CEH member Paul Merchant has published new research on the Pacific Ocean in Chilean cinema in the Bulletin of Latin American Research.
”Collecting What the Sea Gives Back’: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film’ addresses the entanglements between ecology and postcolonial politics in the films of Tiziana Panizza and Patricio Guzmán.
The abstract, from BLAR, is:
This article proposes a new mode of understanding the entanglement of ecological and postcolonial questions in contemporary Chilean filmmaking, through the lens of directorial subjectivity. Both Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017), and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán, 2015) contest hegemonic structures of belonging by constructing an alternative ‘oceanic archive’. Yet where Guzmán’s metaphorical meditations on indigenous connections to the ocean risk collapsing into romanticism and replicating colonial visuality, Panizza’s reflexive conception of filmmaking as a situated and embodied practice facilitates a subtler understanding of cinema’s political engagement in this sphere.
Dr Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American film and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the countries of the Southern Cone and, more recently, Peru and Bolivia. He has recently completed his first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015.
Header image credit: Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017)
Dr Paul Merchant, Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture, writes about his new AHRC Leadership fellowship.
Coastal communities around the world are facing significant challenges, both ecological (such as rising sea temperatures) and as a consequence of human activity (for instance through flows of migration). Chile and Peru have been identified as two of the countries likely to be most affected by climate change, with their fishing industries vulnerable to rising sea temperatures, and their coastal regions vulnerable to the El Niño phenomenon, which is intensified by climate change. This project asks how visual and audiovisual creative responses to these and other issues from Chile and Peru can help us to live well in changing coastal environments across the world.
Scholars working in the environmental humanities and the emerging field of oceanic studies have argued that in order to develop a more sustainable relationship to the world’s oceans, we must understand the history and present of our responses to them. This project fills an important gap in this field of enquiry, which has to date paid little attention to the Pacific coast of South America and has remained focused on European and North American contexts. The project’s exploration of creative responses to ports as places of transnational encounter and exchange moreover responds to global concerns over how to adapt to increasing flows of migration. Coasts have long been viewed as spaces of exhibition and performance, where social change is particularly apparent, and while the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America has long been recognised as a hive of counter-culture and creativity, the diverse political traditions and cultures of Pacific ports such as Valparaíso and Callao have received far less attention.
The Port of Callao, Peru. Credit: Paul Merchant
Beginning in 1960, the date of a major earthquake and tsunami on the Chilean coast, this project asks how visual and audiovisual responses to the Pacific Ocean from Chile and Peru can shape a new critical understanding of how coastal communities respond to social and environmental pressures. The project analyses the production, reception and circulation of feature films (Patricio Guzmán, Javier Fuentes-León), video art (Cecilia Vicuña) and installations (Claudia Müller, Ana Teresa Barboza), among other forms of cultural production. It asks what changes are visible across the time period studied (1960 to the present), and shows how coastal cultural production brings to the surface lesser-known local, national and transnational histories.
How can scholars of audiovisual media produce critical work that supports public engagement with ecological issues?
The project also asks a methodological question: how can scholars of audiovisual media produce critical work that supports public engagement with ecological issues? This question is particularly important given the vital role that audiovisual media have played in recent years, whether in the form of television series or online video clips, in furthering public understanding of contemporary ecological challenges. One need only think of the influence of the BBC’s Blue Planet II series on debates around plastic use in the UK.
The project’s findings will be disseminated through several major scholarly publications, including a monograph with a leading university press and a methodological article in a leading peer-reviewed environmental humanities journal. A Post-Doctoral Research Assistant will be recruited, and they will publish an article in a major peer-reviewed Latin American studies journal.
In addition to these academic outputs, I will hold stakeholder workshops with local arts organisations and representatives of environmental NGOs in Chile and Peru. I will work with the Project Partner, the Centre for Cinema and Creation in Santiago de Chile, to develop the format of these workshops and to disseminate outcomes. Discussions at these events, along with a symposium on ecomedia and audiovisual research methods to be held in Bristol, will inform the design of a project website on which to disseminate examples of the material studied, and critical responses to it.
Dr Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American film and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the countries of the Southern Cone and, more recently, Peru and Bolivia. He has recently completed his first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015.
In the memorable second instalment of Blue Planet II, we are offered glimpses of an unfamiliar world – the deep ocean. The episode places an unusual emphasis on its own construction: glimpses of the deep sea and its inhabitants are interspersed with shots of the technology – a manned submersible – that brought us these astonishing images. It is very unusual and extremely challenging, we are given to understand, for a human to enter and interact with this unfamiliar world.The most watched programme of 2017 in the UK, Blue Planet II provides the opportunity to revisit questions that have long occupied us. To whom does the sea belong? Should humans enter its depths? These questions are perhaps especially urgent today, when Nautilus Minerals, a mining company registered in Vancouver, has been granted a license to extract gold and copper from the seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Though the company has suffered some setbacks, mining is still scheduled to begin in 2019.
