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

Alexander the Great [1980]

 Alexander the Great, with its sprawling tapestry and intricate thematic examinations – beautiful but fragile dream of utopia, transition of a mythic and heroic revolutionary into an authoritarian corrupted by personality cult, contemporary Greek history rife with repressive regimes and foreign interventions – made it, alongwith The Travelling Players and The Hunters, among the most complex, searingly leftist, provocative and densely structured films in Angelopoulos’ storied career. And yet, interestingly, its historical evocations and allusions were relatively more obtuse, elusive and metaphorical. These facets, therefore, made this an interesting point of intersection between his extraordinary ‘Trilogy of History’ (which also comprised of Days of ’36) and equally sublime ‘Trilogy of Silence’ (Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper, Landscape in the Mist). It opens with the kidnap of pompous English nobility in Athens by a group of rebel freedom fighters spearheaded by an enigmatic, charismatic, staunchly dissident leader who calls himself Alexander the Great. The ransom demand to the puppet Greek government is simple – amnesty for his gang and write-off of debts of small peasants at the mercy of feudal landlords. They take refuge at a small village where he was revered and which has radically transitioned into socialist governance – using the short-lived Paris Commune as model, under the aegis of an idealist Communist teacher and Italian anarchists – where no one owns any property and everyone is responsible for everyone else. Things, though, take a troublesome turn when Alexander turn into an oppressor, while in turn being increasingly cornered by ruthless government forces bullied by the English. The exquisitely atmospheric narrative was filled with audaciously conceived and choreographed long takes, an infectious theme score, lively folk songs and a profound sense of fatalism.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Theo Angelopoulos

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Political Drama/Epic

Language: Greek/English

Country: Greece

Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel [2003]

 The 1947 UN Resolution 181 recommended partitioning of Palestine into two unequal halves, with 56% allocated to the Jewish minority and 43% to the Arab majority; this so-called “Green Line”, however, was swiftly abrogated upon the 1948 War – thus further skewing the rights and demographic distribution over time – and ensured that it’d remain just on paper. In 2002, two defiantly leftist and politically conscious émigré filmmakers – Eyal Sivan, an Israeli, and Michel Khleifi, a Palestinian – travelled for two months following this non-existent line from south of Gaza to Galilee in the north – collecting stories, anecdotes, opinions, experiences, memories – which they aptly titled Route 181. The resultant work – powerfully traversing across oral political history, road movie and documentary essay – made for a stirring, evocative, piercing, discomfiting work that beautifully succeeded in being both radically dissident and profoundly melancholic in equal measures. That the film – capturing the distressing perpetuation of setter-colonialism and an apartheid state, which’ve only exacerbated over time – was borne out of collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, thus eloquently subverting the political divides on ground, added an ironic touch to its wryly observant and delicately strung proceedings. Over its 4 ½ hour length divided into three segments, the duo interacted with a dizzyingly diverse group of people – old and young, men and women, soldiers and civilians, oppressors and exploited, bigoted and disillusioned, bellicose and weary – in weaving this complex tapestry. In a tour de force sequence, an aged barber, surrounded by equally aged customers, recounts a harrowing account of ethnic cleansing; this sequence, which mirrored a similar one in Lanzmann’s Shoah, inevitably led to vociferous oppositions by those blinded of the Palestinian plight by their nationalist zealotry.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Eyal Sivan & Michel Khleifi

Genre: Documentary/Road Movie/Political History

Language: Arabic/Hebrew/English

Country: Palestine

The Great Indian Kitchen [2021]

 The most impish joke – and a darkly ironic one too – that Keralite filmmaker Jeo Baby pulled on unwitting viewers was cannily naming this film The Great Indian Kitchen. Furthermore, he began it by focusing, in all its gastronomical glory, the minutest culinary details of an Indian kitchen, with all its chopping, cutting, grinding, boiling, sautéing, frying, garnishing and whatnot – so much so that, those absorbing initial sections are bound to get an epicure excited. Before long, though, its incendiary themes started surfacing – viz. casual, inbred, entitled and toxic patriarchy, masculinity, misogyny, and the accompanying religious bigotry, which together define most of Indian middle-class – and the effect was undeniably lacerating, potentially more so on account of its commonplace nature and banality. The titular kitchen is part of the home of a conservative, well-to-do family that the protagonist (Nimisha Sajayan) – an educated woman and trained dancer – moves into post an arranged marriage with a school teacher (Suraj Venjaramoodu). Both husband and father-in-law appear to be mild-natured men; in fact, when the latter starts displaying his regressive traits, the seemingly tender but essentially slimy husband initially provides false comfort before starting to reveal his nasty sides too; and as she increasingly starts displaying quiet defiance by not letting go of her identity, thought-process and resolve, the more belligerent they become. Baby made striking use of repetitions, sparseness and progressive tonal buildups while meticulously underscoring the putrid drudgery that the wife gets sucked into amidst domestic and conjugal obligations. Terrific turns by Sajayan and Venjaramoodu made the sordid marital drama that much more provocative and incisive; and, by the time the movie’s climax approached, the director had emphatically transitioned into activisit filmmaking too.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jeo Baby

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Social Drama

Language: Malayalam

Country: India