Patricio GuzmánGuzmán, Patricio Matt Losada August 2024 Great Directors Issue 110 b. 11 August, 1941, Santiago, Chile Patricio Guzmán’s career in documentary film now stretches through six decades. He started out as a young man filming on the streets a political movement and the challenges it faced, lived through a coup and subsequent arrest, then went into exile to Europe. There he made less urgent films, often for French or Spanish television, while frequently returning to Chile to film more politically engaged work. More recently he made a trilogy in essay mode that linked the past and present of his home country and earned him universal recognition. Guzmán’s best known films are the three-part The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of an Unarmed People (La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas, 1975-1979) and the 2010s trilogy comprised of Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz, 2010), The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar, 2015) and The Cordillera of Dreams (La cordillera de los sueños, 2019). He has also made many lesser known, yet equally accomplished films, like In the Name of God (En nombre de Dios, 1987), a documentary that centers on liberation theology in the Latin American context, and My Jules Verne (Mon Jules Verne, 2005), which contains subjective accounts of the French novelist’s work and its repercussions in science and exploration. Born in 1941, Guzmán grew up in the coastal town of Viña del Mar and the capital city, Santiago. In the mid-60s he left for Madrid to study at the Official Cinema School (Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía, or EOC), where he made several shorts. In 1971 he returned to Chile, where Salvador Allende had recently been elected president and was implementing his “Chilean way to socialism.” Guzmán enthusiastically lent his skills to Allende’s project, becoming the head of the documentary section of the state production company, Chile Films. He made two films that document the initial year of the new government before filming The Battle of Chile. Interrupted by the coup, he left the country. He has often returned to film in Chile, but never permanently, living in Madrid for most of the 1990s and since then in Paris. The Battle of Chile, released as three separate parts, is among the most important Latin American films ever made. Guzmán decided to document the progress and setbacks of Allende’s government but faced the problem of buying the large amount of film needed with a weak currency. He wrote to the French filmmaker Chris Marker, who responded by shipping film to him. The result is not strictly propaganda nor a call to armed revolution à la The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos, 1968), but a rather reasoned exposition and analysis of the sociopolitical dynamics that eventually brought down Allende’s ambitious presidency. It goes well beyond the cliched cartoon strongmen of most accounts of coups and dictatorships that reach English-speaking viewers, by documenting the efforts of business sectors and the Chilean bourgeoisie to complicate Allende’s democratic transition to socialism, efforts that contributed to the overthrow of his democratically elected government. The First Year When the coup interrupted the filming, Guzmán was arrested, detained in the infamous National Stadium, and only released after 15 days. In the meantime, the film cans were hidden, then secretly brought to the Swedish embassy, from where they were put on a ship in diplomatic pouch and taken to Sweden where, by the time they arrived, Guzmán was waiting. He eventually found support for post-production in the Cuban Institute of Cinema Art and Industry (ICAIC), where he, with a team that included fellow Chilean exiles Pedro Chaskel and Marta Harnecker, spent several years editing the footage into a coherent film. Part I of The Battle of Chile, subtitled The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (La insurrección de la burguesía), presents the violent coup at the beginning of the film, then proceeds to document the activities of the opposed political forces that led up to it. An anti-Allende movement based in the middle and upper classes manages to gain the support of certain workers. Those of El Teniente mine and freight truckers are the most troublesome, because their efforts to sabotage the economy contribute palpably to the instability that the right hoped would give it an overwhelming majority in the national congress in the mid-term elections of 1972. The ties to capital of these workers features importantly, and the more expected and widespread opposition, that of the bourgeoisie, the press, wide sectors of the military, and an extreme-right faction is also documented and explained in detail. Congress is shown to be another center of resistance. Amid anti-Allende speeches the conservative sectors block the projects of his Popular Union (UP). The film also deeply explores the efforts of supporters, primarily working-class, to neutralize the plans of the opposition as they discuss how to repair supply chains and produce more goods. This first part of the film creates suspense around the mid-term election, in which the right hopes to gain enough of a majority to remove Allende from the presidency. Those on the right invariably express confidence in their victory, so when the UP defies expectations and gains the majority, a shift in attitude from a faith in democratic institutions toward a coup strategy is palpable and the neofascist militia Fatherland and Liberty (Patria y Libertad) becomes more vociferous in the streets. At this point, the ominous specter of the military becomes more present. This part of the film ends with a sort of pre-coup in which several tanks attack the presidential palace before surrendering. In some of the most memorable images in all of Latin American film, an Argentine cameraman working for Swedish television films the rebel soldiers as they aim and shoot the bullets that kill him. The Battle of Chile The second part of the film, The Coup d’État (El golpe de estado), tells a more linear story of the accelerating process that began with the pre-coup on June 29, 1973 and ended on September 11 with the overthrow of Allende. While the imminence of the coup is palpable throughout, the tension is internal to the left sectors, between those who maintained faith in the institutions and those who favored arming the workers in defense of the UP. Allende opted for the former, a decision that would be much questioned in the decades after the coup. Soon, right-wing terrorism commences. Allende’s most loyal military leaders are assassinated, clearing the way for Pinochet and other golpistas