In his debut feature, Erratics, screened in the New Directors section of the San Sebastián International Film Festival, Chilean filmmaker Thomas Woodroffe resurrects the ghost of a cameraman who took part in an expedition with a view to revisiting a unique ethnographic record of Tierra del Fuego. The director discusses the violence embedded in archives and the need for cinema to resist formal standardisation.

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Cineuropa: How did Erratics come about?
Thomas Woodroffe: I discovered Terre de Feu at the Toulouse Cinémathèque. The film was shot during a French expedition led by Paul Castelnau and contains extraordinary images of the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego. I had already researched the photographs of Martin Gusinde, many of which were staged: Selk’nam people were paid in sheep to re-enact rituals in front of his camera. The Toulouse film presented the same contradiction. It is a broad and perhaps unique record, but it's also manipulated and constructed through a colonial gaze.

Where did you discern the violence in that archive footage?
In several scenes, people appear drunk or smoke directly towards the lens; everything suggests the filmmakers supplied them with the alcohol and cigarettes. However, the violence lies not only in those acts, but also in the position from which the images were created: who is looking, why and from where. I wanted Erratics to serve as a key to reading that archive, rather than merely reproducing it. That’s why the entire film is seen through the ghost’s eyes.

The project began as a documentary essay. Why did you bring fiction into it?
I come from a fiction background, and the documentary language I tried at first never felt like my own. Screenwriter Valeria Hofmann helped me introduce the ghost and the science-fiction dimension. Two Chilean movies were important references: Sueños de hielo by Ignacio Agüero and Brise-glace by Raúl Ruiz. Both begin with documentary material but allow a fictional presence - be it a ghost or a voice-over - to unsettle it. That hybrid space ended up shaping the project.

How did such an unusual production process shape the film?
We began with exploratory trips on which we reconstructed the expedition’s route from the cameraman’s diaries. Chance became an integral part of the research: we came across a dead whale and even filmed the shoot for The Settlers by Felipe Gálvez. After those trips, I wrote the voice-over, and we embarked on a 40-day shoot. The scenes in France were the last and were filmed at the Cinémathèque itself, with members of its real team and Denis Lavant. The movie was written as much through those encounters as it was on the page.

You don’t portray Castelnau as a simple villain. Why?
His ideas were not exceptional in 1925 Europe; they were part of the dominant discourse of the time. That doesn’t exonerate him, but it complicates our judgement. We, too, normalise forms of violence today that will seem horrific a century from now. In the film, the contemporary colonisation of the landscape converses with the colonial violence of the past. I’m sure my own work will be questioned in the future, and so it should be.

How did your own position shape your approach to indigenous history?
As a Chilean from the capital city, I am also a foreigner in Tierra del Fuego. I could not appropriate an indigenous discourse or pretend to speak on behalf of those communities; indigenous peoples must speak for themselves. My responsibility was to acknowledge where I was looking from and make that position visible, rather than hide it behind an apparently neutral documentary voice.

The film is demanding on the formal level. Are you concerned about it reaching a wide audience?
I don’t measure a film by the size of its audience. The filmmakers who really move me (Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, Kiro Russo, Teddy Williams and Michelangelo Frammartino, among others) expand the possibilities of cinema. Today, films are increasingly standardised, while viewers are underestimated and everything is judged through immediate consumption, as on social platforms. But cinema can outlive its own present. 2001: A Space Odyssey, India Song and the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul were not made solely for their premiere audiences. We need cinephilia, curiosity and works willing to take risks with their form.