Reviews
THE BATTLE OF CHILE I-II-III
(272 minutes, 1972-1979)
“Great films rarely arrive unannounced, like “The Battle of Chile”. A documentary in several parts and lasting many hours, about the events that preceded the fall of Allende... How could a team of 5 people, some of them without previous experience (...) produce a work of this magnitude?... Patricio Guzmán has said in an interview (...) that, during the street fights, he could anticipate what was going to happen and that, standing behind the operator, he told him when he got ahead, show a sector , lower the camera and raise it. That is, he was so imbued with the possibilities of the situation that it was as if he was directing the action. I could use the methods of fiction cinema that I had studied at the Madrid school in the late 1960s...”
Pauline Kael, The New Yorker , USA 1978.
“A capital testimony. Let's see, never to forget."
Le Nouvel Observateur , France 1977.
“The Battle of Chile”: the most impressive seen in Cannes and an invaluable documentary for history”.
Change 16 . Spain 1976.
“Two extraordinary moments from the second part: fragments of anthology, one could say (...). Under the sounds of a funeral march, the funeral of Allende's murdered aide. The camera scrutinizes the faces, an incisive comment practically invites us to read under those hermetic gazes that the decisive blow is being prepared. Second historical moment: the gigantic demonstration of September 4, a week before the coup...”
Louis Marcorelles, Le Monde , France 1976.
“This film is the first masterpiece of a new way of looking at politics... It offers us a history lesson like the cinema has never offered us... Although several well-known filmmakers are inscribed in the rubric of the script, like Pedro Chaskel, another Chilean director, Julio García Espinosa, a Cuban director, and Chris Marker, the work, very obviously, is due to one man. Not for reasons of origin, but, perhaps, because the work of creation, production, assembly, is well worth that of a Bresson or a Fellini”...
Louis Marcolles. Le Monde, France 1975.
“If it were in my hand, I would declare “The Battle of Chile”
film of "democratic interest" and would force the use
as school supplies.
Manuel Vazquez Montalban. Mundo Obrero, Spain 1977.
“None of the new Hollywood conspiracy and murder movies
can live up to the suspense
they manage to create these images.”
Judy Stone. San Francisco Chronicle, USA 1977.
“Beyond the historical and political analysis, the film is worth the extraordinary human quality of certain unpublished documents. It is a film that is directed first to reflection, but that reaches us to the heart”.
Marcel Martin. Ecran, France 1977.
Patricio Guzmán's "The Battle of Chile" is an overwhelming and admirable documentary of a country thrown into chaos with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy." Kevin Thomas.
Los Angeles Times , USA 1978.
"Whatever one's reaction to "The Battle of Chile III," it is unquestionably an epic film."
Vincent Camby, The New York Times , USA 1978.
IN THE NAME OF GOD
(95 minutes, 1985-1986)
“In the name of God, filmed by Patricio Guzmán for Spanish TV, seems like an exceptional testimony to the schizophrenia of the Pinochet regime that imprisons and tortures dissidents but at the same time leaves Chileans free to demonstrate against the dictatorship and reporters movie filming the police charges. Lasting an hour and a half --better than anything I could have done in a journalistic report--, the documentary allows one to savor the delirious ideology of Pinochet's men and to value the great significance of the position assumed by many archbishops ”…
Giovani Grazzini, Corriere della Sera , December 4, 1987.
“Guzmán has filmed demonstrations, arrests and violence of every kind, always finding himself at the center of the event, and the jury of the Festival dei Popoli (Florence, Italy) has underlined the director's courage in the argument for the award: “Made in extremely dramatic circumstances – says the argument -, the film conveys with great immediacy and force the sense of continuity in the struggle of a people that fights the dictatorship with all means. In addition, the director illustrates in an unprecedented way the image of a Church that is inscribed as a protagonist in this fight, supporting it with all the ideal, moral and practical means”.
AF Oggi, Tuscany , December 13, 1987.
“Guzmán delivers a lively and technically sound look at a complex subject that lives up to his previous work.”
Hans Ehrmann, Variety , April 18, 1987.
