There are few filmmakers who have woven their oeuvre around a single subject like the Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán. While other stories have earned his attention intermittently throughout his career, his work has largely documented the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende and the Coup d’etat that overthrew him, and its reverberating consequences in Chilean society. Orbiting around this 1973 historical moment, Guzman’s cinema has looked squarely at its rippling presence in past, present, and future. From different angles and points of history, his films have concerned themselves not just with the political significance of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s takeover, but most intently, Guzman has tried to facilitate Chile’s historical memory and its understanding of itself. His greatest enemy is forgetting, and his cinema is itself an act of remembrance.
A box set released this past fall from Icarus Films brings five of these works together that when assembled side by side form a decades-spanning project from the 1970s to the present, beginning with his monumental three-part masterpiece, The Battle of Chile (1975-79), and up to 2011’s Nostalgia for the Light. The movement, across forty years of filmmaking, is one from preservation to restoration. Shot on the ground, in the moment, The Battle of Chile is a collection of awe-striking footage that documents the political tension in Chile from Allende’s re-election to his death on September, 11th, 1973, when the military bombed the presidential palace and he had stayed on, alongside a handful of people who stood by him, to rightfully defend his government and his people.
The first part of the film, “The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie”, articulates Chile as a country divided. The workers have united in solidarity and elected Allende, but the wealthy middle class refuse to sit quietly. The next six months of political turmoil that lead to the Coup are meticulously captured as they unfold by Guzmán and his crew. At the end of part one, a cameraman, Leonardo Henrichsen, films his own death at the hands of a rightist military man, part of a group that took to the streets armed with tanks in a foreshadowing of the successful coup that was to come. From here, the second part, “The Coup d'état” shows how the Chilean right gained momentum, with plenty of assistance from the Red-scared United States of America (at a moment when the criminality of the U.S. government on its own soil as well as abroad was at a peak), and eventually attacked with minimal resistance from the non-violent left in spite of their numbers, ending with Allende’s death at his own hand.
Boldly, the final part of the documentary, “Popular Power”, retraces some steps, and takes place before Allende’s death on the day of the Coup, and analyzes with considerable detail the ways in which the workers and the left organized themselves and the measures they took over the course of the months following the election to try and preserve their socialist vision of their country’s future. At once a how-to guide, a tribute to the solidarity and strength of those who “fought” for the left, and a demonstration, ultimately of how they failed, this final part is also, somewhat romantically, a way of emphasizing not the results of the events of ’73, but to emphasize what was accomplished, and to freeze forever a moment of hope that would be eradicated for decades to come during Pinochet’s dictatorship. In a way, the structure of The Battle of Chile can be instructively read as a summation of Guzmán’s philosophy: if there is no present, and there is only memory, then the order of things is secondary to their having taking place at all. For Guzmán, however naively, the rise of the left in the early 70s exists as fully now as it did then, even after its dissolution. An act of preservation, Guzman and his collaborators captured the events as they unfolded. Banned from screening in Chile, it is a film that has reached the rest of the world but not its own country, a perfect metaphor for Chile’s willed forgetting of its dark and violent past.
Fast forward to twenty years in the future to Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), a stirring film in which Guzmán visits with people who experienced the Coup firsthand (some of whom can actually be spotted in The Battle of Chile). Several of the film’s sequences consist of Guzmán showing people The Battle of Chile (it should be noted, for the first time), arousing reminiscences and reflections 25 years after the events. Movingly, the film closes with Guzman showing the doc to students. The emotionally-charged reactions that he captures are intense and complex. The sheer clash of what The Battle of Chile’s footage reveals with the blinded cultural memory of Chile is made palpable by the confusion, the tears, and the harsh realizations worn on their faces. From preservation to restoration, Guzman works to resurrect a lost memory, placing pieces of a puzzle to create a clearer picture of a nation’s history.
Less poetic and more info-doc in its style than its predecessors, The Pinochet Case (2001) is nevertheless a thoughtfully constructed film that prosaically details the process of how the dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested and and tried after visiting London in 1998. The case originated in Madrid, where relatives of the Chilean “disappeared” testified against Pinochet. The “disappeared” refers to the enemies of his regime that were either tortured, executed or secretly murdered and buried in the desert or dumped into the ocean during the dictatorship. The film, with dry irony, observes as the case against Pinochet, so many years after his initial crimes first took place, becomes a stop-start ordeal in Britain. While Pinochet eventually returned to Chile facing charges for his crimes, he passed away before being convicted, yet another problematic chapter in this seemingly never-ending story of injustice.
Salvador Allende (2004) is a loving, albeit romantic, portrait of Allende told squarely from Guzmán’s subjective point of view. The approach disarms any potential qualms with the documentary’s responsibility to represent an unbiased view of the ultimately flawed Allende. It becomes less about Allende, and more of a new way for Guzmán to engage with this unique window of history from a personal perspective. The mark left by Allende on Guzman’s own consciousness is inestimable, and points to living impact of his words and actions. Hardly a work of simple glorification, the film is a measured and elegant way of articulating Allende as both man and hero, but a complex one that still cannot be pinned down as being one thing or another—even according to his friends, family, and colleagues, who appear here in interviews, and offer insights that help complete this nuanced picture of an inspirational figure whose place in Chile’s history has long been under duress.
Finally there is Nostalgia For the Light, a film through which many new audiences have discovered Guzmán. Theretofore his most formally ambitious film, Nostalgia is more overtly philosophical than his previous films, and feels like a thematic culmination. Taking place at the Atacama Desert along the Chilean coast—the driest place on earth—this geographically remarkable spot curiously captures Guzman’s imagination because it brings together astronomers and archaeologists as well as relatives of those “disappeared” under Pinochet. The translucent sky makes for the clearest few of the stars above and beyond us, the dry climate preserves the remains of Pre-Columbian mummies—and it is also the desert where Pinochet had hundreds and hundreds of people buried, where the victims’ relatives still scour in search of their loved ones’ bodies. While a giant telescope points skyward at distant galaxies, revealing to us the mysteries of our universe one by one, right under the nose of stargazers are the buried secrets of Chile’s recent past. Within this biting irony, Guzman meditates on the ideas of memory, history, and existence that flow as undercurrents through his entire body of work.
2015 was a year that, thanks to The Pearl Button, revealed Guzmán has more stories to tell, but even one about the nature of water, the cosmos, and Chile’s aboriginal peoples, arrives at Pinochet’s takeover and the bodies dumped into the sea. Guzmán is not repeating himself. Each time he re-examines the Coup and Pinochet’s reign over Chile, he does so from a new vantage point that expands his and our understanding of what the events mean and, moreover, challenges our collective memory to grow and evolve in the hopes of being better prepared for a chance at a brighter future. His works of remembrance transcend temporality and point to a solidarity even larger than that of the Chilean people. Most nobly, the films of Patrico Guzmán honour the dead, the living and the yet to be alike.
This article was originally published on Fandor in January 2016 but was no longer available online.