Documentary Film from the Southern Cone during Exile (1970–1980)

Film Before the Dictatorships

Soon after the First Conference of Latin American Filmmakers in Viña de Mar, Chile, in 1967, the paths of political cinema broadened, and the seeds of the new Latin American film began to germinate. The activist film movement in Argentina received an unprecedented boost with the release (clandestine in the country) of La hora de los hornos, by the group Cine Liberación, made up of Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, and Gerardo Vallejo, in 1968. Even during the dictatorship of the self-styled Argentine Revolution of Juan Carlos Onganía and Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, the following films were produced: Argentina, mayo de 1969: Los caminos de la liberación (1969) by a group of filmmakers linked to revolutionary projects (see Campo, 2009), Ya es tiempo de violencia (Enrique Juárez, 1969), the series of interviews with Perón in his exile in Spain by Cine Liberación (Perón: Actualización política y doctrinaria para la toma del poder, 1971, and Perón: La revolución justicialista, 1971), and the first films by the group Cine de la Base, led by Raymundo Gleyzer. In fact, Argentine activist film remained clandestine until some works were released commercially during the Peronist democratic government (among them the first part of La hora de los hornos and Operación masacre, by Jorge Cedrón).

For its part, Chilean political film did not receive its initial impulse in adverse political circumstances. To the contrary, the Popular Unity government, established in 1970, strongly supported film and launched the experiment of Chile Films, placing filmmakers with communist (such as Miguel Littin) and socialist (such as Raúl Ruiz and Patricio Guzmán) leanings in relevant administrative positions. Becoming a major production center, Chile Films propelled not only the making of movies but also the practical training of filmmakers studying in the universities and national schools. Despite the brevity of this experiment (1970–1973) and the disagreements among the various political sectors over its operation, many of the filmmakers who continued producing in exile had had their first film experiences with Chile Films.

With respect to Uruguayan film, the work of Mario Handler (Me gustan los estudiantes, 1968; Liber Arce, liberarse, 1970) and of Handler with Ugo Ulive (Elecciones, 1967), the activities around the weekly Marcha, and the Third World Cinematheque were building a strong foundation of experiences in the region’s smallest country. Unfortunately, when Handler, Walter Tournier, and Walter Achúgar, among others who worked in films, went into exile, they did not produce political films about Uruguay but dedicated themselves to exploring popular religiosity or colonial history. For this reason when I refer here to Southern Cone films from exile I am referring exclusively to the cases of Argentina and Chile. ⁷

The political activist works of the period immediately preceding exile (1968–1976 in the Argentine case and 1970–1973 in the Chilean case) were precursors of films from exile in their combative tone, their new techniques of documentation, and, in some cases, their radical political-discursive perspective. At the same time, the condition of exile produced changes that anticipated the humanitarian narratives that would become operational (in cinema, literature, and national historiography, for example) after the democratic transition, and these changes had corollaries in the films produced. The changes are chronologically visible in the difference between the early militant documentaries and the reflections on the condition of the exiles themselves and the demands for safeguarding human rights of the later stages of the dictatorships.

Exile or Death

Filmmakers, along with other artists and intellectuals, had to go into exile or fall back on other resources (as did Aldo Francia, who went back to practice his profession as pediatrician in Chile, and Nemesio Juárez, who suffered internal exile in Argentina) if they wanted to keep producing during the military regimes. Pablo Szir (one of the directors of Argentina, mayo de 1969: Los caminos de la liberación), Enrique Juárez, Raymundo Gleyzer, Carmen Bueno (the actress in La tierra prometida, by Miguel Littin, 1973), and Jorge Müller (cameraman of La batalla de Chile, 1975–1979, among other films) were kidnapped and assassinated or remain disappeared. Jorge Cedrón was the exception to the rule not in that he stayed and lived but in that he left Argentina and died in Paris under circumstances that are still unclear, supposedly assassinated by the Argentine secret service.

