Andrés Wood’s Machuca and Violeta Went to Heaven

Collective Memory in the Moving Image

Pierre Nora (1996: 14) describes lieux de mémoire (realms of memory) as “places, sites, causes—in three senses: material, symbolic, and functional.” The Chilean cinematographer Patricio Guzmán was a pioneer in gathering reels of memory of the Allende years. In his epic trilogy The Battle of Chile (1975; 1976; 1979) he depicted stark geographical spaces of conflict in which dialogue between political sides had ceased. The documentary, subtitled “The Struggle of a People without Arms,” begins with the bombing of La Moneda, Chile’s national palace, a remarkable realm of memory of the coup. The wanton damage to La Moneda embodies how the military erased Allende and his followers from the nation. Guzmán declares that he and his team were not quite sure why or what they were after when they began filming the political turmoil of the Allende years, but we know that he was filming so that we would not forget. Because The Battle of Chile was not shown in Chile until after long years of censure and imposed silence, many were shocked to see the blunt sociopolitical divisions that had taken hold of the nation in the Allende period. Indeed, Guzmán could not find distributors for his film, who were fearful of the reaction people would have, and therefore it had only limited screening. The Chilean nation refused to view this film because it depicted the spectacle of a threatened hegemony that reacted with tanks, weapons, and bombing of the sociopolitical spaces that the working class had aggressively penetrated.

Guzmán recorded memories of the streets of Santiago. The various political rallies for the momios (mummies—conservatives) and upelientos (UPers—supporters of the Unidad Popular) show members of each political side jumping up and down to demonstrate that they do not belong to the other side: “El que no salta es momio/de la UP” (Those who do not jump belong to the conservative/UP side). Returning to Chile after exile, Guzmán filmed Chile, the Obstinate Memory, a collective memory of the first screening of The Battle of Chile. In a voiceover, Guzmán performs a “narration of the nation from the experience of the diaspora” (Thies, 2008: 201). Attempting to reawaken the collective memory of Chile’s turbulent past, he seeks the testimony of those who had participated in the film. In it he maintains that for many Chileans collective memory is a “closed chapter” and says that he was seeking to break the code of silence that permeated the nation’s transition to democracy. Witnessing survivors of Allende’s security team escort a convertible without any passengers—in which Allende would have been—we recognize a director who, like Allende’s bodyguards, has been deterritorialized, underscoring a narrative from the outside (Thies, 2008: 202). Constructing the past, individuals piece together subjects that include disappeared friends, the UP, and Allende, the vibrant ghost that inhabits the discourse of many interviewees. Through collective memory, the protagonists examine old pictures to determine the identities of people many of whom had been disappeared. A woman in a photo is identified as Carmen Vivanco, but when she is shown the picture, despite a vivid resemblance, she says that she could be that person but has her doubts.

Since the transition to the posttransition, the Chilean film industry has been engaged in cultural practices in which educational, commercial, and ideological stances have been negotiated (Pinto, 2008: 13). For Wood, Chile’s political struggles and the subsequent coup d’état had considerable influence on his work: “It was an experience that marked me in many ways, from my political choices to the types of films I make” (Cine Político, 2004). Thus he is attempting to narrate Chile’s turbulent past from the inside. Violeta Parra erects her tent on the outskirts of La Reina. Pedro Machuca lives with his family in El Esfuerzo (The Effort), a squatters’ settlement on the edge of the Barrio Alto (a well-to-do neighborhood). In both films, then, the rural migrant exists in proximity to the comfortable urban space of the well-to-do, but there is no social interaction and no shared sense of what it means to belong to Chile.

The Conceptualization of Geographical Spaces of Contention

Kathleen Newman (2010: 4) asserts that world films look for “the conceptualization of power asymmetries: counter-hegemony [and] subalternity.” Wood searches for that power asymmetry in the 1960s and the 1970s through the depiction of class struggle. He examines Violeta’s inner conflicts within and against Chile’s stratified society. In the characters of Infante and Machuca he explores an unlikely friendship from opposite ends of the geographical and economic spectrum. This illustrates in a local Chilean microcosm what David Harvey (2006: 73) has observed about power disparities on a wider scale: “Geographical development follows from the play of power politics (military, political, economic) and competition between territorially based organizations for wealth, power, resources, and qualities of life.” Wood very consciously articulates and underscores Chile’s contested geographical spaces, contrasting the marginalized with the hegemonic. Those spaces express a dialectical war that intensified when Violeta founded her cultural project—her idea of the nation—in La Reina and was abandoned by many. In Machuca the residents of El Esfuerzo are turned into enemies of the state by the opposition, and their lives become expendable.

