A close-up view of democracy’s collapse in Chile: history or prophecy?
Watching the history of a coup unfold in The Battle of Chile — while this era’s Fake News constantly alleges that only one particularly disliked politician’s election claims are “false,” “unproven,” and “unfounded” — is like watching a rehearsal of America’s slow move backward, toward socialism. That’s an unexpected outcome for The Battle of Chile, a film on the short list of the all-time greatest documentaries along with Nanook of the North, Triumph of the Will, Olympiad, Let There Be Light, Louisiana Story, Moi, un noir, Land without Bread, The Sorrow and the Pity, and Eyes on the Prize. Now, upon its 50th anniversary, the film takes on new meaning. Not just historical, it feels almost prophetic.
Put aside the offense that The Battle of Chile’s much hyped re-release challenges the 22nd anniversary of the U.S. commemoration of the 9/11 terrorist attack; notice how this coincidence exposes the anti-American sentiment rife within global film culture.
When The Battle of Chile was first released here in 1975, American critics — mostly a left-sympathy group — took up the film’s fight. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael proclaimed, “This documentary cross-section view of a collapsing government is surely unprecedented. We actually see the country cracking open.” Even The Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert crowed, “[We] understand as we never quite could from the reporting from Chile, how and why an economy was ransacked and a social class was subsidized in order to frustrate a democratically elected government.”
All that is like what we are currently living through following Covid germ warfare and the double impeachments, the J6 show trials, the U.S. border invasions, and the ransacked oil reserves.
The Battle of Chile now mirrors the breakdown of Millennial America. For over three hours, director Patricio Guzmán’s detailed history of the ousting of Marxist president Salvador Allende when General Augusto Pinochet’s junta took control on September 11, 1973, parallels our own post-9/11 catastrophe. Kael’s comment that we actually see the country cracking open is hard to forget.
Guzmán is a talented polymath (his 2015 tone-poem The Pearl Button remarkably combined fact and fiction), and The Battle of Chile looks like what used to be thought of as documentary. That term has gradually degraded into a catch-all term by imprecise critics praising films made by activists. But Guzmán displays rigorous methods of observation that used to define journalism.
Operating somewhere in the liminal space between that lost discipline and political purpose, Guzmán does what today’s media don’t do: His overarching hard work satisfies our interest in being informed and a nonpartisan dedication to inquiry and investigation.
Throughout the film, Guzmán exemplifies the virtues of commitment usually paired with the impulses of leftist, revolutionary filmmakers — from Roberto Rossellini and Chris Marker to Gillo Pontecorvo and Costa-Gavras. Millennial activist Gianfranco Rosi, who made Fire at Sea, is inferior, so are American documentarians Michael Moore, Ken Burns, and the lesser lights working in complicity with the goals of the Democratic Party.
Guzmán’s time-line structure for The Battle of Chile’s two parts provides fascinating revelations: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie and Coup d’état (plus a third film, Popular Power). The accumulating details include the Pentagon’s supplying $45 million in aid to Chile’s Christian Democrat leaders (a.k.a. the Right). Can we trust Guzmán’s reporting when he mentions U.S. intervention by the CIA and FBI? Seventies leftist film circles did. It incited their Watergate-era skepticism about government power. Now the media have lost that skepticism; the press is biased in favor of leftist ideology, and intelligence agencies are no longer scrutinized by reporters (or the ACLU). Sometimes The Battle of Chile presents a prophetic warning about journalistic corruption, showing how the documentary form and so-called news media no longer function.
Guzmán’s assemblage comes from good, perceptive film footage. In hindsight, his anthill vision shows anonymous people participating in their own destruction. That’s Guzmán advance from the re-created narrative of The Battle of Algiers, the classic Pontecorvo dramatic epic so viscerally exciting that American radicals took it as a guide in the 1960s. But Guzmán lays out the factual pattern of a revolution: Representative democracy is ignored; the economy is devastated; the constitution is overridden; student revolt.
It’s reportorial but also impressionistic. Guzmán’s camera crew is given a gift when 300,000 Chileans protest at a worker’s funeral — a rousing, epic vision like the J6 footage if the ABC network hack James Goldston, hired by Pelosi’s Democrats, hadn’t distorted and editorialized it. The Battle of Chile peaks when Leonardo Henrichsen, an Argentinian cameraman, “films his own death.” According to Guzmán: “[Henrichsen] also records, two months before the final coup, the true face of a sector of the Chilean army.” (The soldier who aims at the camera and fires looks a lot like Pinochet.)
It’s not deep, but it’s the most shocking moment of a broad, expansive political vision. Guzmán itemizes Chile’s breakdown, including the national media’s role — highlighting video rebroadcasts as evidence of the political power, noting that Pinochet’s opposition controlled “75 percent of radio, 70 percent of written press.” Before that, we see Allende transpose the terms “democracy” and “fascist” at will — a typical Marxist ploy that offers a brilliant lesson in contemporary newspeak.
The Battle of Chile is an elegy for failed socialism that cautions against other Latin American revolutions. Yet, 50 years later we understand it differently — personally — when Chile’s new government vanquishes “three years of Marxist cancer that has led us to economic, moral, and social disaster.” Alternatively, Guzmán’s narrator laments, “The longest representative democracy in Latin America has ceased to exist,” which now sounds like an early epitaph for the United States. Guzmán’s mirror-doc indicates how future generations might look back on the implosion of the U.S., if future cinema is so rigorous.