Patricio Guzmán obituary: documentary chronicler of Chile’s turbulent political history

Patricio Guzmán – the Chilean documentarist who has died aged 85 in Paris, where he settled after exile in Cuba and Spain – once said: “A country without documentary cinema is like a family without a family album.” He became his country’s epitome of both in a career that spanned five decades, returning periodically to film its halting recovery from the ‘golpe de estado’ (coup d’état) that overthrew Salvador Allende and his government of Popular Unity in 1973, in which thousands of people were murdered or ‘disappeared’ and thousands more fled the country, including Guzmán himself. These films constitute an extended act of mourning in which he returns to the trauma of the dictatorship from a series of different, complementary and evolving angles, always with lucidity, poetry and personal honesty. Out of more than 30 titles in his filmography, 20 are about Chile.

Guzmán was born in Santiago in 1941 and after university, which he had to cut short for financial reasons, had a period working in advertising before studying film in Chile at the Catholic University and then in Madrid. He first came to international attention at the end of the 1970s for the three-part The Battle of Chile, a sweeping account of the political conflict consuming Allende’s government. He and his group began filming the political process in Chile when Allende took office in 1970, producing The First Year (1971) and The Answer of October (1972), about the massive workers’ response to a CIA-backed truck-drivers’ strike against the government. Their intention, when they started shooting The Battle of Chile early in 1973 (supported by Chris Marker sending them film stock from France) was to go beyond the chronicle of events in those two films and analyse the intensifying class struggle being played out increasingly on the streets.

A fertile mixture of direct cinema, investigative reportage and political analysis, the footage was smuggled out immediately after the coup and edited in Cuba at the ICAIC by fellow Chilean exile Pedro Chaskel, the first part coming out in 1975 and the last in 1979. With numerous films on the coup appearing in the intervening period, the novelty of The Battle of Chile was not in telling an unknown story but in the way it was told, from inside the unfolding drama, not by political pundits or commentators but through the words of those participating in it, structured retrospectively by what the viewer already knew – the tragic outcome, whose victims included the film’s cameraman Jorge Müller, who remained in the country and was detained and disappeared the year after the coup. In short, a work of historical testimony rare in the annals of documentary for its scope, density and poignancy. The trilogy won multiple awards and was distributed commercially in 35 countries, but not in Chile.

The first time Guzmán returned to Chile was in 1987 to make a film for Spanish television, In the Name of God, a clandestinely shot report on the human rights work of the Catholic Church which was cut short when two members of the crew were violently detained by the police. Then in 1997, after Chile’s return to democracy, he went back with a copy of The Battle of Chile to find some of the characters in the film who survived the dictatorship, and show the forbidden film to students. Chile, the Obstinate Memory carries a first person narration devoid of egocentricity which stages a personal confrontation with his own melancholic imaginary, only to discover that it isn’t only his, because the country has been left in a condition of official amnesia by the aftermath of neofascist repression. A profoundly self-reflexive work of remembrance, filmed with the utmost tact, it’s a painful revisitation of the past for those who remember and a shocking revelation to a younger generation presented with a history which has been hidden from them.

The chance to confront the demon directly came when Pinochet was detained in London in 1998 on an extradition charge issued by a Spanish prosecutor, accused of genocide, terrorism and torture, and held under house arrest for almost 18 months. In The Pinochet Case (2001), Guzmán pursues the dictator through the words of women victims of his terror who are now able to testify publicly for the first time and be heard.

As if to right the balance, he then turned his attention back to the man whom Pinochet ousted, with Salvador Allende (2004). After the nightmare, the memory of the dream. This is no hagiography, however, but again a first-person film presenting a portrait of the man and his politics in the form of a personal photo album to be shared by all, a family album that an elderly relative kept hidden during the repression, full of tattered images and memories, the reminiscences of Allende’s family and old comrades – ironically set against an interview in which the US ambassador to Chile during the Popular Unity government spills the beans.

