Journal of Religion & Film Volume 21 Article 19 Issue 2October 2017 9-30-2017 “Those who don’t remember don’t exist anywhere:” Historical Redemption in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera University of Florida, [email protected] Recommended Citation Ruiz-Poveda Vera, Cristina (2017) "“Those who don’t remember don’t exist anywhere:” Historical Redemption in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010),"Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 21 : Iss. 2 , Article 19. Available at: http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol21/iss2/19 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Religion & Film by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@UNO. For more information, please [email protected]. “Those who don’t remember don’t exist anywhere:” Historical Redemption in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) Abstract The poetic aesthetic of Patricio Guzman’s documentary Nostalgia for the Light (2010) ponders the nature of memory and history. The film uses a metaphysical approach to explore the traumatic past of Chile, creating a sense of historical redemption as defined by Walter Benjamin (1940). Contemporary Latin American documentaries have abandoned the idea of objectivity to focus on subjective portrayals of memory as a way to capture the plurality of personal experiences of historical events. As a result, these documentaries have become more artistic and formally innovative than the previous epic informative films of the region. In the case of Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light, this new articulation of memory draws from the tradition of “transcendental style” as theorized by Paul Schrader as a result of the evolution of documentaries in Latin America. I analyze the redemptive potential of the film’s aesthetics to portray political events and ponder about the potential of “transcendental style” in the documentary mode. I suggest that this approach facilitates a reflection about memory, history, and political trauma in the Chilean context, echoing the heritage of liberation theology as a way to make sense of political oppression through spirituality in Latin America. Keywords Patricio Guzmán, Nostalgia, documentary, transcendental style, historical redemption, Paul Schrader, Walter Benjamin, Liberation theology, Latin American Author Notes Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera is a doctoral student and film instructor at the University of Florida. Her work focuses on the intersections of spirituality and film aesthetics, particularly in contemporary Iberoamerican cinema. Her research interests also include memory and subjectivity, coproductions and funding programs, transnational cinemas, animation, and articulations of the body in film. In 2017 she received the Ruth McQuown Award for the Humanities of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in recognition of her commitment to diversity and overcoming barriers through her research and teaching style. She received her B.A. from the University Carlos III of Madrid. This article is available in Journal of Religion & Film:http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol21/iss2/19 Ruiz-Poveda Vera: Historical Redemption in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) Set in the heart of the Atacama Desert in Chile, Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz, Patricio Guzmán, 2010) follows two main narrative threads. On the one hand, the film portrays the search for answers of archeologists and astronomers that explore the nature of the universe. On the other hand, the documentary also focuses on a group of women whose family members were executed during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Years after the end of his regime, these women keep looking for the bones of their loved ones in the desert, where the authorities threw them to destroy the evidence of their executions.1 Additionally, Nostalgia for the Light develops secondary motifs that intermingle with the two main narratives. Personal anecdotes about the filmmaker’s childhood, testimonials of survivors of the regime, and the portrayal of pre-Columbian art in the Atacama Desert interlace, resulting in a reflexive display of apparently unrelated events. The combination of the different narratives illustrates the contradictions of exploring the past: while science can apparently study the far distant past, Chilean society still has not reached a consensus to access the recent historical period of the dictatorship. However, the film establishes connections between these seemingly unconnected threads, such as the irony that both the scientists and the victims search for traces of the same matter: calcium. As a result of the combination of these narrative layers, the film takes a subjective and poetic approach to different moments of history. Nostalgia for the Light explores the expressive potential of the tensions between corporeality and abstraction through film form. The film unfolds as a constant negotiation between opposites. It presents pairs of counterparts and brings them into mutual recognition, such as the stars and the bones, scientific research and personal storytelling, and history and memory. The repeated juxtaposition of ideas