September 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the other 9/11: The coup d’etat that overthrew democratically-elected Socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973. The event arguably had a more devastating effect on Chile than the terrorist attacks 28 years later did on the United States.
The camera of award-winning filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, who was born in Santiago in 1941, bears witness to Allende’s election, the bloody US-backed coup by the fascistic General Augusto Pinochet, and a dictatorship that ruthlessly crushed dissent until the 1990 return of democracy and, remarkably, the rise of another leftist government with echoes of Allende in 2022.
Beginning on Sept. 8, to commemorate the half century anniversary of the Chilean coup, Icarus Films and Cinema Tropical screened a retrospective of Guzmán’s oeuvre, entitled “Dreaming of Utopia: 50 Years of Revolutionary Hope and Memory,” at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, and at the IFC Center in New York City, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York. The one-week theatrical runs included new 2k restorations of Guzmán’s “The First Year” and “The Battle of Chile,” and special screenings of his recent films, all of which are all in Spanish with English subtitles. Icarus Films is also releasing the series for rental through its website (www.icarusfilms.com/other/filmmaker/guz.html).
Here’s a rundown of the six Guzmán documentaries in the retrospective.
Patricio Guzmán’s first full-length film documents the first year of the presidency of Salvador Allende in 1970. The election set off a torrent of events, from a steep drop in Chile’s stock market to Indigenous Mapuche, who’d been confined to reservations, occupying land. Chile’s Popular Unity government nationalized industries, including copper; launched social programs, such as meals for school children and agrarian reform; and cut unemployment in half. In a clever film sequence, voters cast paper ballots as Johann Strauss’s waltz, The Blue Danube, plays on the soundtrack—call it “democracy’s dance.” A highlight of the film is Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s official 23-day state visit to Chile, where he meets with Allende and attends mass rallies.
The “Battle of Algiers,” Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 classic account of the struggle for Algeria’s independence. Algiers is renowned for its documentary-style realism, although it is actually a scripted, narrative movie. Ironically, “The Battle of Chile,” which is indeed a real documentary composed entirely of black and white film shot by Guzmán’s risk-taking Equipo Tercer Año crew, was influenced by this fictional feature.
The tireless, intrepid filmmakers had remarkable access, from the ordinary man/woman-in-the-street to government officials, all the way up to the president himself—with glimpses here and there of the dreaded coup plotter Pinochet, lurking in the background. The 97-minute Part I is entitled “The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie” (1975); 88-minute Part II is “The Coup d’Etat” (1976); and 78-minute Part III is “The Power of the People” (1979). The new DVD version has a re-recorded Spanish language narration spoken by the now 82-year-old Guzmán himself, asserting in press notes: “narrating the images that oneself has filmed allows one to recapture the energy of the past moment.”
By covering strikes, demonstrations, speeches, legislative debates, factory and land occupations, tanks in the streets, and protests—including, remarkably, the shooting death of a newsreel cameraman who films his own murder—Guzmán’s analytical triptych imparts a vivid sense of the stormy sweep of Chile’s tumultuous history, as democracy’s fate hangs in the balance. As a form of workers’ self-rule develops, the emerging socialist trend is on a collision course with what the film’s militants call “a bourgeois capitalist state where the means of oppression are still in the hands of the bourgeoisie.” The stage has been set for Pinochet’s Sept. 11, 1973, aerial assault on La Moneda, the presidential palace, where the outgunned Allende valiantly holds out with a handful of civilian supporters. “Battle”’s footage was smuggled out of Chile by the filmmakers—except for Director of Photography Jorge Müller Silva, who was arrested and “disappeared,” and to whom the film is dedicated.
Even when stargazing at observatories, Guzmán remains obsessed with Pinochet’s butchery, which is “engraved in my soul,” as the director confesses in the narration he voices. Among some of Earth’s largest telescopes in Chile’s isolated Atacama Desert, Guzmán—who loved science fiction and astronomy in his youth—captures glimpses of the cosmos, revealing in glorious color the spectacular splendors of the solar system and beyond. Nostalgia also muses about Atacama’s Indigenous people, whose ancient petroglyphs still speak to those who view them.
Yet Guzmán is so fixated on the traumatizing impact of the coup that his vision remains earthbound. In the vast expanse of the desert, women related to victims who have been “disappeared” sift through the sands, searching for the remains of their long-lost loved ones, who may have been among the vanished disposed of in the desert. The intercutting between astronomical sensations and the angst of mothers, sisters, and daughters who are on a quest to find relatives slaughtered by the overthrow makes for a cerebral, unique ninety-minute documentary rumination that takes viewers from here to eternity.
In this movie meditation suffused with poetic imagery, the coup-haunted Guzmán cogitates on the cosmos, reflects on water’s attributes, and draws parallels between the fates of Patagonia’s Indigenous people and Pinochet’s Chilean captives. Through presumably 19th-century sketches and black and white photos we see southern Chile’s Native people, who are mostly nude, except for their body paintings. The “Patagonia Indians,” as they’re called onscreen, are “water nomads” intrepidly traversing islands in canoes, living off the water and land—until the arrival of Europeans.
