The war against forgetting: Salvador Allende

Patricio Guzmán has devoted much of his career to navigating the foggy history of his native Chile, particularly those few jubilant and turbulent years marked by the unprecedented non-violent ascension of its democratically elected socialist government and that long trail of dark years marked by terror, torture, order and oppression, by ostensible prosperity and cooperation with imperialist foreign powers, that followed. There’s this notion that Chile’s elder populace (those who didn’t, like Guzmán, go into exile), thinned out along its peculiar narrow stem of diverse topography, have constructed their national fog by way of a collective willful amnesia surrounding those aforementioned years. This amnesiac fog is invoked in the very title of Guzmán’s film Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997). I wonder if the process inherent in journeying through this fog, unable to apprehend a view of what’s ahead or behind, hasn’t contributed to that special wandering, uncharted feeling that accompanies some of Guzmán’s finest, most personal films.

This feeling is certainly among the most compelling elements of Guzmán’s Nostalgia For the Light (2010), a masterpiece essay film that traverses the Atacama Desert in search of distant stars and bones of the disappeared. Yet this feeling can even be found in the more conventional documentary Salvador Allende (2004), now available on DVD from Icarus. After repeatedly encircling the Allende enigma, most famously in the three-part, Chris Marker-produced The Battle of Chile (1975-79), Guzmán took this project as an opportunity to take direct aim at Chile’s controversial fallen president, about whom there remains a conspicuous paucity of commentary. Yet there’s nothing especially direct about Salvador Allende. It finds its path as it proceeds.

Guzmán narrates Salvador Allende, emphasizing the first-person approach, while his soft voice can also frequently be heard off-camera posing questions. Guzmán was in his early 30s when Allende came into power (and passed 15 doubtlessly despairing days of detainment in the National Stadium following the coup) and is able to cull a healthy portion of Salvador Allende from his own archive of footage, shot between Allende’s 1970 inauguration and 1973, the year of that other September 11, when US-backed military forces ousted Allende’s government (a day Guzmán hauntingly evokes with repeated images of flames consuming the Palacio de la Moneda following the aerial bombing). Early in the film, Guzmán explains that he wants to get to know the Allende beneath the icon. He travels to Allende’s native Valparaiso, where the city’s former mayor persuasively insists that Allende (who received support from Cuba, but not from the USSR) was neither Marxist nor Leninist but libertarian, having received his first political education from an anarchist Italian shoemaker. But as the film goes along this effort to focus on Allende the man quietly dissipates, replaced by a more straightforward chronicle of Allende’s pre-presidential political career, conveying his charisma and popularity, highlighted by memorable images such as the one of gleeful rural children chasing his departing campaign train.

Later in Salvador Allende Guzmán details Allende’s difficult presidency, his agrarian reforms and nationalization of the mining industry, the hostilities directed at his policies, and his outspoken contempt for US interference and multinational corporations. A notable, revealing interview with former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry confirms Nixon’s explicit commands to get rid of Allende by any means necessary. Yet, appropriately for a film about a politician devoted to workers and the poor, Guzmán finds many of his strongest sequences by giving the floor to ordinary Chileans. He documents a lively debate between several former UP militants about whether or not Allende should have defended the government and properly armed the militia. This debate also pries open the thorny question of Allende’s suicide, undertaken just as the army was about to take him prisoner, an event which only compounds the mystery of his life. One could argue that Salvador Allende falls short of its ostensible goal in that Allende is virtually as enigmatic a figure by the film’s end as he was at its start. But the fortitude of this enigma is also, it seems to me, the film’s point. Allende, though revered by Guzmán as he is by millions around the world, is a truly singular, enduringly contentious figure—so singular that very few have made significant attempts to tell his story. The value of Guzmán’s film is that even in its limitations it makes an enormous contribution to a conversation about Allende that needs to be maintained. In Guzmán’s films the personal inevitably merges with the political, and the articulated memories of the filmmaker and his subjects continue to wage a non-violent war against the perils of forgetting.