Returning to Chile at the end of the decade, he makes the first of three extraordinary meditational films, all of them slow-paced and quietly narrated by his gentle and poetic first person voice on the soundtrack, contrasting the Chile of his childhood and youth with the strange unsettling place it has become since the golpe. All three are expressions of melancholia, in the Freudian sense of the unresolved loss of a loved object, whether a person or as here, an ideal such as one’s country. In all three, deep pity for human suffering is set in a cosmic perspective through an improbable amalgam of astronomy, geology, archaeology, history and politics.

Nostalgia for the Light (2010) is filmed in the rarefied air of Chile’s Atacama desert in the north of the country. Here he finds astronomers researching the origins of the universe through radio telescopes located there to take advantage of the clear, bone-dry air, almost cloudless skies, zero humidity and absence of light pollution and radio interference. He also finds archeologists seeking evidence of ancient peoples, and women searching for the remains of husbands and sons who perished under Pinochet in Chacabuco, a concentration camp on the site of an abandoned mine. In lesser hands such a mix of themes might not cohere, but the film is imbued with the visual poetry of Katell Djian’s limpid cinematography, verbally represented in philosophical metaphor, and a deep sense of compassion.

In The Pearl Button (2015), the element is water and the sea as a witness to two genocides – that of the indigenous tribes of Tierra del Fuego in the 19th century and the eradication in the 20th century of political victims of the dictatorship who were disappeared and their bodies dropped into the sea. The film traces the life cycle of water – which the radio telescopes in the Atacama detect in distant planets – sublimely pictured in abstract images of waves, rain, drops of water and water flowing. These are counterpointed with Fuegians, survivors of the Kawesqar people, talking about their relationship to the sea, and by contributions from a range of educated city-dwelling Chileans including an artist, a historian and a poet.

Only half way through do we learn that the button of the title is the mother-of-pearl button with which, in 1830, Robert Fitzroy, captain of The Beagle, bought a 14-year-old boy from his family who became known as Jemmy Button, whom he took to England to be educated along with three other ‘natives’ taken at the same time. Fitzroy’s mission was to map the Patagonian coast; his maps were used for a hundred years. His plan for the Fuegians was less successful—one of them died in England—and he decided to return them whence they came. Jemmy, Guzmán tells us, had been taken to live on another planet, “he travelled from the stone age to the industrial revolution,” and became a perfect English gentleman. When Fitzroy took him back (on the famous voyage that carried Darwin), “he was never the same man again.” Then we learn how the region was colonised by the arrival of settlers coming south from the populated centre of the country, leading to disaster for the indigenous people, who were gathered in a concentration camp on Dawson Island that later served the dictatorship, who used the sea as a cemetery. Then the sea yields up another button, discovered by a diver who salvages an iron rail used to weigh down the bodies, and they find a simple shirt button stuck to it. 

The element in The Cordillera of Dreams (2019) is the Andes, which sandwiches the country between the mountains and the sea, isolating or protecting it from the rest of the world depending on your point of view, the mountains hanging above Santiago seen here as a witness to national memory. But the metaphor is less insistent than the two preceding films, and The Cordillera of Dreams is more autobiographical – he visits his childhood home to find it in ruins – and its mood is one of lament. Much of the film is given over to the figure and harrowing video footage of Pablo Salas, who remained in Chile and documented the protests against the regime and the repression meted out against the protestors by the police and the military, and condemns those who have profited from what the dictatorship left behind – a neoliberal economy and a political system based on denial from which, in both cases, the country has yet to escape.

Guzmán’s cinema of truth, which documents the history of Chile since 1970 and maps the universal and continuing relevance of the first 9/11, occupies a special place in the history of documentary cinema. A paradigm of direct cinema as political testimony which morphs into a poetic cinema of melancholy that places the cosmos and human suffering on the scales and finds the indifference of the former outweighed.

• Patricio Guzmán, 11 August 1941 to 15 September 2026