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History and Memory in Neoliberal Chile: Patricio Guzman's Obstinate Memory and The Battle of Chile
Abstract
Radical History Review 85 (2003) 272-281
In 1973, September 11 also fell on a Tuesday and, in Santiago de Chile, produced a tragic act of international terrorism. The Chilean military, with support from the U.S. government, brought down the democratically elected socialist Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, UP) government of Salvador Allende (1970-73) and initiated one of Latin America's longest and bloodiest dictatorships. In another striking coincidence, the terrorism of September 11, 1973, involved planes; fighter jets belonging to the Chilean air force bombarded the presidential palace (La Moneda), leaving this symbol of Chilean democracy in flames.
Extraordinary scenes of the assault on La Moneda open Patricio Guzmán's recent documentary, Memoria obstinada (Obstinate memory, 1997), as they began his award-winning three-part documentary of the Allende years, La batalla de Chile (The battle of Chile, 1975, 1976, 1978). Memoria obstinada then jumps to the present, as Guzmán and his crew go on a tour of the presidential palace in the mid-1990s. Included with the crew is a former member of Allende's presidential guard, who recounts his experiences of the 1973 coup, including being shot in the attack on the presidential palace and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Subsequently, a number of the other members of the guard who survived the coup look at photos of the attack on La Moneda and identify the fate of their comrades who appear in the images held at gunpoint by soldiers: most are dead or disappeared.
During first the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90) and then the governments of the center-left Concertación de los Partidos por la Democracia (Coalition of Parties for Democracy, 1990-present), which includes Allende's Socialist Party, La batalla de Chile was not shown in Chile. Even after the lifting of military censorship during the transition to democracy, Guzmán could not find a distributor willing to show his films. In Memoria obstinada, Guzmán returns to the country after years of exile to show his film to groups of students and to interview people who had participated in making La batalla de Chile or who had appeared in the footage of the revolutionary process. The censoring of La batalla de Chile stands in for the problem of memory and repression. After almost two decades of military rule, how do the participants in the making of the documentary remember the events it documented? What is the relationship between contemporary recollections of events and the documentary images in La batalla de Chile, between memory and history? How, in a context in which both the military and the democratic opposition seem to have colluded in producing amnesia as a condition for democratization, does memory remain obstinate? Or, does it? Is the claim to history asserted by personal memory a condition for producing change in the present? How can a generation born and raised under military rule remember and record the Chilean road to socialism, as Allende called it, and the devastating state terrorism of the military regime?
In Memoria obstinada, Guzmán explores these questions through interviews that focus on individual memories. He talks to the member of Allende's guard about his experiences during and after September 11, recalls his own detention in Chile's Estadio Nacional (National Stadium), and interviews friends and family members of La batalla de Chile's cinematographer, Jorge Müller Silva, who with his compañera, Carmen Bueno Cifuentes, remains among the thousands disappeared by the Pinochet regime. A fellow filmmaker makes the important point that Müller Silva's disappearance was strategically aimed at producing terror among the circles of people who worked in film and, more...
... La Comisión Funa has "made memory a political and public process by organising protests, publicly unmasking human rights violators living in impunity, and initiating numerous judicial processes and investigations that have led to the discovery of clandestine mass graves and the trials of a significant number of military officers in recent years". 64 Their approach confronts a broader audience with memories of the past as funa demonstrations have their own unique impact through "reaching of indifferent or even hostile publics who would be most unlikely to approach or acknowledge a fixed site or static memorial". 65 People who may not be sympathetic to the issue of human rights violations are then actively confronted with narratives of survivors or relatives of victims. ...
This chapter investigates how tensions in social memory of the Pinochet regime have resulted in the pursuit of “vigilante” initiatives for preserving and transmitting memory about the dictatorship, advancing “justice” in their own way in the absence of sufficient institutional acknowledgement (not least through accountability) for the harms suffered that in many cases continue to have present-day consequences.
En este artículo se analiza la representación de las mujeres en películas documentales que relatan la dictadura de Pinochet. Se han analizado más de trescientas películas realizadas entre 1973 y 2019 para configurar un retrato fílmico de la mujer chilena. Para ello hemos considerado su papel social, cultural y político durante el régimen militar, para así evaluar cómo los personajes y testimonios han cambiado a lo largo de los años, lo que significa que la representación histórica en documentales y la memoria filmica son volátiles, acorde al momento en que son rodadas las películas. Como una poderosa fuerza cambio, las mujeres han tenido una función esencial en la Historia Contemporánea, por lo que un estudio cinematográfico de ellas durante la dictadura en Chile entre 1973 y 1990 es crucial para entender su trascendencia histórica.
