Geology, History, and Landscape in Los materiales (Colectivo Los Hijos 2009)

Abstract

This article analyzes Los materiales (Colectivo Los Hijos, 2009) from formal, ideological, and historical perspectives. It places the film within the collective’s relatively brief trajectory, as well as within the longer history of structural-material film, directly alluded to in the film’s title. It underlines its structural-material traits —as theywerepioneeringlyt ypified by critics P. Adams Sitney and Peter Gidal— and situates the film in relation to recent political mutations of the «cinema of structure», especially in relation to works that use structural procedures to explore the relation between landscape and history from a critical-political perspective. The film shows that collective action ends up precipitating into geological strata and fossil remains as well as into a memory of place—oral narratives that weave personal and collective becoming. In addition to reflecting on history, the film fictionalizes its own process of production and the filmmakers’ mutual rapport. Finally, Los materiales also meditates on the politics of vision and visuality both through dialogue and through the deployment of formal resources that insist on disconnection, opacity, and on the impossibility of seeing in an objective, totalizing fashion. In this regard, the film may be seen as part of a documentary tradition that highlights the limitations of the apparatus and the ambiguity of the moving image, and that seeks to engage the other —the documentary subject— in an open-ended, dialogic, and anti-authoritarian manner.