
In 1997, Guzmán returned to his homeland to screen The Battle of Chile for young students while simultaneously searching for friends who survived the torture. He depicted all this in the documentary Chile, The Obstinate Memory. In El Caso Pinochet (The Pinochet Case), Guzmán meticulously put together a stinging indictment of the Chilean dictator, who was arrested in 1998 and extradited for trial to England on charges of torture and murder. Although El Caso Pincochet didn't have the accumulative force of his previous films, it is still a vividly personal and painful examination of the fallout from a nation's descent into a totalitarian state.
But I think Guzmán's best film is his 2004 Salvador Allende where he goes back to the beginning of the dream of a democratic socialist society in Chile -- and how it became an impossible dream. Guzmán interviews past supporters of Allende and the former American ambassador to Chile to trace the story of how a Marxist leader attempted to realize a utopian vision of communism with a human face. The power in Salvador Allende, though, comes from watching Allende's surviving supporters today still ruminating over how they could have stopped the coup. They have that gleam in their eyes like true believers firm in their belief in a workers' paradise. But the larger question that gives the movie its greatness is how Guzmán has to confront his own ideological paradox as a democratic Marxist. He faces the irrefutable fact that Allende could have only consolidated his power by becoming the kind of totaltitarian leader he deplored. The film makes clear that only in forming a police state could Allende have prevented his regime from being overtaken by the military. Guzmán's inability to resolve that riddle doesn't so much weaken his Marxist resolve as it lends his film an indelibly tragic tone. It's a terrific film.
-- Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.
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