« Guzmán investigates the role of the Catholic Church in Chile today through interviews with priests and archbishops who speak frankly against the regime and where they describe the Chilean daily reality. They appear alongside spectacular footage of street demonstrations and rebellions, brutally suppressed by the police and the army, often using the dreaded water trucks mounted on top of armored vehicles. More importantly, Guzmán shows the work of the Vicariate, a Church organization dedicated to the defense of human rights, and the attempts by the regime to disrupt its work. But the film reaches its most effective point when he speaks with some of the priests whose ideas and theology have undergone important changes thanks to contact with the common people who fill the parishes. However, there is always the army in the background, which in reality becomes an anti-terrorist organization: they also evoke the name of God in their rituals. Guzmán maintains a masterful line between the two poles that divide Chile, while at no time does he hide from us which side his sympathies are on ».
Piers Handling, Toronto Film Festival, September 1987.
""The name of God" has obtained one of the loudest ovations heard at the Havana festival."
Ángel Fernández Santos, El País , December 17, 1987.
THE SOUTHERN CROSS
(78 minutes, 1989-1992)
“We also liked very much the feature film by Patricio Guzmán, La Cruz del Sur (Chile), for its slow and vast camera movements, its reflection that is both baroque and austere (radical, as is common in the author of the documentary trilogy The Battle of Chile) on the religious tradition of Latin America in relation to its political regimes. (...). The Southern Cross contrasts the imported culture of the Spanish conquerors with the ancient culture of the Indians and shows the result of syncretic religions, including Afro-American ones. It offers us to feel ourselves in time and beyond time, in a permanent, magnificent and solemn movement”.
Catherine Humblot. Le Monde , Paris 12 July 1992 .
“This film by Patricio Guzmán is an accurate synthesis of fiction and document. It is a voice of voices: a meeting place for American diversity, which helps us recognize each other as fingers of the same hand”.
Eduardo Galeano, March 1993
“From Hernán Cortés to the Theology of Liberation, the basic threads of this vast historical tragedy are found in La Cruz del Sur... An intelligent, free and beautiful work of combat cinema.” Angel Fernandez Santos.
El País , Madrid, September 10, 1992.
“The extraordinary beauty and subtlety of the sound and the montage of its images place La Cruz del Sur beyond a purely logical documentary. The film takes the audience to another world, to a magical kingdom where we navigate with pleasure and renew our senses, invigorate our minds and transform our hearts.”
Ruby Rich, Sundance Film Festival, 1993.
“Works of beautiful formal invoice are imposed in the “Window to the Imagination” section of the Venice Festival. Without forgetting the content, as Patricio Guzmán -a poet from Allende's Chile- does with La Cruz del Sur, where he alternates fiction and documentary through a meticulous exploration in search of the practices of Catholicism and its political instrumentation in South America. (...)”. Leonardo Autera. Corriere della Sera, September 9, 1992.
“It is a deeply spiritual film with spectacular reconstructions”.
Piers Handling, Toronto Film Festival, 1993.
THE STUBBORN MEMORY
(58 minutes, 1995-1997)
“The film is a battle against oblivion and the falsification of history, but above all the film allows us to fight against the collective amnesia programmed by Pinochet. As José Balmes says: memory and oblivion are like the positive and negative of human reflection, it makes us suffer and die, but it also makes us live”.
Joseph Collison, Les Inrockuptibles , France 1997.
"With his great meta-documentary, Patricio Guzmán manages to make things reappear when he visits the survivors and with them the faces of those who never came back reappear."
A & E., San Francisco Bay Guardian , USA 1988.
“Pure in its approach and forceful in its attack, this 58-minute documentary achieves a poetic intensity, achieved by its unusual approach to subject matter. Returning to his country with his epic work “The Battle of Chile” under his arm, Patricio Guzmán explores the importance and fragility of political memory, presenting a painful collection of images of the Popular Unity government under Allende and his arrest by the bloody coup. What happens when a dream is postponed? The film combines emotional reminiscences with provocative confrontations, such as the visit to the place of the crimes, such as the National Stadium in Santiago, which, after the coup, has been a torture center and a concentration camp. In the most extraordinary sequence, Guzmán films the reaction of men and women in the street when they hear the anthem “Venceremos” of the Unidad Popular. We, at that moment, are the witnesses of nothing less than the resurgence of collective memory”.