The others followed divergent paths in exile: Cine de la Base went to Peru, where its members made Las AAA son las tres armas (1977) about Rodolfo Walsh’s letter to the military junta, and then some of them went to Italy to film Persistir es vencer (1978). Jorge Cedrón went to France, where with Juan Gelman he filmed Resistir (1978), documenting an interview with Mario Firmenich, and Tango (1979). Gerardo Vallejo went to Panama and soon after to Spain, where he filmed Reflexiones de un salvaje (1978) in his grandparents’ hometown. Rodolfo Kuhn made two films in Spain, one movie and one documentary (Todo es ausencia, 1983, about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, international demands for respect of human rights, and the return to democracy). Jorge Denti, a former member of the by-then-disbanded Cine de la Base, investigated the war motives and political struggle of former combatants of the Falklands War (Malvinas, historias de traiciones, 1983). Other films made in exile were reflective films and testimonials about Argentine reality such as Vacas sagradas (Jorge Giannoni, Cuba, 1977) and Esta voz . . . entre muchas (Humberto Rios, Mexico, 1979). Lastly, Carlos Echeverría, who was not exiled but was studying film in Germany, accompanied Osvaldo Bayer on his return to the country in late 1983, when Argentina was convulsed by the first free elections in 10 years, to film Cuarentena, exilio y regreso.

Chileans have the most films from exile to their credit among Latin Americans and among the most in the world. In just the first 10 years of exile (1973–1983), 178 films were made, including long and short films of fiction, animation, and documentaries—a figure that far exceeded the dozen films produced by the Argentines. And, like the Argentine films, their places of production were many. Sergio Castilla settled in Sweden to film Pinochet: Fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo (1974), and Claudio Sapiaín made La canción no muere, generales (1975) there. Patricio Castilla took refuge in Cuba to make Nombre de guerra: Miguel Henríquez (1975), and it was there that Patricio Guzmán finished editing La batalla de Chile (1975–1979) and returned to Chile at the end of the dictatorship to film En nombre de Dios (1986), just as Miguel Littin did to film images clandestinely that he would use in Acta general de Chile (1986). Various filmmakers settled in Canada, among them Leutén Rojas, Leopoldo Gutiérrez, and Marilú Mallet, who made Diario inconcluso in 1982. Cristian Valdés and Sebastián Alarcón produced La noche sobre Chile (1977) in the Soviet Union, and it was distributed throughout the Soviet area of influence, making the director, as he put it, “one of the most unknown Chilean directors, but surely the most seen” (quoted in Mouesca, 1988: 149). Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento settled in France, where they produced a great number of films, not necessarily about Chile. Angelina Vázquez established herself in Finland, where she filmed Dos años en Finlandia (1975) and Gracias a la vida (1980). Orlando Lübbert settled in Germany, as did Antonio Skármeta, and the two made films from opposite sides of the Berlin Wall, Lübbert in the Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) and Skármeta in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).

Denunciation and Activism

The films made in the first years of exile continued to have the combative discursive tone of the works of the previous era (“pamphlet-like,” as Mouesca calls it [1988: 144]). The condemnation of the military coup and the institution of a politics of terror in line with the dictates of U.S. imperialism were the unavoidable referents of the filmmakers who took these first steps away from the pain. Even in the case of Argentine films, all indications of a location were erased with the intention of making it seem as if the setting of the film were the country of origin, aiming to incite resistance and/or combat there. Archival material both from the time of Popular Unity and from the mobilizations during the governments of Héctor Cámpora and Perón in the Argentine case was a widely used resource during this period. Images of exile itself did not take precedence; few believed it would last so long.

Some Chilean producers were able to take rolls of films in process out of their country, among them Gastón Ancelovici and Orlando Lübbert with Los puños frente al cañón (1975) and Patricio Guzmán with La batalla de Chile (1975–1979). These films would be completed and shown in exile, but since the images were entirely filmed in Chile and were produced for screening there we cannot consider these films “films from exile.” However, their importance for the Chilean and international community outside the country was a great incentive for the mobilization of solidarity campaigns. Paradoxically, this was a surprise to Guzmán, since his film had not been conceived for this purpose: “In its quality as a chronicle and as a document of a historical process, La batalla de Chile was edited in terms of the potential impact it could have when shown inside the country. The international acclaim that the first two parts of the film received had surprised Guzmán, who had not considered it a solidarity film” (Pick, 1984: 38). The presentation of the films in the context of exile for the denunciation of the Pinochet dictatorship made them, along with many of the documentaries produced by foreigners, ⁸ very effective weapons of condemnation.

