The Making of Chile: With Poems and Guns

Solidarity in Los Angeles

A group of Los Angeles activists, students, and academics had created the Los Angeles Group for Latin American Solidarity (LAGLAS), an umbrella group that worked with local organizations of Chileans, Argentines, Brazilians, and Central Americans to protest against U.S. government activities regarding these nations and promote awareness of these issues. In the years following the coup, Los Angeles became a center for Chilean resistance activities, including LAGLAS sponsorship of well-attended concerts by the exiled Chilean folk music ensembles Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún. One of the most significant involvements of LAGLAS was providing initial funding ($500) for the group that made Chile: With Poems and Guns. “Teach-ins” on college and university campuses, in which faculty members dismissed their classes to attend campus-wide presentations about issues of immediate concern, had already been developed to educate students about the vibrant student movement related to the anti–Vietnam War and civil rights struggles and had begun to be held on the situation in Chile. Fred’s argument was that a “film pamphlet” could reach far more people than a teach-in and do so quickly. Time pressure led to the film’s rough aesthetic.

Getting Started

The group that coalesced to create the film ultimately included Fred, his brother Phil, William Bollinger, Donald W. Bray, myself, Nancy Hollander, David Kunzle, the poet Deena Metzger, and Walter Locke, a U.S. filmmaker who had been making a documentary film in Chile when the coup occurred. ³ Walter had come to Los Angeles before the coup with footage to be processed. As depicted in the motion picture Missing, one of his crew, Charles Horman, became a victim of the coup, murdered by the military junta that had taken power. Walter generously let us copy whatever we wanted of the footage that he had brought from Chile. ⁴

Although the credits list Fred as “organizer/cinematographer” (which he was), at his instigation we worked as a collective. Although not everyone was involved in each part of the process, the approach, content, and technical aspects were the result of collective decision making. In addition, Fred gave us a crash course in filmmaking. We learned how the camera worked, about focus and camera angles, and about how to avoid confusing the audience by shifting the point of view. We read the work of John Howard Lawson (1967), a theorist of progressive filmmaking and a member of the Hollywood 10. There was no director, no screenwriter. The plan was that we would all become adept at all elements of the process: camera, sound, editing. For people steeped in individualistic scholarly research, this was very liberating; it fit with our political ideals of equality and cooperation and the “New Left” philosophy of the time. It also gave us the courage to state controversial facts and opinions that we might have been reluctant to voice on our own. The ideas that informed our work came from dependency theory, Marxist art history and class analysis, and progressive filmmaking. Because film is art, for those of us used to presenting information and analysis in a linear, objective, and matter-of-fact way the challenge and opportunity to think about conveying knowledge aesthetically, juxtaposing visuals, music, and sound effects with words and cutting them together in a way that would engage an audience emotionally as well as intellectually, was extremely satisfying.

Security was a concern. It was a time of heightened political contention and fear. We believed that our opposition to the conduct of the U.S. government would probably make us subject to surveillance or even more direct jeopardy. Some of us had already been sensitized to the risks of opposing U.S. policies in Latin America through our support of the Cuban Revolution (see Bray and Bray, 2009). We knew that the Chilean secret police (DINA) might be aware of our activities. Chilean political scientist Jorge Nef, one of our collaborators, thought he had been followed by DINA agents in Los Angeles because he looked back and saw they were wearing pointed shoes (a Chilean, not a U.S. style). We did not discuss what we were doing with others until we had finished the film, and we did not keep written records.

In the first stages of our work we met in the homes of members of the group, Deena’s in the San Fernando Valley and Nancy’s in Santa Monica. The editing was done clandestinely at the UCLA film school. Filmmaking was difficult, time-consuming, and expensive before the digital age; the reels on the editing table were operated manually, and each piece of celluloid had to be physically cut and attached to the one that would follow; sound recorded in the camera was not on the film strip in the same place as the picture and had to be separated and then synched up in the editing process.

