Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán)
– Oisín Murphy-Hall (Film Editor)
In a year which saw the death of Chris Marker, film’s greatest essayist, it was a privilege to witness a documentary from his friend and erstwhile collaborator, Patricio Guzmán, a filmmaker whose career has been devoted to the exploration of his native Chile’s past and present. Much of Nostalgia for the Light takes place in Chile’s Atacama desert, the extremely arid climate of which provides a fertile, nearly cloudless environment for astronomy, as well as immaculately preserving the remains of those murdered and dumped unceremoniously therein by Pinochet’s army, following the U.S.-backed, anti-Allende coup of 1973. In that decade, the desert became both a hub for astronomy and the site of the concentration camps set up by Pinochet’s regime, in which political prisoners were interned and executed without trial.
Guzmán’s interviews with Chilean astronomers hinge on a scientific fascination with the high-altitude, zero-humidity climate of the Atacama and their unerring examination of ancient light in a bid to better understand the mysteries of our universe, while the families of those lost under Pinochet’s rule still search for answers, for closure, in the vast, shifting sands beneath. The wives and sisters of the disappeared spend each waking hour of daylight, thirty to forty years on, with shovels and brushes, hoping to uncover a trace of the men and boys undocumented by Chile’s official history. The act of observation, of searching, is one with profound but profoundly disparate significance in modern Chile.
While Nostalgia‘s central dichotomy is intellectually satisfying, the human content of its footage, and Guzmán’s interactions with people, is profoundly affecting, and devastating in the horror it uncovers. “I wish the telescopes didn’t just look into the sky, but could also see through the earth, so that we could find them,” says one of the Atacama’s widows, tenacious in the face of such cosmic despair. Guzmán interviews a man working as an astronomer who discovered his trade and passion while imprisoned under Pinochet, who credits his sanity to his studying of the cosmos while interned. Another woman journeys to work as an astronomer at an Atacama observatory every day, while the remains of her parents may still lie in the surrounding desert. Understanding the vastness of space, she says, helps her to keep her personal grief in perspective.
Guzmán’s psychogeographic exploration of the Atacama forms one single part of a career spent documenting contemporary Chile in all its tumult, from The Battle of Chile trilogy to 2004’s Allende, but its conceptual beauty and poignant, resolute humanity set it apart from almost any other documentary yet produced. Nostalgia for the Light bears witness to the human casualties of fascism, imperialism and revisionism, the failure of the Chilean state to take account of, and answer for, its past, while maintaining a hope that rests in the simple act, denied so many, of bearing witness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Honourable Mention:
Silence (Pat Collins)
Dark Horse (Todd Solondz)