to rise to command, followed soon by the coup and its immediate, violent consequences. This part ends with the stark announcement, filmed from a television screen, by Pinochet and the other junta members that they had taken charge of Chile and suspended democratic institutions. The third part, Popular Power (El poder popular), was finished several years after the first two. It concentrates on the varied efforts by “popular power”—mostly workers in support of Allende—to keep factories in operation despite the strikes and sabotage led by business sectors intent on undermining the government. When essential goods are hoarded with the intent to break supply chains, volunteers react with direct distribution that bypasses the striking transport companies. A central theme is the industrial belt, or “cordón industrial,” in which workers coordinate groups of factories to sustain production. This part celebrates the successes of popular power, with an insistent faith in the People as a revolutionary vanguard necessary to overcome the opposition from economic power and go beyond Allende’s reforms. The Compass Rose (La rosa de los vientos, 1983) is Guzmán’s sole feature-length fiction film. It was shot in Venezuela, mostly in mountainous landscapes of sublime beauty, but is unanimously considered flawed by critics. As Jorge Ruffinelli put it, the film “failed in its attempt to say everything…to encompass the history and condition itself of Latin America” (136). The film resorts to mythical allegory and never develops its characters in depth, leaving them as empty symbols while exalting the survival of indigenous peoples and cultures despite centuries of exploitation and genocide. Though The Compass Rose intrigues, it never overcomes the incoherence generated by its ambition. Guzmán then made a pair of films—separated by two series for Spanish television—that explored the role of the Catholic left in Latin America that coalesced under liberation theology after the Second Vatican Council (1963-1965) and the 1968 Medellín Conference of Latin American Bishops. Liberation theology calls for the interpretation of scripture from the viewpoint of the poor. Two noted practitioners, the brothers Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, succinctly explain its exegetical method: “The liberation theologian goes to the scriptures bearing the whole weight of the problems, sorrows, and hopes of the poor, seeking light and inspiration from the divine word” (32). This perspective on the scriptures does not end with interpretation, but necessarily leads to an obligation: “Liberation theology was born when faith confronted the injustice done to the poor…Underlying (it) is a prophetic and comradely commitment to the life, cause, and struggle of these millions of debased and marginalized human beings, a commitment to ending this historical-social iniquity” (3). The obligation, then, is not to offer charity or aid, but to take action for social change: “we can be followers of Jesus and true Christians only by making common cause with the poor…trade union struggles, battles for land and for the territories belonging to Amerindians, the fight for human rights and all other forms of commitment always pose the same question: What part is Christianity playing in motivating and carrying on the process of liberating the oppressed?” (7). The conclusion is that “the way out of this situation is revolution, understood as the transformation of the bases of the economic and social system” (27). Guzmán’s first film to deeply explore liberation theology in contact with reality is In the Name of God (En nombre de Dios, 1987), which centers on the Chilean Catholic Church during the dictatorship. Produced by Spanish Television (TVE), it was filmed clandestinely between March and May of 1986, when the filming was abruptly halted by the arrest of two members of the crew, seen in the film. The film documents three areas and the links between them. These are organized resistance in the streets, the views and actions of priests, and those of lay persons who resist the dictatorship. Guzmán, then, returns to the idea of popular power, but centers on the role of the Church in protecting and encouraging those courageous individuals in whose actions it resides. Such a role for representatives of the Catholic Church in Latin America may come as a surprise, since the most common idea of its politics is as a “junior partner to an empire-building group” (MacEoin), an institution, that is, that serves to morally sanction an order in which the privileges of the few take precedence over the good of the many, and by extension, legitimizes violence that maintains an unjust status quo. While this has certainly been the role of an important sector of the Church that tended to seek a synergy with 20th-century dictatorships, the institution has always had internal divisions. Unlike Argentina, where a conservative, obsessively anti-Communist Church hierarchy was closely allied with the military throughout the series of dictatorships between 1930 and 1983, in Chile the Church traditionally had no direct relationship to the military and practiced extensive social outreach among the poor and working classes (Ruderer 473). Though there had been some tension with the Allende government, any support for the coup by the clergy quickly evaporated in the face of the regime’s violence and clear intention to retain power. By 1976, except for the Military Vicariate, which was directly dependent on the armed forces, the Church hierarchy openly opposed the regime with not only words, but concrete action, denouncing its violence and aiding its opponents. The head of the Chilean Church, Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, was both outspoken and active in his opposition to the dictatorship from early on (Ruderer 474-475, 482). Silva Henríquez is interviewed in In the Name of God. A priest since 1938, he had long been dedicated to bettering the condition of the poor. He became a thorn in the side of the Pinochet regime starting with his insistence on visiting the prisoners concentrated in the National Stadium in the days after the coup, after which he formed the Pro-Peace Committee (Comité de Cooperación para la Paz), which openly published bulletins on torture and other human rights violations. When the regime forcibly shut it down, Silva Henríquez responded by forming the Solidarity Vicariate (Vicaría de la Solidaridad), which expanded on the work of the earlier organization by attempting to locate those detained by the regime and document their arrests. The massive archive compiled would later serve in prosecutions of human rights abuses. In the Name of God foregoes Guzmán’s usual voiceover to instead