What We were Trying to Accomplish

The making of films by politically committed activists had been pioneered in Latin America. In 1971 Ukamau, led by Jorge Sanjines, had recreated a massacre of Bolivian miners using miners themselves to portray the events in El coraje del pueblo (The Courage of the People, or The Night of San Juan). In the monumental 1970 classic La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), filmmakers of the Cine Liberación collective led by Fernando E. Solanas and Octavo Getino had sought to involve Argentines in discussing the ideas in the film and thus galvanize them into action (see Burton, 1978). We were well aware of the historic significance of these films and sympathetic with their aspirations.

Our film was decidedly not in the observational tradition of Frederick Wiseman of editing together sequences of “reality,” nor did we seek to be “objective,” showing “both sides,” and we meant to be transparent about this. We did not regard ourselves as making a dispassionate, balanced documentary film. On one level the film was designed to convey to a U.S. public saturated with anti-Allende propaganda that his was a democratically elected government trying to overcome poverty and inequality caused by centuries of exploitation. We did this by filming narration, interviews, and visual information that conveyed the facts of this history in an authoritative way. We also used language that implied a more radical analysis of the situation—concepts such as “working class,” “bourgeoisie,” and “imperialism” that would allow the more politically aware members of the audience to gain a deeper understanding of the historical dynamics at play.

Although the information presented in the film was factual, it was marshaled in a way designed to arouse the viewer’s outrage at the consequences for the people of Chile, the assault on the well-being of ordinary men, women, and children, and the wanton destruction of a historic effort to create socialism by democratic means. We wanted to show the direct involvement of the U.S. government and corporations, as well as the Chilean elite, in undermining that effort. Since the film was produced in three months and screened less than five months after the coup, much of what is now known about U.S. involvement in Chile was not yet public, but many scholars and commentators were familiar with the situation, and, as noted in the film, the Washington columnist Jack Anderson had unearthed office memos revealing the collusion and conspiracy of the CIA and International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). We wanted to evoke in viewers the desire to do something to change the situation—to demand that the U.S. government alter its policy and deny the Chilean military junta its support as it had done with the UP government. In order to encourage such a proactive response, we created a 15-page “Organizer’s Guide” that included information on Chilean history, the background of the UP and what had happened since the film was completed, a bibliography, and a list of things viewers could do to express their concerns.

Making the Film

Chile: With Poems and Guns is a combination of Walter’s footage with segments produced by us. ⁵ The Chilean footage included interviews Walter’s crew had produced and events they had filmed as well as archival documentary film that Chilean filmmakers had given them. The interviews and sequences of demonstrations from Chile were essential for the credibility of the film because they showed popular support for the UP government. The interviews were given voice-over translations with answers by Ecuadorian-accented Susana Castillo, an instructor of Spanish at the Claremont Colleges, and her husband, Eddy Castillo, who had brought her to the recording sessions and was drafted to provide the male voices. We produced interviews with people who had been in Chile during the coup, people who had conducted research on U.S. covert activities, and an exiled Chilean political scientist along with filmed slide shows narrated by members of the group or others. Some of these sequences of stills, cut together rapidly to give the impression of motion and with sound laid on, conveyed the coup. To save time and money, the film was assembled on one reel, cutting together copies of Walter’s footage and the original footage we had shot. There were no fades in and out, just cuts. Using our raw material without making copies was risky business.

The camera was a 16-millimeter Auricon newsreel sound camera “borrowed” (without the school’s knowledge) from the UCLA film school. Editing was done during Christmas vacation. One night some of us there were apprehended by the UCLA campus police, who warned us that if they found us there again we would be taken to the Westwood police station. We were back the next night, sneaking through the parking structure. This was almost literally an underground film.

