El Conde [2023]

 In Pablo Larraín’s grisly, hyperbolic, farcical and pungently satirical horror-comedy El Conde, the despotic former Chilean dictator is both literally and metaphorically a hideously decrepit, blood-sucking and heart-chomping vampire. Made as a zany overlap between German expressionism, bawdy humour and political absurdism – and deliberately as an exercise in lowbrow grotesquerie to mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1973 coup – the film recalled two thematic tropes that’ve recurred in the filmmaker’s splendid oeuvre, viz. memories from the military dictatorship years (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No) and unconventional stabs at biopics (Neruda, Jackie, Spencer). This oddball mix of aesthetic experimentation and narrative flippancy sees Pinochet – a French royalist who’d fought against the dissidents during the French Revolution, and finally fulfilled his lust of royal grandeur by illegally grabbing power in Chile – living a banished, ignominious existence since being kicked out of power, with his scheming wife Lucia (Catalina Guerra), and Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), his macabre White Russian butler who loved exterminating Communists. When his conniving kids get a hint of Pinochet’s suicidal tendencies – ironically, he’s more pissed at being called a thief than a murderer – they descend like a pack of vultures to seize his ill-gotten wealth. Meanwhile, a saucy Catholic nun straight out of a lurid Verhoeven slasher (Paula Luchsinger), in the guise of an accountant, arrives to track his dirty money trail and thereafter exorcize him. Shot in deliciously high-contrast B/W, filled with droll set-pieces, and imbued with a gothic and wintry atmosphere recalling earlier Scandinavian cinema, the freakish power struggle is dryly narrated – as it hilariously turns out – by the hawkish former British PM Margaret Thatcher, who isn’t just a fellow blood-sucking vampire but Pinochet’s borderline-incestuous mother too.

Director: Pablo Larrain

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Horror

Language: Spanich/English

Country: Chile

My Imaginary Country [2022]

 Who could’ve imagined that an increase in Santiago’s metro fare by 30 pesos in October 2019 would spark such a massive social outburst that it’d eventually lead to the drafting of a new constitution and election of an avowedly leftist leader for the first time since Allende. That fare increase was essentially the final straw that brought millions to the streets to protest against societal malaise and neo-liberal policies of post-Pinochet governments – under-funded education, housing and healthcare; lack of employment and fair wages; perpetuation of patriarchy and sexual violence; under-representation of women and indigenous people in the government; disproportionate power of the police and military – which they did despite lack of a centralized leadership, and in stunning defiance of the violence unleashed by the authorities. This transformative event – captured by Guzmán in his pulsating, politically urgent, eloquently persuasive and powerful reportage My Imaginary Country – therefore, signified the coming of full circle for Chile, and its most impassioned and outstanding documentarian for around 50 years. Two fascinating choices made this, respectively, an essential work and a scintillating watch – viz. its stirring feminist voice, as all its talking heads – activists, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, medics, cultural collectives, etc. – were avowedly progressive women; and, alongside riveting B/W images and “live” street footage, Guzmán made thrilling use of drones wherein two sequences especially stood out – an armoured vehicle spraying teargas on demonstrators while coasting through an avenue, and throbbing crowds packing Santiago’s Plaza Italia. In an ironic touch, Estadio Nacional, which’d once served as a detention, torture and execution centre upon the 1973 military coup – the filmmaker had himself been imprisoned in it – was the venue for the 2020 plebiscite for a new constitution.

Director: Patricio Guzman

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History

Language: Spanish

Country: Chile

The Pinochet Case [2001]