Artists incognito: books by Jean-Claude Carrière and Gabriel García Márquez

Jean-Claude Carrière

I knew Jean-Claude Carrière primarily as the scenarist for films such as The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Birth, but most especially for his collaborations with Luis Buñuel throughout the final two decades of the great director’s career, during which time the pair co-authored the scripts for Belle de jour, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. The only literary work I’d ever attributed to Carrière was Buñuel’s memoir My Last Sigh—one of my all-time favourite books—which Carrière assembled from transcripts of interviews with Buñuel and no doubt had a large part in shaping. So I was surprised to discover only recently that Carrière, now in his late 70s, has written a novel, and it was no disappointment to realize in just the first few pages of Please, Mr Einstein (Vintage, $21.95), that this novel was very much informed by the dictates of cinema.

“Let’s follow that girl who’s walking down the street…” As he describes his heroine, an attractive, intelligent, and most of all curious young woman who shall remain nameless, Carrière reminds his readers that we will never learn anything about her that can’t be observed through action and dialogue. As in a film, television show or play, or whatever sort of time-based medium, we’re to be swept along, without internal voices to guide us, gathering clues only as they’re presented, ideally without inclination to ponder “subsidiary questions.” I read Please, Mr Einstein quite pleasurably over the course of a single day, so I guess Carrière’s gambit must have worked. I wasn’t very concerned about anything except what was happening in the scenes playing out on the page, which were sufficiently extraordinary to hold one’s attention. Our heroine after all pays a visit to none other than Albert Einstein, and the fact that he’s been dead for over 50 years doesn’t keep their exchange from being lively. The great German physicist always insisted that contradictory facts can be equally true, so why not be both dead and alive, still at work in an office in an unnamed Central European city, with Sir Isaac Newton in the waiting room? (Add an appearance from Liz Taylor or Dante to this anachronistic convergence and you’ve got yourself a new verse of ‘Desolation Row.’)

Mr. Einstein

The conversation between Einstein and his visitor is intellectually playful and only slightly flirtatious, sliding from Tyro Brahe’s attempts to prove the Earth immobile to the secret life of the moustache, from the basics of relativity to lessons gleaned from Shakespeare’s Prospero, from the enduring mysteries of light to the puzzle of dark matter, from the nature of celebrity to the elusive meaning of the word “everything.” Occasionally they exit Einstein’s office through one of a series of doors concealing spectacular surprises, like in an old game show. In the last third or so they discuss Einstein’s complicated culpability for the development of the atom bomb. All the while the allure of science remains infectious. “The universe is irresistible,” Einstein says as he and his visitor gaze upon a field of stars. “It’s seduction itself… The sight of it is a cruel, permanent reminder of how diminutive we are. It crushes us. At the same time, it amplifies us by making us welcome. It opens our eyes and, even more so, our minds.”

Miguel Littín

With Carrière, my familiarity with his films led me to his book, where as in the case of Miguel Littín, a book leads me to wonder why I’ve never even heard of the guy’s movies. Littín had already made a number of features before he fled his home country of Chile in 1973 following the coup that tore apart Salvador Allende’s still young, democratically elected socialist government. Littín returned to Chile in 1985 disguised as a Uruguayan businessman, meeting with an international film crew and covertly gathering material for a documentary about life under dictator Augusto Pinochet. What became of the resulting film I’ve no idea—in his helpful and erudite introduction, even Francisco Goldman claims he’s still never met anyone who’s seen it. No matter, since it could hardly be more fascinating than the book describing the process of making the film, Gabriel García Márquez’s Clandestine in Chile (New York Review Books, $17.95), newly back in print. Coming after a long period of silence for García Márquez, prompted by a somewhat misguided show of solidarity with Chileans living under Pinochet’s reign of terror, the book marks a return and a sort of farewell, since it could be argued that Clandestine in Chile is the last overtly political work in the author’s career, which would henceforth focus on themes of love and desire.

