The Battle of Chile Director: Patricio Guzman
Of all the images present in Patricio Guzman's three-part documentary on the Chilean military coup in 1973, the one which concludes Part I - entitled The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie - is perhaps the most blood-curdling. Culled from newsreel footage shot at a street skirmish, it shows a soldier taking aim at the camera; seconds later, the image spins before it crashes onto the ground. The Swedish cameraman has just filmed his own death, a victim of the military putsch that toppled Salvador Allende's (right) democratically elected socialist administration and subsequently subjected Chileans to a decade of terror.
That haunting image is a harbinger of things to come: the filmmakers behind The Battle of Chile - who shot all their footage with just one camera, one sound recorder, two cars and monochrome stock sent to them by French filmmaker Chris Marker - would all eventually fall foul of the new regime. Four of the films' five crew members spent time in detention, and one of them - the cinematographer Jorge Muller Silva - became one of the many 'disappeared' under Augusto Pinochet's regime. The surviving crew eventually fled Chile and reconvened in Cuba, where they started editing the footage they smuggled out of the country.
What began as a two-parter (The Insurrection was completed in 1975, followed by The Coup d'Etat a year later) soon spawned a final third, The Power of the People, in 1979. Acclaimed then as one of the most remarkable documentaries produced, Guzman's film soon resigned itself to the archives, its standing eclipsed first by Costa Gavras' Oscar-winning Missing - which tells the real-life tale of the torture and murder of an American journalist at the hands of the Chilean military, and the CIA's attempts to stage a cover-up - and then by the media's growing indifference towards the Reagan-backed South American dictatorships.
The first release of The Battle of Chile on DVD in December was given additional significance last month, when the Chilean electorate voted in a right-leaning president (the tycoon Sebastian Pinera, who supported and worked for Pinochet in the late 1980s) for the first time since the country returned to civilian rule in 1990. But even without such external factors, Guzman's film remains a masterful achievement, doubling up as an illustrative piece on politics and a stirring indictment of the brutal tyrannical regimes Washington nurtured and propped up during the cold war.
Guzman was educated in Madrid and returned to Chile in 1971. The emergence of Allende's progressive political movement soon caught his imagination, and he began to film footage that eventually became The First Year, a documentary examining how Chile fared during the socialist government's first 12 months in power. By then, the traditional elite were already agitating for a regime change; The Insurrection was Guzman's record of how businesses and right-wing parties undermine Allende's rule.
