Uruguay 2008

A Very Brief History Of Uruguayan Film

The Uruguayan documentary has been fundamentally political from its origin. One of its pioneers, Ugo Ulive, imposed on it a fierce satirical and critical tone relating to national political life in his Como el Uruguay no hay (1960) and Elecciones (1967, codirected with Mario Handler). Ulive went to Cuba, where in 1963 he filmed Crónica cubana, an unnerving fiction film on the Cuban revolution, and still later was exiled in Venezuela, where he continued filming until 1972 (¡Basta!, 1969; Caracas: Dos o tres cosas, 1969; Diamantes, 1969; TO3, 1972) (see Sciamanna, 1998).The other important filmmaker of that initial period was Mario Handler, who played a mobilizing role in understanding film as a resource for developing political and social awareness. He produced one of the most influential shorts of the time, Me gustan los estudiantes (1968), which is in various ways comparable to the famous Now (1965) by the Cuban Santiago Álvarez. ¹ Handler was a filmmaker with great artistic sensitivity (En Praga, 1964) and an intense political and social point of view (El problema de la carne, 1969; Liber Arce, liberarse, 1970; Sarampión, una epidemia en Fray Bentos, 1973) (for an early review, see Burton, 1991 [1985]). Since its screening in 1965, his film Carlos has been considered a model of the documentary exploration of the Other, in this case a marginal member of Uruguayan society. Operating as a one-man team—manning camera and sound simultaneously—Handler followed the moves of a vagrant for more than a year, filming his everyday life. Carlos was an extraordinary film document of marginal street life and had a lasting influence on filmmakers from various countries, from the Colombians Ciro Durán (Gamín, 1977) and Victor Gaviria (Rodrigo D No futuro, 1990) to the Argentine Brazilian Héctor Babenco (Pixote, 1980). As did Ulive, Handler had to go into exile in Venezuela, where he filmed a full-length film and several institutional documentaries. His real return to film came when he returned to Uruguay in the mid-1990s and, again as a one-man team, filmed an extraordinary 90-minute documentary about various marginal characters in Montevideo entitled Aparte (2002).

The Uruguayan military dictatorship (1973–1984) impeded the free blossoming of documentary film. During the dictatorship, Eugenio Hintz made Crónica desde el exilio (1987), in which he reviewed the years before the coup d’état and what happened later. The only documentary about the 1980 plebiscite, ² A los ganadores no se les pone condiciones, o Despuntando la claridad (1980–1984), by Luis A. Varela Arocena, was filmed using Super-8 and was banned at the time. César de Ferrari recorded the first civil elections of 1984 in Elecciones Generales (1985), and, in an attempt to reconstruct the history censored by the military, materials began to appear that had not been shown until then, such as Tupamaros (1997, Rainer Hoffman and Heidi Specogna). Prison and repression were the themes of Los ojos en la nuca (1988, Grupo Hacedor).

The attempt to recover history began to be combined with another genre, the documentary portrait. Politics also frequently entered into these documentaries. In historical-political order, Luis Batlle Berres (1998, Eliana Delisante and Claude Frison), about the former Uruguayan president, and Héctor el tejedor (2001, José Pedro Charlo and Universindo Rodríguez Díaz), about the journalist and leftist labor leader Héctor Rodríguez, are two clear examples of this form. Other documentary portraits revisited literary figures but could not escape political themes, among them Onetti: Retrato de un escritor (1990, Juan José Mugni) and Idea (1997, Mario Jacob), about the poet Idea Vilariño. Ricardo Casas’s Donde habita la pureza implacable del olvido (1998), about the life and work of the singer-songwriter Eduardo Darnauchans, who was persecuted during the dictatorship, and Palabras verdaderas (2004), about Mario Benedetti, followed.

Virginia Martínez codirected with Gonzalo Arijón one of the most dramatic documentaries on the topic of the disappeared, Por esos ojos (1997), and it was followed by Acratas (1999), an archival film and collective portrait of anarchism in Uruguay. For his part, Gonzalo Arijón made Vengo de un avión que cayó en las montañas/La sociedad de la nieve (2008) and Ojos bien abiertos (2009). A feminist focus on women has also produced important documentaries, among them La caja de Pandora (1991, Mayra Moubaied) and Sin pedir permiso (1991, Hilary Sandison and Moubaied), which recorded women’s participation as agents of change in couples, the family, society, and politics.