We did not want a film of talking heads, so the interviews we produced were shot in places that would give them visual interest and credibility or convey a sense of the circumstances being described. The UCLA graduate student Jeffrey Bortz, who had been picked up by police during the coup, did not want to have his face shown. To convey his fear, we filmed him backlit in front of a brick wall in the basement of the old house where Nancy Hollander lived. The exile Jorge Nef was filmed in his office at UC Santa Barbara in front of a map of Latin America; the journalist Elizabeth Farnsworth, who had researched the U.S. public and private economic efforts to undermine Allende, was shown in the plaza of the Bank of America headquarters in San Francisco; Ruth Needleman, who had conducted research in Chile on U.S. activities there, was seated at a desk surrounded by Chilean posters; Charon D’Aiello, a politically active staff member at California State University, Los Angeles, was filmed in a cubicle in a Cal State office. The first segment, with Tito Nolasco, an aspiring medical student from the Dominican Republic who after the coup had been taken as a prisoner to the national soccer stadium, was filmed in his workplace with Walter in the background taking over his tasks (at Nolasco’s request; his work needed to be done). ⁶

The camera was not reliable, and sometimes its failure had serendipitous results. The second interview with Nolasco was conducted in the Los Angeles Coliseum (standing in for the stadium in Chile). For permission to shoot there we called the management, and they said, “Fine, that will be $1,000.” Our initial $500 had already run out. Our then UCLA graduate student got on the phone and said, “This is William Bollinger of UCLA. Don’t you know we play all of our home games there?” Someone came back on the line and asked for $5.00. (We never paid even that.) The camera failed the first time we went to the Coliseum, so the sequence had to be shot again. During this shoot a helicopter was flying around the stadium; its menacing whirr came through as wild sound on the sound track and contributed to the ominous atmosphere of the scene. The segment with Farnsworth was originally shot in front of the Westwood branch of the Bank of America, and because the camera battery had given out after we arrived we had had to scour the area for yards of extension cords and then ask permission to plug them in from a nearby dress shop; permission was reluctantly given with a request (unfulfilled) to be in the movie. Back at the lab it was discovered that there was nothing on the film. When Farnsworth was reinterviewed in San Francisco, she was posed before a visually arresting large black diagonal structure in front of the Bank of America’s national headquarters, and the camera cut to a list in the lobby of other corporations also housed in the building. This was better than Westwood.

All of the filmmaking devices at our disposal—shocking sound effects, brutal visuals, narration to induce outrage, beautiful music, chanting crowds and rousing public events, evidence of equalizing social policies to create sympathy—were employed. Plaintive, lyrical Andean instrumental music by Inti-Illimani is heard throughout the film, and in some sequences a percussion passage from a piece by the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez provides tension and drama. ⁷ Archival black-and-white film and still photos were tinted red for emotional effect or sepia for a sense of authenticity. The editing style was very important. Fred was a skillful editor, always conscious of the pace that was being established. Sections depicting the coup were cut together with sections extolling the achievements of the Allende period. The sequences were often short, with a quick rhythmic beat that was intended to induce tension in the audience.

We found the title phrase “with poems and guns” in Pablo Neruda’s Canto general (1989 [1950]), in a 1948 poem written to a Venezuelan friend: “We walk out in the street with poems and guns. They don’t know what to do with us, Miguel. What can they do but kill us?” The audience learns this during the dénouement of the film; the narration recounts Neruda’s death shortly after the coup and the atrocities committed by the military at his home, and then the warm voice of the Nobel Prize–winning poet is heard welcoming the listener to his home.

The Structure of the Film

The complexity of the editing is apparent in the first 17 minutes of the film. It opens with color footage of Chilean miners descending on a gondola into a mine, accompanied by railroad sounds and clanging bells followed by plaintive Andean flute music, and then footage of molten copper being processed by a worker into ingots to the sounds of simple percussion instruments and a voice-over passage from Canto general—an homage to Emilio Recabarren, founder of the Chilean Communist Party, written in 1921—listing what copper means to Chileans: “the fatherland, the pampas, the people, the school, home, the resurrection, the fist, order, parade, attack, struggle, grandeur, the resistance.” This is followed by a shot of a crowd of UP supporters and then an interview from Walter’s footage with a smiling shantytown resident, a shirtless mechanic sitting with a child on his lap and two children next to him, saying that things have gotten better for him. Next is another shot of a crowd and then a sequence attesting to Allende’s support of workers and of women, starting with a shot outside a factory and then a shot of three women workers sitting at a table in a factory as one of them says that, before, women did not have a voice in union assemblies but now they participate, that women understand politics and this is part of socialism, that a woman had become minister of labor, and that Allende had for a time governed from a factory. The final interview preceding the titles is with workers in a factory who say that workers chose the socialist road because wages were better in the socialist countries. The introductory sequences conclude with a street demonstration—marchers with Chilean flags—and ends with a freeze frame of a man shaking his uplifted fist, on the soundtrack crowd sounds and the chant “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (The people united will never be defeated!), a slogan that captured the world (for example, the cadence of this chant would be repeated in Arabic on the streets of Cairo in February 2011).

