The Battle of Chile (DVD set, 2009), Patricio Guzmán, director. Four discs include the Battle trilogy (Part One, 1975, 96 mins.; Part Two, 1976, 88 mins.; Part Three, 1978, 79 mins.) and Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997, 57 mins.), $44.98, distributed by Icarus Films (icarusfilms.com)
The year 1973 opened with Chile as a shaken but still resilient democracy headed by Salvador Allende, a president beleaguered by fierce political opposition and acute economic strains, yet determined to defend his government and its vision of a peaceful socialist revolution. It ended with Chile as a dirty-war dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet and a military junta. The junta had bombed the presidential palace on September 11 and relied ever since on murder, disappearance, and torture to destroy civil society and spread fear among citizens redefined as the internal enemy. Violence and power gave them a free hand to remake society.
The world was watching. With Allende’s 1970 election, a divided country had entered into a serious battle to tear down, or to reassert, the social hierarchies and economic inequalities that condemned many, especially workers, peasants, and rural-to-urban migrants, to poverty and lack of dignity. The unique symbolism of Chile’s revolutionary project—it took the path of intense electoral competition rather than guerrilla insurgency, yet met with implacable hostility from U.S. president Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger—added to international interest. For many citizens, social activists, and political leaders across the conventional geographies of West versus East, and North versus South, Allende incarnated a Third World yearning for social justice and escape from the Cold War vise. Pinochet, on the other hand, turned into an icon of ruthless dictatorial regimes that spread over South America and used anti-Communism to justify any outrage and refashion society.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, both the experience of dictatorship and the dream of revolution provoked ambivalence, voids, and indecisiveness—interior doubts within the same sociopolitical camp, as well as open conflicts between opposing camps. Perhaps no one better brought to life this tension than the filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. The Battle of Chile, Guzmán’s epic documentary trilogy produced in the heat of the 1970s struggle for revolution and solidarity against dictatorship, places before our eyes the fractured soul of Chile and the persistent yet unresolved dream of building a bottom-up, participatory democracy.
A new DVD edition of the Battle trilogy enables us to see the films again and to consider them in a new context: a documentary-driven reflection on the long-term legacy of the Chilean revolution. The new four-disc edition brings together Guzmán’s two masterworks—the Battle trilogy (originally released 1975, 1976, 1978) and Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), an elegy told by the elders who lived the dream and its collapse, and who bring the experience into dialogue with the generation coming of age in the 1990s democratic transition.
The 2009 edition of the Battle trilogy differs from the original by featuring Guzmán himself as the off-camera narrator. The result is tight fusion of narrative voice and artistic direction, and sharper ability to “hear” Guzmán’s shift toward a first-person aesthetic in Obstinate Memory. A new interview of Guzmán by critic José Carlos Avellar provides insight on the making of Battle, and an essay by Cecilia Ricciarelli usefully elucidates the participatory dimension of Guzmán’s “practice of knowledge” through documentary cinema.
Two unforgettable scenes in Part One of the Battle series capture the dramatic struggle for Chile in 1973. The first scene, in March 1973, occurred during a heated congressional election campaign. The elections represented the last best chance for the opposition to bring down Allende and his Popular Unity government through a congressional impeachment vote by two-thirds majority. The result was uncertain. Allende had been elected in 1970 with only 36.3% of the vote. After some successes in 1971—a bump in electoral popularity, assisted by the nationalization of copper mines, good economic growth, and increased purchasing power and living standards for the lower classes—the road had grown much tougher.
Short-term successes gave way to difficult economic bottlenecks and structural issues, accompanied by a ferocious political struggle over property and power. The acute crises of the last half-year—including a crippling trucker strike (assisted by covert CIA funding) in October 1972, shortages of food and manufacturing inputs, an inflation spiral, and a tangible sense of street chaos and dread of the unpredictable—had exerted wear and tear. If Allende’s base dropped to less than a third, the constitutional impeachment route was clearly open.
The camera crew interviewed people on the street and in political rallies to ask what would happen in the election. Most responded the way one might expect in a highly mobilized democracy: They optimistically promoted the prospects for their own side. Then, suddenly, one fair-skinned, well-dressed woman in sunglasses looks straight into the camera and exclaims, “This is a corrupt government of degenerates! Filthy Communists, they all have to leave Chile!” For an instant, the language of elections disappears. The viewer glimpses another Chile, just beneath the surface. Chileans who backed Allende were immoral. They had destroyed everything. Get rid of them.
