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.

Quantum of Solace: 007 breaks still further from the past, bonds with a new audience

Careening from car chase to interrogation-gone-horribly-awry, from a foot chase across the crumbling rooftops of Siena, while a horse race collapses into bloody chaos in the streets, to a perilous rope-dangling punch-up amidst scaffolding and broken glass, Quantum of Solace, picking up where Casino Royale left off, making it the first James Bond movie to benefit from continuum, hits the ground running, leaving you as breathless as this sentence. It has a vague, dumb-sounding name—taken, ornery Bondaholics note, directly from Ian Fleming—but is the antithesis of the flabby action spectacle that plagues so many multi-million dollar event movies. The second outing for this renovated, revitalized Bond, beautifully embodied in the battered physique and wounded near-menace of Daniel Craig, is the shortest, sharpest, and most devastating entry in the long-running franchise. The tale, courtesy of Paul Haggis and Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, that turns on cold-blooded comeuppance and the looming threat of impenetrable powers working to horde the world’s dwindling resources, is indeed very bleak Bond—but who ever told you bleak can’t be thrilling?

Casino Royale sought a Bond with psychological nuance, or rather, one with any recognizable psychology whatsoever, and Quantum of Solace follows up on the promise. Which doesn’t mean that the film is ponderousness or explanatory, on the contrary, Craig’s Bond is cagey as befits a killer superspy, his internal turmoil not entirely obscure to the camera—there’s a scene where a friend dies in his arms—but hardly an open book either. That he’s consumed by wrathful grief over the death of his lover Vesper Lynd is all you really need to know about the previous film and it’s in any case made abundantly clear in the telegraphic dialogue sequences. The revenge theme is actually doubled with the introduction of Camille (Olga Kurylenko), easily among the most developed Bond girls, whose determination to kill a Bolivian general planning a coup d’etat supported by the CIA and an international organization disguising itself as an environmentalist group nicely dovetails into Bond’s agenda. That this agenda is as driven by personal motives as professional duty is essential to the drama, and the balance between the two is as ambiguous to us as it is to Bond’s superior, M, played with minimalist flair and spooky containment by Judy Dench. She’ll have to cut him lose once things get too unruly for MI6 to sanction, but you sense that she’s always rooting for him with the same troubling faith in vigilante justice that Commissioner Gordon holds with regards to the Dark Knight.

Quantum of Solace was directed by Marc Forster, whose filmography includes Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction and The Kite Runner, none of which allude to an artist with a hidden urges to blow shit up. Yet I’d venture to say that this is the best thing Forster’s done, a project that utilizes his sensitivity to theme and tension and annexes his tendency toward bathos and emotional kitsch. It is a common complaint of critics, myself included, that most modern filmmakers can’t piece together a comprehensible action sequence, but the frenzy of close-ups, wide shots and collisions that cascade throughout Quantum of Solace remind us of the oppositional argument, that such action in real life is hardly tidy and easy to follow, that instincts overrule thought, that movies don’t always have to give us privileged points of view, that we too can get excited and unnerved by the wild blur of action escalating to a climax. There’s a kind of adrenalized poetry in this, and few can do it with the zest shown here by Forster, cutters Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson, and Dan Bradley, whose fights were incorporated into the similarly dizzying braid of imagery in the Bourne films.

Looking over the reviews thus far, I see a lot of gripes about straying from tradition: What about the gadgets and car fetish? What about the bon vivant Bond who never sweats? What about the silly villains and their pets? What about the zany candy coloured sets? What about the casual misogyny? Well, sorry, those days are gone. And there is no Santa. You’d think with the Bond closing in on nearly two-dozen films we’d welcome an overhaul. Admittedly, I’m no Bondophile, but perhaps the cult can content themselves with the massive back catalogue while the rest of us are entertained, provoked and shaken awake by this bold new direction.

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.