Salvador
Allende
by Patricio
Guzmán, Director
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY,
2006
VHS / DVD $440 100 mins., col., b/w
Sales: $440; rental: VHS, $150
Distributors website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney
legart@ozemail.com.au
A magical image opens the film, as a rock
is used to chip away slowly at the thick
paint covering a wall. Beneath the covering,
the resplendent colours of wall murals
made in the 60s and 70s by artists working
for democratic change in Chile. Salvador
Allende was the leftist president of the
Latin American country elected to power
in 1970 as leader of the Chile Popular
Unity party. He died three years later
in a military coup aided and encouraged
by the CIA, an act that was an extension
of the Cold War and the USAs determination
to maintain economic and political control
over Latin America. Patricio Guzmán,
a Chilean citizen film-maker, smuggled
film out of the country shortly after
the military coup. Salvador Allende
is a collage of much of this material
together with revealing contemporary interviews
with some of those involved in the events.
It includes a brief encounter with Allendes
personal secretary, La Payita. Guzmán
remarks on the period, ambiguously"The
greatest love story
." She replies"Historically
speaking you see it that way, because
you were one of us
."
This reviewer encountered several of the
refugees in Britain as they fled Chile,
gathering their stories on the recently
available popular recording format of
the period, the video Portapak. The same
technology gathered statements and the
conversations in various formats for film
and television companies around the world
and these emerge from archives to retell
the story. But the core of the production
is material shot by Guzmán and
his team on 16mm film, later smuggled
out to make The Battle of Chile
(1976) the official record
of the hard slog and the joyous scenes
of the first socialist government to be
voted into power in Latin America.
"I need to know who this man was
."
Guzmán affirms. Scenes of campaigning
from the 1950s onwards, often in US-style
from the back of trains, as Allende toured
the nation, persuading, cajoling. Contemporary
interviews: with the militant socialists
of Popular Unity, reflecting on the tactics
before, during and following the coup;
an astoundingly smug performance from
Edward Corry, US Ambassador at the time,
defending to the end the later impeached
President Nixon; an amazingly prescient
speech given by Allende to the UN General
Assembly, for which he received a standing
ovation, warning then of what we know
now as globalisation.
Is this a re-consideration by a film-maker
in his sixties of the events in which
he was involved as an young artist? It
is for sure a more engaging (de)composition
than the decidedly wooden attempt by Costa
Gavras in the 1982 feature-film Missing
to stir the consciences of concerned American
voters. Guzmán speaks in voiceover
directly of his outrage after so many
years of the stymieing of so much promise
and "
an energy that could almost
be touched
", talents that could
have served to remove the inequalities
and exploitation that remain to this day
on the continent. But is the film-for-television
documentary the best contemporary format
for keeping these ideas alive, for re-examining
and questioning them?
Whilst the film collage documentary
is a well-established genre for the valid
and reasonable singular presentation of
knowledge and viewpoints, contemporary
media can enable the viewer to be less
passive in gathering information from
evidence in order to construct knowledge.
Records on film and videotape can be presented
to enable a hermeneutic role for the student
of history to continue to work-on
the substance of the auteurist narrative
viewpoint. Awareness in audiences, particularly
younger ones, demand that the material
evidence employed is made available for
inspection after the individual viewpoint
has been expounded. The interactive DVD
format, while a recently established method
for enabling the substance of a story
to be further investigated, (both the
back-story and cut scenes),
evinces that web-based archives can better
combine the singular viewpoint with the
available material evidence.
Over thirty years after the coup, the
Cold War has passed, the war on
terror is in force, focused on a
different continent and another perceived
enemy. The US sphere of influence
remains in place, and Latin America languishes
as a vassal in the globalised pecking
order of a world in disorder. The best
that can be drawn from Salvador Allende
is that information, if not power, is
less centralised than in the time when
Guzmán was gathering his sounds
and images. A Senator in the Allende government
deplores the present day national amnesia
that followed the dictatorship of Pinochet,
trusting projects such as Guzmáns
to begin the process of recovering memory.
Does the internet provide us with the
means to keep these channels open, or
is there a danger that these sources too,
like the tapes made on Portapaks in the
70s, are to become materials for picking
over, after the decisions have been made,
after the events have ground more misery
out for the poor, the disaffected?