La cordillera de los sueños

Modern thought typically considers the realms of politics and geology as fundamentally different. The first is seen as turbulent and fickle, often chaotic and ever-changing. The latter is all about slowness and relative stability; it privileges the durational and predictable. In many of his essay films from the past decades, Chilean director Patricio Guzmán encourages us to rethink these assumptions. In his lecture, Lutz Koepnick (Vanderbilt University) follows Guzmán’s inquiry into the politics of deep geological time: mountains figure as material witnesses to political violence and oppression – rocks become media to return forgotten memories and transformative hopes to the political arena. To illustrate how elemental media can teach us to revise human-centered ideas of history, Guzmán’s film LA CORDILLERA DE LOS SUEÑOS will be shown after the lecture. (Hannes Wesselkämper )

The Cinepoetics Lectures are organized by the research center of the same name at Freie Universität Berlin.