ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the political and poetic use of film in representing the memory of collective trauma and catastrophe. The organic forms of nature, specifically the oceans and the desert, bear traces of human violence and terror which have been erased from the narrative of history yet return as material remnants of a disavowed past. Memory is enmeshed in ecological and environmental processes of change, decay, and renewal that are inextricably entangled with colonial and capitalist acts of exploitation, expropriation, extermination and extinction. The Pearl Button (Guzmán, 2015) and Vertigo Sea (Akomfrah, 2015) explore the deep time of geological and biological life as an archival repository of submerged histories. Both films use montage and metonymy in constructive ways to reconfigure the memory of the past.