Gabriel García Márquez

However, García Márquez is not the author of this book in any conventional sense. As with his earlier Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Clandestine in Chile is a work of literary reportage, with all of the content ostensibly coming directly from conversations with Littín. Yet Littín’s adventures are such that those familiar with García Márquez could be persuaded that Littín was in fact the author’s invention. Whatever the case, this is the story of a director who perhaps imagined he might become not just an actor but the actual protagonist in his own thriller, only to find the masquerade almost unbearable. It’s a story of genuine guerilla filmmaking, of anguished nostalgia and suppressed identity, with Littín never feeling entirely comfortable with his transformed visage, particularly where grooming was concerned: “My uncles had worn beards and no doubt that increased the allure of beards for me. I had shaved mine off in Mexico a few years before but never managed to get my friends and family, much less myself, to accept my new face. All had the impression of being with an impostor…” Beardlessness renders Littín so distorted that, in what constitutes the book’s climax, his own mother doesn’t even recognize him. Whether this is the product of exaggeration on the part of Littín or García Márquez is impossible to say, but the effect holds: when your homeland has been stripped of its sense of self you really, truly can’t go home again. Or, as Littín himself puts it, “those who stayed behind are also exiles,” and not even the sudden reappearance of their loved ones can stir them from their forced internal hibernation.

Futbolistas, pornographers, rat detectives, rabid rabbits: Two new volumes of stories by Bolaño

Photo courtesy of New Directions

A story might begin like so: “William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman from Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on to me…” There’s the suggestion that what’s about to unfurl was simply transcribed from a friendly conversation, or perhaps a drunken, wee-hour confession. Sometimes the names of the characters are the same as those of real people, such as the late porn actor John Holmes. Sometimes these names read as obvious covers for the author himself. These qualities imbue the stories in Roberto Bolaño’s The Return (New Directions, $30) with a seductive intimacy, the allure of secrets being shared, of something once hiding in the world being excavated. But then we remember that there’s no such place as Santa Teresa in the state of Sonora, that John Holmes died in 1988, not 1990, and that it might be advisable to avoid confusing Arturo Belano with Roberto Bolaño, however compelling the illusion. Bolaño’s best stories often hover in this twilight realm where the conviction of the narrator’s voice, speaking to us softly as though over the airwaves, allows us to lose sight of the frontiers between the factual, the apocryphal, and the dream-drawn invention. A lucid voice speaking to us of obscure and illucid things. If you like spending time in this place, keep reading.

The 13 stories in The Return, translated by Bolaño’s award-winning steady Chris Andrews, are culled from two collections already published in Spanish, 1997’s Llamadas telefónicas and 2001’s Putas asesinas. The selections seem arranged in pairs: two about Russia, two about mentally unstable women, two about the porn industry. These little diptychs make for a pleasing fluidity. They also emphasize the freedom Bolaño might have found in working within diverse milieux, that the author of such ambitious novels as 2666 and The Savage Detectives was having fun sinking his teeth into the microworlds of Russian thugs, the adult film industry, necrophile French clothing designers, and international soccer stars. Yes, death lurks in most every corner, but the titular tale assures us that dying is actually pretty much like it’s depicted in the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore mega-hit Ghost, and that forging connections with some living person will set us free to leave our shells behind and roam the afterlife.

Dedicated to Mexican author Juan Villoro, ‘Buba,’ the soccer story, recalls a winning streak that may or may not have been the result of magic blood rituals undertaken by an African playing for Spain. It may have also been the result of a peculiar and impermanent sort of friendship between young men with their lives still ahead of them. The narrator of ‘Clara’ attempts to chronicle the life of a girl he dated in his youth. Clara remains a peripheral figure in his life—it’s only when she vanishes that he recognizes his need for her. ‘Prefiguration of Lalo Cura’ concerns the child of a renegade priest and the female star of the Olimpo Movie Production Company, now a confused adult trying to make sense of his mother’s career. Passing through life with a moniker like Lalo Cura—“la locura” means madness in Spanish; Bolaño liked the name so much he recycled it in 2666—our narrator obsesses over how names determine our fate. Lalo was born in a neighbourhood called The Impaled. “The name glows like the moon. The name opens a way through the dream with its horn and man follows that path.” It also reminds him of how many times his mother was impaled by her costars while acting in the bizarre, surrealistic blue movies authored by a mysterious German working in Latin America. Bolaño’s synopses of these movies make for some lively reading.