 Like his haunting homecoming essay Chile, Obstinate Memory – which powerfully foregrounded the theme of political memory and amnesia that would profoundly inform his filmography thereon – Patricio Guzmán’s The Pinochet Case too served as a coda to his monumental documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile. This brilliant and harrowing docu dispassionately articulated the belated addressal of Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Allende’s socialist government in 1973 and establishment of military dictatorship, which Guzmán had recorded in his electrifying opus. Pinochet, despite “relinquishing” his presidency in 1990, had retained military powers till his retirement when he appointed himself “senator-for-life”, lived with state-conferred privileges, and holidayed regularly in London, thanks to the preposterous 1978 Amnesty Law through which the army had absolved itself. However, Madrid-based prosecutor Carlos Castresana – a tireless advocate of international justice who’d witnessed the outrageous clemency accorded to Franco in Spain – had tenaciously built a case over 2 years on Pinochet’s crimes against humanity, which judge Baltasar Garzón upheld and the Scotland Yard enforced by putting Pinochet under house arrest in 1998. Using that as hinge, it solemnly covered two interconnected strands – the sensational political discourse that ensued in the UK which stripped him of his diplomatic impunity while also stalling tangible punishments; and poignant first-hand witnesses of tortures, rapes and disappearances that Pinochet’s enforcers had meted out to left-wing dissenters and activists, which Guzmán would expand upon in his masterful ‘Chile Trilogy’. Despite support from odious right-wing apologists and his triumphant return to Chile 1 ½ years later, Pinochet finally found his immunity stripped there too by judge Juan Guzmán. Its indelible parting shot, showing the unveiling of an Allende statue in Santiago, emphasized the ironic circle of life.

Director: Patricio Guzman

Genre: Documentary/Political History

Language: Spanish/English

Country: Chile

Salvador Allende [2004]

 It’s truly ironic that Chile – which perhaps had the longest run at democracy, among all Latin American countries, over the 20^th century – experienced its most egalitarian, inclusive, pluralistic and progressive President as its last elected head of state, before it too succumbed to the horrors of repressive, right-wing dictatorship. That Allende was a life-long Marxist, socialist and revolutionary – albeit, one who preferred the electoral route as opposed to armed rebellion – and emphatically anti-imperialist too, arguably hastened the demise of his life and Presidency. And yet, despite the short-lived tenure, he helped the working-class, peasants, leftist activists and intellectuals dream of a utopia and even briefly experience the euphoria of one, before it was violently destroyed from within and without. Guzmán formally marked the culmination of his 3 decades’ exile with this disquieting, elegiac and multifaceted look into the life and times of the revered gentleman politician who was enormously loved by the people, while disparaged by the bourgeoisie, reactionaries and the US government. The film – which was as an integral companion piece to the director’s landmark Battle of Chile, and reflective of his deep admiration for the man – covered Allende and the coup along multiple lines. We get to know about his political journey, personal facets and final moments from his daughters and friends; we hear about his legacy, audacious agrarian reforms and nationalizations, virulent oppositions he encountered and what perhaps he ought to have done differently, from former Popular Unity militants; we unequivocally learn about the American government’s noxious involvement from Edward Korry, the then US Ambassador to Chile; and these were juxtaposed with priceless documentary footage, and accompanied by an affective score and Guzmán’s wry, mournful voiceover.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Patricio Guzman

Genre: Documentary/Biopic

Language: Spanish/English

Country: Chile

Chile, Obstinate Memory [1997]

 Guzmán marked his profoundly complex homecoming, after 23 years in exile, with Chile, Obstinate Memory. Made as a loosely connected sequel to his seminal documentary Battle of Chile – which, unsurprisingly, was banned by Pinochet’s right-wing dictatorship, but surprisingly continued to remain unscreened even after that – this was a haunting, disquieting, disarmingly powerful, eloquently observed, understated and unforgettable mix of the personal and the political; from that perspective, it presaged his recent essay film The Cordillera of Dreams, the stunning final chapter in his devastating Chile Trilogy which also comprised of Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button. Memory – individual and collective – and the associated acts of forgetting and remembering were its pivotal themes. Akin to how he’d smuggled his landmark docu out of Chile – where he’d chronicled the brief but rousing Popular Unity period under Allende, and the violent coup d'état by fascist forces – he secretly brought it back for privately screening it to people belonging to two contrasting generations. He got in touch with those from his own generation – old friends, lost acquaintances, relatives, repressed intellectuals, family members of former political activists, those who experienced the coup and Allende’s final moments first-hand, and those who featured in his famous earlier work and thereafter helped him in getting it out – who’d witnessed the destruction of the dream and the traumatic aftermath in the form of extrajudicial deaths, mass detentions – Guzmán himself faced that in Estadio Nacional – forced disappearances and years of disillusionment. And, alongside that, he also showed it to university students – who’ve lived under censorship and propaganda, and thus unaware of their history – and the outpouring of suppressed emotions that it evokes was deeply revelatory and moving.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Patricio Guzman