allow interviews with clergymen who subscribe to liberation theology to carry the informational load. Guzmán interviews several priests who live in impoverished communities on the periphery of Santiago and shows them risking their own safety to organize protests and defend participants by putting themselves between attacking police and relatively defenseless protestors. The priests are often tactful in their criticisms of the military, but their true feelings are only just beneath the surface. Father Ronaldo Muñoz, asked about the faith of those who make up the regime, doesn’t explicitly doubt their belief, but affirms that their God “is not our God, he is not the God of the poor, not the God who sees us all as his children, who puts the accent on sharing, on commitment to one another. He’s not that God. He is the God of security, of authority. He is a God conceived of as a kind of super-Pinochet of the universe. I don’t believe in that God.” When asked about the economic regime imposed by the dictatorship, Manuel Santos, Archbishop of Concepción, lays out the general position of these clergymen: “The unemployment that has been produced is a sign that the system is not in the service of man. For us that’s the important thing, that the economy, whichever form it takes, is in the service of man, and not the reverse, not man in the service of the economy. The same applies to politics.” These priests see the survival of a true faith as dependent on a responsive approach to the poor. Mariano Puga, a priest from an aristocratic family who devoted his life to marginalized communities, is shown organizing and officiating a wedding, after which he stakes out a doctrine: “Today people aren’t willing to go to the celebration of the God present in the life of a People. Why does this scare people? Because we speak about life, and to speak about life within a system that acts against life causes fear. For me the best sign of a living liturgy, a committed, historical liturgy with a God committed to the life of the poor, is that it causes fear. If it does not cause fear, it can be quite alienating and an opium. I would dare say that many liturgies of the Church are alienating, ahistorical, uncommitted and because of this I don’t think they are celebrating the God of Jesus Christ.” The wedding he organizes is shown as refreshingly unconventional in its responsiveness to the priorities of the poor. Immediately after Puga’s interview, the film cuts to a mass by the Military Vicariate in an ostentatious Church that serves the wealthy and the military, where we see Pinochet himself receiving moral support and legitimization. Such images, when coupled with the interviews with liberation theologists, make for a very powerful critique of the regime’s religious artifice. In another interview, Santos foresees the dilemma Chile would face in the decades after the return to democracy, that of a reconciliation based on forgetting and controlled democracy: “I think reconciliation is always possible, but we bishops have let it be known very clearly that there can be no Christian reconciliation unless it is based on truth and justice. If we wanted, as some Christians do, reconciliation to be simply a kind of peace, an agreement to cover things up…well that is simply not the peace of Christ. Our Lord says almost harshly in the Gospel that he came to bring war and not peace, in the sense that preaching should in fact produce divisions, and I think those divisions have been produced because some do not want to recognize the things that have happened. We’re willing to offer forgiving and peace, but only based on truth and justice.” Important words, but the film goes further, documenting the actions of several priests. Father Pierre Dubois places himself between carabineros and the inhabitants of a marginal neighborhood they are violently repressing. While filming the priest’s actions, the film also takes care to document carabinero tactics of teargas, water cannons and hands-on physical violence. This is followed by a meeting of relatives of the disappeared in which the women share home-made strategies for dealing with tear gas at protests, and in a very striking sequence, Ramiro Olivares, a surgeon who treats those injured by the police shows photographic evidence of wounds and explains in depth the police tactics that caused them. Olivares himself is later shown being arrested. The Sebastián Acevedo Movement Against Torture, led by Father José Aldunate, is also shown in action, and the film closes with an interview with Luisa Toledo, mother of two disappeared sons who were Christians and left militants. She reiterates the imperative that flows from a Christian social conscience to revolutionary activism, and attributes that imperative to Christ. Though a lesser-known film, In the Name of God is a landmark in Guzmán’s career, as it marks a turn toward the direction that would dominate his work for the next decades, with its use of testimony in memory work intended not only to bring the abuses of the military to national and international conscience, but also to reopen the possibility for social change that the dictatorship closed. After In the Name of God, Guzmán took on two series for TVE, Pre-Columbian Mexico (México precolombino, 1987) and The Enlightened Project of Carlos III (El proyecto ilustrado de Carlos III, 1988). The latter comprises four parts, each under an hour, that recount the life and works of Spain’s King Carlos III as enlightened despot. Each consists of an informative voiceover (not Guzmán’s voice) that narrates the life and accomplishments of the man, elegant tracking shots of figures in 18th-century dress and powdered wigs in historic palaces and gardens, and the backing of electronic versions of baroque music that combine very well with the constant movement of the camera. This form, used to communicate the theme of science used for the betterment of man’s condition through the modern state, makes for a viewing experience that is surprisingly engaging. An eloquent example is a long tracking shot in which a young Carlos strolls through the formal French-style gardens of the Palace of La Granja as the narrator observes that “here, he learned to observe how the gardeners transformed the landscape of the wild forest into an ordered and clean space.” A concise illustration of an early lesson that would point the way for this forward-looking proponent of the Enlightenment. In Part II Carlos returns to Spain after decades as the successful King of Naples, only to see his attempts at liberal reform frustrated at first by local resistance and the disastrous effects of the Seven-Years War, after which his efforts gain traction. Parts III and IV explore Carlos’ inspiration in nature and his related interest in the sciences, history, and architecture, along with the consequent devaluing of religious dogma in the management of the state. At one point the narrator affirms that “this man, who loved isolation and rejected palace etiquette, understood before others the importance of the environment for the wellbeing of the people. He understood that the only pure happiness was the happiness of all.” This series, though at first glance an outlier in Guzmán’s career for its theme, portrays Carlos III as a leader with a project to remake society on a progressive model, much as Allende would attempt two centuries later. The Southern Cross (La cruz del sur, 1991) was made just before the 500th anniversary of the first contact between Europeans and Americans. It explores popular religion throughout Latin America as a space of meeting of the two cultures and expands on the theme of In the Name of God by examining liberation theology not just in Chile, but in the “Patria Grande,” or Latin America as a whole. The film begins by fictionalizing historical scenes of conflictive European-American contact in striking landscapes all over the continent, then moves on to display a variety of popular religious practices. As the recreations flow between spaces and times as if, in the words of Julio García Espinosa, “Latin America were a single country” (qtd. in Ruffinelli 168), the viewer is left with a somewhat amorphous appreciation for the richness of religiosity in the Americas. Though the first third of the film is impressively elaborated, the lack of specificity often pulls the experience more in the direction of magic realism than documentary. It flashes forward and back between battle scenes of the first colonization and the present, finding indigenous rites that persist through the centuries and threading the Spanish conquistadores’ brutality through to today’s military who violently oppress indigenous populations. The film then shifts to interviews with practitioners of popular religions from diverse parts of Latin America—Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, Bahia in Brazil—on the role religion plays for them. The first hour of the film, then, is a deeply felt but somewhat formless mélange that only begins to offer clarifying explanations to the viewer, but as the film nears its end, concrete ideas that tie it all together come in interviews with well-known liberation theologists such as Mexico’s Sergio Méndez Arceo, the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Brazilian Leonardo Boff. The Brazilian Frei Betto sums up the political imperative: “All of us Christians are disciples of a political prisoner. Jesus didn’t die in the street, or of an illness in bed. Jesus was killed by a plot put together by the powerful groups of his time.” Set in opposition to these voices are the views of the military priests and the Vatican itself under Pope John Paul II, which, as the previous hour and a half has shown, appear on the side of power, against the interests of the poor, and tragically distanced from the teachings of the Gospels. The origin of Town on Edge (Pueblo en vilo, 1996) is a 1968 book of the same name written by historian Luis González about the town of San José de Gracia, in the Mexican state of Aguascalientes. San José is rural, conservative, and resolutely opposed the Revolutionary government during the Cristero Wars of the 1920s and the centralizing project that followed. A history of a town that stubbornly resisted the imposition of official national culture is, then, bound to remember that which Revolutionary regime suppressed. The Cristiada perspective is the foremost example of history with a regional, not national, scope, but there are also very local episodes recalled in fascinating detail by the townspeople, such as the visit by President Lázaro Cárdenas, the memory of which is overshadowed by that of the disappearance of “Joselón,” Mexico’s tallest man at over seven feet, who vanished from San José one afternoon with a traveling circus. Other memories include episodes of the Revolution itself, but Guzmán’s film is no mere faithful adaptation of the book. He interviews González himself, and the history of the town is extended three decades, to the present of the mid-1990s. The years since the publication of the book had been a time of major changes, especially in the areas of possibilities for women and in the permanent economic crisis that drives many local youths to emigrate to the U.S. After making Town on Edge, Guzmán’s interest shifted back to Chile, which, despite the end of the dictatorship after the 1988 referendum, had disappointed hopes for a reckoning with the crimes of the dictatorship. Upon leaving office, the regime had built anti-democratic controls into the political system that included the continuation of Pinochet as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces until 1998, his self-appointment as lifetime senator along with eight other senators, and binomial congressional elections that allowed the Pinochetist faction to retain permanent control over national politics (Delamaza 274-278). A societal consensus of national reconciliation incentivized forgetting and was enforced by performative acts of intimidation by the military (Stern 97). Before the political system could be democratized, the dictatorship’s crimes needed to be exposed and the perpetrators brought to justice. Guzmán’s next major films—Chile, Obstinate Memory (Chile, la memoria obstinada, 1997), The Pinochet Case (El caso Pinochet, 2001), and Salvador Allende (2004)—would center on testimony and thus play an important role in the struggle between memory and willful forgetting. At the time, the “memory question” was central to Chilean society, so Guzmán’s work took on national importance (Stern 166-167). His own memory appears for the first time in his body of work in Chile, Obstinate Memory, through his telling of the coup, arrest, exile, and the saving of the undeveloped rolls of film of The Battle of Chile. Chile, Obstinate Memory is a landmark in Guzmán’s career as the film in which he fully connects his and Chile’s pasts and presents. In his first work in Chile since the end of the dictatorship, he sets out to explore the generation that was too young to meaningfully remember the Popular Unity experiment and grew up atomized by the dictatorship’s internal propaganda. It masterfully uses provocation, in the cinéma-vérité sense, in which the filmmaker creates situations that provoke reactions that they then document. In Guzmán’s film, these situations involve two generations with radically different political experiences, one that had come of age during the Popular Unity struggle, and