The film’s title appears over the face of a miner in black-and-white. Following are credits that name the filmmakers and acknowledge the footage donated by Walter Locke. The film is dedicated to the Chilean compañeras and compañeros who were carrying on the struggle. Some of this is screened over a shot of agricultural workers with tall farm implements that mirror the marchers’ flagpoles.

There follows a re-creation of the coup using still news photos of the bombing of La Moneda (the presidential office building), police, soldiers, tanks, murders, and a defaced poster of the martyred president in rapid sequence, people being arrested, blood in the street, accompanied by the sound of guns and explosions. Then David’s British-accented voice comes on saying, “Attention all Chileans,” recreating the announcements that were being made ordering Chileans to turn in suspected UP sympathizers and to pay special attention to people with names known to be Jewish. Photos of the four members of the junta are shown, concluding with one of General Augusto Pinochet alone; a swastika appears imposed upon his cheek.

Silence follows, and over a picture of a politician being hustled out of office, Don says, “The coup d’état in Latin America has usually been a kind of gentlemen’s disagreement. Presidents change, the oppressive structure remains.” Archival photos show scenes of exploited people and poverty. Then, as pictures of actions of the military during the coup continue, including a shot of a poster of men in military boots striding onto a map of Chile, intercut with pictures of crowds and flags from previous demonstrations, Don’s narration goes on: “For three years Chile had real social progress. For the first time outside of Cuba the working people of an American country had won a place in the centers of power.” He continues, in an outraged voice, “On September 11, the Chilean military set out to silence the workers’ voice. This was not a coup; it was barbarous all-out warfare against the working class struggling for social justice, a counterrevolution, a war of the army against the people, an outrage against working people everywhere.”

The next section is a recounting of Chilean history, illustrated by an archival map and photos and narrated in the first person (as if being spoken by a Chilean) by Susana Castillo. It emphasizes the exploitation of Chilean natural resources—nitrates and then copper—by foreign companies, abetted by elite Chilean families (depicted by still photos), that left ordinary citizens impoverished to the point that many children (illustrated by moving footage of shantytown children) suffered from such intense malnutrition that they were brain-damaged. After noting that Anaconda Copper Company had taken out profits from the copper “worth more than the entire net worth of Chile and left us with the empty holes” (backed by archival footage of copper mining operations), her narrative concludes with the bitter statement, “They say they developed Chile—that’s bullsheet. We don’t call that development, we call it imperialism,” as an urchin throws a rock toward empty space and the film cuts to the ITT logo as if it had been the target.

To bring the audience back to what has been lost, the film cuts to another interview from Walter’s footage at a rally in a crowded stadium; an articulate supporter points out that he is in a stadium full of socialists. He says that Chile recovered copper under Allende despite the aggression of the CIA-ITT conspiracy against the people of Chile. When asked whether a peaceful road is impossible, he replies that it is U.S. interests and the privileged classes that have promoted confrontation. He refers to the failed truckers’ strike of October 1972 and the electoral gains of March 1973 and says that approval of the government is growing: “We won in March and we won in October. We can win in any kind of confrontation, you’ll see.”

