CHILEAN CINEMA: AN OVERVIEW

Indranil Chakravarty
Chilean cinema received international attention in the late sixties with the birth of a
vibrant film movement that grew out of a larger upheaval in the life of the nation,
particularly in the spheres of music and theatre. These cultural manifestations were all
marked by a strong spirit of non-conformism with existing political structures and
consequently the cultural and political realms became inextricably intertwined. In the
sixties, an entire generation of bright university students were inspired not only by the
Cuban Revolution of 1959 but by developments in their own country as well, by the
protest music of Violeta Parra who went into the Chilean countryside to learn folk
musical traditions and songs of the rural communities and brought them back to a
wider urban society. Though she died early -- committing suicide in 1967 -- her spirit
was transfused and carried forward by her own children (Angel and Isabel Parra) and a
large number of musical groups that became active in the major universities. It was
they, along with several groups of experimental theatre workers, who collectively
transformed Chilean culture in the sixties dominated by the powerful presence of
Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra (Violeta Parra's brother and the 'anti-poet' of the
generation), the latter breaking through the overwhelming Nerudian discourse in
Chilean poetry of the time. However, the threat that Chile would be converted into
'another Cuba' had been so disturbing for the Chilean right-wing establishment and
their American allies that it virtually determined the course of Chilean cinema in the
years that followed.
Like elsewhere in Latin America, the desire for a socially aware, realist and critical
cinema that challenged the conventions of the 'commercial' cinema (that 'falsified'
reality) found its earliest expressions in the university film clubs which became the
breeding ground for future filmmakers. In 1959, a Centre for Experimental Cinema was
established at the University of Chile under the directorship of Sergio Bravo, a
documentary filmmaker, who drew inspiration from the Argentine filmmaker Fernando
Birri's 'adaptation' of Italian neorealism to the Latin American context.
These developments took some time to crystallise until they gave rise to an outburst of
creative filmmaking around 1968-69 when five major filmmakers made their first
featue films: Ral Ruiz's Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers), Helvio Soto's Caliche
Sangriento (Bloody Nitrate), Aldo Francia's Valparaiso mi amor (Valparaiso my love),
Carlos Elsesser's Los Testigos (The Witnesses) and Miguel Littn's El Chacal de
Nahueltoro (The Jackal of Nahueltoro). In the years that followed, these filmmakers
would diversify in different directions but at that point of cinematic history, they could
easily be seen as comprising a homogeneous group driven by similar concerns and
desires. Earlier in 1967 when Aldo Francia had organised the first festival of Latin
American cinema in Via del Mar, Chilean filmmakers had realsied that the films they
harboured in their minds were actually a part of a larger continental project.
The growth of a strong left-wing progressive culture culminated in the victory of the
Popular Unity government by a very slender margin in the elections of 1970 which
brought Salvador Allende as the president of the country in the face of a huge and
hostile opposition which made substantial reform in any sphere, cultural or economic,
extremely difficult. In any case, filmmakers in Chile greeted the Allende government
with great hope and optimism and Miguel Littn was appointed as the director of Chile
Films, the institutionalised body for regulating state-sponsored film production and

distribution. Though Littn took up the job with great enthusiasm and creativity, no
feature films were released during his tenure which was intercepted by the bloody
coup of 1973, bringing the dictator Augusto Pinochet to power and Littn was just
about lucky to escape death unlike President Allende himself. The only filmmakers who
benefitted from the Chile Films initiative were the young filmmakers Patricio Castilla
and Claudio Sapiain who later made films in exile.
The military coup of 1973 became a clear watershed in the history of Chilean culture
because soon after the event, almost all the major filmmakers were forced to leave the
country. Some found refuge in Mexico and Cuba while others went away to Paris and
Madrid. At this time, a film of Littin -- La Tierra Prometida (The Promised Land) -created sensation for having predicted the coup with a great degree of precision and
Patricio Guzmn's La batalla de chile (Battle of Chile) shot clandestinely, captured in a
documentary harrowing images of the military repression leading to the death of the
photographer who was shooting it. Ral Ruz moved to Paris and had a difficult time as
a struggling filmmaker until he established himself as the leading light not only of the
Chilean cinema of exile but of French art cinema of the eighties and nineties. It is
difficult to find any continuity in Chilean filmmaking but one can recount in retrospect
that Chilean filmmakers in exile had collectively made 56 feature films between 1973
and 1983 (the year of the tentative return to democracy). This means that more
Chilean films were made in exile than in the entire history of the country till that point.
It remains an extraordinary and unprecedented phenomenon in the history of cinema
because though there have been instances where a substantial number of 'national'
films were made outside the geographical boundaries of the nation (such as the Polish
cinema of exile), nowhere had the condition of exile exerted such a determining
influence.
While Ruz's earlier work in Chile dealt with the self-obsessed 'petite bourgeoise'
intellectuals whiling away their time over inanities in a bar, his first film in France -Dialogo de Exiliados (Dialogue of Exiles, 1974) -- focussed on the inappropriateness of
the expatriates' desires. This ungratifying look at his own community created much
hostility, condemning him to the condition of a 'double exile' but Ruz looked upon the
condition of exile both as a reality and a metaphor, as an advantage rather than a
handicap, providing him with a critical distance away from both the turbulence of
Chilean as well as French cultural life. (It is perhaps for this reason that Ruz has not
returned to Chile even after the return of democracy.) His subsequent work has a
haunting quality to it, marked by a strong autobiographical element and a yearning
for the absent centre of things. His films are thus commentaries on the state of
displacement: Three crowns for a sailor (1982), Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting
(1978), Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1979), etc. Raul Ruz remains the great
rebel of Latin American cinema in that he pursues the universal human condition and
moves away from particularities of events and issues or the politics of relationships.
The cinema of Miguel Littn, on the other hand, came to represent epics of Latin
American resistance. His first film was an indictment of the social 'system' that is
responsible for creating 'criminals' and then condemning them. His films in exile were
conceived and executed on a grand scale: Actas de Marusia (Letters from Marusia,
1975) made with generous Mexican state support, El Recurso de metodo (Reasons of
State, 1977) made in Cuba, Alsino y el condor (Alsino and the Condor, 1982) and
Sandino (1991), both made in Nicaragua with lavish budgets. Ruz and Littn thus
represent the two poles of Chilean filmmaking in exile.