the other under the prohibition of open politics imposed by the dictatorship. This contact very effectively awakens memories that had been suppressed for over twenty years. The methods of provocation are varied. A band marches through downtown Santiago playing “Venceremos,” the Popular Unity hymn that hadn’t been heard in public since before the coup. Beyond the initial surprise shown by passersby, the reactions provoked are starkly opposed. On the part of those old enough to remember the song, some respond with outward disgust while others display gestures of solidarity, even shedding tears. In another example, a scene from The Battle of Chile in which Allende’s bodyguards walk alongside his car is recreated, though this time the president is conspicuous in his absence. But the power of film to provoke reactions is most evident, in terms of emotional power and changing minds, when Guzmán screens of The Battle of Chile for students who had never seen it. He brought a copy of the first two parts, which he shows to groups of young people, then initiates a post-screening discussion and films their reactions. Much footage from that film is reused here—re-signified by a quarter century of history—while newly shot footage is in color, setting up a clear then-and-now dynamic. The receptions are varied, some in favor of the coup, some repentant, others despondent at the lost opportunity for social change and the society-wide lack of memory, but all are emotionally charged. Guzmán then made the medium-length The Island of Robinson Crusoe (La isla de Robinson Crusoe, 1999) with a crew of two—he and his assistant, Álvaro Silva—and backing by the French television producer La Sept Arte. Guzmán’s subjectivity guides the film, making this basically a first-person documentary in which his presence is felt not only in his voiceover, but in the way his fear of flying and curiosity guide the direction of the film at every turn. Surprisingly atypical of the director’s work, The Island of Robinson Crusoe takes on less serious themes in a lighter, even humorous tone. Guzmán’s voiceover is uncharacteristically dry and comic as it tells of a voyage by the filmmaker from France to Santiago, then on to the island of the title, which is Chilean territory. Guzmán’s fear of flying is compounded by several factors, including the age and small size of the plane, the dangerous runway on the island, and the high winds predicted. Lucky for him, the flight is canceled, so he goes in search of evidence of “Crusoe” in Santiago. Further cancellations inspire Guzmán to travel to Valparaíso to seek a ship that might take him to the island, but the sea is too stormy. After visiting a fish museum and a bar where a man plays tangos on an accordion, Guzmán gives up and returns to Santiago, resigned to board a flight to the island. Once arrived, the island’s stark volcanic beauty is disconcerting, yet the few people who live there turn out to be admirable souls. Guzmán’s narration mixes fact with fiction, referring to the original castaway, Alexander Selkirk, as if he were Crusoe as he searches for his traces. He shares his impressions: “I am again thirteen years old and feel the nostalgia of the world just as we have dreamed it before getting to know it. A world of purity perhaps, something like the degree zero of civilization.” Guzmán finds the cave once inhabited by “Robinson,” and, seeing the world through childhood eyes, Chilean Navy ships become the Spanish Armada or pirates. Though Guzmán’s adventures on the island are nothing like those of Robinson, they are captivating. He hikes an isolated part of the island to the ruins of a cabin built by a German sailor shipwrecked during the First World War who was later cast from the island by locals who thought him a Nazi spy. Later, guided by “the Indiana Jones of the island,” he ascends by mule to Selkirk’s lookout on the highest point of the island. There, as Indiana tells the story of the Scottish castaway’s rescue, the end of the film comes far too soon at minute forty-three, but not before allowing its viewer to experience the profound intrigue of this island. By the time of the 2001 release of The Pinochet Case, conditions in Chile had changed enough to allow for scrutiny of the armed forces through exercises in historical memory. In large part this was due to the impact of the 1998 arrest and 16-month detention of Pinochet in London on what Steve Stern calls the “memory impasse,” in which the “cultural belief by a majority…in the moral urgency of justice, unfolded alongside political belief that Pinochet, the military, and their social base of supporters and sympathizers remained too strong for Chile to take logical ‘next steps’ along the road of truth and justice” (xxxi). Stern clarifies that this impasse was a result of tension between “hard” and “soft” power in which “democratic leaders of the Center-Left held much of the ‘soft power’ of public opinion and election votes; Pinochet and his sympathizers held much of the ‘hard power’ of institutions, force, and investment” (126). Guzmán’s films of this period played an important role as soft power in overcoming the memory impasse. As its title suggests, the film makes a case for Pinochet’s guilt to a spectator it sets up as juror. After an opening in which the Spanish judges and lawyers whose work resulted in Pinochet’s arrest for crimes against humanity are introduced and explain their justifications, family members of victims testify, telling stories that still shock. Yet here as elsewhere, Guzmán’s centering of human rights never leads him to neglect the wider political dimensions of the last half century in Chile, as he consistently underlines the lost opportunity for the progressive social changes that Allende was in the process of implementing and which were extinguished by the coup. Guzmán makes the point that these changes are still pending in a present of neoliberalism and economic injustice, and the first step toward their realization is the restoration of memory of the violence with which they were extinguished. The film takes pains to attribute this impasse to the continuity of the dictatorship’s institutions despite ten years of a “democracy” that can only be set between quotation marks. In an awkwardly revealing scene, Margaret Thatcher visits Pinochet in the mansion where he is under house arrest. A stilted, formal exchange of scripted pleasantries and recognitions of past political favors, such as Pinochet’s support of Britain during the war with Argentina, is managed through translators and recorded for posterity by a roomful of photographers. Though he is eventually released from London custody by a political decision justified by doctors who attest to his