Chileans are still separated by ideological binaries that impede a healthy conversation, underscoring that “collective memory results from the dialectics between forces” that strive to exert a historical hegemony over past events (Tal, 2005: 135). Since online providers served as loci of collective memory for Chileans for the fortieth anniversary of the coup, the flurry of TV programs that dealt with the subject, such as “Mentiras verdaderas” (Truthful Lies), broadcast people’s testimonies to an international audience via web sites and, particularly, YouTube. In this sense, YouTube facilitated people’s access to and experience of visual testimony that might otherwise have been inaccessible or hidden, signaling a transformational new tool for disseminating and reconstructing the events of September 11, 1973.

Wood has not ceased opening channels of communication among Chileans. In September 2013 he and his production company brought to Chilean television a mini-series called Ecos del desierto (Echoes of the Desert), an account of the Pinochet era’s infamous Caravan of Death. The focus of the series is the disappearance and subsequent death of Carlos Berger, husband of the lawyer and human rights advocate Carmen Hertz. Chilevisión, the channel that aired Ecos, made the film available through YouTube on the same night that it was shown in Chile, fostering nearly simultaneous participation in a collective dialogue about the past as people revived the national conversation about the dictatorship. Thus YouTube became a political platform, “a place from which to speak and be heard” (Gillespie, 2010: 352), for Chileans who had lived through the coup and had not been allowed to tell their stories. As in Argentina, theirs became the discourse of the subaltern, marginalized for decades by the military (Villalón, 2013: 301). Finally, for those who were too young or had not been born yet, YouTube served as a historical platform for a turbulent past. ²

Carmen Hertz spoke at the end of the airing of Ecos and embraced it, arguing that this type of film was necessary for the nation. She declared that Chile needed to revisit old wounds in order to “reconstruct its collective memory” so that the nation might heal and become more inclusive (Resúmen Ejecutivo, 2013). In Wood’s view, Chileans have dismissed the evilness of Pinochet by referring to him as a compadre-clown who made a fool of himself. In contrast, Wood wants to remind us that Pinochet was the power behind the terror inflicted upon Chileans. He adds that the dictatorship not only inflicted pain through torture but also created social segregation, the erasure of neighborhoods, and the elimination of shared spaces in Chile (Demasiado Tarde, 2013). With Machuca and Violeta he shines a light on the social turfs that in Ecos del desierto become the geographical spaces of oppressor and oppressed.

For Violeta, Wood unearthed a polarizing figure who had to fight to be allowed entry into Chile’s artistic arena. Through a previously unheard epic narrative of the popular classes, Violeta was a pioneer in linking arts and politics (Torres Alvarado, 2004), making sure that the art of marginalized Chileans was being experienced by at least some Chileans. The social injustice that Violeta saw in her various artistic venues prompted her to commit herself to social action. In Machuca the sharp edges of political hatred are softened by the presence of Pedro, Gonzalo, and Silvana (Manuela Martelli), a poor girl from the neighborhood who becomes Gonzalo’s first love. They play together, begin a sexual awakening, and turn political rallies on both sides into their own personal playgrounds. The film thus results in a fictionalized, toned-down Battle of Chile. Because the protagonists live somewhat outside of the ugly world that the nation has become, the film succeeds in permitting Chileans to confront past violence in the space of the cinema. Nonetheless, its release provoked instances of violence in movie theaters, which puzzled critics who had dismissed it as insufficiently questioning the past. The fights in the theaters underscored the fact that the past was a contested space and that the task of formulating a collective memory had been reopened.

The Protagonists’ Geographical Spaces

Instead of a detailed biography, Violeta concentrates on crucial aspects of the singer’s career until 1967, when she committed suicide in La Carpa de la Reina. Her tent is the rural stage— within the boundaries of the urban space of La Reina—on which her unprecedented rise and fall was enacted. Violeta felt that she had finally arrived at the zenith of her career in La Carpa, working on “a huge and generous project: The University of Folklore” (A. Parra, 2006: 28). Through her music and art she was educating her compatriots and constructing the nation. The biographical film includes well-known moments in Violeta’s artistic career ranging from the countryside, when she was playing the guitar and singing on the street for a living, to the urban spaces of Santiago, Warsaw, and Paris—with real footage of her exhibit of arpilleras (hand-embroidered tapestries) in the Louvre in 1964.