Which represents the real Chile? The impulse to search for an electoral resolution, or at least a negotiated accord among political parties? Or the determination to get rid of those who stand in the way of one’s objective? Will the congressional elections turn out to be an act of effective democracy or a simulation whose relevance depends on its outcome? In just one scene, early in Part One of the Battle trilogy, Guzmán and his crew both established the thesis of the film and exposed the sense of dread that will soon envelop the nation. The bourgeoisie has staged an angry insurrection against Allende’s project of constitutional revolution. With support from the United States, the opposition will do whatever it takes to destroy the project—and the people who back it. The scene foreshadows the chilling statement (reproduced in Part Two of Battle) by Air Force general Gustavo Leigh at the evening press conference of the junta on September 11, 1973. The Chilean people suffered “the Marxist cancer” for three years, he said, and “are ready to do whatever it takes to extirpate it.”
The second scene, which closes Part One, brings the viewer face to face with a Chile that becomes ever more “real” after the congressional elections in March. The Popular Unity received 43.4% of the vote—more than the plurality Allende received in 1970, and far more than needed to block his impeachment. This turn of events drives the opposition and the United States to turn emphatically to a non-electoral strategy that will culminate with the September coup. Violent street clashes and new transport and copper mine strikes fail to bring down the government, and set the stage for the coming climax. On June 29, a coup attempt—tanks assault the presidential palace of La Moneda—fails. The organizers are a renegade group. The armed forces are not yet united, the high commander ranks are not yet purged.
But the face of the Chile around the corner, the coup menace, is now evident. In the extraordinary climax of Part One, Argentine cameraman Leonardo Henricksen films the abortive June coup attempt—and his own murder. An angry soldier sees Henricksen filming, takes straight aim, and shoots. Amazingly, Henricksen keeps the camera focused on the soldier for another instant, before it finally tumbles. In an interview available in the DVD edition, Guzmán reveals the rest of the story: Some workers rescued the camera—and saved an extraordinary story for posterity.
What gives Part One such compelling power is not simply its clear thesis of steady escalation, backed by the United States as well as internal privileged classes, of an insurrection against the Allende experiment, and the inherent drama of watching a country and a social justice project come apart. The deeper power comes from a consistent “you are there” aesthetic. Guzmán and his collaborators talk with ordinary people, and the camera records, often close up at a participant-observation level rather than panoramically, street demonstrations and clashes, campaign rallies, and trade union debates about strikes. The argument, tension, and close-up aesthetic of Part One are so powerful that they render Part Two, the final run-up and making of the coup from July to September, somewhat anti-climactic. The audio-visual documentation is valuable, but the die has been cast by the end of June. The later events matter, but they unfold inexorably. No one can jump off the train of History.
The documentary appeal of the Battle trilogy derives not only from its thrusting of the viewer into an epic struggle for power, but also from the poignant sense of promise and loss. An experiment in bottom-up democracy, by an inventive people determined to chart a path to social and economic justice against the odds, is crushed. The story of a people awakening, present in Parts One and Two as a tension within the big drama of insurrectionary conflict, takes center stage in Part Three, “The Power of the People.” Guzmán worked on the film while exiled in Cuba, and did not at first realize that Battle had to be a trilogy. Once he reached that decision, he could create a film that focused on the flowering of class-consciousness among workers and revolutionaries, their direct-action experiments, and their determination to somehow carry on and achieve a just society, despite the odds.
Part epic and part elegy, the third film testifies to the sense of creative possibility that awakened amid the turmoil. When trucker strikes and boycotts paralyze the economy, workers take over factories and invent ways to build missing parts, keep production going, and create exchange and coordination mechanisms with other nearby industries. Neighborhood activists create popular warehouses and food distribution organisms to combat scarcity, hoarding, and the black market. City workers and revolutionaries go to the countryside to support a peasant land invasion. Peasants feel empowered enough to denounce an official whose response to the demand for land seems more bureaucratic than revolutionary—and he responds with self-critique. As one activist puts it, workers and the pueblo will not be duped. “They are not like before.”
In effect, the grassroots impact of the crisis of 1973 was to spur “popular power” through creative direct action. For many, organized popular power was the only way to render the revolution irreversible, defend it against the coming armed insurrection, and promote tougher action by the government against its adversaries. But it was no panacea, either. Grassroots takeovers and centers of popular power that were parallel to official state organisms were not easy to reconcile with the vision of constitutional revolution promoted by Allende. Popular power sparked political controversy rather than unity, even within the left. Whatever its theoretical potential, it did not develop to the point of providing an effective answer to the diagnosis announced in the subtitle of the Battle trilogy: The Struggle of a People Without Arms.
