"Voice of God" and Voices of Water in The Pearl Button: Read through the Work of Charles Wolfe

Hannah Goodwin

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In Charles Wolfe’s ground-breaking piece on narration in documentary film, “Historicising the ‘Voice of God’: The Place of Vocal Narration in Classical Documentary,” he muses on the idea of voice-over: “Voices are heard over . . . what?” he questions.[1] It’s not merely that a narrator’s voice hovers over the image; such a voice also, he notes, has a hierarchical position granting it some authority over other sounds within the diegetic world of the documentary, which do not have a reciprocal ability to comment on its commentary. This authority is what has led to such a narration being referred to (however glibly) as “voice of God.” As Wolfe explains, “Omniscient, omnipresent (that is to say everywhere and nowhere in particular), God may be thought of as both celestial (watching down on us) and terrestrial (inhabiting the world in all its details). The authority to describe, narrate, or interpret a world already known is thus attributed to a transcendent force.”[2] Yet rather than embracing the language of the “voice of God” as valuable framework for understanding that power of the voice-over’s voice, Wolfe instead asks us to attend to the specificities of voice—whose voices, and what kinds of narrations, are granted degrees of power, authenticity, and knowing? Where do voices emanate from, and how are we to imagine them in relation to the space and time of the documentary’s diegesis?[3]

Analyzing The Battle of Midway and The Spanish Earth in this piece and Native Land in an essay titled “Modes of Discourse in Thirties Social Documentary,” Wolfe articulates the disembodied narrator of classical documentary as in fact historically and socially situated.[4] Even if the narrator’s omniscience is never explicitly questioned, the idea of the “voice of God” fails to account for the ways “these documentaries employ forms of verbal address and verbal tenses that define a complex spatial and temporal relation among commentator, spectator, and documented events.”[5] However disembodied they might be, narrators have ways of speaking that betray aspects of their identities, or they may allude to their own positionality in relation to the world they narrate. What’s more, as Wolfe points out, nothing prevents “the spectator from scrutinizing and evaluating what this narrator has to say.”[6] In addition to acknowledging the possibility of spectatorial voices not wholeheartedly aligned with the perspective of the narrator, Wolfe suggests that we must consider the relationship between the voice of a disembodied narrator in relation to other voices within a documentary text. Documentaries can encourage a sense of polyvocalism and “variegated subjectivity” that challenge the godly authority of a singular narrator.[7]

Guided by Wolfe’s voice as a scholar and as my revered graduate advisor—one might make a joke about “voice of God” here, but in this case that nomenclature strikes closer to the truth—I will turn to an analysis of the 2014 documentary The Pearl Button (Chile, dir. Patricio Guzmán), which is richly polyvocal even as it is steered by a recurrent voice-over narration. Exploring the history of Chile through its troubled relationship to the sea it abuts, The Pearl Button combines the voice of an off-screen narrator (Guzmán himself) with an array of other voices, including, notably, those of indigenous people whose tribes have been systematically robbed of their voices and their lives. While Wolfe makes his argument about documentary voices and voice-over in relation to social documentaries of the 1930s and 40s, his invective to look closely at the way documentary voices work remains deeply relevant in the realm of contemporary documentaries like this one, which continues to experiment with tensions between authoritative narration of some ostensible truth and the ways film can manifest slippages around the possibility of documenting such a truth.

Moving between still photographs, sequences of cosmic imagery, interviews, nature footage, and attempts at historical reenactment, The Pearl Button gropes at a filmic vocabulary capable of representing two horrific historical episodes in which people have been forcefully, violently erased: the 19th century near-eradication of the Kawésqar, Selk’nam, Aoniken, Hausch, and Yámana people who navigated the waters of southern Chile, and the extermination, including by drowning, of political dissidents under the Pinochet regime in the 1970s. Throughout The Pearl Button, Guzmán’s first-person voice-over has an omniscient register that asserts cosmological as well as historical fact. He describes the way Chile’s telescopes probe the depths of space (“From here astronomers discovered water in almost the entire cosmos”) and the longue durée contours of Chile’s history (“They arrived ten thousand years ago. They were water nomads”) in the same steady tone of emotional remove tinged with mourning.