Nevertheless, the year of the best harvest in all of Uruguayan documentary history was 2008. The release of five excellent full-length documentaries—Siete instantes, by Diana Cardozo; D.F./Destino final, by Mateo Gutiérrez; Decile a Mario que no vuelva, by Mario Handler; El círculo, by José Pedro Charlo and Aldo Garay; and Hit, by Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff—proved it so.

Siete Instantes

Diana Cardozo, born in Uruguay in 1962 and currently living in Mexico, where she studied filmmaking, produced Siete instantes with support from her adoptive country. It took 20 years of democracy to process emotionally and intellectually the vicissitudes of what are today known as “the gray years” of armed insurrection and the appearance of the first clandestine urban militant group in Latin America, the Movimento de Liberación Nacional Tupamaro (Tupamaros Liberation Movement—MLN). ³ Siete instantes is a notable result of this effort to review and narrate the past from a different present.

Cardozo reunites in her documentary a number of women and a few men who participated in the clandestine struggle. That the majority are women, as the director explains, is due not to any intention to give women Tupamaros a voice but to a choice in organizing the materials in favor of stories that lacked the self-justification that was common in men’s testimonies and were more direct and “authentic.” Siete instantes, more than telling the story of the Tupamaros as explicated by its protagonists, seeks to capture unique moments of decision that allow glimpses into the human nature of these characters, stripped of rhetoric and plunged into the most poignant memory.

One of the most emotional moments is Alba’s story of her 88-year-old grandmother’s visit to the prison where Alba was detained on her twentieth birthday: her grandmother, who was dressed in her best clothes for the occasion, begged the guard to let her take her granddaughter’s place, saying that she had already lived long enough and her granddaughter was just starting her life. The beauty and pathos of that impossible request give meaning to Alba’s tears as she narrates the episode. Another instance recreated in the documentary is Gloria’s story of how one day a farmhand accidentally discovered a tatucera (rural hideaway) full of people and weapons. This episode—known in the history of the movement but never before narrated in such detail—was a disturbing moment of decision because the choice was either to take the humble witness, Pascasio Báez Mena, out of the country or to kill him. The second option was chosen, and it has come down in history as a simple assassination and even as an intractable ideological contradiction, given that the Tupamaros were fighting for the poor. Never before had such a thorny issue been addressed in an Uruguayan documentary. Also unprecedented in documentary film was the depiction of the relationship between the Tupamaros and those they kidnapped, which in the case of the British ambassador and his guard, Pancho, who tells the story, led to friendship and the discussion of issues but included the awareness that when they were found out they would both die.

The almost casual dialogue between two friends, Adriana and Lía, remembering a visit when they were very young to the port of Montevideo, where they went out with Italian sailors to learn the language, maintains the same flat tone. With basic resources of information, they give an account of the times from the creation of the MLN until its defeat in 1972, including the improbable escapes from prison (on one occasion of 38 women, on another of 111 men). But in this framework of collective and above all personal stories, what is interesting is not the journalistic or historical facts but the human quality of the people who lived them. The director calls the characters “common people confronting exceptional situations” and points to “the exceptional in those common people in admitting and taking charge of that history.”

D.f./destino final

In D.F./Destino final Mateo Gutiérrez has reconstructed several historical figures: his father, Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz (“el Toba”), Zelmar Michelini, and William Whitelaw and his wife, Rosario Barredo, political refugees who were kidnapped and killed on May 18, 1976, and left to be discovered in a car abandoned on the street in Buenos Aires three days later. ⁴ With the help of numerous witnesses, he constructs what Rodolfo Walsh would have called an investigative documentary but which is also a response to a personal need to recover the absent father, a mythic figure rather than an everyday presence for the child Gutiérrez was when he lost him. His mother, Matilde Rodríguez, keeps him company throughout the film. With her privileged memory of her relationship with Gutiérrez Ruiz, she tells affecting anecdotes (for example, about the moment that she discovered that, believing that she had married a “man from the country,” she had married a político) and appears in archival materials denouncing the kidnapping and killing of her husband during the trials of the Argentine dictatorship’s juntas.