The sections that follow include interviews and testimonies from researchers and from witnesses to the coup whom we recruited. Needleman recounts economic accomplishments such as the nationalization of factories and land redistribution as statistics (typed and turned into slides) appear on the screen. Also, reflecting our didactic intent, the somewhat heavy-handed word “LISTEN” is twice flashed onto the screen. Farnsworth describes her investigations, which exposed how the United States imposed an economic blockade designed to undermine the Allende regime by having Chile declared a credit risk, thus blocking the import of essential consumer products and industrial inputs. But she reminds the audience that the United States did not stop providing military aid; pointing to the Bank of America behind her, she says, “They’re sitting in there right now, right now, making policies that affect the destinies of millions of people; that means you and that means the Chileans. Think about it a minute. Those men aren’t killers [pause], or are they?”

The camera pans up to a window in the bank, and the film cuts to the office cubicle from which D’Aiello describes the historic struggle of workers to organize that finally brought the UP government into being and the efforts of previous governments to suppress it. Nolasco describes the failed coup effort that took place in June 1973 and the defensive organizing by workers in their plants and working-class people in their neighborhoods and says that after the abortive coup attempt, the military had systematically confiscated people’s weapons. He notes that in recent local elections support for UP candidates increased and they were expected to win again in the next presidential election. He refers to the coup and says, “I will tell you about that later,” letting the audience know that it will be seeing him again. Needleman describes the October 1972 truckers’ strike, in which independent operators of trucks stopped making deliveries, paralyzing the economy, while at the same time a flood of U.S. currency appeared on the black market, making it clear how the truckers were being financed. Here there are sequences of upper- and middle-class women banging on kitchen utensils in the “March of the Empty Pots” to protest the shortages and of a militant demonstration by the right-wing militia Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty). Needleman tells of her research revealing the coordinated activities of the U.S. Institute for Free Labor Development (now known to have been an asset of the CIA) and the meetings of U.S. agents with members of the Chilean opposition at an exclusive social club. She emphasizes the three-pronged U.S. strategy of support for the military, economic blockade, and the training of civilians.

Bortz brings the audience back to the coup, telling how 15 or 20 carabineros (police) came to his apartment at the time of the coup and beat him and a friend for about 15 minutes, asked for their passports, then took them into the hallway and stomped and beat them with rifle butts and machine guns for about two hours, shot up and stole things from the apartment, put them on a bus with other prisoners, and then let them go. Asked why he thought the coup had occurred, he replies, “The propertied classes will kill whenever threatened, whether by legal or illegal means, just kill.”

Andean folk music returns, and a still photo of an empty Chilean stadium comes on the screen. Deena says, “They turned Santiago’s national stadium into a concentration camp. This was a symbolic act. When the military finishes cleansing Chile of creativity and socialism, all that will remain of the national culture will be soccer.” Next there are pictures of prisoners sitting in the bleachers being guarded by the military.

The emotional high point of the film conveys the social accomplishments and the flowering of popular culture under the UP government. It starts with the image of the miner seen under the film’s title, now shown to be a poster depicting UP unity with faces of two cultural workers, one a woman, on either side of his. This section includes a sequence of some 45 Chilean posters, projected by two slide projectors to allow fades in and out, onto a screen set on Deena’s dining room table. Fred was at the camera in the adjacent kitchen; his voice can inadvertently be heard saying, softly, “action.” The posters came from David’s Chilean political poster collection. The visuals and Deena’s luminous narration are enhanced by the music of Chilean folk artists. Brilliant images in primary colors depict achievements in education, recognition of disenfranchised groups, the indigenous and peasants, and the rights of children, housing, and film, as well as international solidarity with Cuba and Vietnam. Deena narrates; “Film, art, literature, music became truly Chilean. The focus changed; there were created new images of people who had never before been at the center. The political goals were not for the privileged but for the people.” The nationalization of copper is celebrated in a poster that says “Chile puts on long pants” with an image of a boy in long pants raising a Chilean flag. The images also show volunteer work brigades going out to paint murals in an attempt to overcome the effects of U.S. cultural imperialism, shown though images of U.S. products and cartoons (see Dorfman and Mattelart, 1973, 1991; Kunzle, 1991).