The film confirms that the singer was plagued by economic hardship that she tried to escape by moving to Santiago in 1932 to join her brother Nicanor (I. Parra, 1985: 10). Not surprisingly, many compatriots feel uncomfortable watching a disheveled Violeta singing for her supper and have criticized Wood for portraying her as so poor. But, as Wood states very clearly, “being poor . . . meant not having shoes and being forced to work” (Radio Nacional Mendoza, 2011). Young Violeta, wearing a ragged dress and with a dirty face, performs with her old guitar on the street with other campesinos who look just as poor. One of her younger siblings, with a runny nose, collects money from the humble viewers. In a voiceover she says, “Because we were so many brothers and sisters, I always believed myself to be happy. But at times I would look around at other homes and say to myself, ‘I wish my father were alive. Even sleeping, I would wish him to be alive.’”

One of the most salient aspects of Violeta’s career was that it was “conditioned, in spirit and in the way in which it developed, by urban culture” (Morales, 2003: 34). Violeta inscribes rural Chilean subjectivity within the city’s traditional scheme, wherein men were the breadwinners and women stayed at home. Since Violeta “skates over Parra’s involvement with Communism” (Catsoulis, 2013), the artist’s personal turmoil takes precedence over her political commitment, but in pivotal scenes we can still sense the artist’s commitment to the marginalized. Violeta had wanted to create a place where art could be exhibited and songs could be performed. Instead, she found herself unpopular in her neighborhood and unappreciated in Santiago: “Few lent her a hand. For her show there was no publicity in the newspapers. There was no review in El Mercurio’s Sunday paper. . . . [She] was alone and desperate at times” (Subercaseaux and Londoño, 1976: 109).

Francisca Gavilán, who plays the role of Violeta, is highly effective in bringing the artist to life. The Chilean actress, with her uncombed long hair, gypsy-like dresses, and vivacious countenance, convincingly recreates Violeta’s extraordinary effort to stop the ruinous abandonment of the rural song “provoked by the expansion of urban culture, of ‘modernism’” (Morales, 2003: 46). In many scenes she is shown walking about the countryside and encountering forgotten people to tape them as they sing from an entirely oral repertoire. It was Violeta’s life mission to save for the nation and its citizens the rural music that would have otherwise died with its singers. For her it signified saving the people for later generations that would then have a strong and persistent collective memory of what it meant to be Chilean.

In Machuca Wood chooses the innocence of children to recount “social upheaval and political disaster” (Scott, 2005). The camera walks through history with the innocence of Gonzalo’s perspective. At one point he asks Silvana, “What is a momio?” And she responds, “A snob like you.” This distancing of the protagonists facilitated the collective memory of “conflict and tension in the workplace, schools, neighborhoods, and families” (Hite, 2005: 56). When confronted by Chileans from conservative sectors about his partiality in narrating events, Wood commented, “They said [Machuca] was partial to one side, and, of course, it was partial” (Esther, 2005: 67). Roberto Brodsky, a well-known Chilean novelist and filmmaker, contributed to the writing of the film and infused it with his own personal experience of the collision of political values that took place in 1973 (de Elizalde, 2005). Having endured exile from Chile, Brodsky identified with Pedro Machuca and his family’s trauma and the anguish induced by the military’s savagery, an experience that went beyond Wood’s own witnessing of history during Chile’s troubled times.

Father Whelan (the model for Father McEnroe in Machuca) was imbued with progressive ideas and concretized the tenets of the UP. According to Héctor Torres Dammon, a real-life “Machuca” who studied at St. George’s and graduated with an engineering degree from a top Chilean university, the initiative was a success: “Surely, my formal education and value system would have been different had I not received that educational experience. . . . I was a Machuca” (e-mail interview, August 25, 2013). The extraordinary educational step by Whelan involved many students who were poor (Cine Político, 2004), and Wood drew on those contacts and contexts in creating his film: “I interviewed the real priest and my classmates, and I have always been in contact with that period” (Esther, 2005: 67). In the film, Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbrán, also of Obstinate Memory) is constantly at odds with the school’s conservative parents, who oppose the admission of the poor.