The times were violent, but these protagonists were not. Gutiérrez Ruiz and Michelini belonged to the two Uruguayan traditional parties that had peacefully alternated in political power for almost all if its history, Gutiérrez to the White and Michelini to the Red. They were also independents of good judgment, and Gutiérrez Ruiz’s work as president of the Chamber of Deputies was always the most democratic and least partisan that might be imagined. Michelini had left the Red Party, formed his own group, and joined the Broad Front, ⁵ a coalition of political forces with progressive and leftist tendencies. At the same time, the MLN Tupamaros had captured national attention and threatened the police and later the joint forces (police and military). Although by the time of the coup they had been practically defeated, Plan Condor ⁶ was active in the kidnapping and assassination of exiles. Gutiérrez Ruiz and Michelini had been in exile in Argentina, mistakenly thinking that this would guarantee their and their families’ personal safety.

The first hour of D.F./Destino final reconstructs the lives of Gutiérrez Ruiz and Michelini, alternating stories told by friends and others who knew them. From this first part—without emphasis, demagoguery, or any trace of hagiography—emerge portraits of two men known for their political clarity and their passion in the service of others. Anecdotes such as those about Gutiérrez Ruiz’s taste in music and his love of riding horses help to produce portraits of individuals who are remembered with great respect and pain for their tragic fate. Fewer details are offered about Whitelaw and Barredo, who, in contrast to Gutiérrez Ruiz and Michelini, belonged to the MNL Tupamaros. The final 40 minutes are focused, however, on reconstructing the kidnapping and the discovery of the corpses. The narration of the kidnapping by family members who witnessed it and the account of the discovery of the corpses (illustrated by previously unpublished photos) are dramatic and painful components of the exposé. The documentary includes statements from Matilde Rodríguez, Enrique Rodríguez Larreta, and other witnesses and victims and from prosecutors and judges involved in the trials of Argentina’s juntas during the government of Alfonsín. D.F./Destino final goes beyond the two objectives that motivated it: the emotional recovery of the paternal figure—a kind of family album—and historical reconstruction. Its great force lies in something that is central to these two impulses or emerges from them: the kidnapping and political assassinations that were part of the dictatorship’s repression, state terror, and bloody abuse of power, which, along with Nazism and the “final solution,” have gone down in history as some of human species’ most degrading acts.

Decile A Mario Que No Vuelva

Just as in Aparte (2002) he focused his camera on Montevideo’s most marginal and dispossessed, in Decile a Mario que no vuelva (2008) Mario Handler turns it on himself and a group of contemporaries who lived and suffered the 13 years of the Uruguayan military dictatorship. The documentary begins with the question “How did those who remained live, both in prison and in everyday life?” Who is asking this question is partly explained by the fact that Handler, who had belonged to a Tupamaro group and at some point had photographed prisoners in the People’s Prison, was exiled in Venezuela for 26 years. The title is explained in a segment in which the playwright Mauricio Rosencof says that, when he himself was detained, he was able to tell his ex-wife in a very low voice, “Tell Mario not to return,” knowing that for him returning to the country under the dictatorship would have meant imprisonment and an unpredictable (or perhaps very predictable) fate. In the last segments of this documentary, however, Handler points out other motives, perhaps more personal and ethical, for making it: the fact that during his years in Venezuela he never filmed anything on Uruguay and this left him with a moral debt, along with the feeling that the years and recent ill health might make this his last film. With this honest awareness of a debt to settle and a legacy to leave behind, Handler films a documentary that is valuable in many ways. At least with respect to the everyday life of those who did not suffer in prison, the initial question is developed in the first 15 minutes, with testimonies of some people and a few minutes of newscasts of the dictatorship: repression was an everyday form of personal insecurity; there was even repression in the way people dressed (no short skirts on young women), and “the model for being a man” was being created (as Frontán, who discovered his homosexuality while at the Naval Academy, tells us).