infirmity, their evaluation is shown to be false when Pinochet disembarks from his plane in Santiago, rises from his wheelchair and walks to cheerily greet the officers who welcome him. The prosecution has been stopped, but Guzmán persists after the dictator’s return to Chile, where the arrest has already dissipated his aura of invincibility and shaken the memory impasse. As street demonstrations publicly shame the torturers, legal investigations of torture sites are carried out by Judge Juan Guzmán, who would soon initiate a series of cases against Pinochet, stripping him of his parliamentary immunity as self-appointed lifetime senator and eventually holding him under house arrest. By this point in his career, especially with In the Name of God, Chile, Obstinate Memory and The Pinochet Case, Guzmán’s work had become a high-profile space for victims of the dictatorship to make themselves heard and to restore the memory that had been suppressed by the process that began on September 11, 1973. This would continue with his next film. Salvador Allende documents the material traces of the socialist president, among which are his broken glasses and a long-covered graffiti on a wall. Guzmán’s voiceover justifies this project by affirming that “power cultivates forgetting, but behind the layer of amnesia that covers the country, memory emerges and remembrances vibrate to the surface.” The film tells the story of Allende’s intellectual and ethical formation, his life and political career. Unlike neighboring countries, in Chile the left did not form armed revolutionary movements, and instead Allende patiently constructed a popular movement that democratically elected him. Guzmán is not afraid to critique Allende’s presidency. Interviews mention possible mistakes, like his lack of control over the military and especially his failure to arm supporters, but the filmmaker’s allegiance eventually wins out. As he says, “Salvador Allende loved life and life loved him. With that life in mind, let’s keep acting, thinking, and inventing a future. The past is never past.” Guzmán’s eye is on human rights, yet as always, he looks beyond, toward future social change. My Jules Verne (Mon Jules Verne, 2005) is a French production that makes an insightfully simple connection between the popular author’s extraordinary fictional voyages and the explorations, scientific knowledge, and technologies they inspired, which are documented in the film through interviews and archival footage. The first account is Guzmán’s own autobiography, in which he tells of his childhood literary education (in the voice of Jacques Bidou), then the film pairs each of six novels with a single explorer, documents their adventures, and interviews them on their inspiration in Verne’s work. Beautiful, inventive imagery of nature superimposed with drawn images illustrates the interviews. The explorers include a hot-air balloonist, an astronaut, an astrophysicist, a speleologist, a deep-sea diver and an explorer of the Antarctic. They give accounts of their own youthful dreams, sourced from the impossible knowledge and prodigious imagination of Verne, and the resulting obsessions that guided them, but the film does not stop there. Specialists display a Verne manuscript, describe his working methods in detail, and discuss the sources of his scientific knowledge. On a 21st-century Earth that has become much smaller, with its entire surface photographed, self-indulgent billionaire tourists in space and at the bottom of the sea, what role is left for the imagination? Jean-Luc Courcoult, the artistic director of Royal de Luxe theater company, creator of giant marionettes inspired by Verne, responds: “Imagination is a need like oxygen, like breathing” and says of his own creations that “it’s beautiful to make machines that serve no other purpose than to make one dream.” My Jules Verne is a refreshing exploration of the place of literature in a century in which reading fiction is increasingly relegated as economically unproductive. Its importance is demonstrated not only by the accomplishments of these men and women of the arts and sciences, but by Guzmán’s own oeuvre. At this point in his career Guzmán was a prominent documentary maker, known well beyond Chile, though in limited circles. He decided to return again to the theme of Chile and, with a much larger production budget, in his next three films explored the country’s three main geographic regions—the Atacama Desert, the Pacific Ocean, and the Andes Mountains—in an elemental key, using as material metaphors first calcium, then water, then rock. He employs varied scales, from the microscopic to the interstellar, links them through a filmic poetics of the graphic match, and “alternates between the small detail that unfolds in time and the unfathomable vastness enfolding in time, carrying an event forward and backward in a string of possible and impossible connections across space and time” (Couret 70). Yet Guzmán keeps his feet on the ground, so to speak, persisting in his questioning on the whereabouts of those disappeared by the Pinochet regime, whose violence he links to earlier extermination campaigns carried out against the Selk’nam people of southern Chile. These episodes become part of a single offensive rooted in an extractivist worldview that appears even more shortsighted when seen from the geologic time and interstellar scale cultivated by these three films. Guzmán turns away from his 1970s reliance on film’s index-based credibility—“this existed, this happened”—with the use of digital manipulation to introduce a new, interstellar perspective from which to mount an ethical critique that points out the senselessness of humanity’s mistreatment of humans and their planet. The perspective strives for consonance with indigenous ways of relating to the earth, in formulating a manifesto of eco-centric wellbeing that denounces a Western epistemology that links knowledge to extraction, exploitation and violence and persists from Spanish colonization through British neocolonialism to the U.S.