Michael Sragow, San Francisco Weekly , USA 1998.
“It turns out that the few faltering bars of the Claro de luna sonata, the leitmotif for the disappeared in the film, are played by the filmmaker's 80-year-old Uncle Ignacio. In the film we learn how Ignacio hid the material from La Batalla de Chile after the coup. At great personal risk (which he denies), he saved the irreplaceable document and handed it over to the Swedish embassy to be removed from the country. Now we see Ignacio with his piano, trying with his trembling hands to remember that half-forgotten music. He's wrong, he starts over, he's wrong again. With a resigned smile he says “It's the lame man who blames the piano”.
Then, gently and courageously, he makes the effort to fail again”.
Stuart Klawans, The Village Voice , USA 1998.
"The film ends with an intense and terrible sequence: the shaken, moved faces of the young people unable to control the emotion that arises when they contemplate their own history."
Catherine Humblot, Le Monde, France 1998.
"The confrontation of a generation that has lived an indelible past, etched in its memory, with a youth educated to forget history, leads this film to a surprising quality."
Leonard Klady, Variety , USA 1998.
“Guzmán nos deja sacar nuestras propias conclusiones y eso es finalmente el único aspecto pendiente en su nuevo documental. Uno espera que la tragedia del pasado no se repita y que los que han sufrido la historia lo van a vigilar”.
Leonard Klady, Cineaste, New York, N° 44, 1998.
THE PINOCHET CASE
(108 minutes, 1999-2001)
“On one side, the old dictator persecuted by justice. On the other hand, its victims, survivors and relatives of the disappeared. Confronting his destinies, Patricio Guzmán breaks a quarter of a century of silence”. Jean-Claude Raspiengeas.
Telerama , Paris 10. October 2001, N° 2700.
“It is the work of a master of his trade. Guzmán's knowledge of the rhythms and ins and outs of documentary composition reaches exciting heights, and this is so because it is perceived, not while watching the film, which is then pure transparency, but when once viewed it is rewound and projected on the screen. memory, and in the sieve of this inner moviola it then reveals the precision and meticulousness of the goldsmith's work, together with the surprising source of emotion and poetic warmth that there is in its (exact and therefore cold) calculations”.
Angel Fernandez Santos. The Country , Madrid 2001.
“The first images of “El Caso Pinochet” are those of a desert landscape. Survivors and judges are looking there for evidence, human remains, destroyed and hidden here by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. This opening sequence, as dry as it is moving, lives up to what the film is going to be: the struggle of the survivors against the dictatorship considered (...) as a company of oblivion and disappearance. Against this force of annihilation, with surprising security, "The Pinochet case" reveals one after another the tangible evidence that confirms the catastrophe.
Jean-Sebastian Chauvin. Cahier du Cinema, October 2001, No. 561.
“Classically built around the main characters (the victims, the Spanish judges Baltasar Garzón and the Chilean Juan Guzmán, in particular) “El Caso Pinochet” is an optimistic documentary that wants to believe in the justice of men. (...) An experienced documentary filmmaker, the filmmaker establishes such contact with his interlocutors that each testimony is enormously dense. (...) Without memory, concludes Patricio Guzmán, a country has no future”.
Veronique Soule. Libération , Paris, October 10, 2001
(...) “El Caso Pinochet” narrates the genesis of a miracle. The precious images of Guzmán allow to solve a Pinochet case that no justice will ever examine, without any exception”.
Michel Palmieri. Elle , Paris, 8-14 October 2001, No. 2910.
“El Caso Pinochet” is a fascinating documentary (...). A great tribute to women, terrible narrators of the torture they have suffered. Difficult to make it more excellent, clearer and more captivating”.
FT Zurban, Cannes, May 16, 2001, No. 7.