Part Three celebrates the promise of popular power, and implicitly argues that it could have provided the road to an alternate resolution. But the tribute is inflected by loss. The soundtrack of a somewhat mournful version of “Venceremos,” the normally cheerful anthem of the Popular Unity, occasionally provides a haunting counterpoint to the 1973 testimonies and scenes of possibility.
*
Twenty years later, in 1997, Guzmán produced a full-blown elegy, Chile, Obstinate Memory. Pinochet had lost a plebiscite in 1988, but the visions of socialism and revolution so influential in the 1960s and 1970s had become an anachronism, and the democratic transition of the 1990s has been haunted by constraint. A kind of dual power unfolded—on the one hand, democratic elections of the president and most congressional representatives; on the other, entrenched authoritarianism, protected by Pinochet’s ongoing role as army commander and by Pinochet allies in key arenas, including the judiciary, the constitutionally mandated appointee bloc within the Senate, and the investor class. Under the circumstances, memory has become a delicate and sometimes suffocated topic, especially after the waning of key truth-telling and social-repair initiatives in the early years of transition. The taboo about the Popular Unity period is strong, and the meaning of the Allende era seems reduced to its disastrous final result.
Against this backdrop of social difficulty in taking on the memory and legacy of earlier times, Guzmán documents his return from exile to break the silence. He seeks out the comrade-survivors of his generation, including Allende’s bodyguards, and shows the Battle trilogy to the younger generation for whom the Popular Unity experience is a void. In an ingenious scene, Guzmán has a band of young musicians play “Venceremos” in a downtown pedestrian street of Santiago. The pedestrians react with shock, irritation, and delight to the breaking of the memory taboo.
A profoundly moving meditation on memory and generations, Guzmán’s work puts forth the ways the lost world of dreams is stubbornly remembered by some, even as the general culture succumbs to the impulse to forget. The comrade-survivors of the film are not ashamed of their political failure. Over time, and prompted by Guzmán’s visit and replays of scenes and images, they have come to accept that they treasure the memory of their time with Allende—“the most marvelous 1,000 days of my life,” in the words of one of his personal assistants. They recover, with a certain bittersweet tenderness, the people crushed by atrocity and repression, and the scenes and dreams that still matter. One may be tempted to forget the past, but memory insinuates itself. A poignantly persistent, yet flawed version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” imperfectly remembered and played by Guzmán’s aging uncle Ignacio, keeps finding its way into the soundtrack.
For their part, the youths who see the Battle of Chile for the first time react strongly. Some argue heatedly and repeat the standard scripts of competing memory camps (the military saved us from chaos and Communism; the dictatorship destroyed those who dared to think differently). Above all, they take in the emotion of an experience that had been a void—foundational in the making of their world, yet empty at the level of lived experience or empathy. Guzmán’s camera homes in on the silent body languages of shock, sorrow, tension, and anger. The discussions after the film screening are powerful. As one eloquent young woman puts it, after taking in the creativity and loss of an earlier era, “I feel very proud of my pueblo.” The paths of our struggle today are different, but “it is legitimate to dream.”
Ernesto Malbrán, the youths’ professor and a person seen in Battle in his youthful days as an activist-educator, serves as the final authoritative voice of the film. The dream was noble, and what followed it “is not a shipwreck, but a tremor, nothing more.” The intent seems to be a message of inspiration and vindication, but the effect is more ambiguous. The message is not explicitly grounded in the politico-cultural issues of the 1990s. Even for young people moved by the film and inclined toward the left, will the message turn out to be inspiration or nostalgia?
*
As historical analysis, these films have their flaws, especially of omission. The Battle trilogy does not ask, for example, whether it was still imaginable, in August and September, to negotiate a democratic exit from the Chilean crisis. It does not ask whether the obstacles to such an exit lay in sectors of the left, as well as the right and center. It laments the crushing of a people without arms, but does not analyze in depth the politico-military strategy of Allende and moderate sectors of the Popular Unity. It lets us hear Allende’s plea to supporters to align popular power with government strategy, but does not analyze the deeper clash—the intensifying tension between top-down and bottom-up dynamics of revolution, and the ambivalence within the left about the consequences of popular power through direct action. It brilliantly captures the menacing sense of a coup foretold in 1973, but sets aside an equally important sensibility: Even those who saw a coup coming were shocked by its violent ferocity.