The Chilean producers who filmed most in this first stage of exile were those who had less professional experience and employed more combative political discourse. The titles of some films are eloquent: La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos (Alvaro Ramírez, GDR, 1974), Pinochet: Fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo (Sergio Castilla, Sweden, 1974), La canción no muere, generales (Claudio Sapiaín, Sweden, 1975), and Nombre de guerra: Miguel Henríquez (Patricio Castilla, Cuba, 1975). The film by Ramírez was a montage of archival material about the mobilizations during the time of Popular Unity, while Sergio Castilla’s film used animation to make graphic what was not represented in those real images. Probably one of the most interesting films of this period was La canción no muere, generales, filmed in Stockholm, London, and Verona and following the performances by the musical groups most representative of Chile under Popular Unity: Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani. Sapiaín’s film allowed reflection on the conditions for overcoming exile in addition to promoting protest against the barbarity of the violent regime imposed in his country. After archival images of Santiago, Chile, the film moves to the solidarity campaign in Sweden, a concert by Quilapayún in London, and one by Inti-Illimani in Verona. In a sense, Sapiaín and all the representatives of exile who present intellectual or artistic testimony in his film were trying to say that resistance to the dictatorship was alive and very productive in exile. He provided the date and place of his testimony, adopting the new coordinates in which the culture and art of Popular Unity survived.

Jorge Cedrón was one of the most productive of the activist Argentine filmmakers in exile. Soon after leaving Argentina, he was called on by Juan Gelman to film a speech by Mario Firmenich, leader of the Montoneros in exile, to facilitate the diffusion of the “counteroffensive” being orchestrated by the Montonero leadership from exile (Peña, 2003). Cedrón filmed Resistir (1978) under the pseudonym Julián Calinki to keep his identity a secret.

After the disappearance of Raymundo Gleyzer, members of the group Cine de la Base got together once again in Lima, Peru. On Jorge Denti’s initiative they filmed Las AAA son las tres armas, which consisted of a reading of the letter by Rodolfo Walsh to the military junta illustrated with archival images and fictional scenes. The final heading read “March 25, 1977. Rodolfo Walsh was kidnapped by members of the Argentine armed forces.” This was Walsh’s last testament. As for the filmmakers, Denti left for Nicaragua to film a series of works for the Sandinistas, among them La revolución cultural (1979). Alvaro Melián and Jorge Giannoni went to Italy to film Persistir es vencer (1977), supposedly for a press conference with Enrique Gorriarán Merlo and Luis Mattini (top leaders of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party—People’s Revolutionary Army in Exile).

Subjective Reflection

The absence of locational markings in the previous films was indicative of the filmmakers’ resistance to their new condition of political exile and their confidence that the dictatorship would not last very long. After a few years of exile and the defeat of revolutionary projects, the representations produced by the protagonists about their stories became reconciled with their objective situation (Franco, 2008). In this sense, the political story of exile moved from militancy to the defense of human rights and democracy through a necessary process of affirmation of a new identity, that of “exiled.”

As Zuzana Pick (1984: 39) notes, this passage into a second phase of more reflective documentary production happened when “the necessity to keep the memory of a country alive through its refugees was giving way to an idea of exile based on critical observation of the environment and critical reflection about the future.” In this discursive phase we can locate the films Yo también recuerdo (Leutén Rojas, Canada, 1975), Dos años en Finlandia (Angelina Vázquez, Finland, 1975), Los ojos como mi papá (Pedro Chaskel, Cuba, 1979), and Diario inconcluso (Marilú Mallet, Canada, 1982). This group of documentaries reveals the exiles’ doubts, suffering, discussions, and reflections, and the filmmakers themselves give autobiographical testimony on film.

