Nostalgia for the Light

Nostalgia for the Light (2010) is a film that is hard to characterize. The director, Patricio Guzman, makes documentaries; his vibrant and terrifying The Battle of Chile was an agit-prop masterpiece about Allende’s rise to power and his death under CIA-sponsored bombardment. The Battle of Chile had a clear, if disheartening, narrative with obvious heroes and villains. A long film, it was the kind of movie that gave the viewer the sense that he or she had learned something valuable about historical events and, further, that the images had documented something that would otherwise have been destroyed by General Pinochet and his American backers. Nostalgia for the Light is also nonfiction but doesn’t chronicle or document anything – rather, it is lyric essay about death and time, baroque and digressive with a strong admixture of Pre-Columbian and Catholic morbidity. It’s the film equivalent of Gongora’s poetry or Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, metaphysical and intensely metaphoric. In the Atacama desert, three types of searchers wander the desolate wasteland. Astronomers exploit the spectacular translucency of the skies to observe celestial phenomena, photographing erupting galaxies using light that has traveled billions of years to reach their telescopes mounted on high, barren peaks in the vast, empty desert. Archeologists roam the land seeking relics of long-dead Indians who crossed the stony wasteland with their llamas: we see the corpse of one Pre-Columbian Indian, mummified and startlingly well-preserved, carefully unwrapped in some kind of repository for ancient remains collected from the desert. Finally, groups of women whose family members have disappeared wander the desert searching for the bones of people murdered by Pinochet’s goons. Guzman draws all three desert-explorers into his metaphorical web, linking them by their concern for the past and, by the fact, that the present is an illusion to them – their reality is controlled by events that have long passed. Pinochet’s death squads, apparently, massacred political enemies, dumped them in shallow graves in the Atacama, and, then, later may have exhumed them (messily – at one site heads and feet were left; the front-end loader’s bucket was only big enough to reliably lift the torsos of the cadavers), only to dump the corpses in the sea. The women are unpersuaded that the bodies have been wholly destroyed and criss-cross the desert picking up minute fragments of human bones that seem scattered randomly across the desolate, moonscape. The film shows an intense interest in relics; there is a powerful Hispanic-Catholic sensibility implicit in the women’s tales about their joy at finding, for instance, the mummified foot of lost, and much beloved, brother. Guzman, who was capable of showing horrific images in The Battle of Chile, doesn’t emphasize the macabre aspect of this quest in this film – he shows the relics from a discrete distance and, in most cases, the corpses are elliptically portrayed – one alarming sequence shows thousands of cardboard boxes that apparently contain unidentified remains of people killed by Pinochet’s regime: we don’t see the bones or mummies just the bland boxes sitting on industrial shelving. This is a very beautiful film, containing some of the most spectacular photography that I have ever seen – the pictures of old telescopes made of glistening brass being deployed to scan the skies and the huge frescos of exploding super-novae, clouds of luminous gas expanding around catastrophic galactic events, are extraordinary. The film is also a Proustian recollection of the past, an attempt to recover lost time, and there are beautiful shots of every day items – empty rooms, kitchens, curtains moving in the breeze, Guzman’s effort at reclaiming the peaceful Chile that existed before the Revolution. An old man says that our bones are made from calcium forged in the fires of the Big Bang – then, we see a huge image of the crater-pocked moon, a picture that later morphs into the webwork of old bones, a shattered cranium shining like a yellow harvest moon. Like Herzog’s Into the Abyss, Guzman’s film ends on a note of cautious optimism – we see a woman whose parents were slaughtered by Pinochet – she has become an astronomer – hugging her tiny infant, these pictures matched to images of her grandparents who had to betray their own children to save their granddaughter. Guzman shows Santiago at night, the lights of the city like stars against the pitch-black ocean: Each night, Guzman says, like Herzog narrating his film, the center of the universe crosses over Santiago. Curiously, Guzman who was renowned as the most Marxist and materialist of all film-makers seems to have become a mystic of sorts. This is one of the best films of the year.