Similarly, one may subject Obstinate Memory to historical and political critique. The film vindicates the survivors who dared to dream of a revolution of social justice, but the vindication is nostalgic. It does not offer a political project credible to the young in the 1990s context. The film resists the silencing of suppressed memory, but it does not recognize the strategic role of memory politics in charting a difficult democratic transition by a center-left government. More than a culture of silence, what Chile experienced in the 1990s was a struggle to define whose memories mattered and what meanings should be drawn from the experience of dictatorship.
Such critiques are valid, but they also miss the enduring value of these films. Guzmán’s creations are works of art, and they are historical documents of their time. They draw us into the psychological and cultural truths of an era, not easily captured by third-person historical accounts, while identifying such truths with human yearnings that can travel across time and space. The Battle trilogy enables us to take in, almost experientially, the twin dramas of Chile that caught the world’s notice in the 1970s. We see from close up the titanic struggle, before September 1973, to build or crush the revolutionary future of a people who have embarked on a controversial quest for dignity and justice—without internal unity or solid backing by a majority.
We are invited to participate, in the wake of the disastrous military coup, in the sense of outrage and loss that impels denunciation and mobilization. One had to explain what happened and why it mattered, assign responsibilities to Chilean and imperial actors, and draw lessons that could bring down a dictatorship and rebuild hope for a political future. It was precisely during 1974–78, when Battle was produced and released in exile, that Chilean activists at home and abroad helped mobilize a transnational solidarity and human rights movement, and began to rethink their strategies of armed and unarmed political struggle.
Obstinate Memory is both a postscript to the Battle trilogy and a document of its own time. Produced in the mid- to late-1990s-phase of democratic transition and its cultural memory wars, it captured the sense that many Chileans—including elites of the governing center-left coalition—had let go of their earlier resolve to advance the truth and justice demanded by a legacy of human rights violations under dictatorship. Military saber-rattling and resistance by a powerful conservative minority in the 1990s transition have taken their toll, and the biggest taboo of all was memory of the Popular Unity. This was the Chile haunted by impasse about the meaning of the past, and by ambivalent swings between the impulse to remember and the temptation to forget.
The film enables us to understand the sensation of suffocated memory, and the moral impossibility of accepting silence after times of atrocity. Those who protest taboo and silence are authentic Chileans who have suffered—the elder dreamers who survived and are proud to have had ideals, the young who have come of age experiencing a void of denial and deflection about a foundational era. They yearn to know who they are.
Taken together, Guzmán’s epic and elegy enable us to see an enduring legacy of the era of revolution and dictatorship in Chile and Latin America—a personally experienced shattering of culture and values around unresolved questions of social justice, some linked to the dream of socioeconomic fairness, some linked to the dream of accountability after state-sponsored atrocity. It is as if the drive for justice in the late 20th century led to the great fracturing of a cultural fiction once popular in mid-century: the idea of a united national soul or people.
The Chileans of Guzmán’s documentaries are always divided—between those who pushed for and against revolution; between those who promoted a revolution of popular power and those who thought it doomed; between those who thought the point was to win elections and those determined to win by any means necessary; between the elders who live as exiles from another time and wish to hold on to a dream, and youths who live the void of rushing into postmodernity.
The most subtle fractures, only hinted at in these films, are interior—the ambivalences and doubts that come from awareness that life did not turn out as one imagined. The distance between the certainties of then, and the life experiences that shape the now, are too great. Carmen Vivanco, a human rights activist who for years persisted in the push for truth and justice investigations to hold the state accountable for the disappeared, including her own kin, put the point succinctly. In Obstinate Memory, Guzmán showed her a film scene of the young Vivanco at a 1970s street rally, and asked if that was her. “I have my doubts,” she replied. One senses that this exchange is not simply about the literal truth.
Vivanco and other survivor-activists persisted in a long struggle to remember lost people, reckon with atrocity, and thereby build a more democratic and accountable future. When viewed retrospectively, Guzmán’s superb documentary art of the 1970s and 1990s testifies to a perhaps unintended insight. One legacy of the era of revolution and dictatorship is to accept that one lives with doubt—but not to let it turn into justification for complacency.
Steve J. Stern teaches history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The final installment of his own trilogy on Chile, Reckoning With Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