The centerpiece of the documentary comes later, as all of the testimonies begin to focus on torture. These testimonies are both from those who suffered torture (Rosencof, Engler, Berruti, Cámpora, Vigil, and Macchi, all Tupamaro activists) and from those who inflicted it (Gilberto Vázquez, an imprisoned officer), along with those who collaborated with the military and police intelligence (Ricardo Domínguez, a private investigator) and those who thought that “many” ought to have been kept in prison (Daniel García Pintos, a politician). The writer Carlos Liscano is a special case; he was arrested before the coup and was freed after it was over. There is a moment when he defines himself: “I am a son not of the dictatorship but of the prison.” Torture has become an international issue, and the testimonies of this documentary, given the serenity with which they are offered by both victims and torturers, achieve unexpected relevance. The picana (cattle prod) and the tacho (a tank full of water for the equivalent of waterboarding) become commonly used terms, sometimes even for representing the struggle for survival. For example, Berruti tells how Rosencof screamed “No picana!” to trick his torturers, since the tacho’s asphyxiation by water was more intolerable than electric shock. Rosencof himself refers (in his novel El barataz he develops this through literature) to the psychological strategy of transferring the suffering of torture to an imaginary being, in this case a rooster (“It’s a rooster they are torturing, not me”). Examples such as these must unfortunately be added to the history of human barbarity as instances of gratuitous cruelty and of love for life and the determination to survive. With supreme narrative ability, Handler weaves the testimonies together, often making one testimony respond to another to establish a true collective story. The discursive strategy achieves the best results from the point of view of the story in general, because it gives the film a flexible and attractive rhythm, contrasting with the slow pace of the interviews. What Handler proposes, above all by controlling the editing when everything has already been said and filmed, is to produce a single complex story told by different voices.

The documentary is necessarily contradictory, and the contradictions are established not, as one would think, only between the adversaries of that time but mostly among the partners in struggle, torture, and prison. Toward the end, the dialogue between Engler and Vigil is extremely rich in trying to calibrate notions such as “forgiveness,” “coexistence,” and “compassion.” This wound created by the actions of the Tupamaros and above all the dictatorship has not healed. Handler says at the end of his documentary, “This film is an attempt at reconciliation or coexistence, and it is also a search for truth or truths. And perhaps it is a reconstruction of society’s soul, and my soul.” His documentary may well generate controversy because the terms “reconciliation” and “coexistence” have been used less by the right and by progressives than by those interested in a generalized amnesia about their barbaric actions. Vázquez, the imprisoned officer, suspects that things will not remain as they are, meaning that they will get worse for his kind. Engler insists on seeing “the day when they will be humbled” before considering reconciliation but knows that a mea culpa will not come. Frontán points out (in one of the few truly emotional scenes) that the dictatorship mutilated his generation, destroying it forever. This film confirms, then, both the protean nature of the genre and today’s tendency for personal documentaries to dominate. Decile a Mario que no vuelva is active and vital because Handler seeks answers in a context that he knew well before his absence of three decades and in which he was known and valued. When Rosencof sent him the precautionary message, it was obviously because Handler had already produced activist films of social and political protest and “it was not hard to know who the author of Carlos was.” Carlos (1965), Me gustan los estudiantes, and Líber Arce were well-known films in Uruguay, and at various points in this new documentary Handler alternates fragments of them with his voice-over reflections. Fragments of Me gustan los estudiantes were in fact used by the dictatorship, reversing the documentary’s intention and giving it the meaning of condemnation of “subversion.”

If there is one fault with this film, it is its filmic purity, its insistence on distancing itself as much as possible from television reports and didactic and historical films. In its search for answers it cannot do without direct testimonies, with real people talking to the director and the camera (that is, to the viewers), but except for a couple of moments all this is done in sober, undramatic style to preserve the discourse from any hint of graphic exploitation of suffering. The new Uruguayan cinema has been reluctant to face its dictatorial past. Thus the return to his country of a great filmmaker such as Handler has not been insubstantial: he has made two brilliant documentaries, Aparte and Decile a Mario que no vuelva, that inspire the reflection that may restore the national and individual soul. If the decades of military dictatorship and the return to democracy have taught us anything, it is that the struggle for justice and against barbarity never ceases to be valid.