The tone shifts as the story returns to the coup. The sound track becomes intense and loud. The audience sees and is told that the murals were being painted over and books and posters burned. One iconic poster, America despierta (America Awakes), by Patricia Israel and Alberto Pérez (self-identified as “geographers”), that is shown being burned depicts the South American continent covered with colorful images that characterize the region and Chile, such as bananas, a langostino, a copihue (the national flower of Chile), Brazilian generals, butterflies, the face of Che Guevara over Bolivia where he died, and the island of Cuba encased in a crocodile above it. ⁸ Our slide of the poster was filmed while turning the projector off and on to simulate the burning. As stills are shown of the military engaging in destruction, the narration notes that within the first hours of the coup, universities, art schools, and museums were burned and that UNESCO condemned the coup by a vote of 32 to 2 (the United States and Taiwan).

The next shot is a still photo of the national soccer stadium, and Deena describes how it became the prison for the hundreds of people detained by the military. A shot pans around the Los Angeles Coliseum to the accompaniment of the helicopter overhead, and Tito Nolasco, standing, describes how, after the U.S. consulate had failed to help him regularize his status and that of his daughter, he was held in the stadium accused, because of his dark complexion, of having coming to Chile “to spoil the race.” Then he is shown seated, hunched over and covered by a gray cotton blanket, with rows of numbered seats stretching behind him (his idea), recounting the horror of the torture and murders that he had witnessed. Deena’s narration concludes with the names of leaders detained (accompanying photos of some of them being picked up on the streets by police or the army) and a description of the murder of the singer Victor Jara and Neruda’s death a few days later.

The film then shifts to a black-and-white 1966 newsreel report of African Americans responding to police violence after the shooting of a teenager at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco. A line of police with guns raised advances on the protesters. ⁹ The camera focuses on a man who rips off his shirt to take on the police authorities (in the next shot he was captured, but we deliberately did not show that). Then Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown comes before the camera to intone to “anyone within the sound of my voice” that “we can’t have revolution in this country.” This event had occurred at a time when there was considerable unrest in the United States as a result of the civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War. With this reference, we were trying to bring the relevance of events in a faraway nation closer to home.

The end of the film seeks to inspire viewers to action. Hortensia Allende, widow of the deceased president, praises members of the Longshoremen’s Union for having refused to unload ships coming to U.S. ports with Chilean products. Then, over archive pictures of army repression and color shots of Chilean cemeteries, Don describes the repressive conditions in Chile at the time, including that Chilean workers had to dress in coats and ties and were not even allowed to use the word “worker” any more. A blank map of South America is shown; as he counts off the countries with U.S.-supported fascist dictatorships, “Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and now Chile,” their shapes pop onto the continent.

The film ends with three powerful anti-imperialist Cuban posters, one of them showing President Nixon with his brain exposed to show the body of a young man in a field of rubble above lurid images of warfare in black and red. The voice-over is Don’s angry denunciation of leaders who had aided and abetted the overthrow of the UP government: “Know this Mr. Edwards [publisher of the major Chilean newspaper], Mr. Matte, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Villarrín, General Pinochet, Mr. Kissinger, Mr. Frei [the previous president, who had not expressed any opposition to the coup], you cannot stop the people’s revolution.” Finally, there is a montage of earlier scenes from the film while the narration continues: “The ally of Chileans is you. Organize!” as that word appears in white on a black screen and then the film cuts to black. ¹⁰

We Show the Movie

Chile: With Poems and Guns, a 55-minute film, was first screened in January 1974 in the theater of the School of Business at the University of Southern California. Editing had been completed during the previous Christmas vacation, just four months after the coup and less than three months after we started working together. The auditorium had been reserved, and the audience invited, but time had run out and the sound track had not been laid on the film. We ran the two separately, and it worked. Most of us had never made a film before. We had never seen our finished product. As it unfolded on the screen, we were overwhelmed by the power of what we saw. So were the rest of the viewers, who gave it an ovation. Although we did not know the full involvement of the United States, what we put together in a few months remains valid as an indictment of U.S. foreign policy.