This voice has the quality of one conveying a legend, connecting cosmos to earthly narratives, and yet it is also personal, with occasional reference to the “I” whose memories, beliefs, and efforts to grapple with this history filter our understanding of these two catastrophic periods. Between stories of indigenous “water nomads” being murdered and stripped of their ability to navigate the ocean and those of Allende supporters and civil servants being tossed into the sea weighed down by steel rails, his voice tells the shocking story of a classmate who disappeared into the sea, never to return. This story bespeaks tragedy at a much smaller scale, and yet the horror of it pierces through. Through his narration of this disappearance, we see how for him the ocean has become a powerful, terrifying force, permanently associated with death and yet extraordinarily vital—indeed, it is fundamentally cosmic. “When water moves, the cosmos intervenes,” he posits. “Water receives the forces of the planets and transmits them to us. Water is an intermediary force between the stars and us.” In much the same way, here, Guzmán’s voice-over mediates between the layers of this film; it positions him in relation to the histories he narrates and connects the stories of the people we encounter in the film to the cosmological questions he raises as he seeks to make sense of a violent history and imagine outer space as both a refuge and a kind of disembodied witness to that history.[8]

Speaking these philosophical ideas with quiet authority, Guzmán’s voice makes use of the association between documentary narration and the “voice of God.” Set against images of cosmic bodies—nebula, comet, stars, the Earth from above—and bodies of water with their crashing waves and bubbling streams, his voice seems to speak, in sections, from a space of all-knowing. Even in the moments where the narration enters the first person, embedding the voice within the diegesis, this omniscient quality is tricky to reconcile with the film’s efforts to foreground other voices, namely those of the Indigenous people he interviews, Gabriela Paterito, Martín Calderón, and Cristina Calderón, who keep their mother tongues alive and speak of the silenced others. Returning to Wolfe’s observations, the voice-over has a hierarchical position over the other sounds and voices rendered only within the diegesis, and this grants his voice an uneasy power over the shaping of a story that centers on Indigenous people. The interviews ensure that these people’s voices aid in shaping our encounter with this story, too, but Guzmán is our historical guide to the atrocities as well as our philosophical guide to making sense of them. There are moments when Guzmán’s narration is quick to seek resolution, when his leap to the respite of the cosmos feels too easy. As we gaze at a telescope image after hearing of the galling dehumanization and persecution of Indigenous people and Guzmán’s voice asks whether a distant galaxy might have been a “refuge where Indians could have lived in peace,” turning to the cosmos feels like both the only way out and an unearned escape from a necessary confrontation with the evils of colonial history. Again, near the end of the film, the narration speculates about a quasar, which scientists have discovered is filled with 120 million times as much water as the Earth’s oceans: “How many wandering souls might find refuge in this vast ocean that is drifting in the void?” These passages are evocative, filled with a seductive sense of retroactive hope. Yet Guzmán’s voice feels like not quite the right one to express such a wish for an alternate history, removed as he is from the genocide as well as the Indigenous cosmology we learn of primarily through his narration. It is too easy to imagine such a respite when one has not endured the suffering that was not, in fact, alleviated by the presence of water many light years away.

Wolfe points to the way voice-over claims a certain hierarchical status above the other voices of a film. That sense of hierarchy imbues Guzmán’s voice with a special power to narrate the events it describes. Yet the film also reveals the power of documentary’s other voices, which compensate for the limits of what Guzmán is able to say about these unspeakable episodes. Beyond this voice-over narration, other voices speak more in fewer words. In one notable passage, Guzmán asks Gabriela, one of few surviving Kawésqar people, to translate a series of words into her native language, which she does obligingly. When he arrives at “God,” she pauses for a moment before responding “no, not God, we don’t have that.” And when it comes to “police,” she searches her brain before responding “no, we don’t need that either.” This absence of speech—a word not repressed but rather not even existent because of its sheer non-necessity, speaks worlds, telling us more about the people and their way of life than any of Guzmán’s framing narration or the black and white photographs whose colonial, ethnographic provenance is unspoken. This moment is striking, too, in its defiance of the idea of “giving voice” to those who have been silenced. Yes, Guzmán invites Indigenous people to speak. But it is in what they don’t speak, what is perhaps inarticulable, that the most interesting truths emerge. The unspeakability of trauma and the inarticulability of a cosmology that cannot be translated force a vocal gap that haunts and shapes the film beyond what any voice-over narration can contain. There is no word for God, nor is there the possibility of telling this story with a ‘voice of God.’

