It was going to be called The First Year, as the idea of the young filmmaker Patricio Guzmán was to record, camera in hand, everything that happened during the initial year of Salvador Allende‘s government, when the Popular Unity was trying to implement the Chilean path to socialism, that is, structural changes within the framework of legality and the democratic system. Over time, The First Year became a separate film and all the remaining material went to another even more monumental project: it was called The Battle of Chile, the Struggle of a People Without Arms, which went down in history as the greatest milestone of Chilean and Latin American documentary cinema.
Composed of three films The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (1975), The Coup d’État (1976) and The Popular Power (1979), the film – which until now was on the Ondamedia platform and has only been broadcast on open television by the channel La Red – arrives on the streaming platform Mubi this Friday, September 11, on the commemoration of a new anniversary of the 1973 military coup.
What Guzmán narrates is that whirlwind of the popular project. “Chile was a party,” he noted in the book The Battle of Chile (Catalonia, 2020), where he tells the story of the film. “In the summer of 1971, when I got off the plane (after my long absence in Madrid) on a wonderful morning in February, the first thing that caught my attention was a large poster that said: ‘Chile begins its second independence’.”
And the filmmaker continues: “From the first moment, Chile seemed to me a motivated, active, exuberant country, as if people were living a long party that had already lasted many months. There was an attitude of jubilation, of satisfaction, especially in the poor neighborhoods, in the ‘camps’, in the ‘populations’. But the poor were also in the city center. For the first time I saw humble people walking near La Moneda, like tourists, who were touring Santiago for the first time. In many streets, people marched with flags and shouting slogans. There were meetings, parties, rallies. Many people greeted each other without knowing each other. It was like a state of collective infatuation. I never believed that a project could excite people to such an extent. What was the cause? Why so much passion? It was the revolution.”
Aware that he was living a unique moment in Chile’s history, Guzmán decided to film it. “At that moment, the only thing I wanted to do was film – the filmmaker recalls in the mentioned book -. Film reality without wasting time. I was coming out of a school. I had a lot of energy and my eyes were full of images. I was a filmmaker at my ‘starting point’. I was lucky to find some financial resources and quickly formed a team. We had a 16mm camera, two portable reflectors, and a sound recorder. We had enough black and white film.”
With cameras and photography by Jorge Müller Silva (later detained and disappeared) and the Argentine Gustavo Moris, plus the valuable contribution of the French filmmaker Chris Marker, who provided the material for filming: 43,000 feet of film tape, plus 134 magnetic tapes, Guzmán began a process that involved a lot of craftsmanship and care.
“The Battle of Chile was a great adventure. We were totally free, we only depended on ourselves and our creativity. It was a privileged and unique situation. We didn’t have much film, but it was enough; we had a 1959 model car, an Eclair camera with two lenses, some chassis, a single tripod, a Nagra-4, and a single Sennheiser microphone,” Guzmán recounts in the cited book.
As the film progresses, the tensions of UP Chile are recorded in the film, although Guzmán clarifies that this was possible thanks to the fact that there was still respect for legality and the Constitution. “With The Battle of Chile we went from euphoria to a climate of civil war. Democratic legality allowed us to film freely everything we wanted. It was filming the class struggle as a landscape. And little by little, an aggressive mass of opponents appeared around us who fought every initiative of Allende. If at that moment the institutionality had been broken, we would not have been able to continue filming.”
“The working style of The Battle of Chile was possible thanks to the rule of law – he adds -. Without that protection, we would not have gotten anywhere. When institutionality breaks and a war begins, you can no longer film like that. You have to hide, camouflage yourself, jump from trench to trench. But when the country is ‘within legality’ you can film almost everything.”
In his second film, the documentary portrays both the uprising of June 29 (the “tancazo”) and Tuesday, September 11, 1973, the day of the coup d’état. That crucial day, Guzmán narrates it with a particular narrative. “The most important thing, without a doubt, is balance. Keeping the two forces almost at the same level… maintaining the struggle of opposites… and above all building a convincing story. The only thing the viewer wants is plausibility, credibility, authenticity… being objective, being partial, is not the most important. What was important to me, in this case, was to be sincere and show my own point of view in a convincing way.”
