THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
One of the most famous Chileans in Paris, Patricio Guzman, 81, has lived in France for half a century. Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat in 1973, the assassination of President Salvador Allende, the establishment of a dictatorship drove him from his home forever. He was then 32 years old and was preparing, on the strength of his meeting with the writer, photographer and filmmaker Chris Marker (1921-2012), to produce a remarkable documentary trilogy on these tragic events, under the generic title of The Battle of Chile.
Patricio Guzman never stopped coming back to his country, to his pain, to his compassion for his fellow citizens
It would be wrong to think that this man then mourned this trauma, both collective and individual. Quite the contrary. Guzman, in a way, never left Chile. By political fidelity no doubt, by personal temperament most certainly also. A fidelity to his youthful hopes, mowed down by fascist barbarism, a desire not to let go, as long as the beast has not given up the ghost. A brief look at his vast filmography attests to this: Guzman never stopped coming back to it. To his country, to his pain, to his compassion for his fellow citizens who, dead or alive, will have borne the yoke of an iniquitous regime, with hands red with blood.
The poetic inflection, a sort of widening of the drama on a cosmic scale, which his work has recently experienced (nostalgia for light2010; The mother-of-pearl button, 2015) will not have prevented, however, this watchman from watching. And to return, if need be, to the core of his documentary vocation. The social revolt that erupted in October 2019 against the regime of President Sebastian Piñera and resulted, on December 19, 2021, in the election of his young successor, Gabriel Boric, representative of an ecologist and feminist left, could not be missed, in this regard, to captivate Patricio Guzman. As he himself reminds us at the start of the film, it is the relationship between these two revolutions that makes the film interesting for him. And which makes it, for us, so moving when we know that it is the battered but living conscience of Guzman himself who stands at the historical crossroads of these two events.
Challenging story
If he will not stop, during the film, to discreetly recall this link, his modesty will prevent him, and it is perhaps a shame, from putting it more forward than that. It is therefore a documentary of classic style, and of excellent quality, that he offers us on recent events. Interviews with the actors of the insurrection and archive images, films and photos, captured at the height of the clashes, intersect here to tell the story of the causes, means and effects of the revolt.
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