-backed imposition of neoliberalism by way of the Pinochet dictatorship. Nostalgia for the Light The first part of the trilogy, Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz, 2010), begins with the power of early scale-shifting technology. Through an antique telescope we see the moon, which evokes a nostalgic vision of Guzmán’s childhood. His voiceover here is more poetic, yet as always it leads back to the political: “Science fell in love with the sky of Chile. A group of astronomers discovered that you could touch the stars with your hand in the Atacama Desert. Wrapped in star dust, scientists from all over the world constructed the largest telescopes on Earth here. Later, a coup swept away democracy, dreams and science.” In the trilogy, beauty is always political, illuminating the more immediate pasts of the dictatorship and the genocidal 19th-century modernizing project through plays of scale that shuttle us back and forth as bird’s-eye shots from outer space are matched with microphotographic close-ups. But the links are not exhausted by scale. Here an element ties everything together: calcium, produced in the Big Bang and found in the bones of the disappeared and in the stars. Although the powerful in Chile might prefer to imagine they inhabit the best of all possible worlds, a neoliberal present they will themselves to see as natural and unproblematically prosperous, Guzmán questions this by accompanying explorers of various layers of the past: the astral (the noise of the big bang heard by astronomers), the indigenous (rupestrian carvings studied by an archaeologist), the 19th century (exploited workers studied by the historian) and the dictatorship (those who draw the concentration camps from memory, the women condemned to wander the desert in search of the bones of their loved ones). The latter is the most urgent, so the film moves on from the other explorations to concentrate on the women’s testimony. The play of elements and scales provides consolation for one victim of the dictatorship, an astronomer and daughter of disappeared, as she eloquently explains: “Astronomy…gives another dimension to absence, to loss. To think that everything comes from a cycle that didn’t start nor will end in me nor in my parents nor my children, but rather that we are all part of a current of energy or of material that is recycled, like what happens with the stars. The stars have to die so that other stars can appear, planets can appear, life can appear, and in that play, what happened to them, their absence, takes on another dimension, another meaning, and it frees me a little too from this pain and deep sorrow of feeling that when things are over, they’re over.” This description also aptly describes the workings of the trilogy. The Pearl Button In The Pearl Button (2015), Guzmán again complicates conventional epistemology through the graphic match, producing unthought connections between apparently distant times and scales—a button, the moon, drops of water, round rocks—thus pointing to the limits of Western ways of knowing and instead opening the doors of perception to a multitude of associations, many of them troubling. Among these, the timeliest are the little-known genocide of the Selk’nam in the 19th century and the disappeared under the dictatorship, both of which directly indict the Chilean economic establishment. Guzmán connects apparently disparate images and sounds with the most absolute sincerity, such as when he takes very earnestly a man who sings the sounds he hears in a river by matching images of rushing water to his song. To put it another way, the film is less a documentary than a film essay. The poetic logic of the editing is matched by a voiceover that, instead of seeking credibility and providing exposition in order to orient the viewer toward a stable reality posited by the film, privileges a more poetic logic, one in which resonances and rhymes form connections across generations and scales that defamiliarize our gaze on reality and such notions as modernity and progress, long employed to devalue the ways of the indigenous and justify genocide. While the film undoubtedly makes its viewer think in new ways about seemingly intractable problems, a filmic poetics based on the graphic match can never be more than a step away from mysticism, and at times—such as in the interplanetary ending—The Pearl Button verges on just that. Some critics have expressed reservations, such as Paul Merchant’s cautionary note that in the film’s “desire to tell neglected histories through an engagement with indigenous cosmologies…There is a risk that a renewed understanding of how power relations are ecologically articulated might be gained at the expense of converting indigenous experience into cinematic spectacle” (210). Merchant goes on to note in The Pearl Button a “reassertion of hierarchical relations” (224), in which, particularly in the use of voiceover, “to a significant extent, Guzmán adheres to epistemic conventions of documentary under which a disembodied, white, male narrator acts as the organizer and interpreter of the material” (223). I would counter that it is overstated to force Guzmán’s subjective narration of these films into the maligned category of the disembodied white male, given his own identity, life experience and long defense of the victims of dictatorial violence. I would argue that it is precisely Guzmán’s voiceover, and the ethos it brings to bear, that prevents the trilogy from falling into New Age mysticism. The Cordillera of Dreams (La cordillera de los sueños, 2019) begins with Guzmán’s melancholic voiceover expressing alienation upon returning to Chile. He asks himself if the dictatorship managed to eliminate the innocent optimism of the country he grew up in, but it is clear from the tone of his own voice that he too has changed. Since early in his career, Guzmán’s voiceover has been an immediately recognizable signature of many of his films, and its shift from a more objective to a subjective and elegiac tone is gradual but clear. In The Battle of Chile his voice is calm, somewhat neutral and objective, though his position relative to the coup shows through at moments. In Guzmán’s following films—as the dictatorship dragged on, followed by a limited democracy and a slow process of justice that has yet to produce deep social change—the calmly reasoning voiceover is marked by an indignance that increasingly combines with melancholy as it provides political insight authorized by his years of experience. In the trilogy, the autobiography of an audibly older Guzmán subjectivizes the images with a tone that ranges from wonder and hope to melancholy and sorrow. Where in The Pearl Button it was the sea that Chile had ignored, here it is the Andes. Though fascinated with the mountain range, Guzmán states that it “is not revolutionary.” He wants to instead use the mountains to understand the enigma of today’s Chile. An example is how the film transitions through a cinematic sleight-of-hand from theme to theme. Images of the Andes turn to a series of old matchboxes with a drawing of the mountains on them, which evokes Guzmán’s childhood, so he goes to visit his old neighborhood, where a drone shot looks down upon the otherwise inaccessible ruins of his childhood home. Then to the home where he lived until the coup, which brings up the dictatorship, stories of which are told by Guzmán