Two of these films are centered on the children of exiles. In Yo también recuerdo and Los ojos como mi papá the “children of exile” communicate their experiences by way of games and drawings, offering testimony to what is foreign to them—the land in which they had lived only a short time or never set foot. They are already children of the world who enjoin their parents to think about a future no longer centered exclusively on Chile and its issues. Exile has already irremediably changed them. In contrast, Angelina Vázquez recollects the testimonies and experiences of exiles in Dos años en Finlandia, focusing not on condemnation of the political situation in Chile but on the different kinds of connections that the exiles have made in a country so distant from Chile’s cultural ways. Further, elements that had not been seen in Latin American films until that time were introduced in exile, among them those of the subgenre called the cinematic essay. ⁹

Not only Chilean film was greatly enriched during exile (Valeria Sarmiento, quoted in Mouesca, 1985) but also the professionalism of some directors, such as Marilú Mallet. During the time of Popular Unity Mallet had directed for Chile Films the short documentary Amuhuelai-mi (1972) about the Mapuche community’s struggle for recognition of the possession of their lands in Chilean territory. The aesthetic quality of the work, which was a sort of training exercise for a director in the making, was uneven, a clear example of the necessary abandonment of training in cinema for the practice of filming in exile. Mallet was a filmmaker who polished her work and experimented with new aesthetic and discursive forms while living in Canada. From her documentary observing a family of Portuguese immigrants in Montreal for the National Film Board (NFB) (Los Borges, 1978) to Diario inconcluso (1982) there is a notable stylistic progression.

Many of the images of Diario inconcluso were filmed aiming for a co-production between Mallet and Valeria Sarmiento (based in France) that was to be called Cartas del exilio. The project did not progress beyond the initial phase because of “financing problems” (Pick, 1984: 40), but it would have recorded a kind of meeting of Chilean filmmakers in exile. Mallet filmed in her house in a snowy neighborhood in the city of Quebec; she introduced her family and friends, exiles like herself, and thus began to construct a multicultural discourse of exile. In most of the scenes she speaks French, her husband English, and her Chilean colleagues Spanish, and the recurring theme is usually immigration and acculturation in an environment that is totally different from their origins. The visual action is multiple, from the initial tour of the house through a subjective camera to direct filming of conversations between the protagonists, with the showing of a few images of September 11, 1973, and a self-introduction by Michael Rubbo, Mallet’s husband, also a filmmaker and immigrant. ¹⁰

Numerous occasions throughout the film illustrate the pain exiles had suffered, such as in the scene in which Mallet asks Isabel Allende, “When was the last time you saw your father?” and she responds in an “off” voice over images of the repression during the coup: “I don’t know . . . on September 11.” Likewise, an exiled Chilean baker comments that Immigration had detained him and was going to deport him to the country he had escaped in fear for his life. In this 1982 film we no longer note any interest in the condemnation of the atrocities committed by the Pinochet government. It is a reflection aimed at reworking an intercultural future from a past that is in ruins. At almost 10 years after the coup, the exiles already have different lives. The discussions between the director and her husband reflect this when she asks him, “What are you doing here, that you do not get involved with Quebec? . . . I want to put down roots here, be part of this country. I want to decide.” Rubbo plays the part of the obstinate man who is there only to work at the NFB and has little interest in having a local social life, and his characterization is intended to confront Mallet. In this connection, an interesting discussion takes place in the final scenes over the form the film has taken, a controversy between two documentary filmmakers’ positions, the “classic” and the “modern.” “What are you doing?”—asks Rubbo—“This is not a documentary.” “This is my culture, and I want to express myself in this [fragmented] way,” answers Mallet. Beyond the fictional staging of the discourses in this last discussion, the contrast between the two forms of documentary filmmaking, one more informative and narrative, or “classic,” and the other fragmentary and open, or “modern,” illustrates the shift toward an essay-driven phase in films from exile.

In this film, “Mallet,” Pick (1993: 162) points out, “recovers some of the fragmentary and ambivalent elements of exile and privileges forms of consciousness raising usually censured by collective political orientations.” The displacement of the modes of representation present in the film essay means that “memory must always be reconditioned” (167) and open for discussion, one way of understanding the past in its intersection with the present for the discursive development of elements that contribute to the collective construction of a different future. Probably because of this, this film was not considered part of the tight nucleus of Chilean exile films, and it received wider distribution in Canada than in Mallet’s native country. Diario inconcluso won the special prize in the 1983 Biarritz Festival and the Quebec Film Critics award that same year.