In 1830, English Captain Robert FitzRoy took Jemmy Button from Patagonia to England in exchange for a mother-of-pearl button (hence the Yaghan Native’s Anglicized moniker) aboard the H.M.S. Beagle (the ship which subsequently carried Charles Darwin). According to Guzmán’s 82-minute film, Button traveled “from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution” and upon returning home, was “never the same man again.” The cartography from FitzRoy’s voyage enabled settlers, gold prospectors, missionaries, and others to descend upon Patagonia, wiping out the Native population. Some were confined at an internment camp on Dawson Island; barely 20 direct descendants of the Indigenous Kawésqar are alive today.
Among his many reforms, Allende had returned land to Patagonia’s Indigenous peoples—until Pinochet’s bloody insurrection put an end to that and so much more. The dictatorship would send many high-ranking members of Allende’s government (including diplomat Orlando Letelier, who was subsequently released and later assassinated in Washington, D.C.) to a concentration camp at Dawson Island.
Nominated for France’s Best Documentary César Award, “The Pearl Button” relates how other Pinochet political prisoners were disposed of by dropping them from helicopters or planes into the ocean, often tied to heavy train track rails, so they’d sink. “There’s no limit to their cruelty,” comments poet Raul Zurita in the film. Decades later, following Pinochet’s ironfisted rule, the rails were retrieved from the ocean depths. Of course, the human remains are long gone, but underwater sea life, including shells, are attached to the rails—including a pearl button from a liquidated victim’s shirt, embedded onto the metal. Guzmán, who narrates, links Jemmy Button to the documentary’s titular button: “Both buttons tell the same story; a story of extermination.” The narrator adds: “Patagonia’s Indians believed souls didn’t die, they lived in the stars,” and as he speaks, beautiful images of the universe lyrically appear.
Using the Andes mountains as a metaphorical background, the exiled Chilean director returns home after almost fifty years abroad to explore the homeland he had fled, creating an 84-minute documentary that combines the intensely personal and the political. To do so, Guzmán interviews Chilean artists, including fellow filmmaker Pablo Salas, who Guzmán says in his narration, “was marked by the same utopia … but I fled and Pablo stayed.”
Somehow, Salas managed to film the ensuing terrors of security forces rounding up and imprisoning dissidents (including Guzmán) in a stadium turned into a “concentration camp,” and went on to shoot street fighting, as protesters are teargassed and sprayed by water cannons, then tossed into paddy wagons and billy clubbed—including, remarkably, demonstrators singing Beethoven’s Ode To Joy.
Guzmán asserts: “Pablo’s archives are a fragile treasure, but an extraordinary one . . . witnesses of a page of Chilean history [which] it is impossible to erase.”
After General Pinochet stepped down in 1990, Salas is outraged that subsequent regimes “never issued a mea culpa, didn’t acknowledge” the devastation wrought by the coup and dictatorship.
The pro-privatization “Chicago school” of neoliberal economics comes in for especially harsh criticism in Guzmán’s narration: “The Chicago model was the most radical formula that existed at the time. In a country with no freedom, they were given total freedom to implement their ideas. They are still proud today that Chile was the first country to apply them.”
Returning to his theme of the mountains, Guzmán—who, like many Chileans, was traumatized by the 1973 coup d’état—ponders his “isolation” and “loneliness” as an exile. In the Andes, fragments of meteorites can be found, and Guzmán remembers his mother telling him during his childhood that upon seeing meteors fall to Earth, one can make a wish that comes true if you keep it a secret. “But I want to say it out loud,” the adult Guzmán insists. “My wish is that Chile recovers its childhood and joy”—things it seems that this documentarian without a country lost long ago.
In his next film, a massive outpouring of 1,200,000 Chileans flood a Santiago plaza to protest. And what ignites this “social explosion”? A 30-peso increase in the price of subway fares in October 2019. Narrating this film, Guzmán says he never thought he’d see scenes again in Chile similar to what he’d witnessed about 50 years earlier. But this time, he films street fighters fiercely facing off against police and military in vivid color.
The massive demonstrations force the moribund Chilean congress to set the stage for a new constituent assembly, when nearly 80% of voters cast their ballots for an opportunity to write a new, post-dictatorship constitution. The constituent assembly’s president is a Mapuche woman, Elisa Loncón, who wears Indigenous attire and is the highest ranking Native woman in the country’s history.
Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former leader of student protests from Patagonia, and co-founder of the leftwing Social Convergence party, is elected president in 2022, defeating the far-right candidate by more than 4,600,000 votes. Narrating this 83-minute documentary, a revived Guzmán gushes: “Today, there is new hope. I like to think that the dream is finally happening and that the country we imagined will become a reality … I am beginning to see a new imaginary country.”
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2023
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