Sean Rocha

The Battle of Chile and the wonder of movie theaters

September 11th is an anniversary resonant to all New Yorkers, of course — I wrote previously about my standing on a street corner that day in lower Manhattan watching the Twin Towers fall — but tomorrow is also the 45th anniversary of the coup d’etat against Salvador Allende in Chile.  As it happens, there is an anniversary related to that for me: 20 years ago today I went to the Film Forum on West Houston Street in New York to watch a double bill of films by the great Chilean director Patricio Guzman that was, even then, one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had at the cinema.  But with the passage of time, as I go to the movie theater much less and watch most films on my computer, this memory also marks a particular kind of loss: of the shared, communal experience of being in close proximity to a large group of strangers watching the same thing.  So this is what I wrote in my journal that night:

New York 10 September 1998

I went to Film Forum to see a double bill that began with the second part of “The Battle of Chile,” Patricio Guzman’s epic documentary about Salvador Allende and the coup d’état on 11 September 1973 that he had to smuggle out of the country. There was a powerful sense of filmed-from-the-barricades immediacy to it, as the camera goes out in the field with strikers as they are shot at by the police or out the military as it begins its trial runs for the coup d’etat by raiding factories. But, in truth, to those who grew up outside Chile it was sometimes confusing  just where the various actors lined up and who was on which side. Partly this was by design – not the film’s but the coup’s – because, for example, a major trucker’s strike was funded by the Right, not the Left, to establish a pretext for intervention.

During the film’s intermission, I heard a man behind me, obviously Chilean, explaining some of the more confusing details to the woman, obviously not Chilean, seated next to him. Theirs was a casual conversation and I could not tell, in the few words they spoke on the subject, which side he had been on at the time of the coup. I guessed Left, if he cared at all.

Then the second film started, called “Chile, Obstinate Memory,” which Patricio Guzman made on his return from exile 23 years later. In it he shows parts of his earlier documentary, “The Battle of Chile,” to students and older people who have never seen it, shut out by the years of censorship that followed the coup. He asks many of them if they recognize any of the anonymous people in the film – protesters, activists, bystanders – so he can talk to them about their memories. A young woman at a funeral is recognized as Carmen and when Guzman finds her the similarity between her older image and her younger one is striking. Yet she is oddly uncertain, conceding only that it might be her, but she wasn’t sure. As they talk, Guzman asks her if anyone in her family has “disappeared,” the euphemism for those who were taken away by the security forces, interrogated, often tortured and only rarely reappearing. She starts to list the people, very slowly, and it’s everyone that ever mattered to her – husband, brothers, sons, uncles, nephews – almost like a Holocaust survivor listing those who died in the concentration camps.

At that moment I heard a horrible cry behind me and then the strained, uncontrollable sobbing of the Chilean man who, just 20 minutes earlier, had managed to sound so untouched by the coup years. Nothing could have more powerfully illustrated Guzman’s point, that these events have been “forgotten” of necessity but continue to linger unresolved just below the surface. And this deep, wounded weeping went on and on in the quiet theater.  We listened, not wanting to make him more self-concious by turning to him but also not wanting him to be alone in his pain, until, finally, he was able to bring his emotions under control once again and all that remained was his heavy, strained breath as he gasped for air.

The rest of the film passed in a blurred swirl of sadness and horror and even laughter and recovery. It was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had at a film. Walking home, down Houston and Bedford, there was a fall chill in the air and a quaintness to the streets and I’d just had an experience I’ll never forget.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2018 at 8:26 am. It is filed under Latest Work and tagged with Chile, coup d'etat, film, military, Patricio Guzman, politics, revolution, South America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.