In the 40 years since Chile and the United Kingdom became the crucibles of neoliberalization, working-class agency has been transformed, its institutions systematically dismantled and its politics, after the continuity neoliberalism of both the UK Blair government and the Chilean Concertación, in a crisis of legitimacy. In the process, memories of struggle have been captured within narratives of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – the present, past and future collapsed into Walter Benjamin’s ‘empty homogeneous time’. This article explores ways in which two traumatic moments of working-class struggle have been narrativized by the media in the service of this ‘presentism’: the 1973 coup in Chile and the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in the United Kingdom. We argue that the use of ‘living history’ or bottom-up approaches to memory provides an urgently needed recovery of disruptive narratives of class identity and offers a way of reclaiming alternative futures from the grip of reductive economic nationalism.
Este artículo indaga en las transiciones entre escalas como estrategia artística durante el período dictatorial y postdictatorial en Chile. Se presenta el documental Nostalgia de la luz (2010), de Patricio Guzmán, y el trabajo del Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (1979-1985) como estrategias de replanteamiento tanto de las posibilidades de la imaginación política como de la agencia política del arte a través de los efectos escalares y las bifurcaciones que inscriben en el relato lineal histórico. A partir de esos saltos entre espacios y tiempos, y entre actores humanos y no humanos (abordados desde las consideraciones de Anna McCarthy, Manuel de Landa, Neil Smith y Timothy Clark), argumentaremos que el «desmayo de la representación» efectuado por la dictadura (rastreado por Alberto Moreiras, Nelly Richard y Willy Thayer) resuena en esos experimentos escalares que, en una trama más amplia, llegan hasta el reciente estallido social en Chile y el plebiscito de 2020.
In this dissertation, I analyze the relationship between extractive capitalism and ecological crisis in a series of novels and documentary films from contemporary Latin America. Focusing on novels such as Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004), Lina Meruane’s Fruta Podrida (2007), Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de Rescate (2014), Juan Cárdenas’ El diablo de las provincias (2017), and documentary films such as Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (2010) and El botón de nácar (2015), I show how an uncontrolled wave of resource extraction, also known as neo-extractivism, unfolded in Latin American countries during the authoritarian and neoliberal governments that followed the revolutionary struggles of the Sixties and Seventies, and provoked reforms that led to the systemic privatization of nature and labor through political and economic violence. Drawing on a Marxist critique of capitalist ecologies and ecocriticism, this dissertation makes three key claims. First, I argue that resource extraction is the other side of the free-market economy, in that by forcibly separating resources and goods from their environment, particularly in indigenous territories and borderlands, it makes them available as commodities to be traded. Second, I contend that the violence of neo-extractivism provokes a crisis in the aesthetic representation of the landscape and its project to organize social and natural relations, which leads to narratives of environmental catastrophe that contradict ideas of progress and development. Finally, I show that due to Latin America’s role as a source of exports in the world-system, the region’s artistic production not only reveals the intimate relation between extractivism and neoliberalism, but also allows us to visualize the symbolic articulations that emerge from the fracture between human and non-human nature in the peripheries of global capital.
Con una filmografía compuesta por más de una veintena de películas que se extienden a lo largo de más de cincuenta años, Patricio Guzmán es uno de los principales exponentes de la generación del Nuevo Cine Chileno que todavía sigue en activo. Su dedicación casi exclusiva al cine documental, plantea a través de una multitud de trabajos distintos acercamientos al Chile de Salvador Allende que amplían y ponen en cuestión los hechos recogidos en la historia oficial. La hipótesis de partida del presente artículo presenta la idea de cómo si bien toda la obra de Guzmán está basada en similares preceptos ideológicos, el paso del tiempo y el cambio de las circunstancias bajo las que nace su cine provocan una depuración de las formas y los estilos cinematográficos empleados en los films que realiza con posterioridad a la caída del gobierno de Unidad Popular. De esta forma, la obra del cineasta chileno sustituye la espontaneidad documental por una reflexividad mediada, la cual adquiere un componente poético bañado por la nostalgia de un pasado irrecuperable que abandona la innovación formal para buscar una contención en la imagen que además de transmitir el mensaje permite constituir un placer estético.