Throughout the movie, we see strong connections between Wood’s film and Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987); in fact, there are key scenes that pay homage to Malle’s work. Gonzalo, a child immersed in dramatic historical events, does not quite grasp them in their entirety. What unravels before his eyes does not undergo any compartmentalization of preconceived models (de Luca, 2009: 89). ³ For this reason, there are numerous scenes in which Wood’s camera zooms in on Gonzalo’s eyes to “present” rather than to “comment on” events (Vergara-Mery, 2005: 211). Primary in the boys’ relationship is their improbable friendship. ⁴

Spaces of Marginalization

Up till September 11, 1973, the torture and killing of compatriots would not have been conceived possible by Chileans, “but it could have only happened in a country that was already sick” (Constable and Valenzuela, 1993: 34). Wood represents the malaise of Chile’s society by contrasting poor and rich in adjacent zones in Santiago. The residents of El Esfuerzo in Machuca are filmed outdoors, “in the social space” (Tal, 2005: 146), working the land, preparing the ground for seed and harvest both literally and figuratively. These scenes depict the empowerment of the working class and help explain why Allende’s government was both feared and vilified by the upper classes. ⁵ This triumph of the people caused substantial geographical upheaval and a reaction from the hegemonic power, indicating that in power struggles social relations are “located (spatialized), delimited, and, ultimately, transformed, whether by cooperation or under the sign of violence” (Newman, 2010: 6). Reacting to a perceived threat, El Mercurio, the oldest newspaper in Chile, headed “an unyielding campaign, running countless virulent, inflammatory articles” against Allende’s government (Kornbluh, 2003: 91), causing Allende’s supporters to react and resist the attack. In the end, the struggle for equality did not succeed, and the status quo was reestablished.

In Chile’s social discord, participants in the more powerful space abuse the other and tell how political shifts “and geography . . . can all play a role in defining the forms of struggle as well as their outcomes” (Harvey, 2006: 73). Like many others from rural areas, Violeta was aware of her status of “other.” In this respect, she was doubly marginalized, being of peasant stock and trying to make it in a poor neighborhood in Santiago (Agosín and Dölz-Blackburn, 1988: 18). She validated herself through her poetic and artistic work by becoming a spokesperson, a voice, for the dispossessed of the Chilean countryside, people living in particular urban areas and maintaining their rural customs. As a result, a rural/marginalized geographical space became the focus of her political and artistic career. A vast number of her songs were political manifestos that used rhythms from Chile’s remote areas. In the film—a faithful portrayal of her later life—the musician places herself artistically in La Carpa de La Reina, recreating the rural in an urban space and giving her music “a sense of social struggle, [and] finally a political sense” (Martínez, 1976: 11).

It becomes clear that Violeta was “looking for what belonged to her, Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval. She was looking for Violeta Parra” (A. Parra, 2006: 68). In the film, through songs of the rural elderly such as those of Don Gabriel, a campesino who sang for the well-being of angelitos (dead babies), Violeta preserved the collective memory of those forced to immigrate to urban spaces; she rescued “what she herself represented” (Agosín and Dölz-Blackburn, 1988: 15). Through the camera’s lens, we encounter a self-made woman who grows increasingly conscious of “class strife and national liberation.” In fact, “she takes on the performative model of a traditional female peasant singer which she gradually enhances to the point of transgression” (Torres Alvarado, 2004). In Santiago, Violeta and her radio-program team, which included the legendary radio and TV personality Ricardo García, continued their traveling, now to the peripheral towns of Santiago, to find themes for her variety show. As García recalls, the team would gather people in the streets of working-class neighborhoods to record impressions of their artistic endeavors: “A true theater would emerge, and we would gather all the flavor of what was being experienced [there], with dogs barking, sounds that would spring up, on the city’s periphery” (I. Parra, 1985: 42).

In Wood’s film, as Violeta performs with her sister Hilda at a mine site, the camera does a close-up of the singer looking at the humble audience of miners. She sees herself in them. They have nothing of their own; they are limited to working for and depending upon the owners of Chile’s national assets. By the mid-1960s 38 percent of all manufacturing assets were controlled by Chile’s powerful families (Constable and Valenzuela, 1993: 200). Next the camera does a close-up of the miners, whose beaten expressions testify to the injustices that Violeta denounces in her songs. As the miners prepare to leave the tent she begins to sing “Arriba quemando el sol” (The Sun Burning Above). Here the camera moves through the scene, showing extreme close-ups of rows of miners listening to her intently. In a following sequence, the singer tells her sister that she is going to begin singing by herself because she wants to make “another kind of music.”

