| Summary: | This paper analyze the use of photography in the documentary The Pearl Button, by Patricio Guzmán (2015). Among the multiple elements that make up the story proposed in the film, photography appears as a thread that links the different episodes of the national past recalled by the filmmaker, which focus on the twilight of the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego and the disappearance of leftist militants during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. If photography is the visual index that refers to both moments, political violence is the practice that historically crosses them. From a historical point of view, the article focuses on the relationship between the photographs used in the documentary, the disappearance as a repeated mechanism of state violence, and the melancholic vision of the filmmaker in the face of the end of certain “community projects” in Chilean history.
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