Guzmán attempts to bring voices out of the silences with a persistent return to the motif of water, and especially water’s sonic qualities: we hear water crackling inside of ice, gurgling in streams, and crashing in waves, all punctuating the stories of how Chile’s people have lived (and died) in relation to the water. After an interview with Gabriela in which she describes a childhood lived in, on, and with the water, we hear the sound of oars moving through water as we see silent footage of Indigenous people of the past moving in and through water. The voice-over muses, “For Gabriela, water is part of her family.” Cutting to contemporary footage of the ocean, now with synchronous sound of waves gently crashing, the voice adds, “I, as a Chilean, don’t feel close to the sea.” The story Guzmán tells of colonization and “civilization” is one of alienation from the water, with its powers to sustain but also its constant threat to subsume. In the closing of the film, Guzmán poses water as an answer to the absence of Indigenous voices. Over an image of the moon reflected on the unstable surface of a body of water, with the sounds of moving water faint in the background, his voice tells us, “They say that water has memory. I believe it also has a voice. If we were to get very close to it, we’d hear the voices of each of the Indians and the disappeared.” The film cuts to a series of shots of Cristina, Gabriela, and Martín looking at the camera, blinking, breathing, but not speaking. Guzmán enlists the sound of water to stand in for their voices as well as those of their ancestors, who exist in this film only through images captured by colonizers (notably, we never hear archival recordings of their voices, only their images). But magical though the thinking is that imagines water to hold the memory of these voices, and indeed to bring them to life again, the cosmology that animates such an imagination feels forced by Guzmán himself. The moments when his living interviewees speak convey Indigenous cosmologies and histories more compellingly. The stories they tell, spoken a language that is remembered now by so few, reanimate ancestral legacies in ways the voice of water cannot.

As the final credits roll, we hear a voice incanting a poem or meditation of some kind in the Kawésqar language. The voice speaks from beyond the image, over the words that scroll past, but with its now familiar soft-spoken timbre and slight raspiness of age, it clearly belongs to Gabriela. In ceding the documentary’s voice-over to Gabriela, granting her the final word, Guzmán moves past the limited vocal metaphor of water. Now unanchored from an image of her face, her voice becomes cosmic—it seems to exist after the end of the film, set against the black and white of the credits, much in the way the ancestors of Chile’s indigenous people persist after death in the stars of the night sky, according to the cosmology that Guzmán’s own voice-over narration cites at several junctures in the film. Gabriela, one of the very few members of her tribe to survive the genocide of her people, has been presented throughout the film as a vital living vessel for the continuation of a language only spoken by a handful of people. Her voice-over evokes that very human power of voice, but in carrying past the end of the film’s diegesis, it also transcends a mortal genealogy. Yet this is no ‘voice of God.’ Even as it comes from an “invisible realm,” this voice is, to return to Wolfe, “preeminently social,” emerging from the history the documentary has exposed, and from one of the central raconteurs of that history rather than a distant observer. A conduit of ancestral language and orator of poetry we can’t understand, Gabriela’s voice-over, more powerfully than Guzmán’s careful and deliberate ruminations, bespeaks the impossibility of fully narrating unfathomable loss.

Wolfe concludes his piece on documentary narration by arguing that “Construing the placeless space of vocal narration in documentary as fundamentally social and historical brings to light the limits of ‘voice-over’ as a metaphor to describe the varied kinds of work that vocal commentary performs” and “encourages us to explore precisely those features that are occluded by the conventional notion of ‘voice of God’ narration” including “accents, inflections, and forms of speech."[9] Analyzing the voices of The Pearl Button through this lens allows us to see the limits of omniscience in Guzmán’s voice-over, which, far from being unaccented and neutral, might be read against Gabriela’s voice as the voice of the colonizing ‘Other,’ speaking in a language that seeks to articulate Indigenous cosmologies, histories, and lived experiences in terms that can never fully express them. The ‘voice of water’ becomes a metaphorical way of exploring that gap sonically—of Guzmán acknowledging the limits of his own voice to express the suppressed voices of this story—but ultimately, it is Gabriela’s untranslated voice at the end that reconstrues the ‘voice-over’ to make visible the limits of Guzman’s voice as embedded within a sociohistorical perspective.

Notes

[1] Wolfe, “Historicising the ‘Voice of God’: The Place of Vocal Narration in Classical Documentary,” Film History 9, n. 2 (1997): 150.

[2]Ibid, 151.

[3]Ibid, 157.

[4]Wolfe, “Modes of Discourse in Thirties Social Documentary: The Shifting ‘I’ of Native Land,” Journal of Film and Video 36, n. 4 (1984), 13–20.

[6]Ibid.

[7]Ibid.

[8]Guzmán’s 2011 documentary Nostalgia for the Light probes the idea of celestial witness more extensively, as I discuss in the final chapter of my book Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024).

[9]Wolfe, "Historicizing the 'Voice of God'," 163.

Hannah Goodwin is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Mount Holyoke College, where she also co-leads the program in Journalism, Media, and Public Discourse. Her book Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) traces the interconnected technologies, aesthetics, and temporalities of astronomy and the cinema around moments of crisis. She is currently co-editing a collection, Mediating Deep Time, that explores the ways media represent and translate vast geological, biological, and cosmic timescales.