"Él que no salta es Pinochet!" The Poetics of Knowledge and the Silence of NO

James Harvey-DavittAnglia Ruskin University

Film, History, and Public MemoryFriday 4th October 2013Nerve Centre, Derry

James.harvey-davitt@student.anglia.ac.uk

Criticisms• Larraín  is a Larraín!

• “A gross oversimplification that has nothing to do with reality” (Genaro Arriagada, Real-life director of the NO campaign)

• History books name millions of people vital to the plebiscite victory – Larrain focuses on just Saavedra

• Distortion (unethical use?) of archive footage

• Changes to the source material – the protagonist

(Rohter, 2013)

The Silence of No• Why does NO not focus more

on the atrocities?

• Why does NO place such an emphasis on the director of the advertising campaign?

• Why does NO distort facts?

Rancière: The ‘Poetics of Knowledge’ (1994)

...a study of a set of literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of a science, and signifies this status. The poetics of knowledge has an interest in the rules according to which knowledge is written and read, is constituted as a specific genre of discourse.

(in The Names of History, 1994, 8)

Rancière on Michelet• An anti-representational, “second-person”.

If there is no place to make Chalier speak it is because no one speaks through his mouth: “He is the voice of the deep, dark mud of the streets, silent since the beginning of time. Through him, the ancient, dismal darkness, the damp and dismal houses begin to speak; and hunger and fasts; and abandoned children and the women dishonoured; and all those heaped-up sacrificed generations. Now all these awake, now they arise, now they sing from their sepulchers; and their story is of menace and death...Their voices, their song, their menace, all is Chalier.”

(ibid., 47)

• A Democratic form, allowing the silence to speak for itself

How might this look?• Like Deleuze ‘s shift from the action- to time-image: introducing the “any-space whatever” (Deleuze, 1989)

• Motivations behind post-war cinema in Italy – similarly ambivalent.

Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

1. René• Why is he doing this job?

• Advertising: using the iconology of the era in order to question one’s own complicity with the regime.

2. Larraín• Like René, Larraín too is compromised by his being-

situated as a maker of history, with tools of oppression.

The silent voice of the conditional is that which can come back to us only through the tombstone or the cries of rocks; a voice without paper, a meaning indelibly inscribed in things, which one may read, which one would be able to read endlessly in the materiality of the objects of everyday life.

(Rancière, 1994, 57)

• The culture represented: rather than silencing, or speaking on-behalf-of the silent, Larraín produces a third option.

2. Larraín

• Complicity gestured towards in the films’ aesthetics.

• As with Post Mortem (2010), the aesthetics embody the era’s technologies – evoking the history in an alternative form to narrative.

Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín, 2010)

"Él que no salta es Pinochet!"

• René, like Larraín, does not “jump” in a partisan way.

• Difficulty of negotiating the differing discourses on the left continue to put strain on Chilean society.

• Larraín's alternative = ambivalence as critical style – silence shown as silence

• “Through [René’s video], the ancient, dismal darkness, the damp and dismal houses begin to speak; and hunger and fasts; and abandoned children and the women dishonoured; and all those heaped-up sacrificed generations.”

(Michelet, 1973)

james.harvey-davitt@student.anglia.ac.uk