Among other filmmakers who documented through fiction the difficulties of the exile
experience in diverse places were Pablo de la Barra in Venezuela and Angelina Vasquez
in Finland, whose film titled Dos aos en Finlandia (Two years in Finland, 1975) was
about Chileans in Finland and Gracias a la vida (Thanks to Life, 1980) dealt with a
woman who carries the child of her own torturer. Several other women directors
emerged such as Maril Mallet in Canada and Valeria Sarmiento in France. Some of the
films occasionally did not deal with the condition of exile such as Sarmiento's Mi boda
contigo (My marriage with you, 1984) which deals with the conventions and pleasures
of melodrama.
While these filmmakers worked in exile, it will be wrong to assume that
cinematographic activity or feature film-making in particular, came to a standstill
within the country. Several filmmakers, Silvio Caiozzi being the most prominent among
them, worked within the parameters of the military dictatorship, often working with
fictional allegories about contemporary Chile in order to communicate with the
sensitive audience, bypassing the regulations of the censors, as the Brazilians had
done so successfully. In fact, Caiozzi complains of the simplistic, reductionist
categorisations whereby the films of those who stayed back were branded as 'fascist'
by those outside the country (particularly by the exile community) and labelled
'communist' within the country by the military dictatorship. Caiozzi for one, walks the
tight rope, trying to negotiate hostilities from both ends. He ridicules the implicit
prescription that every film has to be a denunciation or a reportage, another sign of
dictatorship, according to him.
Between 1973 and 1985, seven feature films were made from within Chile: Sergio
Reisenberg's Gracia y el forastero (Gracia and the stranger), Silvio Caiozzi's A la
sombra del sol (In the shadow of the sun) and Julio comienza en julio (Julio starts in
July), Patricio Bustamente's El maule (The trick), Alejo Alvarez's Como aman los
chilenos (How the Chileans love), Carlos Flores' Identicamente igual (Identically
equal), Gonzalo Justiniano's Los hijos de la guerra fria (The children of the cold war)
and Jorge Lopez's El ltimo grumete (The final cabin).
In the years that followed the military dictatorship, several Chilean films received
international recognition: Pablo Perelman's Imagen Latente (Latent Image), Silvio
Caiozzi's La luna en el espejo (Moon in the mirror), Ricardo Larrain's La Frontera (The
border), Gonzalo Justiniano's Amnesia, Andres Woods' Historias de ftbol (Story of
Football), Miguel Littin's Los Naufragos (The Shipwrecked). Raul Ruz made Tres vidas
y uno solo muerte (Three lives and only one death) in France with Marcello Mastroiani
in all the three roles where three lives lived independently merge into a singular death
at a futuristic moment, alluding to the 'formula of the Trinity'.
As in the rest of Latin America, Chilean cinema in the 1980s has seen a movement
away from the aesthetics associated with radical notions such as militant, 'third
cinema'. In the process, genres rarely attempted in the 60s and 70s have made a reemergence, visual styles have shifted, and the more radical demands made by filmmakers on their audiences have been widely attenuated.
What has changed is the political, cultural and economic environment within which this
cinema finds itself. Economically, there is one major new factor, which is the entry of
foreign money into Latin American cinema through the mechanism of coproduction.
Politically, the Marxist militancy of the 1960s and 1970s is obviously no longer
possible. The political character of the 'New' Latin American cinema was never

primarily a matter of party line but lay in its depth of understanding of the political
space represented on the screen. Politics was always mixed in with a variety of stylistic
experiments and excesses, which have not by any means subsided. Recent Chilean
cinema also retains a certain utopian streak as well as a deep social conscience.
There has also been a distinct return to the genre of melodrama, which in the 60s and
70s had been strongly disparaged by the political susceptibilities of the revolutionary
left. It has come back, however, in a new guise, informed by a feminist focus, and
largely, though not exclusively, the domain of a new generation of women directors
Thus, while conceptualising Chilean cinema, it is important not to pigeonhole the
nation's diverse cinematic production as either a cinema of resistance or conformist for
that would mean to delegitimise a whole range of efforts by filmmakers of different
persuasions and sensibilities.
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