This article proposes a new mode of understanding the entanglement of ecological and postcolonial questions in contemporary Chilean filmmaking, through the lens of directorial subjectivity. Both Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017), and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán, 2015) contest hegemonic structures of belonging by constructing an alternative ‘oceanic archive’. Yet where Guzmán's metaphorical meditations on indigenous connections to the ocean risk collapsing into romanticism and replicating colonial visuality, Panizza's reflexive conception of filmmaking as a situated and embodied practice facilitates a subtler understanding of cinema's political engagement in this sphere.
Focusing on two documentary films by Patricio Guzmán, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) and, especially, Nostalgia of the Light (2010), this paper examines some of the relations between neoliberal violence (during and after the Pinochet dictatorship), memory, knowledge and emotionality, both historical and personal. It does so by reading and reviewing the actions, narratives and experiences of a group of astronomers, archaeologists and geologists who work in the Atacama desert of northern Chile and a group of women who search for the remains of their loved ones, victims of political violence, in the same desert within the shifting contexts of cinematic spectatorship. Attentive to the possibilities and pitfalls of empathic identifications and connections, it also considers the ethical and political implications of the interplay of cinema (Guzmán), photography (Paula Allen) and poetry, sky writing and "land art" (Raúl Zurita).
In 1996, exiled Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán returned to his home country for the first time in 23 years. In his suitcase, he carefully packed copies of his internationally renowned three-part documentary, La Batalla de Chile (The Battle for Chile), in the hope of showing it in Chile for the very first time. This essay focuses not on La Batalla de Chile, although the film plays a central role throughout, but rather on the profound historiographical implications of the film Guzmán created as a chronicle of his return visit: Chile, Memoria Obstinada (Chile, Obstinate Memory; hereafter referred to as Memoria Obstinada). Made six years after Chile’s official transition from dictatorship to democratic governance and halfway between Chile’s first and second truth commissions, Memoria Obstinada is a complex film that reflects on the role of the past in the present. It is about the interplay between individual and collective memory and the dangers of forgetting, or never knowing in the first place. Writing in the wake of the fortieth anniversary of the 1973 coup about a film made in 1996, I am primarily interested in exploring the following questions: what tactics does Guzmán employ in order to intervene in national consciousness and memory during Chile’s post-transition period; how does the film process, negotiate, and map memory; and, finally, how might a close reading of this documentary film allow us to think about the possibilities the materiality of memory offers as a historiographical strategy?
In a section called "Some Social Dos and Don'ts," the Lonely Planet tour guide for Argentina warns tourists that the recent dictatorship is among the "sensitive subjects to avoid in conversation with Argentines (at least until you know them better)."1 The entry presents the authoritarian repression in Latin America's recent past as contested terrain locally and a tourist taboo. It also recognizes the curiosity of international tourists about that past and their desire to explore it in their journeys in the region. The guidebooks published by Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Moon, Frommer's, and Fodor's have responded to that demand by offering descriptions of some of the sites of atrocity in Latin America.2 In some cases, it is the sites themselves that provide overviews, tour information, and relate visitors' experiences, on official websites and in print publications. Visitors' travel blogs provide further exposure for such sites and the experiences they offer to tourists. So despite the taboo on tourism to them, the sites of authoritarian regime repression and of the resistance to repression nevertheless form part of the tourist experience in Latin America.
On 14 February 1992, in the context of relentless insurgent attacks and car bombings, the Maoist group known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) declared an armed strike in Lima, the capital city of Peru. María Elena Moyano, a prominent Afro-Peruvian community leader, decided that the time had come to openly challenge Sendero. The group had initiated a "prolonged popular war" against the Peruvian state in 1980, and its tactics included attacking leaders of Peru's democratic Left, which it viewed as an obstacle to the revolutionary conquest of power in Peru. Since 1991, Sendero Luminoso had been gaining ground in Villa El Salvador, the popular district on the southern outskirts of Lima where Moyano lived and worked, and where she was serving her first term as deputy mayor.
