The Atacama Desert is, though, also the site of a high-tech observatory, and Nostalgia for the Light includes interviews with scientists who ponder the mysteries of the universe, as though light speed or the fact that calcium is the common substance of stars and skeletons really mattered at all when set against the story of how the bones of the coup’s victims came to be strewn in the sand. Women restlessly search in a scattered group for the remains of the disappeared the site of a miners’ camp that was turned into a concentration camp bears the weathered traces of its former inhabitants. It revisits the Chilean desert, but whereas in The Battle of Chile the barren landscape is the productive home of heavy industry, in Nostalgia for the Light it is an eerie territory of loss and apotropaic obsession. ![]() Guzmán’s latest reflection on the coup’s aftermath, Nostalgia for the Light, is arguably-though not obviously-a much more ambiguous and despairing work. The students’ pain and tears are signs of defiance the hurt is hopeful. Killing a family because it doesn’t think like you.” Chile, Obstinate Memory contrasts these young faces awakened by anguish with the boisterous marching band’s impassive witnesses in so doing, the film raises the problem of how the recent past can become secret even to its own participants. “I feel proud of my people,” says one, “even though we failed.” Sobbing, another says, “I don’t understand how men can be so barbaric. Some simply cannot speak for grief those that do acknowledge despite their distress what the film lets them understand. How much this impairment of consciousness costs is suggested in the overwhelming last section of Chile, Obstinate Memory in which students respond to The Battle of Chile, having just seen it for the first time. The citizens’ lack of expression may derive from sheer ignorance, collusion, fear, apathy, but it is here that a disorder of memory and knowledge is to be found, not in the counter-chronology of The Battle of Chile. What Chile, Obstinate Memory makes clear is that the coup was a phenomenon of psychic repression as well as physical brutality. It is fascinating to watch the bystanders: a middle-aged man applauds, another raises a fist in solidarity, but so many faces are blank. (The filmmaker, currently based in Paris, has lived in exile since 1973.) He assembled a marching band that for the first time in twenty-three years plays the anthem in the center of Santiago. “We Shall Triumph” returns in Chile, Obstinate Memory, which Guzmán filmed in 1997 during a long-delayed return visit to Chile. History is not finished what has disappeared can reappear, even if the tortured and killed must stay in their graves. Thus The Battle of Chile stays true to what the coup savaged, which is not a denial of history-what occurred has already been horrifyingly recorded in the film-but rather a refusal to accept that the violence of the coup is conclusive. The last image is a freeze frame that protests, by failing to arrive at, what the previous parts show happened next. The film concludes with pipes slowly playing “We Shall Triumph,” the anthem of Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, as the camera zooms out from an image of a saltpeter mine in the desert. But the third part, The Power of the People, turns back the clock to the brief time when popular socialism started to flourish in Chile. The first parts, The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie and The Coup d’État, document the downfall of Allende’s government after a relentless Establishment campaign of obstruction, subversion, assassination, and clampdown. Guzmán’s three-part masterpiece, The Battle of Chile (1975–78), does something similar. Thanks to Corina Poore for expert interpreting.)Īt the end of Salvador Allende, Guzmán’s 2004 portrait of his country’s president from 1970 to 1973, there is haunting black-and-white footage of the poet Gonzalo Millán enunciating a revisionary dream of time’s undoing: “Bullets fly out of flesh, / Balls return to their cannons, / Officers put away their pistols / … Concentration camps become empty, / The disappeared reappear, / The dead rise from their graves.” These words both commemorate and repudiate the Pinochet coup during which Allende killed himself. ROB WHITE spoke to Chilean director Patricio Guzmán about his most recent documentary, Nostalgia for the Light, in London, February 2, 2012.
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