“When one thinks about all the dead who have fallen before one,” said the filmmaker Jorge Cedrón, “it’s not easy to keep making films, it’s not easy to go back to work. That is, at least, my personal experience. For me it was necessary at one time to cry for the dead. I was holed up at home like that for some six months. But that was also a time for reflection on what had happened there—a reflection I did not have time for when I was there” (quoted in Gumucio Dagrón, 1984: 57). After three years in exile he made Tango, a personal work in which he fused the history of tango with national politics. He does not explicitly set the production location in France—although the voice-over is in French ¹¹ —and does not attempt to incite resistance or struggle against the hegemonic powers in Argentina. The Cedrón Quartet plays tangos and milongas between historical accounts describing different stages in the musical genre and society. Cedrón’s montage seeks to avoid ideological conflicts: when the chronological trajectory reaches 1972—the massacre of Trelew—the story skips four problematic years and immediately goes to 1976. The director intends to dig deeper into the music from the port, with which, in a less problematic way, all Argentines in exile could identify. Tango employed experimentation in the intersection of various documentary and fictional recordings (including the grotesque). It marked a definite break with the director’s previous sober and militant discourses and would be his last film.

In 1978, Gerardo Vallejo filmed Reflexiones de un salvaje in Spain as a way of squaring accounts with his past. Highlighting some characteristics of the filmography and the director’s ideas before and after 1978 can contribute to an understanding of this film. Vallejo did not limit himself to a particular historical context; he never claimed to be in favor of armed struggle (although he did represent that “option” in El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales, 1971) and always included numerous fictional scenes, some critical to the argument, in his documentaries. He said that the motivation for his film was “to understand that my exile had not begun with me, but much earlier, with that shepherd grandfather . . . who decided to escape from misery to America” (Vallejo, 1984: 220). His “reflection” is, therefore, framed in terms of a vision that proposes to link all exiles as one and the same. This is the reason for the absence of references in the film to the political situation in contemporary Argentina and the conflict preceding the military coup. Vallejo is interested not in contemplating Perón, Videla, political violence, and resistance in exile but in reflecting in general, almost metaphysical terms about the condition of the exiled, delving into his own family history of exile. Vallejo refers to the people—proletarians before Spanish or Argentines—to avoid the thorny issue of having to pronounce himself in favor of or against political violence. Reflexiones de un salvaje makes use of fiction through the use of the director’s own Spanish family members to portray his grandparents. These scenes, like some scenes from El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales, permit Vallejo to enrich the testimonies in recreating the events of the past. The representative model that helps to construct this resource allows us to speak of “Doc-Fic” 15 years before Orlando Senna coined the term and Fernando Birri popularized it.

Birri himself wrote Vallejo to congratulate him for the filming of Reflexiones de un salvaje and the inclusion of the “subjective element,” which he saw as lacking in militant film (see Vallejo, 1984). Vallejo provides his voice-over as articulator of the different sequences of the film, thus making it an antecedent of the first-person documentary disseminated in Argentina since the 1990s. Reflexiones de un salvaje is the director’s notebook, linking his ancestors’ story to his present condition. He is not interested in giving testimony about his country, but his personal experience gives him the authority to spread it to Argentines outside that country. “Before it was my grandfather, now it is I.” This is his cyclical explanation of exile, and images of contemporary Argentina are unnecessary to represent it. The problem is not being outside the country but finding a personal narrative-existential solution.

In this second group of films the spatial-temporal anchor went from a skewed shot to an explicit one, and sustained discourse underwent a process of maceration to the warmth of the experience of exile. From historical-political revision, as in the case of Tango, and autobiography, as in Diario inconcluso and Reflexiones de un salvaje, the representations in their documentaries, which had been militant a few years earlier, were driven by the new coordinated politics in which they had to operate to enter into discursive inflection in which the “truths” were no longer so categorical. The abandonment of militant discourse, full of certainties, in favor of historical documentation that questioned the causes of the present through a reflection that was less tied to organic discourses introduced processes that opened the way for a debate over the reconfiguration of points of view. Vallejo’s cyclical conception of the eternal exile of the exploited, comparing his experience to that of his grandparents, and the analysis of multiculturalism in the fragments that make up the exiles’ “diaries” in Mallet’s film are elements of a reconfiguration of representations and discourses that contemplated the possibility of other perspectives. In other words, they propose a more open debate about exile and about contemporary history and politics.