Coming just a month after The Return, The Insufferable Gaucho (New Directions, $28.50), also translated by Andrews—who even has a story dedicated to him—is a somewhat slimmer collection of short work. There are fewer, longer stories, and a couple of these might just be among the finest writings available in English from Bolaño. The titular story concerns a retired lawyer and judge who, following the departure of his adult children from his Buenos Aires home and the collapse of the Argentine economy, moves to his long-abandoned ranch in las Pampas, where he very gradually sheds an entire way of life and adopts another. Along the way he becomes familiar with the local rabbit population, some of which prove to be shockingly bloodthirsty, their appearances resembling something out of Paul Bowles. Bolaño’s evocation of place is rife with typically odd details and utterly immersive. There’s something almost like optimism here, too, a sense that there are brief windows in our lives that, should we heed their invitation, will offer up the opportunity to change everything.

A sort of homage to Kafka’s final short story, the unambiguously titled ‘Rat Police’ at first glance seems like the least likely Bolaño project yet: a detective fiction set in the sewer-washed world of rats. Rats, we’re told, rarely make art and they rarely murder, so this story is about the exceptions to the rule, narrated by a rat cop whose life brushes against both phenomena. As is often the case in Bolaño’s cosmology, art and murder share something essential that’s never quite articulated but dangles brilliantly in the imagination. The rat authorities lack of interest in what appears to be serial murders could almost read as a dry run for the under-investigated killings in 2666.

The Argentine novelist at the centre of ‘Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey’ discovers he’s plagiarized by a European filmmaker. Still a minor author, perhaps vaguely flattered, he lets it slide. Time passes, Rousselot publishes another novel, the filmmaker makes another movie—and plagiarizes Rousselot again! Not only that, the filmmaker actually kind of improves on the source material. Rousselot still doesn’t take legal action. In fact, he despairs that the filmmaker might have abandoned him, that he might lose his best reader, “the reader for whom he had really been writing, the only one who was capable of fully responding to his work.” The story is very funny, shaped by unexpected encounters, and there is a delicious irony at work here, but there’s also an allusion to the secret destinies that seem to lay waiting for everyone, should they take off the lid and peer into the burbling stew. What you see might make your blood curdle. It might also startle you with the beauty of its design.

Blood on the dancefloor: Tony Manero on DVD

We can interrogate and, to some degree, illuminate the most tenebrous horrors of the past through making up stories, but what sort of stories should we devise? Which are best equipped to stir us out of despondency and actively engage us? The greater the horror, the more urgently and rigorously this question needs to be addressed. When the young filmmaker Pablo Larraín interviewed his fellow Chileans about living through the institutionalized terror of the Pinochet years, he found most of their memories to be foggy and imprecise. “What I got from this research was not any particular idea of what happened in terms of facts, but a tone, an atmosphere,” Larraín explains, “a combination of fear, sadness, and strangeness, because they didn’t know what was going to happen the next day.” Larraín’s response to these interviews was not to somberly chronicle the plight of victims of the Pinochet years, but rather to scour the era’s atmosphere and dread in search of a unique sort of character, one that might cloud the conventional frontiers diving victim from oppressor. His response was Tony Manero.