ultimately becomes the conductive thread. However, even though these might seem like conflicting categories, Nostalgia for the Light connects them through reconciliation, as inseparable codependent parts of the same whole. As a result, the documentary Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2017 1 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 21 [2017], Iss. 2, Art. 19 reflects about the specificities of Chile’s recent past while simultaneously pondering universal concepts. The film relies on the minimalist, anti-dramatic tradition of transcendental style to depict concrete geopolitical realities. Dominant discourses about spirituality and cinematic form argue for contemplative aesthetics based on austere formal choices. The phenomenologists Amèdèe Ayfre and Henri Agel, André Bazin’s disciples, started this minimalist, contemplative trend in the early 1960s. For them, film cannot be analyzed separate from the viewing experience because it depends on the complex personal predispositions of the spectator.2 Therefore, “in the aesthetic evocation of the transcendent, film demands the active participation of the spectator” to interpret the mysterious meanings beyond the surface.3 For Ayfre and Agel, contemplative film has the potential to evoke and capture the traces of the divine, but this divine is transcendent: it exists beyond the image, in the invisible, and film can only portray signs of its presence. At the same time in the United States, scholar Susan Sontag developed a similar model in her essay “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson” (1964), in which she argues for the same austere “spiritual realism” of Ayfre and Agel. Sontag argued that Bresson’s plots and acting method made his films spiritual because the confusing, inexpressive emotions of the characters suggested the mysterious and ambiguous nature of the “human action and the human heart.”4 But Paul Schrader epitomized this anti-dramatic, introspective aesthetic paradigm with his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. According to Schrader transcendental style describes a “representative filmic form which expresses the Transcendent.”5 For Schrader, the transcendent refers to what “is beyond normal sense experience”: the holy and the human experience of the divine.6 Influenced by his predecessors Bazin and Ayfre, he argues that due to the influence of specific cultural and artistic traditions, transcendental films need to http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol21/iss2/19 2 Ruiz-Poveda Vera: Historical Redemption in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) rely on formal austerity. He argues that this “style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence” and, to that end, it uses a minimalist and less openly expressive form.7 Schrader considers cinematic elements such as montage, camera movements, narrative action, expressive acting, and non-diegetic music as “excessive” and identifies them with the mundane and the immanent. Therefore, transcendental films progressively eliminate those aspects to become subtler through a process based on the following steps: first, the depiction of the everyday as a hostile space; second, the “disparity” or conflict that emerges between the main character and the mundane; and lastly, a decisive action that leads to “stasis,” the enlightenment of the film or the transcendence of the character. As a result, Schrader’s definition of transcendental style aims to be universal and to apply to all cultural contexts because it implies a contemplative, introspective understanding of spirituality that exists in transcendence, in the beyond, and not within the physical and mundane objects of social reality. Nostalgia for the Light appropriates some stylistic elements of transcendental style while it adapts them to the demands of historic memory in contemporary Chile. The tensions between corporeality and abstraction in the film mirror those between immanence and transcendence defined by Schrader. Transcendental style privileges the ethereal, the transcendental, the beyond, and neglects the corporeal as less spiritual. For Schrader, the transcendent can only emerge through the elimination of the mundane. As a result, immanence and transcendence cannot coexist; they negate each other. However, Nostalgia for the Light navigates the tensions between immanence and transcendence differently. The relationship between the two emerges as a fluid and productive coexistence: the analogies between the bones and the stars create space for simultaneous reflection on the specific and the abstract. As a result of the coexistence of the corporeal and the transcendental, Nostalgia for the Light does not follow the linear structure prescribed by Schrader. Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2017 3 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 21 [2017], Iss. 2, Art. 19 Additionally, geopolitical realities belong to the realm of the mundane and thus they do not have spiritual potential according to transcendental style. Such reasoning implies that documentaries cannot offer Schrader’s stasis, or revelatory experiences for the audience, because the mundane cannot express sacredness. I argue that such abstraction indirectly eschews reality and cultural specificity. In fact, it is partly because of the film’s documentary nature that the binary between the mundane and the beyond becomes constraining. Yet it is productive to consider transcendental style in the analysis of Nostalgia for the Light. Schrader’s ideas are still highly influential in the conversation about spirituality and cinematic form, a conversation that often overlooks both documentaries and Latin American cinema. Revising the notion of transcendental style in the context of a political documentary will help elucidate the potential and the limitations of universalizing discourses about spirituality. How does the detached dimension of transcendence apply to a documentary? Nostalgia for the Light uses these tensions expressively to capture the elusiveness of memory and traumatic experiences and to problematize the ineffable nature of history and humanity. By analyzing a specific political issue, the film uses cinematic form to ponder the cruel nature of humanity as well as the essence of life in the universe as a whole. Ultimately, such spiritual approach creates a cinematic hierophany, but in this case, such hierophany emerges in a specific geopolitical context infused by traumatic past events. Thus, as I will elaborate in the coming pages, in this film transcendence does not emerge by overcoming the mundane reality but by engaging it. Nostalgia for the Light presents a political type of transcendence which takes the form of historical redemption in a Benjaminian sense: the traumatic past can only be redeemed and recovered through a messianic exercise of memory. However, eliminating the distinction between the specific and the abstract through the portrayal of historical events could pose ethical challenges in documentary filmmaking. As Bill http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol21/iss2/19 4 Ruiz-Poveda Vera: Historical Redemption in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) Nichols argues, style is what makes documentaries untrustworthy because the medium of film itself has the potential to challenge the objective intentions of informative discourses through form.8 In the end, the film utilizes the suffering of the victims of the Pinochet regime to reflect upon abstract concepts. The parallel between the universe and the victims ultimately tries to alleviate their suffering but, in doing so, the film could compromise the hardships of the survivors, bypassing a much needed confrontation with historical events and creating a false sense of national forgiveness. In other words, the abstraction of this particular episode of Chilean history could erase its specificities. However, I argue that the metaphysical and the political productively coexist in Nostalgia for the Light. The film reconciles abstract concepts with specific political realities through memory by revisiting the traumatic events with testimonials and interviews. To analyze this process, I first provide a contextualization of Guzmán’s career and of the aesthetic evolution of documentaries. Then I analyze the aesthetic choices of the film such as editing and voiceover, to explore how the past and the present coexist in the film. Finally I explore how Nostalgia for the Light appropriates Schrader’s notion of transcendence and transforms it into historical redemption. I analyze how Benjamin’s ideas about memory and the approach of Liberation Theology serve to adapt Schrader’s transcendental style to the political nature of the film. Through historical redemption, the film reconciles immanence and transcendence, the personal and the political, the subjective experience and scientific knowledge. Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2017 5 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 21 [2017], Iss. 2, Art. 19 Patricio Guzmán and Latin American Documentaries The evolution of Guzmán’s career, the trends of political Latin American documentaries, and the process of historic memory in Chile explain the aesthetic approach of Nostalgia for the Light. For over thirty-five years, Guzmán has worked as a documentary filmmaker. Highly educated in philosophy, film studies, and documentary production, he has made over twenty films and is actively engaged in the documentary industry as a jury member of multiple festivals and as a teacher in film schools internationally.9 His oeuvre explores memory, history, and nature in general but his most acclaimed works are his political films about Chile. The Battle of Chile (1975-1979) constitutes Guzmán’s most renowned work. This trilogy, for which Guzmán risked his life, is one of the few audiovisual evidences that focuses on the events that occurred in Chile between 1972 and 1973, including the execution of the democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the military coup led by Pinochet. The trilogy soon became evidence of the tragic events occurring in Chile at the time. It functioned as a global document, which “generated international awareness and solidarity against the crimes that had occurred and were still taking place” in the country.10 In fact, Jorge Ruffinelli suggests that the film’s enormous political impact probably influenced the unfolding of other crucial historical events, such as the indictment and arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998 