“This scenario has a double risk: limiting itself to a montage of television documents; or lock themselves in a militant and compassionate rhetoric. “The Pinochet case” avoids those dangers. The construction of the film is organized by successive waves, like memory bandages, which return little by little... Did people know about the things that happened after the coup d'état?... No doubt they were known, but the force the film is to take this "knowledge" as insufficient. Testimonies reappear from a past half buried by the military and civilian governments (...): arbitrary arrests, torture, mass executions and the secrecy surrounding the disappeared. Here comes the second and main achievement of the film: even if we are well informed, the physical presence of the people concerned produces a totally different relationship. The victims, with their way of speaking at length, of saying and not saying, of hesitating, the texture of their voices, just like the features of their faces, conceal an unspeakable force that exceeds the sense (political, ethical, affective) of what they say or mean. This is also true for Joan Garcés, Allende's partner and animator of the fight against the junta. He only talks about procedures, but his face, his body, his voice, are like a moving song. (...) The meeting between the old dictator and Margaret Thatcher emanates a physically perceptible violence (...) Guzmán reaches beyond the testimony and beyond the denunciation. His film becomes the invocation of a black world (the world of terror, of oblivion) where the tribulations of the crooked and cunning old monster draw their mark on the surface of today”.
JMF, Le Monde, Paris, October 10, 2001.
SALVADOR ALLENDE
(100 minutes, 2004)
"Salvador Allende" is not a simple biography. It is above all a poem that comes from the soul of the filmmaker to pay tribute to the Chilean president."
LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE , José Maldavsky, Paris, Sept. 2004
"With Salvador Allende, Patricio Guzmán's material is triple. He weaves archive images, encounters with characters and the intimate material of his own memories and his life (...) Every portrait is also a self-portrait (...) Together with Raymond Depardon, the Brazilian Walter Salles or Michael Moore, the opening to documentary cinema begun three years ago by the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival, which confirms all the vitality of this cinematographic form in the face of fiction".
L'HUMANITE , Paris, May 14, 2004
"Like Salvador Allende, Patricio Guzmán has dedicated his life to Chile, his country. It therefore seems entirely normal that he devotes a documentary to his political hero, martyr of September 11, 1973. More than a simple portrait, it is a film inspired by the which Guzmán manages to take a considerable distance in relation to the subject.Based on archive images, testimonies of survivors and an unpublished political analysis, he shows the enthusiasm that Allende's victory in 1970 has represented for an entire people, without avoiding the errors of judgment and above all to show the political and economic tense in which Allende found himself imprisoned. A very rich film, sometimes very emotional, that breaks the taboo of silence about a leading personality of the 20th century".
ZURBAN, Paris, May 13, 2004
"A country without a documentary is like a family without a photo album," says Patricio Guzmán, a Chilean filmmaker dedicated after 30 years to telling the history of his country to complete his memory. After The Pinochet Case (2001) he now shows the antagonistic portrait of Salvador Allende. It is to oppose light to darkness, civilization and legality to the brutality of the dictatorship in an antithesis in the style of Victor Hugo (...) It offers a very hagiographic biography from the point of view of the president's supporters (the opponents, especially the Americans are clearly the villains) which does not prevent him from being captivating and nuanced within the revolutionary field.
LE FIGARO , Paris, May 13, 2004
"There was a memory of the nightmare... now there is the memory of the dream (...) Patricio Guzmán shows that radiant dream of the young filmmaker he was then and the dream of an entire people who installed Salvador Allende in power in 1970 (...) Guzmán finds the main material of his film in archive shots from his own filmmaker collections plus some shots by Dutchman Joris Ivens (…) The dream remains intact".
LIBERATION, Paris, May 13, 2004
"Inspiring and moving documentary about President Allende.
An elegy on the fate of the Chilean people who cannot leave
indifferent to anyone".
LES INROCKUPTIBLES, Jean-Baptiste Morain, Paris, September 8. 2004
"A clear and rigorous documentary. An opportunity to educate oneself or to remember when the process against Pinochet opens again."
LE CANARD ENCHAINÉ, Jean-Paul Grousset, Paris, September 8, 2004
"The last journey of Patricio Guzmán through the space of amnesia that is the history of Chile is without a doubt one of the most exciting journeys of this documentary filmmaker, with many rigorous and exciting sequences (...) A captivating film (...). The The originality of the film rests on a sensible evolution of Guzmán with his own art (…). The film, without being sensationalist, puts utopia on the scene and privileges the myth".
