Nostalgia for the Light (original title: Nostalgia de la luz) (review)

Any reasonable short list of the world's great documentary filmmakers would certainly include the name of the Chilean director Patricio Guzmán. The auteur of numerous films (the term from Cahiers du Cinéma, so often misapplied, is appropriate here), Guzmán remains best known for The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile; Venezuela/France/Cuba/Chile 1975-79), a monumental three-part work that traces the tragically brief period of political hope and progress in Chile during the democratic-socialist Popular Unity government (1970-73) of President Salvador Allende; the war against Popular Unity waged by the Chilean bourgeoisie and their allies in the Nixon Administration in Washington; and the destruction of Chilean democracy in the military coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet on 11 September, 1973, when Allende was killed, his government overthrown and a ferociously reactionary dictatorship of mass terror imposed on the country. Made with a tiny crew and with almost risibly meagre equipment and other resources, The Battle of Chile invented new techniques for representing history in cinema: and the film still possesses a scope and a power that are nearly unrivalled among documentaries. Many consider it the most consequential political documentary ever made.

Though almost indisputably the greatest, The Battle of Chile is, however, by no means the only important film in which Guzmán has sought to deal with the deeply troubled modern history of his country. Chile, Obstinate Memory (Chile, la memoria obstinada; Canada/France 1997) tells the story of Guzmán's return to Chile after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship, there to screen The Battle of Chile (which had been banned) for veterans of the Popular Unity days as well as for a new generation of Chileans with little knowledge of their country's past. The Pinochet Case (Le cas Pinochet; France/Chile/Belgium/Spain 2001) tells of Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998 and the elaborate - though ultimately unsuccessful - attempts to hold him legally responsible for the murders and other crimes committed by his government. Salvador Allende (Belgium/Chile/ France/Germany/Spain/Mexico 2004) is a biography of the late president from his childhood until his death.

Nostalgia for the Light, Guzmán's latest effort, continues to develop his great and overriding theme - but in unusual and rather surprising ways. The film is primarily concerned with three quests for knowledge: the search by astronomers for knowledge of distant stars and galaxies; the search by archaeologists for knowledge of ancient civilizations as revealed in human remains and artefacts; and the search by aging Chilean women for knowledge of their loved ones whom the Pinochet regime secretly kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured and murdered.

What do these three apparently quite different quests have in common? One thing they share is Chile's vast Atacama Desert. The Atacama is said to be the driest place on earth, and it provides Guzmán with the raw material for some of the most memorable cinematographic images of desert landscape since 3 Godfathers (Ford US 1948), Lawrence of Arabia (Lean UK 1962) and Fata Morgana (Herzog West Germany 1971). Astronomers are naturally drawn to the Atacama, because the almost complete absence of humidity in the atmosphere above the desert means that celestial bodies can be observed with unparalleled clarity and brilliance - as Guzmán illustrates with some of the most gorgeous images of outer space since 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick UK/US 1968). Likewise, the dryness of the desert makes the Atacama a magnet for archaeologists eager to study the extraordinarily well-preserved pre-Columbian carvings and other artefacts created thousands of years ago by the area's prehistoric inhabitants. Finally, the Atacama is the location of the Chacabuco concentration camp, the largest such facility in which the Pinochet regime imprisoned and, often, killed Chilean democrats in the 1970s. Originally a nineteenth-century salt-mining camp in which the mineworkers were held...