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Diary Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Chile

The Battle of Chile [1975, 1976, 1979]

 Patricio Guzmán’s monumental documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile – moulded with electrifying vitality, revolutionary fervor and political conscience – represents the pinnacle of street filmmaking, advocacy journalism and fearless dissidence. However, its thrilling prescience is what set it apart because, instead of the usual practice of looking back, Guzmán recorded Chilean history in action – the romantic apotheosis of non-violent socialist revolution heralded by Allende’s Marxist presidency, brief realization of working-class dreams, reactionary subversions, people’s resistance and the devastating nadir upon the US-backed coup that put Pinochet’s fascist military junta in power – by heroically shooting for over a year from mid-1972 till the fateful day on 11^th September 1973, with a team of fellow left-wing activists and using film stock gifted by Chris Marker. The brilliant, sardonically titled first chapter, The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie, covered the conservative, capitalist class’ putrid opposition to Allende’s progressive Popular Unity government and ended with an Argentinian photojournalist’s murder captured by his own camera during a short-lived putsch. The masterful middle chapter, Coup D'état, chronicled the chilling opposition – orchestrated by right-wing politicians, industrialists, military bosses, paramilitary hoodlums and the CIA – that, despite massive popular surges, ended with La Moneda’s bombing and Allende’s murder. And, in the elegiac coda, The Power of the People, the focus shifted to the proletariat workers, farmers, students and activists who believed in Allende even if they didn’t always agree with him, and made valiant efforts to keep the collective dream alive. Guzmán smuggled the unedited reels to Europe and somehow escaped himself too, but cameraman Jorge Müller – responsible for the film’s grainy, exhilarating vérité imagery – and his girlfriend Carmen Bueno unfortunately couldn’t avert the macabre fate that befell upon countless leftists.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Patricio Guzman

Genre: Documentary/Political Journalism

Language: Spanish

Country: Chile

Night Across the Street [2012]

 Awash in nostalgia and filled with splashes of surrealism, Raúl Ruiz’s charming, playful and idiosyncratic swansong Night across the Street – he returned to Santiago from exile to make his final film – was  the Chilean giant’s gently expressionistic ode to cinema and filmaking. Having just undergone a liver transplant, he was perhaps well aware of his impending mortality while he made this – which released posthumously – and hence it was also a disarmingly affecting meditation on death, along with quirky reflections on time, ageing, and the complex web of memories and dreams. Past and present, real and fantasy, life and post-life, etc., therefore, freely coalesced in this oftentimes inexplicable and yet strangely hypnotic work. Don Celso (Sergio Hernández), the film’s ageing, dreamy, soft-spoken, gentle-natured, absent-minded protagonist, is clearly the director’s alter-ego; he lives alone in a boarding house surrounded by curios and artefacts he loves making, and is on the verge of retiring. While he spends his final days at work, he often travels back in time to his days as a young, precocious boy (Santiago Figueroa) who calls himself Rhododendron, takes lessons on life from the fictional pirate Long John Silver, and befuddles Beethoven on the technological advances of the modern world, perhaps as a way to escape from his fascist father (in perhaps the narrative’s sole openly political stance); meanwhile present-day Celso has rambling conversations with the French writer Jean Giono, anticipates his murder by an assassin, finds himself surrounded by ghosts from his past, and even imagines himself becoming one. Filled with irreverent asides, dense with allusions and gorgeously choreographed, this is a work that pulls one in despite its incoherence and structural complexity.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Raul Ruiz

Genre: Drama/Magic Realism

Language: Spanish

Country: Chile