CAHIERS DU CINEMA, Thierry Méranger, Paris, September 2004
"How good to get carried away by the images of Patricio Guzmán!".
LE COURIER, Emmilie Valentin, Paris, October 2, 2004
"With Salvador Allende, Patricio Guzmán exhumes that radiant dream of equality and justice that he embodies for a whole generation of Chileans, that revolutionary and pacifist dream (…). Guzmán shakes our amnesia."
PARIS-OBS-SUPPLEMENT, Richard Cannavo, Paris, 9-15 Sept. 2004
"The film is moving, elegant, powerful. Behind its editing cadence, it reveals the hand of a master in this task of cinema embarking on its beautiful battle against oblivion (…) It is a document of extraordinary evocative force, a unusual exercise in introspective documentary cinema, in which Guzmán commemorates from the corners of his intimate memory the moments of glory of President Allende and what his figure had as a meeting point with the dreamed hope of a fusion between full socialism and full democracy".
EL PAIS, Angel Fernandez-Santos, Madrid, May 14, 2004
NOSTALGIA OF THE LIGHT
(90 minutes, 2010)
“One necessarily thinks of the brilliant ellipsis of 2001 a Space Odyssey where a bone thrown by a prehistoric man was transformed into a spaceship some millions of years later, but the relationship established by Kubrick was based on the evolution of the human species . In Guzmán, on the other hand, it rests on a timeless and vertiginous simultaneity”.
Nicholas Azalbert. Cahiers du Cinema. November 2010.
“Metaphysical and political, intimate and collective, a beautiful and unclassifiable documentary about the Pinochet dictatorship by an emblematic Chilean filmmaker. Raúl Ruiz evoked a week ago the arrest of his compatriot by Pinochet's military. Here is the latest film by this filmmaker --little known in France--, a strange and singular essay-poem (...). Guzmán invents the meditative documentary where beauty arises from an absolutely unclassifiable arrangement of ideas, images and sounds”.
The Unrockable. October 26, 2010.
“Nostalgia de la luz sounds like a tribute to time, to astronomy, to history. To the movies. It aims to stamp on memories a version of Chilean history that is absent from official books. And it leaves behind a memory of beauty that prevents it from disappearing into the dark.”
Dominic Martinez. positif . November 2010.
“The Chilean documentary maker who normally looks at the lives of men turns his eyes on the tiny traces that remain from the past. He crosses the gazes of astronomers and families looking for the fragments of their loved ones in the sand of the Atacama desert.
Thomas Sotinel. Le Monde Magazine.
October 30, 2010.
"Patricio Guzmán, known for his documentaries on Chile de Allende and the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1988), proposes a fascinating meditation on memory by mixing the time of the universe with human history." . .
Frank Tenaille. Cease. October 2010.
“The calm of the film and the beauty of its images work as an antidote to unleash the emotion. Nostalgia for light also undoubtedly allows us to better understand a recent event: the rescue of the miners of San José, also in the Atacama desert. As if behind this story of living beings, uprooted from the bowels of the earth and the exaggerated dramatization of solidarity and compassion in front of cameras from all over the world, the bad conscience of the other unburied dead came to the surface.
Rene Solis. Libération . October 27, 2010.
“Here is certainly a documentary that one does not see every day. A film that goes beyond what you can imagine. And that, at first, will lead them to ask themselves, what are we doing here? (...) And then Patricio Guzmán makes us enter little by little in his vision of the cosmos, in his dreams, where past, present and future are mixed, in his questions about life and human destiny. Here science, metaphysics and politics intersect.
Pierre Faure. Croix du Nord. October 28, 2010.
“The emotion takes shape and builds up in layers as the film progresses. One does not realize where the filmmaker wants to take us (...) but when one enters the culmination of humanity that Patricio Guzmán proposes to us, the effect is heartbreaking. An emotional thunder.”
Carlos Gomez. Journal du Dimanche . October 24, 2010.
“Star dust on one hand, earth dust on the other… Based on this parallel Patricio Guzmán builds a surprising and exciting documentary where the search for origins is forged. And besides, this Atacama desert is very beautiful when it is not invaded by the international press eager for the buried miners”.
