and Saavedra were only
persuaded to look through the telescope by Galaz, who said that the
moon had been watching the Earth for millions of years, and therefore
may know the last resting place of the remains of their loved ones.37 In
this conclusion, then, Guzmán seems to be deliberately referring back
to his initial contention that our roots are above us, ‘beyond the light’,
and his observation that ‘the stars observe us’. This latter musing is
immediately followed by a striking image of stars in the night sky,
which seem to be showering down upon us, as though the stardust that
obscures the three figures has landed on Earth from space. Thus,
because the matter of the universe is the same as that which informs
our physical being, the stardust that covers Galaz, Berrı́os and Saavedra
illustrates their existence, as Preston notes earlier, ‘among the stars’.
They demonstrate Preston’s idea that as humans: ‘We live among the
galaxies. We are part of the universe.’ In the film’s final images the
universe claims them for its archive, of matter, of light. Thus a Deleuzian
approach to Nostalgia for the Light, focusing on the film’s crystalline
construction that renders indiscernible Earth (whether Atacama Desert,
Santiago de Chile or Chile) and cosmos, amidst the swirling stardust of
universal matter (along with its use of any-space-whatever to enable
entrance into the material landscape and the virtual archive of
time itself), unlocks something of the complexities of this remarkable
documentary.

This article was written whilst I was the Prowse Visiting Fellow at the Institute of
Advanced Studies, Durham University, 2012. I would like to extend my thanks to
all staff and visiting fellows at the Institute of Advanced Studies for their productive
input into this piece. Thanks to Marı́a Soledad Montañez for helpful feedback on an
initial draft.
37. Ibid