An Interview with Patricio Guzmán
On this day, 50 years ago, a United States-backed military coup deposed Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist president: President Salvador Allende of Chile. For the next 17 years, Chile was subject to the brutal rule of General Augusto Pinochet and neoliberal economic experimentation carried out by Uncle Sam’s Chicago Boys. One year after Pinochet stepped down from office, President Patricio Aylwin created national committees to determine how many people were killed, disappeared, and tortured under the military dictatorship. The 1991 Rettig Report produced by the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation determined 2,296 people were killed for political reasons and in 2005, the Valech Commission found that 28,459 people were arrested for political reasons. Subsequent investigations into the dictatorship’s crimes have shown that the total number of people recognized as disappeared or killed in Chile is closer to 3,000 and those who survived political imprisonment almost 40,000. The perpetrators behind this atrocity have tried to blot it out from history, but on this day we must remember the action’s taken by hegemonic forces to curtail a people’s will for a fair leftist government.
When President Allende was elected, documentarian Patricio Guzmán decided to make film about how his new policies — land-redistribution programs for Chile’s Indigenous people, the nationalization of resources that were exploited by foreign powers, the development of housing for those in need — were being carried out and perceived by Chileans. The resultant film, The First Year, showed Chile’s working-class was happy with the reforms. When Chile’s bourgeoisie, with the help of fascist CIA operatives, decided to fight Allende’s government through military and economic warfare, Guzmán — and four of his close friends — kept filming. Their tripartite epic, The Battle of Chile, was acclaimed around the world for showing the violence provoked by capitalist interests and the might of those who fought against it. Decades later, Guzmán returned to Chile to film another trilogy analyzing Chile’s most distinct natural landmarks — the Atacama Desert, its Pacific Coast and the Andes — and their relationship to its long history of brutal dispute over land that should be free and accessible for all. Last year, following the Social Outburst that broke out in 2019 when Chile’s metro-fare was hiked up (take notes New York), Guzmán released another documentary titled My Imaginary Country that showed how Chile’s youth mobilized the country’s population to protest its country’s continued reliance on the neoliberal structure built up under Pinochet.
Guzmán has filmed Chile for over fifty years, producing radical leftist films that oppose the ideals held by its governing industrial elite. To mark the 50th Anniversary of the coup, we sat down with Guzmán to discuss political filmmaking and his thoughts on the future of Chile.
CINEMÓVIL: You recently became the second filmmaker to receive Chile’s National Arts Prize. How do you feel?
PATRICIO GUZMÁN: The award is a great honor and it matters a lot to me. It is a way of rewarding the work carried out by the left in the streets during the years of the dictatorship. In short, it is a way of summarizing what happens in Chile.
CM: Watching The Battle of Chile versus your most recent elemental trilogy, a clear difference in form presents itself. Where the former is aggressively direct with its messaging and visuals, the latter takes on a more oblique and essayistic character. What inspired this change in mode-of-address and do you have a preferred method of communicating political ideas in films?
PG: First of all, the passage of time. Also, the fact that during The Battle of Chile I only had direct cinema to transmit a message. We had a 16mm camera, a Nagra recording device; that is to say, it was minimal equipment.
As the years went by, I realized that there was another kind of theme. For example, the Chilean North has plastic qualities and different spaces, so you can’t act as though you are in the city interviewing people passing by in a committee. When I became interested in the North, I was very uncertain, but little by little my team and I managed to find the right way to reach singular characters in the towns out there. I remember that we started in Calama and then went deeper into the north, toward the Cordillera. There, little by little, unknown characters appeared who had experiences that seemed like adventures. That is the style that the film acquired, above all, it was driven by the north’s landscape. My other films, like The Battle of Chile, were composed of interviews and moments that are indicated without saying anything, and are their environment.
The second method is much more complex because anything goes. For example, I can begin in the sea and end in the desert without giving any explanation. These are films with a more difficult structure. You have to rehearse them in the Moviola many times until the thing starts to walk on its own. They are very long montages. I made three of them, the three of which share a slim continuity that transforms them into three frescoes of several important moments in Chile. Then, the last one is a documentary at the edge of voltage; that’s to say, it is very brief and things happen with such speed and force that you can almost say that it is a single sequence.
CM: Since you’ve just mentioned it, in your newest film My Imaginary Country, you interview several young activists who deny affiliation to any existing political parties in Chile. Do you find this worrying?
PG: It’s possible that it is a symptom of change but neither you nor I know that. We don’t yet know what is going to happen in Chile.
CM: Now, regarding the national plan to search for the remains of those disappeared by the Pinochet dictatorship that has just been formed in Chile, do you think this will inspire other countries in the region to take similar actions?
PG: It’s difficult to say because the atmosphere in Peru and Argentina is diametrically opposed to the one in Chile. They do make efforts to recover their old democratic systems but they are countries that are more devoid of an ideological framework and a strong ideological body, and that triumphs over their wills. Here, for example, there is a very old political party tradition that will always weigh on our country’s development.