Humanitarian Demands and Clandestine Returns

The change in the horizon with regard to exiles’ expectations generated a change in political strategy—moving from an absolute dedication to politics to a bounded and concrete mobilization—as the “revolutionary struggle” (both by violent and by democratic means) was joined by the defense of human rights. As Franco (2008: 308) points out, this was not depoliticization but the adoption of new forms of political action. It had its correlation in the representations and discourses of films from exile, although in the Chilean case there was less displacement because the exiles had experienced a largely democratic system before the coup suffered by Popular Unity and therefore the demand for a return to democracy could sound more “genuine” than that of the Argentines, who had so recently supported an armed revolution. The defense of human rights was the starting point for these new humanitarian narratives, which began to circulate more widely with the return of democracy but had made their first appearance in exile.

In this last group of films, the spatial and temporal markings are already explicit (and real) while militant speeches and even the mention of the names of the political groups of the 1970s are absent. Esta voz . . . entre muchas, by Humberto Ríos, filmed during his exile in Mexico, for example, begins with titles indicating that it was filmed in Mexico in 1979 with the collaboration of Mexican citizens and includes recognizable images of Mexico City throughout the film. As did Vallejo, Ríos used a resource that had been absent in much of Latin American political documentaries up to that time: he presented himself interviewing the protagonists in the field. He was able to document the harshest testimonies on the torture of the Argentine exiles at a time (1978–1979) when the concentration camps were in full operation.

In the images captured, tense testimonies alternate with images of the work of organizations of exiles such as the Comité de Solidaridad con el Pueblo Argentino (Committee in Solidarity with the Argentine People—COSPA), showing those recently arrived from Argentina provisionally settled in hallways with mattresses and a few belongings. Among those images there are many of children, not only with their parents but also playing among themselves in independent shots. Except to represent misery, images of children had not been part of political documentaries until the films from exile (such as those of Leutén Rojas and Pedro Chaskel); the condemnation of human rights violations acquires singular force when children are positioned as victims of dictatorship. The declaration at the beginning legitimates the procedures of this group of films: “Each voice that is raised can save a life in Argentina.” Esta voz . . . entre muchas was made to foment a campaign of international claims for the disappeared. It is unique in this sense, since the films that were made later dealt with testimonies in favor of the prosecution of those responsible.

The creativity of the veteran Argentine filmmaker Rodolfo Kuhn was not limited to fiction, in which he became one of the most prolific directors of the so-called Generation of the Sixties, but included the first film documentary on the problem of the disappeared and the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. With the collaboration of Osvaldo Bayer, an intellectual committed to the condemnation of the dictatorship, on the structuring of the screenplay, he made Todo es ausencia (1983) a unique film in various ways. The inclusion of unconventional interviews (in public spaces and everyday situations, with an interviewer who is out of view), the unprecedented use of archival television footage, and the theme and discourse, which were certainly counterhegemonic until the end of the dictatorship, made Kuhn’s film a clear antecedent of the testimonial documentaries that would proliferate in the mid-1990s. Through interviews with the families of the disappeared in Spain or in Buenos Aires during the dictatorship—protected by Spanish Television (TVE) credentials at the time of production—Kuhn reconstructed a damning report on the political violence practiced by the dictatorship. The model of representation combined scenes reconstructed abroad with materials recovered from archives and filmed in Argentina in 1983. Kuhn spoke from the outside with one foot inside.

In Todo es ausencia there are no parties or political ideologies but simply a struggle to learn the fate of the disappeared consisting of a claim that emphasizes human beings over their political ideas. This strategy, which had begun to be deployed in exile to capture international public attention on the issue of the disappeared (Franco, 2008) and that soon would be taken up again with the return of democracy and the trials of the juntas (Crenzel, 2008), appeared in this film as a fundamental factor in humanitarian claims. The disappeared were, first and foremost, Argentine citizens, and it was appropriate to conceal their political activities as a judicial-social strategy.