FP Le Canard Enchainé . October 20, 2010.
“This land of desolation is illuminated by the figure
of a young astronomer raised by her grandparents (...).
Raised in the spirit of her absent parents
she claims a manufacturing defect
that their children fortunately do not have.
A note of hope, in the image of the stars,
that die to give birth to other galaxies.
The celestial bodies aspire the terrestrial bodies.
It is the triumph of eternal life.”
Didier Hemardinquer. L'Est Republicaine . October 23, 2010.
“Since his exile in 1973, Guzmán has not stopped confronting his country with its past. He has never done it before with such sensitivity and soul elevation as in this documentary (...).”
LePoint.fr. Francois-Guillaume Lorrain. October 30, 2010.
“Head in the stars and feet on the ground, Patricio Guzmán's film reflects on the initial light for an indispensable work on memory”. CV Meter.
“The film Nostalgia de la Luz by the Chilean Patricio Guzmán, co-produced by France, Germany and Chile, will compete for the best documentary award from the European Film Academy (EFA) against the Scandinavian films “Armadillo” and “Mienten Vuoro”. EFE. October 29, 2010.
“Through moving testimonies, Guzmán echoes the celestial search and the desperate excavations of the women of the victims, giving the search for these women a cosmic dimension. His virtuous staging superimposes images of the sky, the desert and interviews. It manages to equalize the place of man in the universe and the duty of memory. An astonishing political-poetic reflection, Nostalgia de la luz carries the dark sun of a melancholy that we no longer believed cinema was capable of.
Gaël Golhen. Premiere . October 2010.
“"Nostalgia de la luz" by Patricio Guzmán offers us an imposing philosophical treatise at the Toronto International Film Festival. Patricio Guzmán, the chronicler of his beloved Chile and its tragic fate at the hands of Pinochet, returns to Toronto for the first time in many years with a new film, Nostalgia for Light. I've saved it for last because it was such a surprise, such a moving masterpiece. Who knew that Guzmán was an astronomy buff all his life? He travels to the farthest points of Chile, to the dry desert where the greatest number of stars can be observed, where the sky feels closer than anywhere else: the Atacama desert, an area where the most important observatories in the world are located. . As Guzmán begins to relate astronomy to history, comparing and contrasting their functions, he slowly begins to widen his circles of inquiry. The dryness of the desert also mummifies the bodies. History, horror, the universe, the earth below our feet, the galaxies above. micro and macro. The universal, the particular. Obsession and magic. This is Guzmán's leap towards a different cinema: a majestic philosophical treatise for the eyes and disturbing for the spirit. Sitting in the Bell Lightbox room, facing the screen beaming with visions of the Atacama, I was enthralled. So were the spectators around me. Ahh!…for such momentous moments there are film festivals.”
Ruby Rich. Toronto's New Lightbox Offers Transcendence. September 16 – 2010
THE MOTHER OF PEARL BUTTON
(82 minutes, 2015)
"The Nacre Button"
Chile, that memorial archipelago.
The filmmaker Patricio Guzmán films the story with brio
of his country, with all the violence and his poetry.
Since his expatriation (first to Cuba, then to Spain and then to France) due to Augusto Pinochet's coup in 1973, the Chilean Patricio Guzmán has not stopped documenting the contemporary history of his country: the trilogy "The Battle of Chile” (1973-1979), made with the participation of Chris Marker, “El Caso Pinochet” (2001) or “Salvador Allende” (2004), are made up of film titles that speak to moviegoers, but also to all those who have an interest in Latin America, from the bloody dictatorships on this continent during the cold war.
For Guzmán himself, this tireless concern for the history of his country was undoubtedly, for him as an exile, a way of getting into the course of a history, both intimate and national, from which he was violently torn away.
The spirit of exile.
Who will ever be able to say, at least if they have not lived it in their own flesh, what this feeling of exile is? This brutal tearing away from oneself, this searing suffering of no longer being able to inhabit the world for which one was destined, that habit of learning to live eternally outside of oneself. This break, however, can reveal a bright phase: the distancing of nationalism, the discovery of the world and of oneself as otherness, the celebration that life is universal and pluralistic. If one sticks to what his cinema shows, one might think that Patricio Guzmán has recently entered that luminous, soft, peaceful phase of existence in the diaspora. It seems that the spirit of exile inspires him more than oppresses him, giving him a different way of looking at the world.