over images of the mountain range, impassive witness to the cruelty of those who took control of the country and who continue to benefit from the economic model installed, and a population disciplined, by force. Among all this artifice the trilogy returns, perhaps unsurprisingly, to indexicality and the importance of documentation. A central character is Pablo Salas, who devoted himself to filming actions of resistance and police violence during the dictatorship, building up an archive that shows the true face of the regime despite the propaganda. Combat-ready soldiers invade working-class neighborhoods and carabineros violently repress peaceful protestors in Salas’ archive, for which he risked his own safety innumerable times. His footage results in the film’s most gripping moments, forming a stark contrast with Guzmán’s more contemplative footage. To resolve this contrast, a juxtaposition of police violence with closeups of shattered rock, imbuing the latter with a rarely seen poetic power. The film turns to the perverse nature of the system of private property in Chile, discussing the ownership, often foreign, of immense tracts, nearly all of the most profitable and most beautiful lands in the country. It is in the economic model imposed by the dictatorship that Guzmán resolves the opening enigma. The neoliberalism imposed by the Chicago Boys sold off the country of his youth, altered the worldview of its people, atomized all sense of community, sacrificed innocence on the altar of consumerism. Guzmán closes with a wish upon a falling star, “that Chile may recover its infancy and happiness.” With his most recent film, My Imaginary Country (Mi país imaginario, 2022), Guzmán returned to his early reportage style to document Chile’s recent social uprising. The film opens in his late-period style, as stones are observed lying in the streets, but soon protests break out, met by repression identical to that seen decades earlier in In the Name of God. The film is about Chile’s present, but also about the failure, during the thirty years since the return of democracy, to replace the 1980 Constitution and substantially alter the direction of the country set by the dictatorship, including the unrestrained violence of the carabineros. The neoliberal economic system persists after all these years, with inequalities sharpening and discontent brewing until the uprising documented in the film explodes in October of 2019 with a student protest over a subway fare increase. Guzmán passes the torch by interviewing inspired and inspiring young women—mothers, medics, photographers, journalists—who were on the front line of the protests. With police violence, the importance of indexicality returns. The photographer speaks of the importance of photographic evidence of police violence and the resulting direction of violence toward those using cameras during the protests. My Imaginary Country By the film’s end, the country votes in a Constituent Assembly, but before the film was finished, after an intense and well-funded campaign against the new progressive Constitution, it failed to win approval. In hindsight, this failure seems announced by a seeming lassitude in the last interviews and in Guzmán’s melancholic, weary voiceover that seems to betray a flagging of his faith in popular power to sustain a movement long enough to bring about long-term change. When he states, late in the film, “I’m beginning to glimpse a new imaginary country,” he sounds more wishful than confident. The drafting of a second version, dominated by politically conservative sectors, would also fail in a December 2023 vote, but the Constitutional process stalled. The story of Chile’s fifty-year struggle with the legacy of the coup, told on film by Guzmán better than any other, continues. Filmography: Long Live Liberty (Viva la Libertad) (1965) The Adventures of a Chilean, Wicker and Clay (Las andanzas de un chileno, mimbre y greda) (1966) Electro Show (Chile, 1966) Folk Crafts (Artesanía popular) (1966) Gestures for Listening (Gestos para escuchar) (co-directed with Enrique Álvarez and Romualdo Molina (1967) A Hundred Meters to Charlot (Cien metros para Charlot) (1967) Notes on Torture and Other Forms of Dialogue (Apuntes sobre la Tortura y otras formas de diálogo) (1968) Imposibrante (Spain, 1968) Orthopedic Heaven (El Paraíso ortopédico) (1969) Opus 6 (1969) Chile: Municipal Elections (Chile: elecciones municipales) (1971) The First Year (El primer año) (1972) The October Response (La Respuesta de octubre) (1972) The Battle of Chile I: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (La Batalla de Chile I: La insurrección de la burguesía) (1975) The Battle of Chile II: The Coup d’État (La Batalla de Chile II: El golpe de estado) (1976) The Battle of Chile III: Popular Power (La Batalla de Chile III: El poder popular) (1979) The Compass Rose (La rosa de los vientos) (1983) In the Name of God (En nombre de Dios) (1987) Pre-Columbian Mexico (México precolombino) (1987) The Enlightened Project of Carlos III (El proyecto ilustrado de Carlos III) (1988) The Southern Cross (La Cruz del Sur) (1992) Town on Edge (Pueblo en vilo) (1995) Chile, Obstinate Memory (Chile, la memoria obstinada) (1997) The Island of Robinson Crusoe (La Isla de Robinson Crusoe) (1999) Invocation (Invocación) (2000) The Pinochet Case (El caso Pinochet) (2001) Madrid (2002) Salvador Allende (2004) My Jules Verne (Mon Jules Verne) (2005) Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz) (2010) The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar) (2015) The Cordillera of Dreams (La Cordillera de los sueños) (2019) My Imaginary Country (Mi país imaginario) (2022) Bibliography: Boff, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff. Introducing Liberation Theology. Trans. Paul Burns. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2000. Couret, Nilo. “Scale as Nostalgic Form: Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2011).” Discourse 39.1 (Winter 2017): 67-91. Delamaza, Gustavo. “La disputa por la participación en la democracia elitista chilena.” Latin American Research Review 45 (2010): 274-297. MacEoin, Gary. “Chile’s Silent Church.” Commonweal (July 18, 1975) n. pag. Merchant, Paul. “‘Collecting What the Sea Gives Back’: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 41. 2 (2022): 209–226. Ruderer, Stephan. “Between Religion and Politics: The Military Clergy During the Late Twentieth-Century Dictatorships in Argentina and Chile.” Journal of Latin American Studies 47.3 (August 2015): 463-489. Ruffinelli, Jorge. El cine de Patricio Guzmán: En busca de las imágenes verdaderas. Santiago de Chile: Uqbar Editores, 2008. Stern, Steve. Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.
