Salvador Allende (review)

A magical image opens this film: a rock is used to chip away slowly at the thick paint covering a wall. Beneath the covering are the resplendent colors of wall murals made in the 1960s and 1970s by artists working for democratic change in Chile. Salvador Allende was the leftist president of that Latin American country, elected to power in 1970 as leader of the Chile Popular Unity party. He died 3 years later in a military coup aided and encouraged by the CIA, an act that was an extension of the Cold War and the U.S.A.'s determination to maintain economic and political control over Latin America. Patricio Guzmán, a Chilean citizen filmmaker, smuggled film out of the country shortly after the military coup. Salvador Allende is a collage of much of this material, together with revealing contemporary interviews with some of those involved in the events. It includes a brief encounter with Allende's personal secretary, La Payita, in which Guzmán remarks on the period, ambiguously, as "the greatest love story." She replies, "Historically speaking you see it that way, because you were one of us."

This reviewer encountered several refugees in Britain as they fled Chile, gathering their stories on the recently available popular recording format of the period, the video Portapak. The same technology gathered such statements and conversations in various formats for film and television companies around the world, and these emerge from archives to retell the story. But the core of the production is material shot by Guzmán and his team on 16mm film, later smuggled out to make The Battle of Chile (1976) the "official" record of the hard slog and the joyous scenes of the first socialist government to be voted into power in Latin America.

"I need to know who this man was," Guzmán affirms. Scenes of campaigning from the 1950s onward, often in U.S. style, from the backs of trains, were recorded as Allende toured the nation, persuading, cajoling. Also featured: contemporary interviews are shown with the "militant socialists" of Popular Unity, reflecting on tactics before, during and following the coup; an astoundingly smug performance from Edward Corry, U.S. Ambassador at the time, defending to the end the later all-but-impeached President Nixon; an amazingly prescient speech given by Allende to the U.N. General Assembly, for which he received a standing ovation, warning then of what we know now as "globalization."

Is this a reconsideration by a filmmaker in his 60s of the events in which he was involved as an young artist? It is certainly a more engaging (de)composition than the decidedly wooden attempt by Costa-Gavras in the 1982 feature film Missing to stir the consciences of concerned American voters. Guzmán speaks in voiceover directly of his outrage after so many years of the stymieing of so much promise and "an energy that could almost be touched," talents that could have served to remove the inequalities and exploitation that remain to this day on the continent. Is, however, the film-for-television documentary the best contemporary format for keeping these ideas alive, for re-examining and questioning them?

While the film collage "documentary" is a well-established genre for the valid and reasonable singular presentation of knowledge and viewpoints, contemporary media can enable the viewer to be less passive in gathering information from evidence in order to construct knowledge. Records on film and videotape can be presented to enable a hermeneutic role for the student of history to continue to "work on" the substance of the auteurist narrative viewpoint. Awareness in audiences, particularly younger ones, demands that the material evidence employed is made available for inspection after the individual viewpoint has been expounded. The interactive DVD format, while a recently established method for enabling the substance of a story to be further investigated (through both the back-story and "cut scenes"), evinces that web-based archives can better combine the singular viewpoint with the available...