Chile, Pinochet, Allende and the sea: Patricio Guzmán's placid, lovely THE PEARL BUTTON

Those of us who have followed the career of writer/director Patricio Guzmán have seen this documentary filmmaker grow and change from a young(er) man covering the dreadful fall and murder of the democratically-elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende -- thanks to the nefarious and illegal efforts of our own nation and its sleazy right-wing leaders -- to an older, seasoned and increa-singly mystical man who must continue covering the horrible events that happen-ed to his country.

With his latest effort, THE PEARL BUTTON, we see the filmmaker (Guzmán is shown at right) moving from the angst and anger of his youth into even more of the quiet, calm acceptance of what has been -- together with the kind of mystical, encompassing understanding that seems to come to some of us with age --  that was such a part of this filmmaker's last documentary, Nostalgia for the Light. While Nostalgia/Light looked up and outward into the skies and to the universe to find solace in the understanding that both the stars out there and the bones of the Chilean dead (and living) are made of calcium, The Pearl Button considers the great sea that partially encompasses Chile and how it, too, has served as solace, provider and graveyard for its people.

This is not to say that, by accepting the past, Guzman is in any way condoning it. Hardly. This man appears to have lived and worked to do as much as he can to keep Chile's awful past current in the minds of his countrymen. It's just that he is now doing it in a more thoughtful, philosophical, even poetic manner -- and the result is a movie that moves us via its beauty, as well as its unearthing of not-so-ancient horrors.

In fact, the Allende regime, together with its disgusting replacement by Pinochet and his minions, does not even come up until past the film's halfway point (the documentary lasts but 79 minutes). Prior to this, we get a strange and amazing history of the indigenous tribes of Patagonia (above), in Chile's southern extreme: how they lived via the sea, how they devoted their bodies (below) to providing a canvas for their art and myths, and how they were at last wiped out almost completely in a genocide that pre-dated by maybe a century or more Pinochet's attempt to wipe out Chile's "socialist" population.

Visually The Pearl Button offers some gorgeous location shots of Chile's ocean venues, its glacial areas, as well as its more verdant locations. We see rain and ice and the original native population -- what's left of them, anyway. We meet poets and scientists and those natives themselves, and finally a few of the folk involved in and with the many "disappeared" who were tortured and murdered during the Pinochet regime.

This is a constant in Guzman's films, though here it is used in a manner much more quiet and subdued than ever before. In fact, there are really only two major disappeared people who are important to the film. One is a young schoolmate of Patricio's who drowns and is never found (the first "disappeared," the filmmaker call him); the other is Marta Ugarte, a woman whom we know mostly by the extraordinary and extraordinarily awful manner in which she died. This is told to us quietly, as is all else in the film, but Ms Ugarte stands in remarkably well for the rest of the "disappeared." As for the impunity offered to so many of the torturers and murderers, "This is," notes Guzmán, "like killing the dead twice."

The movie is, by turns, pantheistic, mystical, challenging, thoughtful, poetic, and sad. We see geography as destiny, and history as horror that only repeats itself. If Guzmán gives this genocide to us filtered through a kind of mysticism, given a subject this awful -- this difficult to comprehend and tolerate -- I am beginning to wonder how else it can be done? I'm stymied. If you have a suggestion, please feel free to offer it up.

Meanwhile, The Pearl Button, from Kino Lorber -- the title of which harks back to those aboriginal natives and one of their number, dubbed Jemmy Button, who (just as does the main character in Malick's classic, The New World) travels to England to discover "civilization" and is paid for his trouble with that titular button -- opens this Friday, October 23, in New York City at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema. In the weeks to follow, it will open in seven more cities. You can click here (then scroll down) to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.

