Colonialism, Extractivism and Violence in Contemporary Chilean Cinema: The Selk’nam Genocide in White on White and The Settlers

Abstract

This article examines the Chilean films White on White (Blanco en blanco, Théo Court, 2019) and The Settlers (Los colonos, Felipe Gálvez 2023) as aesthetic and political interventions that revise the history of the Selk’nam genocide in Tierra del Fuego. In a dialogue with the contrasting historiographical perspectives of Mateo Martinic and José Luis Marchante, this analysis suggests that both films destabilise the heroic settler narrative and expose the structural violence of the modernising, extractivist project that underpinned the colonisation of southern Patagonia. These films are part of what Hayden White calls a post-colonial historiophoty that confronts the historical amnesia and proposes ethical ways of depicting colonialist violence. Both films reveal the intersecting nature of colonialism, extractivism and barbarism, which established peripheral capitalism in the Southern Cone through control over territory and over bodies. In these examples, contemporary Chilean cinema emerges as a space for a critical revision of the national imaginary and its foundational silences, positioning fiction as a critical, reflective and scientifically rigorous device for engaging with contemporary debates and historical documents.