The Pearl Button

Film (2015)
Poetic documentary

Kendall Square Cinema, Cambridge, MA

At the outset, this poetic film might strike one as a kind of broad-swathed reflection on nature, culture and the world at large à la Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and its follow-ups in the Qatsi trilogy by director Godfrey Reggio. Though it has much of that species of cinematic poetry to it, this amazingly well shot and edited work, documentary-like but also so far ranging in tone and conception as to fall into a category of its own, is far more pointed than those earlier, experimental and interesting, but poetically indulgent, works.

The title of the film is taken from history. Robert FitzRoy, a twenty-three year old Englishman, came to Tierra del Fuego (in what is now Chile) in 1828 to take command of an expedition already underway there. On his return to England in 1830, FitzRoy arranged to take an indigenous Fuegian Yaghan native back with him and offered the tribe, in exchange, a pearl button. They accepted. That Yaghan boy, subsequently known as Jemmy Button, lived in England for some years then eventually returned to Chile, somewhat worse off for the venture.

Subsequently, as the film shows, Chile was overrun by imperialists and the natives were gradually forced out of their natural and reasonable ways of life, patterns of mistreatment and alienation systematically foisted upon them.

Through touching and revealing nterviews with some living Yaghans, one gets a vivid sense of the richness of the culture that was torn apart by the imposition of European expansion and colonization. The film simply traces a series of Yaghans reciting the translation into Yaghan for a series of terms given in English – this basic exchange remarkably provides a moving sense of this small amount of culture retained in the wake of massive overrun.

Starting with an image of a droplet of water trapped inside a piece of quartz, the film uses the theme of water throughout as emblematic of something significant for Chile. Poised between mountains, desert and the ocean, Chile stretches for 2653 miles along the edge of the Pacific.

After tracing the difficult lives of indigenous peoples under that sway of outside domination, the film turns to the awful events of the period of dictatorship (1973-1990) under Augusto Pinochet, during masses of innocent people were tortured, killed and their remains disposed of.

As the film details, bodies of these victims were tied to sections of iron rail and dropped into the Pacific. These many years later, some of these sections of rail have been found, barnacled and without trace of human remains. On one of them, all that could be found was a single button, poetically reminiscent of the story of the purchase of Jemmy Button two centuries beforehand.

This exquisite, poetic and daring film is quite short (82 minutes), but powerful, at once a meditation on the earth and its oceans, a reflection on tribal cultures and their displacement by imperialists, and a consideration of the inhumane treatment that modern political tyrannies cruelly impose on innocent victims.

This button is a gem – don’t miss it.

– BADMan