Guzmán also recounted how the footage of that day was made, including the bombing of La Moneda. “The second part of The Battle of Chile is a single sequence. From the uprising of a tank unit to the coup, the whole film unfolds as a single sequence. For every action of the right, there is an opposing action of the left, and vice versa; there is no respite for the viewer, the commentary informs what each side does. It is a story of action and reaction that captures the audience. On the other hand, if you only have assemblies and parades… there is no way to build a dramatic curve. In the third part, there is a change of tone. It is the flattest and most difficult to make because it has no major conflicts.”
“On September 11, the neighborhood was full of soldiers, we heard the noise of tanks, a column of vehicles had occupied the Forestal Park behind our office. Our blood ran cold, we had the evidence that the entire army was turning against us. Jorge (Müller) and I went out towards La Moneda to see if there were conditions to film. As we advanced, we met some cameramen coming in the opposite direction. They told us: ‘It is impossible to film, there are soldiers everywhere.’ We returned to our office and talked. My opinion was that if we filmed the coup itself, we risked losing everything we had already done, as we ran the danger of being arrested or something worse. With the five rolls we still had left, the skinny guy could keep filming in front of a television set. Having agreed on this, we set off. Jorge went out with the camera wrapped in a cloth along with the Nagra, accompanied by Federico, Bernardo, and Angelina. I went out with José Bartolomé to my house. I had the rolls of the ‘Tancazo’ in my hand. The shooting was over.”
For film critic Sol Márquez, from Radio 13c, The Battle of Chile is an unmissable film. “The Battle of Chile is a fundamental film in national cinematography, and I believe it also has a place in world cinema for the documentary work it proposes and because it speaks of the Zeitgeist of that moment in history. It is one of the cinematic experiences I remember most in my life since the first time I saw it, because it manages to account for an era, to speak of a Zeitgeist at a global and local level. Also, it reflects the fundamental difference of this revolution in Chilean terms: coming to power through the ballot box and not by arms, which was the trend in what happened in other countries, mainly thinking of Latin America.”
“I also think it is worth highlighting that form and content come together somehow. It is a film on a very large scale in terms of going out to the streets, showing how polarized the country was in the marches and entering meetings and all the grassroots work that was being done. It shows that moment of immense hope of thinking about a change that is finally cut short by the civic-military coup. In fact, I remember the image of Pinochet with his glasses and that idea of the power of the image as a weapon somehow; that force of saying ‘this is as far as we go, this is over’. It marks the beginning of another era that one knows has a lot of darkness.”
“It is very impressive how combative it is, the rhythm you feel and that urgency at a moment in Latin American cinema where perhaps Chile had chosen a different path from what happened in Brazil or Argentina in terms of the search for cinema. I don’t want to say pamphleteering, but more rebellious and mobilizing. The new Chilean cinema took another route, but I feel that The Battle of Chile connects with that and with the particularity of the process of Allende’s rise to power through democratic means.”
On his side, Rodrigo González, film critic for Culto, stated: “Patricio Guzmán is not only the most recognized Chilean documentarian in the world, but thanks to him we have the most complete and intense audiovisual record of the turbulent days of Popular Unity and the subsequent Military Coup. It is a privilege for our country that an artist with the talent and instinct of Guzmán was in the right place at the right time to film The Battle of Chile. Not all countries can boast of that.”
Asked in 2020 by Culto if he considered The Battle of Chile his most important film, Guzmán paused and said: “It’s a good question because it’s a film that haunts you. Yes, it is important, but also Nostalgia for the Light I consider a work that has weight, right? and The Pearl Button as well. I think with the latest ones, I have made works that will endure over time. But of course, The Battle tells something so key in Chilean history that it will inevitably be referred to.”
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