ordered by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, which debilitated his leadership. Guzmán has widely documented this and other episodes dealing with Chilean historical memory and postmemory, the indirect experience of remembering of those who did not witness traumatic events in person but who are deeply connected with them.11 Guzmán’s topics of exploration have remained consistent, but his style has transformed concurrently, also mirroring the renewal of the documentary genre itself. Ruffinelli explains: http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol21/iss2/19 6 Ruiz-Poveda Vera: Historical Redemption in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) Guzmán evolves and matures historically as a documentary filmmaker while he also contributes to the evolution of this mode (or genre) … Documentaries as a film mode and as a practice evolved in unpredicted directions, while at the same time the critical understanding of this genre also changed. Patricio Guzmán was not only sensitive and receptive to these changes; he has been and still is a driving force of such transformations. To put it simply, think about how far contemporary documentary is from fulfilling those prejudices and pre-requisites that cloistered it in an 'objective' and 'impersonal' modality. Today we have (we enjoy) a more documentary cinema that is personal, auteurist, narrative, subjective, creative, and fresh in many different ways.12 The films of Guzmán consistently focus on issues of historical memory, but as Ruffinelli suggests, his style gradually evolved from the epic political documentary into a more auteurist and poetic aesthetics. In this sense, Guzmán has liberated his films from the burden of documentary objectivity. What is more, Guzmán acknowledges the theoretical challenges of documentary cinema and is therefore profoundly conscious of the implications of his stylistic choices. In his reflections about documentary published in Ruffinelli’s El Cine de Patricio Guzmán, Guzmán argues against the “false polemic” of the objective director. He claims that the auteur always influences the documented reality, and thus “subjectivity is always imposed.”13 The auteur participates in the world, and in turn the main concern is whether the filmmaker applies her or his subjectivity to the represented reality morally rather than neutrally. In an interview about his film The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar, 2015), which stylistically resembles Nostalgia for the Light, Guzmán explains that he started using a more “poetic” style in his films once the necessity to document specific political issues was not imminent.14 He claims that he could not have used such an approach in Salvador Allende (2004), since his goal was to document the life of the leader rather than to reflect on it. Guzmán’s style has evolved along with the specific historical circumstances and the transformation of Latin American documentary filmmaking in general. Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2017 7 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 21 [2017], Iss. 2, Art. 19 Some scholars consider Guzmán’s aesthetic evolution to be influenced by his own experience of exile. In her reading of Nostalgia for the Light, Argentinian scholar Julieta Vitullo has noted that one of the main factors of such stylistic evolution comes from his condition as an exiled director. The nostalgia of the film can be understood as the longing from exile. In her article, Vitullo explains how Michel Chanan applies the concept of diasporic cinema coined by Hamid Naficy to the films of Guzmán.15 As a result of diasporic nostalgia, his films constitute “a never ending question due to the ways in which historical events are remembered, an exploration of the intersections between public and private memory, a philosophical concern about time, a reflection about remembrance and amnesia.”16 Indeed, other secondary literature about Nostalgia for the Light emphasizes the importance of uncertainty and unresolved questions17 as well as the relevance of exile, migrations, and transnationalism in the film and its production process.18 Guzmán makes independently produced films that deal with historical events constructing a non- institutional memory. His tenet about non-fiction cinema can be summarized in his well-known statement, “a country without documentaries … is like a family without a photo album.”19 In Nostalgia for the Light, Guzmán keeps elucidating the past and expanding the album of Chile, but with a new perspective. To better understand Nostalgia for the Light, it is necessary to consider the aesthetic trends of contemporary documentaries in the region as well as the limits of cinema to represent traumatic experiences. In his book Latin American Documentary Filmmaking, David William Foster highlights the importance of the non-fiction mode in the region as a response to oppressive discourses and convulsive political circumstances. Besides the specificities of each country, Foster argues that documentaries provide an empowering tool to rewrite history in Latin America. In his analysis of La Batalla de Chile, Foster explores how Guzmán represents his account of a http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol21/iss2/19 8