Thus, after “Nostalgia de la Luz” (2010), a documentary masterpiece, made after six years of silence, Guzmán, almost 70 years old, suddenly began to film not only the things themselves, but in their supposed identity, but also the things between them, in their sinuous and invisible relationships that keep them united to the world, between the memory of the dictatorship, the astronomical search and the archeology of indigenous civilization.
We are then back in Chile, where Guzmán films, but in a Chile not only in political and historical terms, but also in geographical, anthropological, poetic, and cosmic terms. From the cosmic to the cosmological there is only one step, which Guzmán crosses today with his new film “The Pearl Button”, which turns out to be as magnificent as the previous one.
This button, a casual object of a documentary fable, where the film is going to find the thread tragically torn off, takes us very far south, to Patagonia, to the antipodes of the Atacama desert, where “Nostalgia for the Light” was developed. There, at the extreme tip of Latin America, the conglomerate of the largest archipelago in the world is drawn, with its bluish, frozen, sublime and extreme Antarctic landscapes; there are also the waters of indigenous memory and colonizing power, two conceptions of the world oriented, one towards respect for the world and life, the other towards the conquest of power and the depletion of resources. It is at this crossroads that the director stages a fluid and symphonic film. It opposes a forgotten indigenous cosmogony to the violence of the West that advances from destruction to destruction.
Alchemy between science and poetry.
All this happens concretely through stories of characters, places, photographs and a subtle thought that unites them. One story among others: the Jemmy Button, the native seduced by a mother-of-pearl button and brought to London in 1830 by Robert FitzRoy, commander of the British Royal Navy who mapped that region and paved the way for colonization. They teach him the language of the Queen Mother, dress him properly, instill good manners in him, make him a gentleman, then return him to his place. This is evidently the beginning of the end for their civilization, a business that cost the West the price of a mother-of-pearl button. That same type of button is found on the seabed very close, in the surroundings, agglutinated with the mollusks that colonized the rails on which, in Pinochet's time, the opponents were tied to drown them better.
Between these two buttons, the film tells us the story of a continuous extermination, but it also gives the profile of a vision of the brilliant world, conceived by men disguised as spirits (hallucinating photographs by the Austrian Martin Gusinde) who thought that the dead turn into stars. This is complemented by testimonies from a few survivors (Cristina Calderón, the last representative of the Yagán ethnic group), from a philosopher (Gabriel Salazar), from a poet (Raúl Zurita), from an artist (Ema Malig).
Just like the murdered indigenous people who were nomads, on the edge of the water that preserves their memory, just like the murdered indigenous people, just like the crucified oceanic people of the Pinochet era, transfigured into mother-of-pearl molluscs, Patricio Guzmán invents for this film an alchemy that reconciles science and poetry, dreams and consciousness. As if he wanted to pay homage in turn to the most filmmaker of philosophers, Gastón Bachelard, who had titled his fascinating other written in 1942 as follows: “Water and dreams. Essay on the imagination of matter”.
Le Monde , Jacques Mandelbaum
THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS
(85 minutes, 2019)
“The Cordillera de los Sueños, awarded the Golden Eye as the best documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, coincides with the deep insurrectionary shock that broke out in the country (…). Suddenly there is a mirror effect between what is seen these days on television and the archive images of Guzmán's film, which show the repression under the dictatorship, with that man (Pablo Salas) filming for forty years and the fact that no one recovers from a coup d'état or from their lost country. The Cordillera de Los Andes ends in a very personal way this brilliant, poetic and political trilogy of the author about the confrontation between men, the cosmos and nature… With very simple means he unfolds the magic of a very great cinema”.