On the evening of 14 July 1992, an unprecedented event took place on Brazilian television: the premiere of the first serial drama ever to portray the political violence and repression that took place under the military regime. Airing on the Globo television network, the miniseries Anos Rebeldes (Rebel Years) transported an estimated thirty million viewers back to the authoritarian period through the fictional story of a group of high school friends who come of age during the most repressive phase of the dictatorship and whose fates become enmeshed with the political and cultural upheavals of the era. 1 The plot revolved around two star-crossed lovers: João, a student activist whose youthful idealism eventually leads him to join the armed struggle, and Maria Lúcia, an individualist with little patience for political crusades. Not only did the drama feature a member of the resistance as its romantic lead, it also explored subjects rarely discussed before on the small screen, particularly torture and censorship.
On1 September 1973, a political earthquake rocked Chile, a country shaped over the eons by quakes of a more geological nature. From the shaken earth and architecture of the September coup, the strongman General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte emerged. But Pinochet, who until 1973 had been a non-actor on the national public stage, and practically unknown to the majority of Chileans, did not produce the coup: he was produced by it. The General emerged from the vacuum of power engendered by the coup, with the media serving as his principal scaffold. A closeknit group of media advisors, against whom Pinochet would rebel once in power, designed the coup's communications strategy and stage-managed the overall mise-en-scène. In 1973, the principal forms of media - radio, television, and the printed press - gave corporality to his image, projection to his voice, and relevance to his words, generating a body for the dictator, upon which post-coup law would be constituted.1 After the coup, Pinochet led the longest government in the country's history (1973-89), known both for its neoliberal economic model and for its massive human rights violations whereby thousands were killed, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, or "disappeared.".
Thursday afternoon at the Plaza de Mayo, the Madres hold their weekly march, and several members attend to a stand around which a crowd gathers to buy products - ranging from books to key rings. On a sunny Sunday morning, tourists explore the street market of San Telmo, where an artist sells his photographs; one photograph portrays tango dancers, several others project the "memory theme" of the Madres' marches. Monday night after a performance of the Teatro X la Identidad (a project developed by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo), the public buys T-shirts outside of a downtown theater. On a windy Saturday afternoon, under the highway that replaced Club Atlético, a center for torture and extermination, dozens of people attend the inauguration of a new "espacio para la memoria," and activists from h.i.j.o.s. (Hijos Por la Identidad y la Justicia Contra el Olvido y el Silencio) concurrently sell T-shirts and calendars. The list goes on.
In 2001, shortly after the Parque de la Memoria was inaugurated on the banks of the Río de la Plata, a new advertising campaign was launched by Los Platitos, a popular restaurant located directly across the street from the park. Recognizing that the public memorial had the potential to draw more visitors to the northern section of the costanera river walkway, the restaurant owners distributed flyers that exhorted potential customers to remember its location. While several of the park's overseers found such a tactic distasteful, many family members of the disappeared were enchanted with the flyers, believing such publicity would help draw visitors to the park itself. The tension between those who believed a space for remembering past horror should not be associated with a marketing campaign, and those who believed such a space might benefit from the free advertising, illuminates some of the inherent and perhaps irresolvable contradictions involved in the "marketing" of memory. Given that the creation of any public memorial space can never remain ideologically pure - outside of market forces - does the influence of external factors that shape any memorial inevitably taint the honorable impulse to remember? Put simply, what is the role of profane market forces in a sacred memorial space?.
Although the 2 October 1968 massacre in Mexico City's Tlatelolco Plaza is a well-established historical fact,1 there was never a proper trial of its perpetrators. Three decades went by before the state allowed scholars to partially explore archives related to those events. Almost another ten years passed before the Memorial del 68 finally opened its doors, allowing belated recognition of the student movement's importance. The massacre still does not appear in Mexican textbooks.
A través de dos películas de Patricio Guzmán, Chile, la memoria obstinada; (1997) y Nostalgia de la luz (2010), se examinan algunas de las relaciones en Chile entre la violencia neoliberal (dictatorial y postdictorial), la memoria, el saber y la emotividad, en su doble vertiente histórica y personal. Junto a las historias y experiencias de un grupo de astrónomos, arqueólogos, geólogos y mujeres que buscan los restos de sus seres queridos en el desierto de Atacama, también se realiza una meditación sobre las posibilidades y limitaciones del quehacer cinematográfico en relación con la fotografía y la escritura “celeste” y “terrestre”.
