The battle of Chile: image, poetry, memory

Abstract

The trauma, by definition, leaves no traces in the psychic apparatus. This absence becomes even more complex when the trauma is linked to state
violence, which leaves only shapeless, discontinuous and fragmented traces. When we are confronted with this type of experience, the construction
of a movement-image as the basis of a narrative allows us to integrate these experiences, even that of the trauma, by deploying an individual novel, a
memory and a collective myth of horror. However, it is not the simple reference to the image that this access to a narrative makes possible, but rather
a fantastic-fictionnal one, shifted from any « ordinary sense » and which the narrative organizes by the “figuration” which it deploys around an
enigmatic void. It is from the films in which the South African artist William Kentridge questions the function of the “memorial” in sites, sometimes
forgotten, having witnessed the violence of apartheid, that I propose an approach to the mutation of registers that can be seen in the work of the
documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzman, between the pure inscription of the image in “La batalla de Chile”, up to the poetic montage of “Nostalgia
de la luz”. In this analysis, I propose a parallel between the poetic function of the movement-image and the question of fantasy in Freud, to then
think about the notion of creativity, defined as the possibility of accessing life from primary shapeless traces by DW Winnicott.