It’s Santiago, 1978, and 52-year-old Raúl is devoting all his energies to preparing for a local televised celebrity impersonation contest. It seems Raúl wants not simply to evoke but to literally transform himself into Tony Manero, John Travolta’s ambitious, disco dancing sensation from Bay Ridge, the hero of John Badham’s 1977 hit movie Saturday Night Fever. We see Raúl in a rundown cinema watching the film, studying Travolta’s moves and parroting his dialogue—but does Raúl ever stay to the end? Does Raúl even realize that Tony Manero never actually becomes a big star? Or is Raúl hoping to correct Saturday Night Fever’s downbeat ending by miraculously transcending his own marginalized existence of despair, poverty, confinement, communal living, dysfunctional sex, and routine applications of jet black hair dye to cover up the accumulating grey? Raúl will do anything to fulfill his dream of usurping reality with his distorted reading of an imported fantasy. His desire initially seems akin to that of so many go-for-it movie protagonists. You wonder at first if Tony Manero will be a comedy of self-discovery and triumph over adversity, its protagonist yet another addition to the movies’ ongoing collection of lovably obsessive, nerdy, underdog dreamers. But any such suspicions are dashed once we see Raúl help an old lady home after being mugged, only to get her alone in her little apartment and calmly bash her head in so as to steal her colour TV. Colour TVs were apparently tough to come by in Pinochet’s Chile.

Would Raúl have been a sociopath had he not lived under a murderous dictatorship? Are there certain kinds of monsters that are only awakened by the right circumstances, prompted by social conditions that seem to offer tacit permission to act out otherwise repressed atrocities? It’s a question that lingers in some of the novels of the posthumously celebrated Chilean-born author Roberto Bolaño, and Larraín, in his documentary-like follow-up to the very different, far more baroque, and not very successful debut Fuga, implies this question too, without offering any answers that might oversimplify his bizarre, grotesque and utterly absorbing story. Larraín instead focuses on imbuing Tony Manero with numerous details that heighten the film’s sense of place, its tension, and its black humour. Raúl’s incestuous housemates rehearse in their ramshackle performance space and perform their almost endearingly lame song and dance show for paltry audiences of locals happy for whatever sort of diversion to fill their hours before curfew arrives. Some of these housemates meet with secret insurgent groups, though Raúl himself isn’t to be distracted from his mastery of Manero embodiment, getting the right number of buttons on his white pants or the right high-density glass cubes to build an illuminated dance floor, just like that of Saturday Night Fever’s 2001 Odyssey nightclub, and replace the crappy wooden plank floor he memorably rips up in a wild fit when something in one of the group’s disco routines goes wrong. The success of that scene, like so many others, including an especially messy one you’ve just got to see to believe, rests firmly on the interpretative talents of lead actor Alfredo Castro, who plays Raúl with such complete, deadpan immersion it’s positively chilling. Castro’s work alone is reason to see this film.

Kino’s disc of Tony Manero is pretty much devoid of extras, and while that’s regrettable given that some minimal historical context at the very least might help certain viewers to appreciate its layers of critique and genuine audacity, it is finally a work that can stand alone and leave you reeling. Tony Manero barely screened in North American cinemas, but everyone with whom I watched it during its appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival, including a few Chilean friends, still haven’t forgotten the experience. Here’s hoping it continues to intrigue and appall viewers on DVD.

Unfinished business: books from Aira, Curtis, Bolaño intersect in spooky buildings

Just last week I was reading Roberto Bolaño’s short story ‘Dentist’ and I was struck by something said by the titular character regarding what one feels when in an empty building, or rather, a seemingly empty building: “the reason you’re anxious or afraid is that you know, deep down, that there is no such thing as an empty building; in every so-called empty building, someone is hiding, keeping quiet, and that’s the terrifying thing: the fact that you are not alone… even when everything indicates that you are.”

The dentist’s little monologue is very much a detour, having no direct consequence on the rest of the story, yet this passage stood out, I suppose, because it rings absolutely true: an empty building becomes anxiogenic precisely when you don’t fully believe it to be empty, when you sense a presence whose intentions are, at best, unnervingly ambiguous. And this passage lingered in my mind just long enough for me to notice how it flowers fully in an altogether different text, Ghosts (New Directions, $14.50), César Aira’s wonderfully strange, characteristically taut and yet irreducible 1989 novel, translated by Chris Andrews and now published for the first time in English. The novel takes place largely within the confines of a Buenos Aires apartment building still under construction. The building, still without doors, flooring or even windows, is ostensibly empty, yet the family of a Chilean immigrant worker is squatting there—along with a company of phantoms who typically appear during siesta, naked, and covered in dust. The ghosts are all male. Are they immigrant workers who died on the job? Aira doesn’t say. The date is December 31st. The heat, we’re told, is supernatural.