This chapter describes how certain civil society groupings in Chile have recently – since around the late 1990s – turned their attention to the reclaiming of public or private spaces to use for commemoration of the individuals or causes targeted by past repression. These groups, now varied in composition, origins and purposes, initially included both ‘traditional’ human rights and political activists plus new associations formed in the aftermath of the 1998 Pinochet arrest to pursue renewed justice for victims of human rights violations committed by Chile’s 1973-1990 military dictatorship.
Although often motivated to take up memorialisation activity by the desire to find a field of direct, unmediated action, relatives’ and survivors’ groups quickly found themselves driven to engage with state authorities. The need to negotiate permission, ownership and resources to transform sites has led in some sense to a ‘re-professionalisation’ of the commemorative impulse. An increasing official insistence on state-run and adjudicated public licitations for major site projects has replaced an early, more ad hoc system whereby sympathetic individuals within the state apparatus would find ways to support or finance campaigners’ own projects. This has resulted in a certain loss of protagonism by relatives’ and survivors’ groups, and is accordingly resented by some. Nonetheless, there are signs of a largely unintended but possibly welcome consequence in the increasing – although still embryonic – ‘mainstreaming’ of commemorative discourse and activity as a legitimate, and indeed a necessary, activity for the state to engage in.
Análisis del modo como La memoria obstinada de Patricio Guzmán, trataba de desbloquear la memoria social de la violencia construyendo un documental que hiciera dialogar el discurso de los supervivientes con elementos del archivo y con imágenes del pasado. Se expone cómo, a través de sutiles operaciones discursivas, el documental trata de traer al presente una experiencia de la represión que buena parte de la sociedad trataba de situar en el pasado.The author deals with the place of witness and testimonies in the Guzmán´s documentary La memoria obstinada. It places the Guzman´s film in the early transition context, where survivors had not the public centrality that they have today. The author analizes how the film tries to bring to the present an experience of repression wich has been set in the past.
Dissertation The aim of this investigation is to study the various cinematic and rhetorical strategies that Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán uses to construct a complex image of the postdictatorial Chilean society. By analyzing three of his documentaries from the late 1990s and early 2000s (Chile, Obstinate Memory; The Pinochet Case and Island of Robinson Crusoe), I argue that Guzmán's cinematic images expose the challenges of constructing a collective memory of the 1973 coup in Chile and its aftermath. In an attempt to interrogate the social, political and economic dynamics of the Chilean transition to democracy that began in the year 1990, Guzmán's documentaries also explore the consequences of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1989) in the present. The historical conjuncture of postdictatorial Chile is connected to at least three geopolitical phenomenons: the Post-Cold War international arena formed after the dissolution of existent socialist regimes, the advent of neoliberalism as a transnational economic paradigm, and the struggle for global human rights. The documentaries of Patricio Guzmán are poetic responses to each of these geopolitical phenomenons that affect the constitution of the Chilean present.
Shooting Revolutions with Chile's Patricio Guzmán, " interview with Patricio Guzmán, IndieWire
- Andrea Meyer
Andrea Meyer, " Shooting Revolutions with Chile's Patricio Guzmán, " interview with Patricio
Guzmán, IndieWire, available at
www.indiewire.com/film/interviews/int_Guzman_Patricio_980921.html.
Sin memoria no hay futuro
- Patricio Guzmán
Patricio Guzmán, " Sin memoria no hay futuro, " Conexión Santiago, May 1998, available at
www.conexionsantiago.com/cine/98/mayo/acguzman.html
For discussions of collective memory, see De la memoria suelta a la memoria emblematica: Hacia el recordar y el olvidar como proceso historico (Chile La memoria y sus significados
- Maurice Halbwachs
- On Collective Memory Steve
- J Stern
- Pedro Milos
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
For discussions of collective memory, see Steve J. Stern, " De la memoria suelta a la memoria
emblematica: Hacia el recordar y el olvidar como proceso historico (Chile, 1973–1998) " and
Pedro Milos, " La memoria y sus significados, " both in Mario Garcés et al., eds., Memoria
para un nuevo siglo: Chile, miradas a la segunda mitad del siglo XX (Santiago de Chile:
Ediciones LOM, 2000), 11–33 and 43–50.
Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives); and Daniel James, Doña María's Story: Life History
- Carolyn Kay On
- Steedman
On women, gender, and memory, see Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good
Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); and
Daniel James, Doña María's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2001).