Gonzalo would never have met Pedro had it not been for the UP. The socioeconomic separation between them is depicted in a sequence showing them riding their bicycles from Gonzalo’s affluent neighborhood to Pedro’s poor one. A soccer stadium serves as a solid border that separates the affluent from the poor—a border that obliquely recalls the crimes that took place in Chilean soccer stadiums after the coup (Tal, 2005: 146). Pedro remains in our collective memory as an example of the violence inflicted on Chileans. The violence of the coup is projected as an “image of the outside” that stubbornly irrupts (Nancy, 2005: 16), with soldiers ransacking property and insulting, hitting, and killing people for having professed a different ideology. Pedro is expelled from St. Patrick’s, and, together with his family and neighbors, erased from the nation, ending the social vision of the UP. For a twenty-first-century audience the film illustrates how the military restored the social hegemony that the Allende government had attempted to shake. Thus it serves as a document of collective memory from the discursive perspective of the present (Tal, 2005: 137).

A Nation of Enemies

Halbwachs (1992: 49) asserts that we remember “under the influence of the present social milieu.” Guzmán’s Obstinate Memory accentuates both that the political divisions of 1973 were still in place in 1996 and that exercising collective memory is a very political act. Pino-Ojeda (2009: 134) maintains that “when . . . remembrance and agreements are broken, the memories of individuals become disassociated.” Chileans who regained material goods or continued to prosper during the military dictatorship did not share the same past as those who had been oppressed. On this, Wood observes that one of the successes of the military was that for many Chileans human life became a secondary value (Demasiado Tarde, 2013). In Obstinate Memory, we are dismayed to hear apologists for the coup’s violation of human rights pointing to the healthy economy as justification. For them, the military had rescued the ailing nation of the Allende years, and the economy had become the artifact that defined the nation. In The Battle of Chile it is apparent that Allende had the support of the people. In Wood’s two films we understand what led Allende to power and what kept him there for three years in spite of the massive conspiracy against him.

The numerous publications, discussion panels, interviews, including public mea culpas, etc., that took place on Chilean soil in September 2013 were accompanied by accounts from younger generations. Signaling a desire to be part of the collective memory of the coup, they look for answers from their elders, and Wood’s films offer those answers. In Machuca audiences are confronted with realms of memory of the social tension between rich and poor in differences in speech and in violent political confrontations between left and right such as street fights and heated arguments. In Violeta the artist reads from the décimas (poems with ten-line stanzas) that permeate her music and her manifold other artistic expressions. The poems are Violeta’s lyrical testament to a rural expression set within the urban. They pioneer an urban narrative/lyric symbolizing an autobiographical diary that may be a confrontation with the aesthetic effects of neoliberal politics (Vilches, 2008: 62).

Violeta Parra is buried in a simple tomb in Santiago’s Cementerio General. Perhaps she would not have wanted it any other way, but Chile owes her much more than this. In bringing Violeta to the big screen, Wood has revived a figure who was loved by the people while the upper echelons of the nation remained at best indifferent to her. Likewise, in Machuca, Wood has unearthed the violence of the military in socioeconomic terms, symbolized by the erasure of the poor sector and the material betterment of Allende’s opposition. Indeed, after the coup Gonzalo moves to a bigger house and thus solidifies the notion that the military insurgency “wiped out any pretense at pluralism in the Chilean social system” (Birns, 1974: 26).

After 40 years, the Chilean justice system, making amends for how unjustly it behaved during the Pinochet years, is now looking for the criminals of the dictatorship, among them the man accused of killing Víctor Jara, a singer/songwriter who was detained, tortured, and ultimately killed with a bullet to his head. In the films we understand that Violeta and Víctor Jara—a photo of the latter situated right next to Allende’s on a wall in Pedro’s house—pioneered the dreams of the UP. The viewer becomes conscious of Allende’s priority: ridding the nation of imperialist foreign capital (Debray and Allende, 1972: 71). Pedro’s family fights for a legitimate space in Santiago, working together with other downtrodden people to create a better world for themselves. Gonzalo’s neighborhood is shown devoid of people; in contrast, the residents of El Esfuerzo are always presented as a community in which everybody is working to create a decent space in the slums of the city. In this the residents epitomize the unattainable goals of the UP, which was working for the impossible. Allende’s tenure as president was so feared by capitalist investors that the Nixon administration sought to destabilize the Chilean economy (Constable and Valenzuela, 1993: 26).