El Círculo

El círculo started off being entitled El pocavida and then El viaje. What is the “circle” in this portrait by Henry Engler, one of the Uruguayan dictatorship’s Tupamaro hostages and today a renowned a neurologist in Sweden? Is it the circle his life has taken, or is it the circle he himself refers to as a strategy for controlling his thinking and not going insane during his 13 years of imprisonment? Both these meanings are probably admissible and appropriate, along with the resonance of that (first) “circle”of Alexander Solzhenitzyn, who narrated the horrors of prison in his time. Among the most interesting features of this brilliant documentary by José Pedro Charlo and Aldo Garay is that it is not intended to be a conventional political work, a condemnation of what, at this point, few do not loathe: the repression of the Uruguayan military dictatorship. It is undoubtedly political in the conventional sense, but what is paradoxical is that, in a documentary in which not only Engler but other famous MLN figures appear, they never talk about politics. This is because the heart of the documentary is the testimony of the main character’s gradual descent into insanity, the years of hallucination and paranoia, and how he got through them to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, which is his current mission in life.

It is no accident that the documentary begins in Uppsala and later returns there to show Engler chopping wood in response to the rigors of the Swedish winter. In the documentary Sweden is also a place of silence—of walks with his Swedish wife, their rare dialogues (in Spanish), and aseptic scenes of the hospital and even the hallway (not much like a hospital, more like a maze) along which Engler walks while speaking of the duty of the scientist at the film’s conclusion. Far from the political activism and clandestine armed struggle of Uruguay, Sweden is the refuge, the place where the circle closes.

With the same spiritual tranquility he shows in this documentary, Engler also participated in Decile a Mario que no vuelva; the two films confirm his consistency. But, in contrast to Siete instantes, this film is not about a “common person in extraordinary circumstances”; Engler is extraordinary, and that is what Charlo and Garay show to perfection. The project for the documentary emerged when, according to its directors, Charlo read a sensationalist news clip in 2004 entitled something like “From Tupamaro to Nobel.” Although in the documentary Engler himself corrects this error—he was never a candidate for the Nobel, although many said he deserved it—there is something extraordinary about someone who has lived the violence of armed insurrection but is currently a renowned scientist whose team has made progress in finding the cause of a terrible disease.

The documentary takes the form of a journey, accompanying Engler on his return to Uruguay and filming his meetings with some of the other Tupamaro hostages of the dictatorship. Charlo and Garay deny that these moments of encounter were staged, but they were filmed as absolute and pristine events, as were the visits of Engler and his film crew to the barracks where he had been imprisoned. One of them is almost implausible: the moment when he shows a well and tells how, when he was prescribed “recesses” by the military doctor, they would take him to the well to look at the water. Another scene in this same style (memory/reunion) is his encounter with one of the soldiers who guarded him and, at personal risk, was much more humane with him than his other captors. Also, the documentary discovers another character who is unique in his environment, a university office in Toledo, Spain. José Serrano Piedescasas is a Spaniard who was politically restless in his youth, joined the MLN when he was in Uruguay, and suffered the rigors of prison. Reunited with Engler, he joins him in a visit to the place—what used to be a bar in Montevideo and is currently a veterinary clinic—where they were arrested in a shootout with the army. The young employee who listens to their reconstruction of the event looks at them with astonishment.

The structure and, in part, the tone of the documentary are those of an epic. Even without glorifying the MLN (or opening the Pandora’s box of self-criticism), the mere confrontation with some of those who today are almost legendary (Jorge Zabalza and José Mujica, Julio Marenales and Mauricio Rosencof) helps to produce this tone. There is no glorification, but there is the affirmation of virility that is usual in portraying heroes. This is apparent in details such as the physical posture of Rosencof—with a photo of the national hero José Gervasio Artigas (1764–1850) on the wall—in a very brief scene in which he says, “At that time [in prison], what we did was resist.” But above all, this tone is characteristic of the portrait of Engler, who became the top figure when the founder, Raúl Sendic, died, given Engler’s ascent into the world of scientific research and his coming to the Swedish “paradise.” Everything moves in the direction of an epic, including the admirable story of the mother who, denied a visit to her son, waited at the door of the barracks for hours, under sun and rain, until she got what she wanted.