TVE also produced films by the Chilean exiles Miguel Littin and Patricio Guzmán, who returned to their country during the dictatorship to film their documentaries on the resistance and the situation in which Chile found itself. Littin’s film received the most international publicity, probably because of Gabriel García Márquez’s (2005) book on it and because representatives of the dictatorship were very uneasy about the return of one of the artists who was most irritating to the regime. Acta general de Chile was finished in 1986 and screened on Spanish television in four one-hour segments. The documentary maintains a testimonial tone but has a confessional quality in the poetic voice of Littin, who asks at the beginning, “What does it mean to live under the dictatorship?” The interviews are an essential part of the film, but so also are the sequences in which the director comments on his impressions after 13 years of absence from his country while his image appearing in public places dispels any doubt that he is in Pinochet’s Chile. The first part (“Miguel Littin Clandestine in Chile”) emphasizes recorded images of “grey Chile,” interviews with former officials of the Pinochet regime including one with a former secret agent who describes in detail how to operate a torture rack (one of the few testimonies of an executioner in Latin American cinema).

In contrast to this first part, the other three parts of Acta general de Chile span the geography of the country (“The Great North, When I Went to the Pampas,” “From the Border to the Interior of Chile, the Lit Flame,” and especially “Allende, the Time of History”), and archival material is used in numerous sequences without displacing interviews and records of the area in its contemporary condition. These three sections of the film are more historical and, it could be said, didactic. Littin assumes his role as presenter, even looking into the camera in the first scene. However, the testimonies retain their depth and supreme value for those who were exiled in 1973: the images that follow are of students repeating the old slogans against the momios (bourgeois) and openly declaring themselves against the dictatorship, of the families of the disappeared, who denounce the policies of the regime, and of the armed clandestine activists of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, who openly support violent action to topple the Pinochet government. The last section of Acta general de Chile is dedicated to Allende, and in addition to the archival footage there are testimonies by García Márquez, Fidel Castro, and the widow of the deposed president. A film crew manages to enter the Casa Moneda to film some images while on a radio in the room Pinochet can be heard admitting to being pleased about the death of the president: “They can throw him in a coffin, an old one, and put him on a plane with his family, and they can bury him someplace else, in Cuba. . . . This guy even had problems dying.” The last images of Acta general de Chile are of mobilizations that brought hope for the end of the dictatorship, which was about to come. The use of various stylistic resources favored the last episode of this true record of the state of Neruda’s country, Allende, and all the exiles who approvingly received the images portrayed in it.

En nombre de Dios (1986), by Patricio Guzmán, is dedicated to the analysis of the internal resistance. As did Littin, Guzmán returned to his country covertly (although he did not suffer the repercussions experienced by his colleague) and, in the words of the Argentine critic José Agustín Mahieu (1990: 253), made a “notable film that shows Guzmán’s expertise in the documentary field and his sensitivity in capturing the essential moments of apprehended reality.” The project of the film emerged after Guzmán saw Todo es ausencia (1983), in which the “passive and even conspiratorial conduct of the Church in his country” is mentioned (Ruffinelli, 2008: 143). The case of Chile was considerably different because it was not a marginal fraction of the Church that assumed the criticism of the dictatorship’s policies but a considerable group of bishops and cardinals, who organized the Vicariate of Solidarity to help the victims and press the claims of the families of the disappeared and assassinated.

The first scenes of the film (6 minutes) place us in the middle of the multitude in a direct shot of the crowd singing the slogan “Chi-chi-chi-le-le-le, throw out Pinochet” and the incidents provoked by police repression. There is no introductory voice-over; it is the images themselves that confront us with the events. Similarly, following the “decalogue” of direct cinema, Guzmán does not use archival footage; all the images except for the video recordings of recent protests were made for the film. ¹² In this way, the 90 minutes of film show the testimonies of the protagonists—priests, professionals, students, or mothers of the disappeared—in unconventional interviews (just as Kuhn did in Todo es ausencia), with the camera accompanying the protagonists rather than harassing them. In contrast to Littin in Acta general de Chile, Guzmán appears only fortuitously in one shot, preferring to stay behind the scenes to ask questions off-camera, a procedure he polished in his subsequent films. The director asks the same question of various clergy members—“Are the members of the military in power really Catholic?”—and almost in chorus they say no, contrasting the masses of the military with those celebrated by the priests of the Vicariate of Solidarity.

