Patricio Guzmán’s documentary, Nostalgia for the Light, is both a telescopic probe of deep space as we try to answer the universal questions of where did we come from and a look at the endurance of those who survived Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime when their loved ones did not.
The question Guzmán wishes to pose is why most of us work so hard to dim the light by forgetting the brutalities of the recent past. For Guzmán, who has produced other powerful political documentaries about Chile, it is only through remembering the past, claiming what is ours in the same way that we are trying to understand how the first distant explosion in the universe came to form us, that we will reclaim the light.
Atacama Desert: A Repository of Memory
The Atacama Desert is a beautiful surreal place where the thin air is bone dry and the sky is deeply blue. It is a perfect place to build the world’s largest observatories in order to probe super deep space. From these giant telescopes we can see millions of light years into the past and calculate the primeval age and defining elements of stars. Surprisingly, one of the major elements of stars is calcium which is also the main element in human bones.
The Atacama is where petroglyphs are etched into ancient rocks and mummified remains of pre-Columbian Indians are found intact, attesting to a history of community and foot traffic that is at least 10,000, if not more, years old.
This is where, in the 19th Century, Aymara and Mapuche Indians were housed and died working as mostly slave labour in the nearby saltpetre mines. And this is where more recently the murdered bodies of people considered to be political enemies of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet’s bloody suppressive regime, were secretly dumped over a period of seventeen years by the military police.
But the past as evidenced in the earliest history of the stars doesn’t quite come together with the present. We are fascinated by events that happened billions of years ago, we revere fossils and very old bones – such as those of pre-Columbian Indians mummified by the sands of the Atacama but the more recent past is not a subject most of us wish to face.
It is too close. We want it to go away so we can sleep at night and forget. This is the subject that veteran film Director Patricio Guzmán, famed for his previous political documentaries on Chile’s fraught political past sets out to explore in his latest powerful and poignant work.
Augusto Pinochet’s Politics of Shame
Augusto Pinochet’s bloody seventeen year rule of Chile had its origins in a coup sanctioned and in part armed and funded by the USA when Richard Nixon was president. Fearing a Nationalist and perhaps Communist regime led by a duly elected Salvador Allende, the USA, with the direct involvement of Henry Kissinger, established a covert operation called Track II. The main aim of this operation was to block Allende’s election by first kidnapping General René Schneider, Commander in Chief of the Chilean Army, who, in spite of not approving Allende’s election, stood in the way of a planned military coup against Allende. To this end the USA armed two conspiring Generals with an arsenal of weapons and cash bribes. The plan ran into a snag when during the course of the kidnapping General Schneider was deliberately shot. Owing to the subsequent popular revulsion against the botched kidnapping and murder, the military coup did not occur and Allende became the first democratically elected president in Chile’s history. However, for many reasons, this state of affairs ended on September 11, 1973, when a military Junta staged another planned coup. Allende ended up taking his own life on that same day, allegedly with a pistol given to him by his friend, Fidel Castro.
Thus on September 11, 1973 – please note the 9/11 – Augusto Pinochet, a military dictator, started a seventeen year reign of terror, corruption, murder, kidnapping, imprisonment and concentration camp labour in Chile.
And so we come to the Atacama Desert, a vast place with minimal humidity. Some of the areas in this desert only get rain maybe once in 400 years while others do not appear to have felt rain in human recorded history. The arid landscape is so rich in mineral salts that nothing lives on most of the 600 square miles – no insects, no lizards, no animals, no birds. The only thing that endures is the mummified remains of the dead. The calcified skeletons and bones of men, women and children.
And it is here, the place of five giant white observatories and the world’s biggest telescopes built to unlock the mysteries of the stars all the way back to the big bang, that the infamous Chacabuco concentration camp was reactivated from an existing compound. Nearby to this site are the desiccated bones of Indians forced to work the mines in the 19th century. When the camp was set up the only needed improvement was a string of barbed wire around the compound to keep the prisoners in.
There is an old ironic joke that says, ‘Don’t steal, the Government hates competition.’ In keeping with this irony, Pinochet was ousted from power not for seventeen years of crimes against humanity but for corruption. He allegedly spirited $28 million dollars out of the country into a private bank account.
