In many ways, Patricio Guzman has been making the same movie for more than 35 years. At least his films are all haunted by the same moment, the same rupture, in the same place: Chile, September 11, 1973. That was the day the army (aided by the United States acting behind the scenes) staged a coup d’état, ousting the elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and establishing the dictatorial reign of General Augusto Pinochet. The new right-wing junta declared that Allende had committed suicide by shooting himself with a rifle. But, like the “disappearance” of an estimated 17,000 people under Pinchot’s rule, this official story was generally assumed to be a lie, with the real truth suppressed. Such secrecy made the terror in Chile more frightful and difficult to shake.Guzman’s works, often discussed but, with the exception of a few recent titles, seldom seen, have been brought together in the eight-DVD set “Five Films by Patricio Guzman,” released by Icarus Films. The main attraction is “The Battle of Chile” (1976–79), the work with which Guzman began his career as a documentarian and which overshadows the rest of his corpus. Broken up into three parts — “The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie,” “The Coup d’État,” and “Popular Power” — the film traces, with unbridled urgency, the revolution taking place in the streets, from bus strikes to protests, against the background of government talks. The camera weaves in and out of crowds, those behind it cornering people, shoving a microphone in their faces to ask their opinion on what’s happening, taking the country’s political temperature.Taken as a whole, “The Battle of Chile” remains a dangerous, even shocking work. The first-person documentation of what is happening — infused with desperation because the filmmakers cannot be sure they will be there the next day — is embedded in a sprawling narrative that explodes in every direction. We see a cameraman get shot, still a striking image in an age of hyperviolence; another cameraman, Jorge Muller, to whom the film was dedicated, was arrested and quickly “disappeared.” The late French director Chris Marker had to help out with film stock when the crew ran out and was unable to procure more. And when the movie was completed, the makers had to smuggle themselves and the cans of film out of the country.Guzman returns often to this moment in history. It poses an unanswerable question to which he nevertheless continues to search for answers with his camera. His career can be split in two unequal parts, which could be termed the event and the memory. “The Battle of Chile” trilogy pertains to the event, a jittery, real-time document of what happened. The rest of his oeuvre is concerned with what people choose to remember about what happened, how they deal with the trauma, and how silence has damaged the country as much as the original coup.“The Pinochet Case” (2001), included in the set, is a more traditional documentary, a mode that Guzman settled into later in life. Calmer, more condensed, more ruminative than the cinema-vérité “Battle of Chile,” it follows the case against Pinochet after his arrest for human rights violations in 1998. In “Chile, Obstinate Memory” (1997), Guzman returns to his native country to show “The Battle of Chile” to kids who were too young to understand what was happening when it was made and have never seen what Guzman’s camera captured. “Salvador Allende” (2004) is Guzman’s attempt to craft a portrait of Chile’s famous leader that has never existed, to bring sound to the silence that surrounds his legacy.Even “Nostalgia for the Light” (2011), ostensibly a documentary about Guzman’s connection to astrology, archeology, and the Atacama Desert, becomes, after not much time, a film about what lies under the soil — namely, the bodies of many of the “disappeared,” which are still being found. Like much of his other work, it is concerned with what and how we remember, and the struggle to never forget.But if all Guzman’s works are anchored in the one seminal historical event, that is not to say that he just repeats himself, following in his own footsteps. His movies are about the search for answers, about filmmaking as a way to respond to trauma, as a tool of remembrance and meditation and political action. As long as he continues to make films, we’ll never forget what happened.
↧