Was Bolaño thinking of Ghosts when he wrote ‘Dentist’? It’s certainly possible, since Ghosts was first published long before ‘Dentist’ and Bolaño was a vocal admirer of Aira’s work. As well, there is the curious coincidence regarding the Chilean origins of both Aira’s central characters and of Bolaño himself. In fact, Ghosts, in its ebulliently playful, frequently funny way, is somewhat obsessive in its cataloging of the distinctions between the Chilean and Argentine characters and mores. In any case, the way the dentist’s digression on anxiety and empty buildings speaks to Aira’s novel made the reading of it that much more pleasing. However, until well into the novel’s final third, when they make a proposal that will put a character’s life in mortal danger, Aira’s ghosts are not necessarily rendered as terribly frightening. Actually the living squatters seem perfectly at ease with the daily apparitions of the dead squatters. Raúl, the family patriarch and building’s nightwatchman, even stores wine in the thorax of a ghost to keep it cool. (Maybe this is a Chilean thing?)

Though it drifts between a multitude of characters for the first half or so, Ghosts does ultimately settle on a single protagonist—Raúl’s daughter, Patri—and while Aira tends to subvert traditionally coherent storytelling whenever possible, there is an identifiable dramatic climax. But Ghosts is also a kind of jazzy essay, which performs its jig with one foot in vividly detailed, more or less realistic people, places and behaviour, and unfettered, often dazzling abstraction. The in-between state of a partially finished building evokes the purgatorial or transitory. “The architectural key to the built/unbuilt opposition,” Aira writes, “is the flight of time toward space. And dreaming is that flight. While habits, whether sedentary or nomadic, are made of time, dreams are time-free. Dreams are made of pure space, the species that arrayed in eternity.” So seen through Aira’s lens the novel’s setting, like its personage, is both material and rather less than material, And the presence of the ghosts, like that of the Chileans, calls into question the way we feel about architectural space, and—especially in places like my home province of Alberta, which draws so many with its promise of expansive, neatly contained and unsullied property—about the value we place on the seeming newness of newly built or renovated homes, places offered as a sort of tabula rasa upon which we can identify as exclusively ours, places we can gradually forge the imprint of our own experiences on and invest with our dreams of the future, unburdened by the psychic complications engendered by a history.

These thoughts lingered with me as well as I continued to read Barry Curtis’ Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (Reaktion Books, $19.50), one of the most intriguing recent movie-related books I’ve come across in a while. Curtis has an especially deft hand with examining how a wide variety of cultural influences, from the Gothic to the Surrealists, converge to shape the 21st century notion of the ghost story. And he articulates is crisp, precise language the power of historical burdens on place and the numerous expectations we place on homes, even as out notions about what constitutes a good home evolves in an age simultaneously characterized by the conflicting lures of nostalgia and ecological awareness.

The discovery of Dark Places, which is an essay primarily concerned with architecture and ghost stories, at the same moment that I discovered Ghosts, an essay-like ghost story deeply interested in architecture, has made for one of those deeply pleasurable coincidences a reader comes across now and then, when books come into your hands almost by accident only to then start speaking to one another, while you just sit back and take it all in, picking up one book to continue from page 91 just as the other is being put down on page 129. It’s like literary tag-team wrestling. As soon as I’m finished writing this I’m planning on going back and digging into Dark Places again… Except I’m alone, here in my apparently empty house, and it’s a little bit, I don’t know… creepy.