Blue Planet’s team explore the deep. Image credit BBC/Blue Planet
This marks a new era in our interaction with the oceans. For a long time in Western culture, to go to sea at all was to transgress. In Seneca’s Medea, the chorus blames advances in navigation for having brought the Golden Age to an end, while for more than one Mediterranean culture to travel through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the wide Atlantic was considered unwisely to tempt divine forces. The vast seas were associated with knowledge that humankind was better off without – another version, if you will, of the apple in the garden.
If to travel horizontally across the sea was to trespass, then to travel vertically into its depths was to redouble the indiscretion. In his 17th-century poem Vanitie (I), George Herbert writes of a diver seeking out a “pearl” which “God did hide | On purpose from the ventrous wretch”. In Herbert’s imagination, the deep sea is off limits, containing tempting objects whose attainment will damage us. Something like this vision of the deep resurfaces more than 300 years later in one of the most startling passages of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), as a trip underwater in a diving bell figures forth the protagonist’s desire for occult, ungodly knowledge.
Mann’s deep sea is a symbolic space, but his reference to a diving bell gestures towards the technological advances that have taken humans and their tools into the material deep. Our whale-lines and fathom-lines have long groped into the oceans’ dark reaches, while more recently deep-sea cables, submarines and offshore rigs have penetrated their secrets. Somewhat paradoxically, it may be that our day-to-day involvement in the oceans means that they no longer sit so prominently on our cultural radar: we have demystified the deep, and stripped it of its imaginative power.
But at the same time, technological advances in shipping and travel mean that our culture is one of “sea-blindness”: even while writing by the light provided by oil extracted from the ocean floor, using communications provided by deep-sea cables, or arguing over the renewal of Trident, we perhaps struggle to believe that we, as humans, are linked to the oceans and their black depths. This wine bottle, found lying on the sea bed in the remote Atlantic, is to most of us an uncanny object: a familiar entity in an alien world, it combines the homely with the unhomely.
Wine bottle found in the deep North Atlantic. Laura Robinson, University of Bristol, and the Natural Environment Research Council. Expedition JC094 was funded by the European Research Council.
For this reason, the activities planned by Nautilus Minerals have the whiff of science fiction. The company’s very name recalls that of the underwater craft of Jules Verne’s adventure novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870), perhaps the most famous literary text set in the deep oceans. But mining the deep is no longer a fantasy, and its practice is potentially devastating. As the Deep Sea Mining Campaign points out, the mineral deposits targeted by Nautilus gather around hydrothermal vents, the astonishing structures which featured heavily in the second episode of Blue Planet II. These vents support unique ecosystems which, if the mining goes ahead, are likely to be destroyed before we even begin to understand them. (Notice the total lack of aquatic life in Nautilus’s corporate video: they might as well be drilling on the moon.) The campaigners against deep sea mining also insist – sounding not unlike George Herbert – that we don’t need the minerals located at the bottom of the sea: that the reasons for wrenching them from the deep are at best suspect.
So should we be leaving the deep sea well alone? Sadly, it is rather too late for that. Our underwater cameras transmit images of tangled fishing gear, cables and bottles strewn on the seafloor, and we find specimens of deep sea animals thousands of metres deep and hundreds of kilometres away from land with plastic fibres in their guts and skeletons. It seems almost inevitable that deep sea mining will open a new and substantial chapter on humanity’s relationship with the oceans. Mining new resources is still perceived to be more economically viable than recycling; as natural resources become scarcer, the ocean bed will almost certainly become of interest to global corporations with the capacity to explore and mine it – and to governments that stand to benefit from these activities. These governments are also likely to compete with one another for ownership of parts of the global ocean currently in dispute, such as the South China Sea and the Arctic. The question is perhaps not if the deep sea will be exploited, but how and by whom. So what is to be done?
A feather star in the deep waters of the Antarctic. BBC NHU
Rather than declaring the deep sea off-limits, we think our best course of action is to regain our fascination with it. We may have a toe-hold within the oceans; but, as any marine scientist will tell you, the deep still harbours unimaginable secrets. The onus is on both scientists and those working in what has been dubbed the “blue humanities” to translate, to a wider public, the sense of excitement to be found in exploring this element. Then, perhaps, we can prevent the deep ocean from becoming yet another commodity to be mined – or, at least, we can ensure that such mining is responsible and that it takes place under proper scrutiny.
The sea, and especially the deep sea, will never be “ours” in the way that tracts of land become cities, or even in the way rivers become avenues of commerce. This is one of its great attractions, and is why it is so easy to sit back and view the deep sea with awed detachment when watching Blue Planet II. But we cannot afford to pretend that it lies entirely beyond our sphere of activity. Only by expressing our humility before it, perhaps, can we save it from ruthless exploitation; only by acknowledging and celebrating our ignorance of it can we protect it from the devastation that our technological advances have made possible.
