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Sunday, Apr 17, 2011
3:00 PM
Chile, Obstinate Memory
. Patricio Guzmán returns to Chile twenty years after the military coup ousted Salvador Allende and sent him-along with thousands of others-into exile. In those decades, Guzmán's The Battle of Chile had educated spectators all over the world about the revolutionary process that marked Chile in the early seventies. Except in Chile. In this film, Guzmán takes us back to some of the sites and protagonists of his by-then-famous political documentary as he screens it for the first time in Chile, documenting the complexities of historical memory.-Natalia Brizuela
• Written by Guzmán. Photographed by Eric Pittard. (58 mins, In Spanish with English titles, Color, Digibeta, From Icarus Films)
Preceded by:
A Village Fading Away
Patricio Guzmán (France, 1995)
(Pueblo en vilo). The dominant theme that establishes a link between Pueblo en vilo and Chile, la memoria obstinada is, precisely, memory. . . . Pueblo en vilo is one of (Guzmán's) most beautiful and artful documentaries. . . . The town band, the card players, the cemetery, the grocery store, the bell tower. With these diverse images, Patricio Guzmán begins his film. It is about both (the Mexican village of) San José de Gracia and about Pueblo en vilo, the book by Luis González that inaugurated “microhistory” in Mexico, which is to say the history of small towns or regions without history. Master of the documentary form, Guzmán interweaves interview accounts with the presentation of the town through diverse images-fragments from film archives, family photos, images of faces or human figures that need no text to support them.-Jorge Ruffinelli
• Written by Guzmán. Photographed by Eric Pittard. (52 mins, In Spanish with English electronic titles, Color, Digibeta, From the artist)
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