Allende’s rhetoric of economic liberation alarmed the Chilean opposition, which, in collaboration with the Nixon administration, threw itself wholly into unhinging the economy. In Machuca Gonzalo and his father, Patricio (Francisco Reyes), acquire an abundance of products on the black market and walk away easily with their groceries even as stores announce in giant letters “There’s No Bread,” “There’s No Meat,” “There’s No Flour,” “There’re No Eggs,” etc. At the same time, Pedro’s mother serves Gonzalo and Pedro the humblest of onces (teas). On the wall, together with the photos of Allende and Jara, we see a poster of a child drinking milk, a realm of memory of the UP, ⁶ and we follow Gonzalo’s eyes from it to the modest table displaying bread and a pitiful tin of chancho chino (Chinese ham). The film also depicts with exactitude the long queues that people had to endure to procure food. ⁷

A nation of enemies is presented in a scene with Father McEnroe at a parents’ meeting at St. Patrick’s in which individuals from the dominant geographical space barely tolerate being in proximity to those of the poor sectors. Although a few parents support Father McEnroe’s initiative, among them Patricio Infante, most of them call him a “Communist priest” and a manipulator of young minds. In this political battle, Pedro’s mother momentarily hushes the antagonistic audience when she tells about her life growing up in the countryside as the daughter of a peon, a man who was always blamed for any loss sustained on the landlord’s hacienda. She explains that she came to the city hoping that her children would escape the constant blame: “We are always the guilty party. That’s how it is.” We get less than a second to ponder her life and the impossibility of Father McEnroe’s mission before an elegant woman shouts: “Resentful woman! How dare you! Get yourself and all these people out of here!” And, looking at Father McEnroe, the mother continues: “Get all of these Marxists out of the school once and for all!” This speech is a direct allusion to The Battle of Chile, in which a Barrio Alto woman declares that all left-wing citizens should be expelled from the nation.

The Out-of-Place in the Other’s Space

Violeta, as described in the film and the accounts of various intellectuals (some of them unconditional supporters), was of an extremely rebellious nature. There was a real ideological opposition and a struggle within her that prevented her from reaching out and forming potentially productive alliances. In Violeta, the mayor of La Reina, Fernando Castillo Velasco (Marcial Tagle), generously offers her a space to present her art, but she cannot bring herself to trust him. He appears unannounced at La Carpa to make sure that she is not in a depressive state. She dismisses his concerns and rejects his offer to buy her art, which the camera shows scattered and neglected in La Carpa. In this scene the audience confronts the fact that Violeta does not take care of her art, works so valued by others that they were exhibited in the Louvre. Her emotional decline is intensified when, in an aristocratic members-only club in Santiago, as she sings “Volver a los diecisiete” (To Be Seventeen Again), the response is indifference from the audience of men in tuxedos and elegantly clad women with expensive jewelry and beehive hairdos. As Violeta, Francisca Gavilán is dressed in mournful black, with long uncombed hair. Her facial muscles are tense, and as she begins her song the audience continues its idle chatter. The camera shows close-ups of the actors laughing and oblivious. Violeta seems ready to explode at any moment, underscoring the fact that high socioeconomic urban spaces and a dismissive audience have turned her into an inhospitable and aggressive individual (Subercaseaux and Londoño, 1976: 113).

After the coup, Gonzalo witnesses a hideous ransacking of Pedro’s neighborhood. Men and women are treated like enemies in a war, and Silvana is shot and killed trying to defend her father from a vicious beating by a military platoon. Pedro and Gonzalo look at each other for the last time, the camera standing still depicting Pedro’s gaze of pain, longing, and despair. For Gonzalo, escaping the terrifying surroundings has become essential. As he turns to flee, he is grabbed by a soldier. He desperately tries to persuade the soldier to let him go, shouting, “I’m not from here. I’m from the other side of the river!” The soldier, unmoved, orders him to get back with the rest. Gonzalo, full of anguish, finally screams, “Just look at me!” The soldier, played by an actor with prominent indigenous features that are enhanced by a close-up, takes a close look at the boy and understands that he could not possibly be from El Esfuerzo. He has light skin and wears the nice clothing of a well-to do boy and expensive shoes (a pair of Adidas that in an earlier scene Pedro has admired). In frustration, the soldier hits Gonzalo hard on the head and orders him to get out of the neighborhood.