As does Littin’s film, in which he not only appears before the camera but also discusses the plan for filming with his crew, En nombre de Dios contains a “film within the film.” In it we see images of a struggle between the film crew and the police that culminated in the detention of the director’s colleagues. ¹³ This element serves as an example of a new type of filming that has much to do with the introduction of video and its use as video activism that became widespread in the 1990s—the cameraman in the midst of the action, sometimes alone except for the camera and, naturally, running the same risks as the protesters. Guzmán is found there alongside the leaders of the protest, asking questions and constituting, in a way, the “audiovisual unit” of organized struggle. The prominent counterhegemonic content in En nombre de Dios is reaffirmed by a protester: “Now in this country anyone who belongs to a church is political.”

The Southern Cross in the North

In the films from Chilean and Argentine exile, the challenge to keep filming the protests, reflections, or denunciations that were the central theme was handled in different ways. From the militant revolutionary narratives to the historical reflections on the harsh realities of exile to the moderated constitutionalist and humanitarian discourse of the films in the last phase of exile, the filmed representations illustrated the political changes and the prevailing stories of each of its stages.

In the Argentine case, the temporal and spatial dimension was hidden in the first films, which emphasized a discourse that claimed to continue the struggle against the dictatorship as if the films had been produced in Argentina. In that sense, they were based on formal guidelines similar to those of the previous activist cinema, in which all the directors in question had participated. Las AAA son las tres armas and Resistir were examples of these activist strategies. In the case of the Chilean films, although they did not hide the marks of exile their very titles revealed their condemnatory tone: La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos, Pinochet: Fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo, and La canción no muere, generales.

At the same time, sharing the trajectories of the exiles as a group, the filmmakers went through a process in which awareness of their condition as exiles, the consolidation of the dictatorship, and the collapse of their political projects pivoted on the creative process of their work. Dos años en Finlandia, Diario inconcluso, Tango, and Reflexiones de un salvaje are examples of this awareness, which increasingly left the certainties of activism behind to discuss the historical and political evolution and the present/future of immigration from more open positions. The humanitarian narratives that had already begun to be constructed in exile displaced the rigid ideological-political discourses with a willingness to call for the clarification of the fate of the disappeared. The films that situated themselves between denunciation and the democratic transition were Esta voz . . . entre muchas, Todo es ausencia, Acta general de Chile, and En nombre de Dios. Because of the wide distribution of the last two of these, the resistance to the dictatorship within Chile received great publicity abroad and favored the international demands that beleaguered the Pinochet dictatorship.

In the case of Argentine films from exile, the circulation was very limited and the directors had very little contact among themselves, therefore inhibiting the construction of a political-cinematographic movement. It was a matter of different exiles that, nevertheless, had many things in common. The marked ideological differences among the Argentines were one of the main reasons for this lack of organic collaboration (Bernetti and Giardinelli, 2003). As for the Chileans, even though, as Pick (1997: 425) points out, we cannot speak of the constitution of a “cinematographic movement,” they did more productive work (probably because of the support of the film institutes of the various countries of exile), established the Chilean Cinematheque in Exile, and were welcomed at festivals where they could get together and discuss and even plan joint projects (such as the failed film by Sarmiento and Mallet, Cartas del exilio). The circulation of the films was sometimes wide. Littin’s and some of Guzmán’s films were the most widely distributed, ¹⁴ but it is still difficult or impossible to obtain a great part of the material filmed between 1973 and 1989 outside the national borders.

The films from exile analyzed here allow us to say that there were histories of Argentina and Chile between 1973 and 1989 that were not blocked by the repression. The filmic texts allowed the flame of discursive resistance to remain lit, but they were not recovered during the transition to democracy or even during the deepening of political activist narratives that were reexamined with the proliferation of video activism. Documentary films from exile recorded the diversity of resources used by filmmakers to bear witness to the absent, a very rich cinematographic palette that combined staging, archival material, interviews, and reflection by the filmmakers to produce the only traces of free cinema during this period.