The Abolition of the Present
The Chilean documentary NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT by Patricio Guzman fuses a mesmerizing cinematographic discourse with the personal desire of an author to explore his nation's past, writes Ulises Perez Mancilla of the 2011 Talent Press Guadalajara.
NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT
"Life", said Kirkegard, "can only be understood looking backward, although it should be lived looking forward, or towards something that doesn’t exist."
NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, the documentary by Patricio Guzman, expresses the knitting together of uncontainable emotions throughout the film. One word clearly defines it: it is immense, as immense as the universe itself. The metaphors that the Chilean director makes use of to try to understand one of the most shameful episodes in the history of his country, and the world, are based on recounting the complexity of human existence through the atrocities of military dictatorship, with an untiring (and even beautiful) search for answers by sciences like astronomy or archeology.
In Chile, in the same area where one the world’s most important telescopes for the investigation of space is located, thousands of bodies of disappeared politicians were buried and dug up. The remains of these people, today, keep reappearing thanks to the moral stubbornness of some women that have classified and hidden for years, every dismembered cadaver, and every particle of calcified bone of their family members in order to sleep (some in order to die) in peace.
This apparent coincidence of events is chosen by the director in order to develop a critical posture about the impossibility of undoing the past, while at the same time he uses it as an example to build on, no matter what, whether as a mode of liberation for life, or as a driving force to continue living. Guzman admirably exercises his office as filmmaker to sensitize beyond victimization. The testimonies of every scientific collaboration, those of the children of the disappeared that have found strength and comfort in astronomy, those of the political prisoners redeemed by the stars, are all on a path to building a type of human dignity before the random events of the universe. NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT would have to be in the future, the remainder of a compelling social necessity.
The humanity of the director and the intimacy that he manages to transmit impress, building a discourse of how history is constructed from the most intimate fiction. There is no plane, nor silence, nor anecdote, nor smile, that is not meant to say something, including the Tarkovskian rhythm that introduces the film. His own personal story about an innocent Chile and its radical change to a nation that still looks for the dead in order to have the certainty that they are gone, is earthshaking. This cinematographic discourse fuses with the personal desire of an author, who is capable of leaving behind his own nation's pain in order to explain to the world a tragedy both present and forgotten.
The film enthuses a vision, so very close to science, as it sparks an impetus of the Chilean nationality to reflect theoretically the social conflicts in academia. It suffices to remember the theory of biological love expressed by Umberto Maturana, who conceives love as the acknowledgment and respect for the existence of the other. He supports a theory so enormous that it becomes one with that which is here visualized by Guzman: societies without love, as also happens to the body, become sick according to Maturana. Sick societies shatter. NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, beyond being a potent visual discourse, an Official Selection in Cannes, is a noble attempt at redeeming a nation that stumbled, and now recognizes the need to keep moving forward.