Dialectical Images: Two Films from Chile, ...A Valparaíso (Joris Ivens, 1963) and The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle, 2023)

In this talk I trace the concept of the dialectical image back to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his project which, retrospectively can be understood, against the dominant (bourgeois) interpretation, as a cognitive-affective illumination against reified concepts of the social order. Later, Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism laid the basis of modern critical thought with his dialectical analysis of the relations between forms of appearance and beneath them undisclosed social relations that contradict those appearance forms. With the expansion of the culture industry in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the image as reified, frozen, undialectical hieroglyph and as a means for provoking and stimulating dialectical responses fascinated thinkers such as Kracauer and Benjamin and practitioners such as Eisenstein and Brecht. In the second part of my talk, I want to sketch out how we can apply the concept of the dialectical image (which includes its relationship to sound) in film. I will take two Chilean films, ...A Valparaiso (Joris Ivens1962) and The Settlers (Felipe Gálvez Haberle 2023) as examples. I will focus more on the recent film, because it is narrative based, and I want to show how narrative and dialectical structures are not necessarily opposed.