The film was distributed by Third World Films (later Unifilms), which was the owner of the master copy. When Unifilms went out of business, it was not picked up by any other distributor. Unifilms had never been able to pay royalties, so we never knew how many people saw it. We do know that it was shown on many U.S. campuses, on an independent public television station in Los Angeles, and on network TV in Australia and that it was translated into Greek. One of our daughters saw it years later at Alameda Community College.

Upon its initial showing, Kevin Thomas (1974), the film reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, reviewed the film favorably; although he said there was a “bombardment of data too heavy to absorb fully,” he judged it a “fervent (and persuasive) protest against the military coup.” A review in the student newspaper at Cal Arts, where the screening was followed by a discussion led by Deena Metzger, noted that the response to the final message, “Organize!” was silence—the audience did not know what to do—and then “vigorous applause” (Feeney, 1974). The East Coast premiere was at Harvard on February 9, 1974 (Boston Phoenix, 1974), and according to a flyer it was shown in other venues in the Boston area on that weekend (including MIT and Northeastern University). The Harvard Crimson review commented that it lacked the production values of a commercial film but “in a way the film’s roughness even enhances its politics; it seems unafraid to show itself the product of labor, a commitment to content over gloss” (Shane, 1974). It was screened shortly thereafter in London, England, under the auspices of a Chilean solidarity organization led by adherents of the Communist Party; it was well received by the audience, but when David asked the leader of the group if he wished to have a copy to circulate, he demurred because it was too critical of the United States (a reflection of the Soviet strategy of the period). It is an indication of the film’s significance that Allan Francovich, maker of the groundbreaking exposé of the CIA On Company Business (1980), asked us for feedback on his rough cut.

Lucha Carries On

After the completion of Chile: With Poems and Guns, most of the group remained together under the name Lucha, and new members were added. In 1975 the group wrote a short article entitled “Report on a Filmmaking Experience: ‘Chile with Poems and Guns’” that was published in the Latin American Research Review (Bollinger et al., 1975). It completed one more film, Communiqué from Argentina, an exploration of the complex politics of that troubled nation completed shortly after the 1976 coup based on the life of Lili Masaferro, who had become the head of the women’s organization of the Montoneros (the Peronist guerrilla organization) after her son was murdered during the struggle there. Intertwining the life of Masaferro and the career of Evita Perón, it provided a feminist view of Perón’s role in Argentine politics based upon Nancy’s Ph.D. dissertation (1974; see also Hollander, 2010).

Lucha began cooperating with striking rubber union workers in the San Fernando Valley to make a film about their cause, but the project was abandoned as the strike petered out. We also began a film about Peru that would have become Bill’s Ph.D. dissertation. He had received an American Film Institute grant that financed filming in Peru. An assembly of the footage for the film that put the various sections in sequence for the final editing was completed. Unfortunately, the assembly was lost, the price of silver made film stock impossibly expensive, time demands on busy people who lived relatively far from each other became too burdensome, frustration over the loss of the film took its toll, and Lucha disbanded. This happened without rancor, and though the group drifted apart several of the participants remain close friends; contacts among us have been resumed with the writing of this memoir.

We called Chile: With Poems and Guns a “film pamphlet” because, with its low production values, we thought that in time it would be tossed aside, but its educational value did not diminish and the issues it addressed have not gone away. It continued to be shown in my classes at Cal State Los Angeles until spring 2010 and in David’s at UCLA as well. And for me at least, the beginning of an understanding of an aesthetic of struggle and the experience of working together clandestinely and collectively on this endeavor inform my comprehension and my practice to this day. I have shared this memoir with others who made the Chile film, and each had fond memories of the experience stirred by the reminiscences. Deena, as usual, said it best:

It feels very important to say . . . that we enjoyed each other and respected each other greatly and that lasted throughout the making of the film. [There were] ideological reasons for the ways we structured the Lucha collective, but for me, at least, it was not ideological, but intrinsic to the work. It was important to me that there be great integrity between the ideas we were putting out and the ways we were living and working together.