Of Stars and Bones: Patricio Guzmán's profound NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT

New Yorkers are blessed this week to have two documen-taries as diverse and humbling as Bill Cunningham New York (covered two days ago) and now the latest exploration of history and memory in Chile from Patricio Guzmán, the filmmaker/poet who has given us The Battle of Chile; Chile, Obstinate Memory; and the documen-tary about Salvador Allende (also covered earlier this week).

His new film NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, which won Best Docu-mentary at last year's European Film Awards, may not actually bring to a close Guzmán's accounting of the ravaging of his birth country by the Pinochet regime (nothing save the filmmaker's own death will shut that door), but it is hard to imagine that he might do anything better, richer or more profound than this new film.

From the metallic sheen of the telescope (below) that opens the movie to the lace napkin and linen tablecloth in the kitchen or the slim, sculpted legs of a wooden chair in the living room that we see soon after -- the objects that begin the film are captured with such attention and love that we feel somehow secure. We're in the Atacama Desert, where the humidity is the lowest of anywhere on our planet and the air is ultra-clear for viewing the stars. Guzmán (shown at left) narrates the film himself, and his soothing, meditative voice, accompanied by a parade of stunning images, tells of the history of this unusual desert (where rain never comes), with its mollusks and meteorites, archeology and (now) astronomy.

The filmmaker speaks first with an astronomer -- a smart, thoughtful fellow who lives and works in the desert -- and who waxes philosophical about everything from the stars to time itself: "Does the present exist?" he asks, after giving us a terrific explanation of why not. "Maybe only in our mind." (So much for that once popular phrase, Be Here Now.) Another man notes that the country of Chile still remains in the grasp of the coup d'etat: "We've hidden away our nearest past, the 19th Century -- and the Indians." He speaks of buried minerals and buried men, as we watch a row of musical spoons waft and sing in the wind and think about what we owe other living humans beings.

A half-hour in, we get the real connection: Near the observatory (above) lies the remains of Chacabuco, the largest concentration camp of the Pinochet regime. We meet a former prisoner from the camp who explains how he and others in a group of prisoners would observe the stars and feel oddly... free. (Until the guards made them stop because they might use those stars to navigate to freedom. As if.)

We learn that the regime buried many of their prisoners here in the surrounding desert. And then, to ensure that the bodies could not be found, identified and the guilty prosecuted, they dug up those corpses, broke them apart and re-buried them. We meet several of the women (below) who now spend their lives digging and searching through the many bones (and bits of bones) for their "disappeared" loved ones. One of these sits in the desert and speaks of finding and then stroking her brothers foot. "We were reuinited. Only then could I take in the fact that he was dead."

We also meet an exiled mother and son, now back in Chile. He's an astronomer, she gives massages to the victims of the torture. Guzmán does not dwell on the atrocities, as we've seen and heard about them previously. Yet through these people and their stories we glimpse quite enough to make this terrible time indelible.

The last story is that of a young female astronomer (above) who could easily stand in for this entire country. Used as a child hostage by the Pinochet regime to get her grandparents to tell the whereabouts of her parents (which they did  in order to save the child's life), she lost both parents and was raised by her grandparents. How the young woman, herself now a mother, has come to terms with all that has happened, how she feels and why, her splendid use of the word "defect," and how, via astronomy and contemplation, she has found her place in the universe -- all this is profoundly important and moving, a privilege to experience.

You will stand up after watching Nostalgia for the Light feeling invigorated and chastened, with the images of the disappeared -- in close-up above, and all together, like some mammoth AIDS quilt made of tiles, below -- an indelible, even welcome presence. Though absent, they are still here.

Many of the people interviewed in the film are not particularly religious, yet their thoughts and ideas stuck me as being as close to the truth about what unites us to each other and to the universe as anything I have yet heard.  If this is not pleasing to the Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalist religions, it is certainly good enough for me. As I hope it will be for you.

Nostalgia for the Light, from Icarus Films, debuts this Friday, March 18, at IFC Center, New York, for an exclusive two-week engagement. For a complete listing of venues -- cities, dates and theaters (14 in the U.S., two in Canada) where you can see this film, click here. Coming from Icarus, of course, there will also, eventually, be a DVD available.