Argentina, for example, is a country in which many events occur and things happen but everything is so unstructured that everyone ends up doing things on their own. Things move forward as things happen, but the country does not evolve. Argentina is fatigued by an enormously long political struggle that hasn’t borne any fruits. That has always been the difference between Chile and Argentina. When Argentina had a firmer, stronger Peronism, things more or less worked. But, it was not the same as in Chile, where there was a battle among parties.
CM: In your latest film we see Chile in the midst of what appears to be a second revolution led by students and a leftist presidency. At the same time, the industrial elite have stalled many progressive policies from coming into effect. What hope do you have for the future of Chile? Do you perceive a schism between its actual ruling party and Chile’s radical Left?
PG: Yes, there is a chasm between the two forces. But mind you, I don’t think this is going to help things get better. I think we are going to go through a long neutral period until there is a new wave that really swallows the opposition in the form of a mutiny. What happened here was that one group got ahead and that’s hard to replicate because it requires a lot of action by a lot of people and it involves many getting hurt. It’s complicated and it’s a very brutal form of struggle.
CM: Although the tools to make political films are more accessible now than ever before, it appears people today favor sharing footage of protests over editing them together into longform documentaries with clear argumentation. What do you make of this lack of perspective in today’s political clips? Furthermore, will reduced attention spans hinder our ability to digest and produce substantive critique?
PG: Regarding the last question, I do believe so. We live in the moment of the moment. By that I mean that equipment is so light and fast that it’s useful for making sequences but not for long films that have more complicated structures. I don’t think that the making of long films with a complicated structure will hinder social action. On the contrary, I believe they boost it. They’re complements. Nowadays, we have the shorts made by small cameras and quick recordings and we still have the long films which are held in higher regard.
CM: Archives have proven crucial to your filmmaking and similar landmark works in the history of the film such as El Juicio and Nitrate Kisses. In our own practice, we have collaborated with the Chiapas Media Project to show films made by Zapatista communities. Are there other radical archives you know of that need support and are open to collaborating with organizations like ours to show overlooked histories?
PG: It all depends on the country and its filmmakers’ organization. Guatemala, for example, needs ten films a day and I don’t think they are being made. There is major turmoil and scandals. It’s an excellent country, I was there filming for almost a year some time ago. It’s fantastic. But people have to get organized and make important films that they can ship abroad and send to festivals to win awards, because we must constantly draw attention with high quality work.
CM: On a more personal note, I wanted to ask you about your relationship with Chris Marker and the help he provided you in making The Battle of Chile. How did you establish this connection?
PG: Well, actually, I did not establish it, Chris Marker did when he traveled to Chile. He wanted to witness this peaceful experience of revolution that had caught his attention, and he went to look for material of that kind. In fact, he wanted to make a film about the experience. Then, when he saw that I had made The First Year, which was more or less the same thing he wanted to do, he got enthusiastic and after a brief period of time he sent me a ton of material. It was a huge package of virgin film, image, perforated magnetic tape that we could use to record sound, narrow tapes for the Nagra… it was everything we needed.
When we received this gift, we were enthused. This kicked off a series of splendid letters between Chris Marker and I. Within the month, we were organized, five of us got to work and it was great. That experience is unique and hardly to be repeated because no one gives another person so much material. It was a different era.
CM: Lastly, since you mentioned these letters and My Imaginary Country begins with advice from Marker in which he says, “When you want to film a fire, you must be ready at the place where the first flame will be,” I wanted to ask you, what advice do have for documentarians today, and what role do you think film plays in today’s revolutionary circles?
PG: Well, the first thing is that you must be prepared to shoot. You have to create small teams of three, four, five people, no more, get the material from wherever you can and shoot. Today, it’s much simpler to shoot because magnetic tape allows you to practically skip the whole film-editing system that was so slow. Sound negatives, picture negatives, sound mixes, et cetera; a good film on magnetic tape can be very complex and contain an incredibly involved form. Now you can go further with editing and structure than ever before. It’s really a matter of pushing buttons. It’s not much. That’s my advice, to try as much as possible to develop your filmmaking technique. Filming is the least of it, of course you have to have stable cameras that don’t shake back and forth, but that’s very easy to do.
As for the other question, revolutionary cinema does not really exist because it does not have the same standards around the world. Revolutionary cinema is a truthful cinema that takes witness of a relationship, of an institution, that gets into the political fray without fear and dedicates itself to filming, as much as it is possible, the people who are leading a country. There is nothing worse than a film by old or young people, or whoever, that talks ideologically about what has to be done and offers theoretical classes about revolution. That should be laughed at. We must go to the people who act, who act on the street, who move around, who move others, and who explain what is happening. Sometimes you have to be a little violent, but not too violent, just a little violent. That is fundamental because in Latin America if you don’t start with a strong voice, everyone gets run over.
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