The important part of this construction, however, is Engler’s own testimony and his story of the hallucinations he suffered for years and his strategies for surviving and avoiding insanity. Not only did he not submit but he emerged undefeated with a capacity for scientific thinking and for eloquence in recreating the circumstances of his past. The key to the epic is the triumph of the will in confronting the military’s goal of destruction by means of imprisonment and torture. This is why, in those sequences, the camera is set on a close-up of Engler’s face as he narrates: the shot allows no distraction or visual or audio aids. It is about Engler’s life, told by himself, and it aims to illustrate the resistance struggle against the incomparably stronger repression. Engler tells how once, confronting a military karate expert and knowing that he would be beaten, he ordered himself not to think about pain. That was his victory, and when he expressed it to his torturer (“I did it. . . . I didn’t even have an involuntary thought”) the torturer did not understand what he was saying and blamed it on madness. This victory of the tortured over the torturer is what the Argentine critic and theorist Josefina Ludmer (1984), writing of Sor Juana’s tireless struggle in the seventeenth century to keep the Church from obliterating her, has called “the tricks of the weak.” The comparison is apt, despite the distances, given that both were deploying the “culture of resistance.”

Hit

Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff, students of communication, made Uruguayan music the subject of an academic thesis. It ended up as a full-length documentary entitled Hit, and its musicians and their music became their artistic “cast.” Starting from the simple question “How do you create a musical ‘hit’?”—a question that none of the musicians asked could answer and that inspired surprise and laughter—they not only got notable Uruguayan musical figures to participate in their film but produced a real history of the Uruguayan popular music of the past 40 years that becomes a political history in various ways. The film begins with the narrative tone of a fable, saying that “once upon a time there was” a country without its own music whose citizens admired and imitated music from abroad until they started making it themselves, creating an intimate tradition in that space and time. The subtitle “Histories of Songs That Made History” helps to explain and overcome the contradiction of using a term that is not part of the Spanish lexicon—“hit”—to describe the popular songs that became milestones in the history of Uruguayan music. The documentary goes straight to the heart of the problem of cultural identity. The country without a tradition acquires awareness of a dormant tradition, and it is a collective one, lo popular. Five songs are revived and rescued, beginning with one that Uruguayans over 40 sang in elementary school but those younger do not know, “Río de los pájaros.” With this song, a national cultural identity is rediscovered that had been lost during the military dictatorship of the 1970s because of censorship and repression. ⁷ Anibal Sampayo was a victim of the dictatorship, which banned his songs, and by the time this documentary was filmed after the return of democracy he was a victim of Alzheimer’s.

Some key names in Uruguayan music are rescued from oblivion, but the recovery of that of the brothers Hugo and Osvaldo Fattoruso is paradoxical, consisting of their work in the brief period, more Argentine than Uruguayan, in which as the Shakers they made the song “Break It All” famous. These were the rebellious 1960s, and these youths were influenced by the Beatles. They did not know English, but they sang it because “Spanish stank,” and today not even they can understand their lyrics. When interviewed, the Fattorusos were not proud of those times. This illustrates a key aspect of the alienation of identity: not wanting to be who you are, rejecting your own language, Spanish, and singing in a language that you do not even understand. Eduardo Mateo, in contrast, belonged to a later time (the 1980s) and was a solitary genius. His use of drugs and his particular madness produced memorable moments and performances. Although there is not much of an archive of his work, there are essential testimonies, such as the one by the musician, composer, journalist, and director Horacio Buscaglia in the house where Mateo wrote “Principe Azul.” It may be reading too much into his madness to see it as an expression of resistance to the dictatorship, but the possibility should not be ruled out. Undoubtedly the most emotional chapter belongs to Mauricio Ubal and his and Rubén Olivera’s “A redoblar,” a celebrated protest song of its time (1980), not only because the song is more political in a conventional sense but because of its iconic value in evoking hope of resistance to the dictatorship. The appeal to the collective, to an “us” that had generally lacked an Uruguayan song until the end of the military dictatorship, produces great emotion in remembrance.

The last song recovered is a history in itself. “Brindis por Pierrot” was written by Jamie Roos in 1985 and recorded with the unmistakable voice of the great “Canario” Luna. Luna’s interpretive art must be understood in terms of Uruguay’s Carnival culture, which is still strong and involves important elements of the national cultural identity. This part of the documentary was filmed at a time when the composer and the singer were enemies for reasons no one has yet deciphered. Since no other artist has ever sung the song, it has remained in limbo and has become a myth. The documentary includes an unusual sequence of a visit by the filmmakers to Luna’s house. He appears poorly dressed, a glass of wine (an essential element of his identity) beside him and surrounded by his wife, children, and grandchildren as if they constituted his last line of defense after his retirement from the public scene. A stubborn self-denier, Luna denies his fame (“It’s all made up”) and absurdly says that “he does not like” to sing. Luna died a little less than two years after participating in this documentary, and with him died a rediscovered tradition of the new Uruguayan song, the bar music and music of the Carnival stages.

