Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile Is a Masterpiece of Revolutionary Cinema
Filmmaker Patricio Guzmán and his team documented Chile’s Popular Unity government and the 1973 coup that destroyed it. Smuggled out of the country to be edited in exile, The Battle of Chile is an unforgettable record of an extraordinary historical moment.
The Chilean presidential palace, La Moneda, in flames as tanks fire at point-blank range as it was bombed by jets, as the armed forces and national police toppled the government of President Salvador Allende, on September 11, 1973. (UPI Color / Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)
On September 11, 1973, fifty years ago this year, the Chilean military overthrew the Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende with support from the US government. The succeeding military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet would torture over forty thousand people, and more than three thousand were murdered or “disappeared.”
On an international scale, no filmmaker was as crucial to the task of documenting, remembering, and reimagining the first socialist government elected in the Americas and its violent dissolution as documentarian Patricio Guzmán. In 2012, he beautifully summarized his commitment to the memory and memorialization of Chile’s past: “I think that life is memory, everything is memory. There is no present time, and everything in life is remembering. I think memory encompasses all life, and all the mind.”
A Cinematic Giant
Guzmán is a giant of Latin American documentary cinema with a corpus of more than twenty films. His triptych The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of a People Without Arms (1975, 1977, 1979), about the political conflicts preceding the coup, or golpe, against Allende, is a classic example of what Argentinian filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas christened Third Cinema. This was the Latin American filmmaking movement of the late 1960s and ’70s that sought to use cinema as a weapon to document reality and progressively transform it. From exile in Cuba and Europe, Guzmán continued to document resistance efforts against the Pinochet regime in films like In the Name of God (1987) and excavate the memory of Unidad Popular in Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), The Pinochet Case (2001), and Salvador Allende (2004).
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