Note: Interested in meeting this wonderful filmmaker? Señor Guzmán will appear in person at IFC Center on Friday, 3/18, and Saturday, 3/19, at the 8:10 shows.

DVDebut: Patricio Guzmán returns yet again to SALVADOR ALLENDE

For Chileans of a certain age and leftist political leanings, Salvador Allende is the touchstone and always will be, so long as those people live. Likewise for right-leaning Chileans, Augusto Pinochet is the revered model. The latter's overthrow of Allende's democratically elected government (by the American-backed Chilean military) and the 15-year dictatorship that followed, along with the many missing and murdered dissidents, will remain the singular event/time period of all these lives -- no matter that many of Chile's young people today want to cry "Get over it!" There is no getting over it until all those who lived through these decades lave been laid to rest. For Chile, this time frame occupies a place similar to the disappeared in Argentina or, for the elders of Spain, their Civil War.

The Chilean/
Spanish writer, teacher and filmmaker Patricio Guzmán (shown at left) has amassed quite a body of work involving the Allende/
Pinochet time period. Obsessed (but in a useful manner) is not too strong a word, I think, to describe his connection to this era. His massive, three-part docu-mentary/history The Battle of Chile, together with Chile, Obstinate Memory and The Pinochet Case are probably his best-known films in this country. (The filmmaker's newest work, the award-winning Nostaligia for the Light, opens this coming Friday at IFC Center in New York. I'll have more to say about it later this week.)

About Guzmán's Salvadore Allende, for those not so much informed about this Chileans leader, the documentary should prove a good place to begin. Much shorter (100 minutes) than the four-and one-half-hour-long Battle of Chile, Guzmán still uses a number of shots and scenes from that film in his newer documentary.  Some of these I was thrilled to see again (that indelible sequence of the young man running through the streets, pulling the cart!); others, because I was already aware of them and knew the background, seemed more like filler.

What the documentary offers that no one interested in politics and history will want to pass up is the interview with former U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry that Guzmán weaves through the movie. This give-and-take provides what can only be called an insider's account of the absolute insistence of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that Allende and his democratic regime be stopped. Initially it seems that Korry might be sorry for the way things turned out ("things" that include Pinochet's reign of terror), but, no. The ex-ambasssador proves utterly unrepentant about the CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew the Chilean government -- using the old fear-of-Russian-Communism as the usual excuse. He even claims that his superiors kept the information about the coup from him at the time.

The other important reason to view this film is the debate Guzmán gives us between former militants from different political parties, as they argue over how and why Allende failed to defend the government in the period leading up to the coup by arming and mobilizing a people's militia as a counterforce to the military -- which was by then firmly controlled by forces who opposed Allende. This is probably the firmest argument for why the regime collapsed, but Guzmán has already made it clear that Allende wanted his government -- which had been democratically elected rather than taking the country by force, as did the Russians in 1917 and Castro in 1950s Cuba -- to above all remain democratic rather than becoming an armed force. This was not possible given the sleazy dealings of the Cuban right, together with those of the USA, and Allende paid for his miscalculation with his own life and those of many of his countrymen.

But would an armed militia -- which I can't imagine would not have led to a civil war, undoubtedly won by Pinochet's forces (supported, of course, by the USA) -- have resulted in any less suffering and death?  What all this says about the possibility of genuine democratic social change without accompanying armed force is not very positive or promising. Is it?

Salvadore Allende, from Icarus Films Home Video, is available for sale and rent this Tuesday, March 15. In English, French and Spanish, with English Subtitles, the DVD Bonus Features include a stills gallery by Chilean photographer Patricio Guzmán Campos, featuring 22 photos of Chile in the 1960s and 1970s and a theatrical trailer for Guzmán's latest film, Nostalgia for the Light.