Nostalgia for the Light

Patricio Guzmán has been making films about Chile from exile since The Battle of Chile, shot during the last months of Allende's government and smuggled out after the coup. Nostalgia for the Light, made nearly forty years later, won the European Film Award for Best Documentary and is the film that brought him a new international audience.

Its premise is a coincidence of geography. The Atacama is so arid that the great observatories are built there, and so arid that nothing buried in it decays. Guzmán films astronomers at their telescopes describing how every observation is a look into the past, since light takes time to arrive. Then he films women in their sixties and seventies walking the same ground with small shovels, looking for fragments of the relatives the dictatorship disposed of in the desert. Some have been searching for thirty years. The film moves between the two without ever forcing the parallel, and Guzmán narrates in the low, unhurried voice that has become his signature.

It could easily have been schematic. What saves it is that the astronomers turn out to be thinking about the same problem as the women, and say so — one of them observes that he can locate a galaxy but not a body. The film has since been widely taught, and it established the mode Guzmán has worked in ever since: Chilean history read through the physical matter of the country itself.