{"id":740,"date":"2012-10-02T15:11:55","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/?p=740"},"modified":"2012-10-02T15:15:19","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:15:19","slug":"nostalgia-for-the-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/?p=740","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgia for the Light"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/nost_poster_hires.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-741\" title=\"nost_poster_hires\" src=\"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/nost_poster_hires-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/nost_poster_hires-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/nost_poster_hires-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/nost_poster_hires.jpg 850w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">I just spent several hours watching Patricio Guzm\u00e1n&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/icarusfilms.com\/new2011\/nost.html\" target=\"_blank\">Nostalgia for the Light<\/a>. It&#8217;s a 90-minute film and a more focused audience could probably have knocked the viewing out in one sitting. I, on the other hand, found myself completely distracted by the telescope porn in some scenes, and watched them two or three times. When combined with several Internet research forays, I at least doubled, if not trebled, my viewing time.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">If you&#8217;ve seen the trailer for the \u00a0movie, you already know that it is a visually spectacular film. If you haven&#8217;t seen the trailer, take a moment:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ok7f4MLL-Hk\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Obviously, I picked up the film for the observatories, but they were used mostly as a heuristic device, framing the director&#8217;s meditation on the aftermath of Chile&#8217;s Pinochet era. Guzm\u00e1n contextualizes the terrors perpetrated under Pinochet and Chilean society&#8217;s subsequent refusal to own up to them in universal natural history (i.e., what emanates from the Big Bang), but <em>Nostalgia\u00a0<\/em>is really about the human, not the eternal, epoch. And for all the work the director did to draw parallels between astronomy, archaeology, and the quest to unearth (literally) the remains of Pinochet&#8217;s victims, the film is almost exclusively about our understanding of the immediate past. The trauma of nostalgia in Guzm\u00e1n&#8217;s narrative requires memory and suppression, or\u00a0the development of historical consciousness. The universe does not remember, the universe does not forget. Yes, we can trace the calcium in our bones to its origin in the stars, but that &#8220;biological memory&#8221; has no moral drive behind it. The bones don&#8217;t hold the universe accountable for the calcium, while the survivors of Pinochet&#8217;s political massacres do hold the murderers so.<\/p>\n<p>Unless. I was struck by the scenes focused on the work of architect Miguel Lawner. Lawner mapped Pinochet&#8217;s prisons by turning his body into a measuring device, moving it through space, step by step, until it remembered dimensions, locations, and functions of everything around it. It&#8217;s difficult to gauge how much of his mapping ability came from conscious effort and how much could be attributed to what we like to call &#8220;muscle memory.&#8221; Either way, it raises questions about the role of the body&#8212;beyond the brain&#8212;in preserving memories.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_742\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Miguel-Lawner.png\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-742\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-742 \" title=\"Miguel Lawner\" src=\"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Miguel-Lawner-300x168.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" srcset=\"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Miguel-Lawner-300x168.png 300w, https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Miguel-Lawner-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Miguel-Lawner.png 1368w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-742\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Miguel Lawner sketching a concentration camp from memory.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Structurally, this movie reminded me quite a bit of Herzog&#8217;s <em>Cave of Forgotten Dreams<\/em>. Like Herzog,\u00a0Guzm\u00e1n worked to tie together archaeology, historical consciousness, the human present, and vision. But <em>Cave<\/em> was much more optimistic about the human condition.\u00a0<em>Nostalgia<\/em> reminds us that moving out of the cave doesn&#8217;t guarantee civilization, or if it does, it&#8217;s a civilization shot through with\u00a0darkness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just spent several hours watching Patricio Guzm\u00e1n&#8217;s\u00a0Nostalgia for the Light. It&#8217;s a 90-minute film and a more focused audience could probably have knocked the viewing out in one sitting. I, on the other hand, found myself completely distracted by the telescope porn in some scenes, and watched them two or three times. When combined [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,7,8,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architects","category-instruments","category-observatories","category-telescopes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astronomy.snjr.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}