The question that must be addressed about the inclusion of this film in a review of the political documentaries of 2008 is whether it is in fact a political documentary. To answer this question we have to analyze its historical context. On November 30, 1980, the military project of reforming the constitution was overwhelmingly rejected by the public, and the country’s slow return to democracy began. A month later Aquí se canta: Canto popular 1977–1980 (Capagorry and Rodríguez, 1980), the first collection of the lyrics and biographies of singer-songwriters many of whom had gone into exile, appeared. Although the book’s introduction does not identify the compositions as political, it is an opportunity to recognize what was tacitly known: that because of censorship and the cruel repression of citizens and freedom of expression, music was the only vehicle for resistance. In 1983 El canto popular uruguayo (Fabregat and Dabezies, 1983) appeared, and by this time the authors felt free to portray this tradition as resistance. They traced its origins to the “singer of opinion” Bartolomé Hidalgo (1788–1822), pointing to “the subsequent void that cut the thread until well into the twentieth century” (12). Defending the breadth and variety of this Uruguayan popular song, the book’s authors, like the directors of Hit, recognized the political aspect of the songs that identified the movement.

Conclusion

These five Uruguayan documentaries, contemporary but independent of each other, illustrate different modalities of documentary film practice. Their diversity speaks of differing points of view and of artistic freedom and the nature of the modern documentary. Siete instantes, El círculo, and Hit are investigative documentaries made by filmmakers who did not participate in the events concerned but know about them because those events belong to a collective history. The first two place historical participants in those events, members of the MLN Tupamaros, in the role of the Other. The filmmakers Diana Cardozo, José Pedro Charlo, and Aldo Garay have become the heirs of a historical concern; they are its present chroniclers, filmmakers who have found different angles for telling that story that give voice to the authentic protagonists.

The distance between the 1960s and the first decade of the new century, practically half a century, is resolved in the styles of the documentaries and in the ideological and ethical positions that they reflect. In that it leaves the story of the events and the valorization of the meaning of the past to the voice of the Other-protagonist, one might consider the documentary to be situated in the service of that protagonist, but in fact it is not. In Siete instantes, one of the Tupamaros’ most important decisions—the killing of the farm worker— continues to be the object of profound criticism and self-criticism. At the same time El círculo focuses on a singular figure, a leader of the MLN Tupamaros and a prisoner and hostage of the military dictatorship for many years, who was the epitome of the MLN’s defeat. The documentary filmmakers investigate this past from the new and surprising perspective of his scientific career and his personal history of prison and of a journey into and back from madness. Garay was too young in the 1960s and 1970s to have actively participated in the labor and political struggles. Charlo is a different case; he participated in them and was detained and later released at the dawn of redemocratization. For its part, Decile a Mario que no vuelva is self-reflective not just because the filmmaker is profoundly involved in its theme but because its style results in off-camera reflections. It is also a testimonial documentary in that the filmmaker reveals events that had been unknown until that moment such as his participation in the MLN. The use of autobiography opens a window to collective history. The Other is plural here: the author and his society. D.F./Destino final also ends up being reflective as well as investigative because the filmmaker maintains a close relationship with the Other, his father. Gutiérrez’s being an eyewitness to the kidnapping of his father and learning that he had been assassinated makes this relationship unusual in modern documentary film. The few examples that are comparable exist in Argentine documentaries: Los rubios (2003, Albertina Carri), Papá Iván (2000, María Inés Roqué), and M (2007, Nicolás Prividera). In D.F./Destino final the father is the visible Other, while the author-son is invisible.

The political character of these five Uruguayan documentaries is neither concealed nor foregrounded in a conventional way. At the same time, none of them would exist without the reconstruction of memory and identity through reflection on our own experiences and histories. Thus the subject reconstructed in these films, which we have termed the “Other of the documentary,” is the modern Uruguayan documentary filmmaker himself.