How Chilean directors filmed their homeland abroad
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Free in form and spirit, oriented towards politics and social issues, Chilean new cinema flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the presidency of socialist Salvador Allende. But then came the 1973 military coup led by Augusto Pinochet: the capture of Santiago by tanks, Allende’s suicide in the besieged presidential palace and large-scale repressions in which at least three thousand people were killed without trial. According to some reports, every tenth Chilean emigrated from the new regime. Thus, of all the “new waves” of that time, the Chilean one turned out to be the only one of its kind – a new wave in exile. The strategies of its main representatives – Patricio Guzman, Miguel Littin and Raul Ruiz – were completely different, but the coup remained a central event in the creative and personal biography of each of them.
Patricio Guzman: strategy of resistance
Chilean cinema is the “third cinema”. The term was coined by Argentines Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, by analogy with the “Third World” of the Cold War. Latin America, in their opinion, is equally far from Hollywood commerce and European delights, as well as from the clichés of Soviet socialist realism. And Patricio Guzman, in the spirit of the “third cinema,” shot direct action documentaries. He managed to make several films under Allende, but it was not these efforts to document the short-lived left turn in the country that went down in history. His most famous work remains “The Battle of Chile” (1975-1979) – a three-part film with a total duration of more than four hours about how the high hopes of the Chilean socialists evaporated – first under pressure from the right-wing opposition, then at gunpoint from tanks.
History is not necessarily written by the winners. The film, shot by Guzman together with cinematographer Jorge Muller and a small team of like-minded people, shows the events of 1973 as a living political process, a struggle of ideas on the city streets. Such a view could not suit the Pinochet junta: the generals preferred to talk about the coup as a “restoration of order” in accordance with popular aspirations. Shortly after the coup, Jorge Müller was arrested and disappeared without a trace. Guzman himself spent two weeks in custody at a football stadium in Santiago – political prisoners were taken there when prisons ran out of space. The working materials for “The Battle of Chile” were smuggled by ship to Europe, and the film was already being edited in exile.
The 82-year-old Guzman continues to work in cinema and often returns to the topic of Pinochet’s coup, which has turned from an event of current politics into a problem of historical memory. In the mid-1990s, when Pinochet had already been overthrown, Guzman arrived in Chile and found that most of his compatriots preferred not to remember those bloody events, and young people had barely heard about them. This is the subject of the film “Chile, Stubborn Memory” (1997), where the director shows “The Battle of Chile” to high school students from Santiago. Guzmán made one personal film from archival materials about both Allende and Pinochet, and in 2019, when Chile was again unsettled, he again took to the streets of Santiago and captured the protests in the film “My Imaginary Country” (2022).
Miguel Littin: Invasion Strategy
Miguel Littin loudly announced himself with his debut “The Jackal of Nahueltoro”: a 1969 feature film based on a high-profile criminal case was shown in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, and many call this film the best among those that the directors of the Chilean “wave” of the sixties managed to shoot in their homeland. Littin shot the second film, “The Promised Land,” in the year of the revolution and was unable to finish it in Chile. The junta treated politicized directors as a serious nuisance: one of his first decrees, Pinochet ordered the closure of the National Fund for Financial Support of Cinema. But even just showing a film about the failed socialist revolution of 1932 in the new political realities was completely impossible. Editing was completed in Cuba, and the premiere took place at the Moscow Film Festival.
Littin changed several countries – Mexico, Nicaragua, after the democratization of Spain he went there – and in exile he continued to make films based on subjects from Chilean history. Either the director’s own craving for the form of folk epic, or close communication with Cuban and Soviet comrades (Littin became a regular at the Moscow festival) led to the fact that his films began to strongly gravitate towards socialist realism with the pathos and simplifications characteristic of this direction.
But, bored away from his homeland, Littin made himself the hero of an adventurous plot. After 12 years of emigration, the director arrived in Chile on a false passport, under the guise of a businessman from Uruguay, made contacts with the activist underground and made a documentary about their activities, “The Universal Declaration of Chile” (1985), and then safely left, avoiding arrest. Littin’s friend, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, chronicled the story in his book Incognito in Chile; Chilean authorities publicly burned several thousand copies smuggled into the country. After Pinochet left, Littin returned to live and work in Chile under his own name, served as mayor of his hometown of Palmilla for several years, and in 2022 participated in the development of the country’s new constitution.
Raul Ruiz: withdrawal strategy
The most subtle and inventive among the Chilean directors of this generation, Raul Ruiz began with films quite in the spirit of the times: in the debut “Three Sad Tigers” (1968) people sit in the same space and talk a lot, like the American John Cassavetes or the Frenchman Jean Eustache. The Marxist period in Ruiz’s work did not last long, but he managed to shoot a film based on improvisation under the Leninist title “What is to be done?” (1970).
Having left for France after the coup, Ruiz decided to interpret the new circumstances for himself in cinema and shot in Paris the film “Dialogues of Refugees” (1974) about political emigrants from Chile. The difficulties of adaptation are depicted there with irony and without any special attempts to evoke sympathy, and the central event of the plot is completely comedy. Refugee activists “kidnap” the singer, who made compromises with the junta for the sake of his career and came on tour to Paris: the musician is invited to dinner, and then, out of politeness, he cannot leave the emigrant apartment for another two weeks.
Not everyone in the diaspora found Ruiz’s jokes appropriate. The film caused a scandal in emigrant circles, and there were even accusations of working for Pinochet. Ruiz later explained that he actually wanted to make a serious political film – but his directorial temperament and way of looking at things excluded seriousness. The heir of surrealism, Ruiz found a reason for play and provocation in any topic. He remained faithful to this approach in the following films, of which he made about a hundred more. But there were almost no Chilean subjects among them. Having quarreled with the emigrant community, Ruiz began filming in French and even added a letter to his name so that it would be spelled in the French manner – Raoul. He returned to Chile only decades later in several later films, including his farewell Opposite Night (2012).
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