Salvador Allende (review)

Patricio Guzmán's project is that of memory, specifically the recuperation of the memory of those Chileans and others who supported the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende. Memory, in Guzmán's oeuvre, is deeply influenced by Pierre Nora's concept of the "lieux de mémoire." Here, the director focuses our attention on the mundane, not the monumental. The space of loss and pain is located in Allende's wallet, ID card, and watch, the only personal objects that remain of the martyred president, and in the black and white photographs which form the framework of the director's visual narrative. Memory is as much tactile as mental, Guzmán argues, and through Salvador Allende he works to help his audience feel as much as understand.

Guzmán mobilizes memory to answer two questions that remain alive for him 30 years after the death of Allende and his utopian project. First, how are we to remember Allende as a man and as a political force? Guzmán leafs through a variety of aging scrapbooks—making the audience part of Allende's family—and questions how the martyred president could be "both democrat and revolutionary." He poses this to Allende's elderly compañeros from Valparaiso's Socialist Party, former comrades in the Popular Unity, and workers who supported his cause. The picture that emerges is of a man who is variously recalled as "not a Marxist in the strict sense," certainly not a Leninist, if anything closer to a libertarian. But a revolutionary beyond any doubt.

While this is a bit of historical revisionism (Allende certainly saw himself as a Marxist), it also captures something of the man who rose to the presidency within Chile's elite-dominated electoral system. Guzmán's portrayal of Allende is not hagiographic, but he emerges as a larger-than-life figure who will never emerge again: "There isn't any [current] politics worthy of his image," Volodia Teitlebom, a Communist Senator within the UP coalition, sadly notes. Guzmán portrays Allende as an increasingly isolated figure, attacked by the right, prodded by the left. His ultimate act of courage, according to an old comrade from Valparaiso, meant that when he died, everything died with him.

And that is Guzmán's second question: What could we (I?) have done to create a different outcome? Nada, he concludes. As the director looks back at Allende's death and the end of the Popular Unity, he argues it was a "realistic act reminding us that in politics one should face the impossible." In this, Guzmán echoes Ernesto Malbrán's words from his earlier documentary, Obstinate Memory (1997). Yes, we were on a ship of fools, we sought the impossible, but we are better for having challenged history itself.

Salvador Allende would make for excellent viewing by an undergraduate audience. If Obstinate Memory is, ultimately, a more penetrating documentary, this biography is more accessible. For Guzmán there is only one emblematic memory to be resurrected from the ashes of Chile's history, that version shared by those who saw in Allende's project a momentary flash of heart-stopping idealism, the stuff for which we live and the stories which we pass on to our children and our students. He will not accept that a sector of Chile doesn't accept this memory. But if you want to touch Guzmán's memory, this is a good way to do it.