Guest post by David Fresko.
Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries, above all his three-part epic The Battle of Chile (released between 1975 and 1979), have solidified his position as one of the great political filmmakers of his generation. Born in 1941, Guzmán was initially trained as a fiction filmmaker during the late 1960s in his home country of Chile as well as Spain. He turned to documentary filmmaking after encountering not only the energetic commingling of fact and fiction in the work of French New Wave filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Louis Malle, but also the real-life drama unfolding in Chile upon his return in 1971, when rightist forces inside and outside of the government were fighting President Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected socialist regime at the polls and in the streets. As Guzmán describes his cinematic transformation, “you would be sitting in a café, working on a script, and all of a sudden a group of picketing workers with red flags would pass by… How could you not film all that? Why distance oneself from that reality?” The resulting film, The Battle of Chile, was a “living” documentary of the tumultuous social and political upheaval tearing the nation apart, one born of Guzmán and his teams’ sympathies to the socialist cause and participation in the cataclysmic events as they unfolded.
The Battle of Chile, which the film magazine Cinéaste has hailed as one of the greatest political films of all time, is comprised of three parts: “The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie,” “The Coup D’état,” and “The Power of the People.” As the opening credits roll, audiences hear the sounds of the Chilean military’s fighter jets assaulting the presidential palace, thrusting audiences immediately into the country’s drama, a civil war that would touch every citizen’s social experience and result in the CIA-backed installation of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Exploiting the techniques of Direct Cinema, a documentary movement predicated on the use of light-weight camera and sound recording technologies, Guzmán and his crew generate an aesthetic of reality featuring grainy, handheld, black and white images and sound recorded directly on the scene to produce a weighty sense of objectivity. One feels the excitement—and danger—of history unfolding before one’s eyes, above all in a notorious sequence in which camera operator Leonardo Henrichsen photographs his killer pulling the trigger that will take his life.
This excitement thus extends beyond the screen to encompass The Battle of Chile’s very production, which was a drama international in scope. Shot clandestinely with canisters of film hidden after each day’s shooting (and never in the same place), Guzmán was targeted by right-wing authorities after the coup. When the police ransacked his apartment and then imprisoned him, however, they did not even realize he was a filmmaker, so successful were the team’s efforts at masking their intentions. It was only after fleeing Chile for France in 1973 and then eventually relocating to Cuba that Guzmán was able to complete the film with resources provided by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (known as ICAIC) as well as Chris Marker, the enigmatic polymath and mixed media artist.
The final film is more than a straight recitation of historical events. Rather, Guzmán’s editing weaves together a vast array of actions, occurrences, and issues in the form of protests, electioneering, behind-the-scenes exposés of individual citizens and media institutions as well as the speeches, debates, interviews, and discussions that animated Chile’s body politic. In this way, the film is demanding. But what it does is stimulate in audiences the need to consider the real, existing political ramifications of Chile’s experiment with socialism and the recalcitrance of U.S.-backed structures of economic and political power determined to perpetuate class inequity and exploitation. Yet far from the dry, analytical or overly theoretical postures that characterize many radical documentaries of the period, The Battle of Chile succeeds in compelling spectators to adopt a critical, participatory position vis-à-vis the events on-screen and thereby extends its excitement into the auditorium.
Participatory spectatorship is the cornerstone of Guzmán’s aesthetic and reinforces his belief, succinctly summarized in the title of part 3 – “The Power of the People” – that worker and community self-empowerment functions as history’s motor. And the politics underlining this type of spectatorship is anything but sectarian, but rather evinces an open pluralism. “The Battle of Chile,” claimed Guzmán “is pluralist and not dedicated to any particular militant group; only to the Chilean dream (the struggle of an unarmed people), the utopia of a people in its broadest perspective, which I could see with my eyes and feel with my body in that vibrant Chile with which I identified, and still identify today.” In fact, when Guzmán’s style, his organization of images and sounds, invites audiences to partake of The Battle of Chile’s cinematic and political actualization, he and his film open horizons of experience that compel us to consider the themes that further animate his work, namely, memory, and thus our subjective relationship to history.
The IU Cinema’s retrospective of Guzmán’s cinema includes three subsequent films characterized by lyrical beauty and a subjective, if not poetic, approach. Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) finds the filmmaker returning to the country of his origin towing a print of The Battle of Chile with him. For though the film had screened across the globe, receiving numerous awards in the process, it had never been shown in Chile itself. In so doing, Guzmán hoped to revitalize the “utopian dream” of socialism that had been forbidden from the public consciousness in addition to the violent realities produced by Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
In Nostalgia for the Light (2010) (which the IU Cinema will be screening in must-see 35mm), Guzmán juxtaposes astronomers at work in Chile’s observatories, which happen to be adjacent to both pre-Colombian mummies as well as the political prisoners killed by Pinochet’s forces. And with The Pearl Button (2015), Guzmán shows that the very terrain we inhabit on land and sea “speaks” to us across the multiple, superimposed filters that mediate or sense of time and life. Guzmán collapses the near and the far, the universal and the particular, and the celestial with the terrestrial in order, ultimately, to probe reality metaphysically and thus ask not only who we are, but how we participate in the world-making necessary to support who we want to be. “Revolution and repression, hope and memory,” wrote the Argentine-Chilean-American novelist Ariel Dorfman, “[what] Guzmán passionately and clinically observes in Chile is valid for the whole world.”
The Films of Patricio Guzmán: Everything is Memory series runs April 11 – 14, 2017. Screenings will take place at IU Cinema and the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive Screening Room.
David Fresko is the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Documentary Research and Practice at Indiana University, Bloomington. He was Visiting Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School in 2015-2016, and received his Ph.D. in Art & Art History from Stanford University in 2015.