L'Humanite , Magali Jauffret
“To close his trilogy of memory (…) the great Chilean documentary poet makes his camera hover over the Andes mountain range. Guzmán wonders about his relationship with this ghost country, which is slipping through his fingers. Its angle of attack is the Andes mountain range, a barrier of mountains that protect and isolate Chile from the rest of the world. The images from the drones above the cloud-drenched void are vertiginous, metaphysical: they are a “Mountain of Life” that Terrence Malick could have filmed. One has the impression of touching eternity, the power of the Earth itself, as if it could speak, tell something beautiful and terrible at the same time. To this incredible vision, Guzmán joins his voice-over, slow, articulate, aware of each sound, plus the interviews of artists that evoke the mountains and the persistence of the wounds of the Pinochet years.
Premiere , Guillaume Bonnet, 2019.
“Patricio Guzmán the exile closes a fascinating trilogy about that Chile that persecutes him, searching the sumptuous Andes for the traces of the drama of the dictatorship”.
Telerama , Mathilde Blottière.
"It illuminates the history leading up to the current crackdown under President Piñera."
Le Canard Enchainé , 2019.
"The filmmaker has found in the power of the mountains the marks of the past: the dictatorship has disappeared but the neoliberal shock persists."
Etudes , Raphael Nieuwjaer, 2019.
«La Cordillera de los Sueños es un filme extraordinario… un documental fuera de las normas con imágenes sobresalientes ».
Equipe Que Tal París, 2019.
“The mountain range is a gateway to the analysis of the personal feeling that unites the filmmaker (Patricio Guzmán) with his country… It goes over geography to history showing that blind spot that is the coup. And it shows Chile as a country sick of its history, sick of a memory that has always been buried. The character of Pablo Salas is very interesting in this view: a crazy filmmaker of all the Chilean demonstrations of the 1980s, a repository in his local of hundreds of videos that speak of the constant repression that has bloodied the country. This miraculous filmmaker is by himself a figure of hope for a true memory and behind him a justice worthy of the name, which may one day arise in Chile.
Le Monde , Jacques Mandelbaum, 2019.
«Film after film (Guzmán) makes an X-ray of his native land, unfolds a metaphorical dimension of his documentary objective. Far from submitting to the service of collective memory and individual testimony, he builds an archeology of a past that must not pass away».
Magazine Voyageur, Laurent Delmas, 2019.
“There is no coincidence in the fact that, months before the popular insurrection that shakes the streets of Santiago today and plunges the country into a climate of civil war, which it had not known since Pinochet's coup d'état… that Guzmán has the luminous premonition of starting his film exactly in the subway of the Chilean capital. There where the people have woken up to protest, Guzmán denounces in La Cordillera de los Sueños the confiscation of the country's natural treasures by foreign companies, the ultra-liberalism adopted by the government, the non-recognition of past crimes and the increase of the illegalities between the rich and the poor… Filmmaker of Chilean memory, Guzmán becomes the herald of the immediate future of his country. The dream has come true."
Les Inrockuptibles , Bruno Deruisseau
“With "The Cordillera of Dreams" , it is forty years of a work entirely conceived as a mausoleum to the memory of a Chile submitted by the military junta that Patricio Guzmán closes again and, even more, ten years of a trilogy of memory begun with “Nostalgia de la Luz” and followed by “The Pearl Button”, an exploration of a genre and form that is unlike anything else, a documentary and poetic examination of the social, political and geographical body of Chile, uniting the micro of the memories of the director's youth to the macro of the cosmos. A majestic documentary triptych in which memory is considered a natural force. Successively assimilable to gravity, magnetizing the families of the victims of the dictatorship to the pits of the Atacama desert, to the tides of the Pacific, returning the remains of the drowned Pinochet, and again to the telluric folds of the Los Angeles mountain range. Andes, great unknown in Chile, however vigilant and silent in Santiago (...) an open-air prison for the militant adult who was quickly forced to flee (...) In a powerful gesture of friendship and constriction, Guzmán leaves the job to a colleague (Pablo Salas) to take center stage in his film, as a response to his own film "The Battle of Chile", his first five-hour documentary on the death throes of Chilean democracy, completed in exile. He finally makes his way to a grave: the preserved ruins of his childhood home. This double return to the sources of his past allows him, in this way, to close a revolutionary documentary and existential journey, in the cosmic sense of the term, returning to his starting point.
Positif , Emmanuele Raspiengeas