Forging Ahead

After a long struggle with human rights abuse and censorship during Augusto Pinochet’s 17 years in power, Chile’s “collective memory and national memory recovered new energy in the moving image” (Villarroel, 2005: 18). Wood had been advised not to make Machuca because it would again “divide the country”; particularly, it was believed that young viewers “would not care about [that] time” (Esther, 2005: 67). Nonetheless, Machuca became a huge success in Chile and seems to have influenced a radical decision within the high echelons of the Chilean military to admit responsibility for human rights violations during the Pinochet dictatorship (Tal, 2005: 137). Following in the footsteps of Patricio Guzmán, Andrés Wood has contributed with his films to the awakening of people’s collective memory of Chile’s dark past. In the words of the Chilean historian Pablo Artaza, the official version of the military’s having to rescue the nation has broken down: “Nobody is questioning the historic role of Pinochet any longer. . . . Pinochet is condemned by history” (“Mentiras verdaderas,” 2013).

The 1960s and 1970s are characterized in Wood’s films as years when the nation’s perception of self was divided geographically. The optimistic scope of Allende’s UP did not take into account the deep hatred that was being built up by the conservative faction. Lack of communication between opposing sectors “exacerbate[d] ostracism and mistrust” (Pino-Ojeda, 2009: 134). In their plotting, Chile’s rich families were backed by a paranoid Nixon administration, which was intent on disrupting “Allende’s game plan (i.e., maintaining a moderate respectable image)” (Kornbluh, 2003: 87). Allende’s time, therefore, was a period of social equalizing in Chile through the growth of social consciousness in people who lived marginally in the urban areas of the principal cities. As seen in Violeta and Machuca, the dispossessed were vigorously opposed in their process of laying claim to a piece of the pie. As Torres Dammon asserts, St. George’s educational experiment entailed reforming society: “Father Whelan wanted to break the private circles in colegios and universities” (e-mail interview, August 25, 2013). As a consequence, the coup d’état violently erased any claims of and aspirations to social equality on the part of Allende’s sympathizers. Using harsh methods, the government attempted to obliterate its enemies and to bestow even more privileges on the upper classes. On this, Wood declares: “One of the biggest legacies of the [Pinochet] dictatorship is the separation of classes in Chile. The country has gotten richer, but the divisions remain” (Esther, 2005: 67).

For decades, conservative factions have cautioned that digging into the past could reopen wounds that could further divide the Chilean nation. Wood disagrees with this rationalization and argues that the nation may heal by opening up a discussion about our historical wounds (Demasiado Tarde, 2013). In Machuca and Violeta Went to Heaven, Wood provides two visual testimonies intent on fighting “against oblivion and death” (Bello and Saint-Dizier, 2011: 79). In constructing Violeta, for instance, he reenacts the geographical and sociopolitical differences that culminated in a government of the people that is shown on its last legs in Machuca. With the aid of online platforms, Wood has widened his audience and the scope of the nation’s discussion, symbolized by a struggle “to define the meaning of a collective trauma” (Stern, 2006: xix).

Chile in the twenty-first century is contending with increasing social problems and economic divisions, especially emphasized by an enormous gap in children’s levels of education. In this respect, Allende’s dream of a high level of education for all citizens is reawakened in Machuca. Chileans, however, inhabit a nation still divided politically, a “scattered and fragmented country” (Bello and Saint-Dizier, 2011: 83). People like Pedro Machuca, who once penetrated the geographical spaces of the Chilean clase acomodada, are a thing of the past.

Steve Stern (2006: xix) asserts that the ideological divisions that culminated in the coup d’état of 1973 “generated a contentious memory question in Chilean life.” Through Wood’s work, we build our collective memory of Allende’s candidacy at the beginning and at his ousting. Both films present us with images in which Chileans act antagonistically against each other, the wealthy rejecting the invasion of their spaces by the poor. To be sure, Violeta died in La Carpa de La Reina, isolated from society—wanting to mesh the rural with the urban but defeated by poverty and unable to change her ways. In Machuca, we know that Gonzalo and Pedro will no longer be friends; a vast sector of Chileans had to pay a bitter price for their idealism. We become acutely aware that cultural experiences and economic destiny in Chile were and are determined by divided geographical spaces in the cities. In sum, Violeta and Machuca serve as realms of memory of a nation once led by a quixotic dreamer who thought that Chile could become more egalitarian through increased social opportunities and better education.