Walking through the 9/11 memorial museum in Lower Manhattan recently, I came across a visitor who was seething. “9/11? 9/11? Nothing here about Chile?” The visitors around him may have been puzzled, but many Chileans remember 11th September 1973 as the day the country’s air force fired rockets at the presidential palace as part of a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet and supported by Richard Nixon. The democratically elected leader of the ruling Popular Unity coalition, Salvador Allende, committed suicide. In the years that followed, thousands of citizens were tortured, murdered or forced into exile. Pinochet, helped by Chicago School economists, turned the country into a poster child for what became neoliberalism.
Anyone interested in the bloody events of 1973 needs to see The Battle of Chile (1975–1979) by Patricio Guzmán, widely regarded as one of the greatest political documentaries ever made. Its director, born in 1941, had been studying film in Madrid but returned to Santiago because, like many young people of his generation, he was excited by Allende’s reforms and wanted to witness at firsthand the birth of a new nation. The Chile in which he arrived was turbulent. Plutocratic elites, covertly funded by the CIA, were pushing back against reforms. Guzmán’s five-man team filmed as the streets became battlegrounds. In one dreadful scene, Swedish-Argentinian cameraman Leonardo Henrichsen is spotted by a soldier, who fires at him—in effect, he records his own death.
Guzmán was detained after the coup and subjected to mock executions, while his cinematographer Jorge Müller Silva was tortured and then “disappeared”. Guzmán, who fled to Paris, spent years assembling the footage into a three-part monument to dashed idealism. His own idealism, though severely tested, has never disappeared entirely. In Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) he goes back to his home country and talks to survivors of Pinochet’s martial rule. An old friend tells him: “We are like a cemetery, a sacred camp, where ‘all those we were’ are asleep, but ‘those we were’ are not dead.”
Guzmán is now 81. In recent years he has worried that his countrymen have forgotten 11th September 1973. At the start of his new film, My Imaginary Country, he likens present-day Chile to a shopping centre: “A display window that didn’t show what was behind it.” But at the end of 2019, protests suddenly flared up—initially against a hike in metro fares, but then about pensions, university fees, social inequality. Observing police aim rubber bullets and water cannons at demonstrators, he fears history is repeating itself and that fascism is imminent.
But the people refuse to be cowed. There are so many of them (well over a million at one event) that the film’s aerial shots look almost fake. After a referendum, the country’s leading parties finally agree on a need to replace Pinochet’s crooked 1980 constitution. Activists step forward to draft it. Is it possible, Guzmán wonders, that he is present at a “theatre of the future”? In the parliamentary building, new voices resound. One belongs to a queer, working-class student called Valentina Miranda. “I am 21 years old, a hick, a bumpkin, scum, an Indian,” she declares.
In Guzmán’s imaginary country, the future is female. He interviews political scientists, psychologists, volunteer medics, performance artists, chess players: all of them women, all luminously eloquent. Prize-winning journalist Mónica González, on the edge of tears, describes a nation in which 73 per cent of infants are born out of wedlock; their mothers, she says, hands cracked from labouring all day, return home too exhausted to caress their children. “The right to make love is a human right,” she exclaims. He also talks to photographer Nicole Kramm who, like Henrichsen in The Battle of Chile, was shot by a soldier; like over 400 protesters, she was maimed in the eye.
Guzmán’s recent films—including The Pearl Button (2015)—are beautiful, meditative, melancholy. By contrast, My Imaginary Country is infused with vibrant militancy. Writer Nona Fernández, reflecting on the social protests, says she’s “left with the feeling of a wonderful buzz, as if the soul has returned to the body.” “I feel a new era is beginning,” enthuses Guzmán himself. By the close of the film, Chile has a new president—Gabriel Boric, at 35 its youngest ever. His campaign slogan is: “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.”
When My Imaginary Country premiered at Cannes, it was hailed as an evocation of revolutionary change. In September, though, the proposed constitution—committed to universal healthcare and fighting climate change—was rejected by over 60 per cent of voters. For now, the future remains uncertain, imaginary. Whatever happens next, we can only hope that Guzmán will be there to document it.