Missing: Costa-Gavras' investigation into American casualties resulting from that other fateful September 11th, now on DVD

Santiago, 1973. The murderous coup d’etat that felled Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist government spills its terror into the streets. Masses begin to disappear. Bodies accumulate everywhere like neglected trash. After getting trapped out after curfew and spending a night scurrying from one hiding place to another, Beth Horman (Sissy Spacek) returns to find her home ransacked and her husband Charlie (John Shea), a young writer who may have heard a few things about the possible involvement of the CIA or the US State Department while visiting Viña del Mar, is nowhere to be found.

Charlie’s father Ed (Jack Lemmon) comes down from New York. He’s demure, a republican, a patriot, wears the silent majority’s suit, tie and hat, marking himself a yes man with every stammered “sir”—yet he gets no more genuine assistance from the US embassy or government officials than the suspiciously hippified Beth did on her own. An uneasy alliance and utter embodiment of the generation gap, Beth and Ed thus are united in their helplessness and persistence. They can’t pass ten minutes without the sound of gunfire breaking the silence, can’t walk down an avenue without pools of blood appearing beneath their feet, and soon get to feeling increasingly sure that Charlie’s dead, that everyone knows it, but no one wants to confirm it.

It was heavily researched and verified by Thomas Hauser for his book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice (1978), this story that is, of course, about an American, one of just a handful of foreign victims, something you can’t help but weigh against the thousands of Chilean nationals, so many still among the disappeared. But somehow this is what makes Missing (82), the American debut of writer/director Costa-Gavras, made for Universal, showered with Oscar nods, work in its very particular way. This is an especially scrupulous true story movie—I think it may have been the one that initiated the “docu-drama” designation—with not a single event depicted that did not have eyewitnesses. The near singularity of Horman’s case, its attack on the sense of entitlement and security that comes with certain passports, is one of the key subjects here, something emphasized above all in scenes of tourists trying to keep chipper as the tanks roll by and citizens are hauled away just beyond the hotel or restaurant windows. There’s the creeping sense of bloodshed and humiliation on display just being part of the travel package. If this was fiction it might have come from J.G. Ballard.

There is also, at the heart of this, a personal, more emotionally accessible story of a father only coming to know his son through tragedy. Presumably, this is how such a movie could be made in the Hollywood of the early ’80s, and it is in essence very moving. But the unacknowledged parallels between Ed and Charlie, conveyed here as virtually estranged, so deep are their conflicting ideals, are sometimes bluntly and unimaginatively conveyed, with Ed saying or doing some little thing and Beth simply pointing out that Charlie used to say or do just the same. There are moments of ostensible connection between Ed and Beth, and Charlie in absentia, that like the 100% synth score from Vangelis, a credit sandwiched between his equally godawful scores for Chariots of Fire (81) and Blade Runner (82), feel tokenistic, or rather academic in their emotionalism.

But the script, credited to Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart, does feature at least one crucial, very elegant method of linking father and son that necessarily requires the entire movie to bring itself to fruition and beautifully marries the theme of familial reconciliation with that of American vulnerability. The last thing Charlie half-jokingly says before he vanishes is: “They can’t hurt us—we’re Americans!” The last thing Ed says to the US officials before he flies back to America with Beth is: “I just thank God that we live in a country where we can still put people like you in jail!” They were wrong, needless to say, on both counts. Charlie was killed, and his fellow Americans that tacitly allowed if not actually aided in his execution were never brought to justice, thanks largely to classified documents. And Missing bristles with indignation.

Which brings us to the supplements on Criterion’s new two-disc set—they’re worth the effort even if you already know the movie itself. There’s a very good half-hour of interview with Costa-Gavras, who carefully lays out his intentions with the film—he always wanted Lemmon, then not known for drama—and an interview of equal length and substance with Joyce Horman, the real-life Beth Horman. There are also featurettes on the film’s Cannes reception—it shared the Palme d’Or with Yol (82)—and, most intriguing of all, on the ongoing lobbying of the US government to declassify documents that would confirm the exact involvement of Americans in the coup that ushered Augusto Pinochet into power. The title of Missing alludes to much more than the status of Charles Horman for some weeks in 1973—it directs us to the gaps in the official history that obscure the full measure of the grave darkness that has so long corroded US foreign policy.