The Question is not why we forget but why we refuse to remember
As Gaspar, an astronomer who is interviewed in Guzmán’s documentary states: there is no present. The light and sound that reaches our eyes, ears and brains happened seconds ago. Even the light we see from the sun takes 8 minutes to get to us and then it takes another few milliseconds for our brains to process it into our awareness. In this way we live perpetually in the past. Even so we are constantly trying to define it in some way – the far past because we wish to reconstruct it and the near past because we may wish to forget it.
Telescopes mining the cosmos for the origins of the big bang, archaeologists combing the desert sands for petroglyphs and ancient mummies: these things we are curious about. As Guzmán says, most Chileans are fascinated with astronomy. Even the prisoners at Chacabuco formed a study group in the late nights to learn about the stars. A group that was forcibly disbanded by the guards when they became afraid the prisoners would try to escape through the desert by following the stars.
But when the past is closer to home, when murder, torture and terror is suffered by our next door neighbours we wish for amnesia. It is a curious thing. Our shame at having to hear another’s pain. The same thing happened to survivors of the Holocaust after the Second World War. They crawled out of the horrific death camps and forests and were made to feel ashamed about speaking of their suffering.
In the same way as the Chilean military sneaked back into the desert with bulldozers in an effort to get rid of the bodies they previously buried there, scooping them up with huge serrated shovels while leaving curious little bone shards behind, we think by hiding the evidence and looking away we hide our shame at doing nothing, knowing nothing. But we do not.
Violetta, a 70 year old Chilean woman who has been combing the desert sands for over thirty years says it would be easier for everybody if those like her who keep searching or questioning would go away: “Because we are problems – for society, for justice, for everyone. We are the lepers of Chile.”
And there is Luis who was part of the group of around 25 men who came out of their prison compound at night to study the stars. Luis reads off the names of the men in his compound; names that are beginning to disappear from the crumbling walls. And there is Miguel; the Architect of Memory, Guzmán calls him. Miguel paced off the dimensions of Chacabuco and committed them all to memory so that when he was released the accuracy of the drawings he recreated was astonishing to many.
Patricio Guzmán tells us that we revere ancient artefacts, petrified skeletons, old mummies. We label them and put them in museums for everyone to study and learn from. But there are other bones that don’t have a place in any museum, more recent bones without names, not etched yet into our collective memory because they are still filled with such recent suffering.
And the pain is being kept alive by a dwindling number of those who want to remember, those who have given themselves the aching task of being the keepers of memory.
We Are Stardust
The final sequence in the documentary and perhaps the beginning of faint signs of light belongs to a young woman, Valentina, who works in an astronomy lab. She is the child of disappeared parents. When she was one years old the military police came to her grandparents house where she was staying and told them that unless the grandparents gave up the location of her parents, Valentina would disappear.
What you see on the faces of the grandparents, without a word being said, is the sorrow. In order to save their grandchild they had to give up their own flesh and blood and the years have not erased this fact. And here is where we come to another reason for silence. It is not that we have forgotten. It is that sometimes memory is too raw to be spoken out loud.
Valentina says that what keeps her going is the thought that, like the stars, we are all part of the current, the energy, the material that recycles. So even though she says she feels as if she has a factory defect, her children do not.
Stars die to give birth to other stars, their dust and their light is spread over the entire universe, traveling and recycling forever. We are all part of those winds of rebirthing and creating anew. We all contain ancient material from the universe going all the way back to the beginning including the calcium in our bones.
As Joni Mitchell sang at Woodstock, four years before Pinochet began his iron-fisted regime, “We are stardust, we are golden and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
End Notes
Nostalgia for the Light (2010) was the winner of Best Documentary at the Prix ARTE, 2010 European Film Academy Awards and at the 2010 Abu Dhabi Film Festival; it was the Official Selection at the 2010 Cannes, Toronto, San Francisco, Miami and Melbourne International Film Festivals.
Country: France/Germany/Spain
Language: Spanish
Runtime: 90 minutes
Screenplay writer and director: Patricio Guzmán Lozanes (born August 11, 1941). Guzmán also teaches documentary film classes in Europe and Latin America, and is the founder and director of the International Documentary Festival of Santiago (FIDOCS). He currently lives in France.
Producer: Renate Sachse
Cinematographer: Katell Djian
Editor: Patricio Guzmán, Emmanuelle Joly
Sound: Freddy González
Music: Miranda & Tobar
International Sales Agent: Pyramide International
Production Company: Atacama Productions
Ariane Blackman - As an Experimental Psychologist, Reiki Master and Energy medicine practitioner, I am always curious about both the seen and unseen worlds; ...
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