Nostalgia For The Light (2010)

The Atacama desert in northern Chile is a remarkable, uniquely evocative place on our Earth. Due to the zero humidity it is our fragile globes most ideal spot to gaze unimpeded into the distant heavens, with its meagre annual precipitation of one millimetre affording unparalleled atmospheric conditions for the largest concentration of telescopes and astronomical infrastructure that our inquisitive species have manufactured and maintained for the world communities scientific benefit.  In this bewitching documentary Nostalgia For The Light  Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán narrates a hymn to our humanistic instinct to chart our skies and attempt to divine the solution to those impossible mysteries – where did we come from? What is out there? Are we the only ones alone in the infinite, mysterious cosmos? – which becomes inextricably aligned with more earthbound matters, specifically the legacy and horrors of the Pinochet regime, its horrific genocide of dissidents, leftists and anyone deemed offensive to the fascist state, and crucially the failure of the  current regime and the countries people to come to terms with their nebulous history and suffocated, obscured, relatively recent past.

Through this prism Guzmán moves organically from the profound and infinite to the political and personal with devastating effect, as it is revealed that the junta located its concentration camps amongst these arid plateaus, and many of the so called ‘disappeared’ were buried under the shadows of these immense binoculars. Amongst the astronomy there is also archeology, as civil right activists and relatives of those murdered sift through the desert to find traces of their lost ones, all those mothers and brothers, sisters and lovers lives as effectively destroyed as the tortured and murdered, their lives a yearning  of unknowing intangibility as the seek to achieve what the psychiatrists call ‘closure’. It’s devastating stuff and difficult to watch at times, utterly heartbreaking to witness these souls literally combing a vast desert for fragments of teeth or skull, of clothes or bone, to fruitlessly alleviate their overwhelming grief as the current government – which of course still harbours many of the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity – refuses to acknowledge the location of mass graves, many of which were subsequently disinterred and transferred to other sites such was the orchestrators paranoia, or simply flown out over the west of the country and dumped into the Pacific Ocean, with no hope for any memorial or burial. This grievous and brilliant documentary has the geology of Herzog with its studied, vocal wonder of our species conflicting instincts being both heavenly and infernal, with a mirror to Malick’s glorious paeans to the infinite serving as some small spectre of hope amongst the void. The celestial scrying stands in sharp contrast to the melancholic outrage that it instills in the viewer, as embroidered into its canvass of stunning majesty and transcendent woe is a simmering political rage at the silence of a schizophrenic state, as Nostalgia For The Light simultaneously exposes our hellish, inhuman depths alongside our soaring imaginations and yearning for purpose and meaning, the glittering search for knowledge a Jungian war of attrition that mimics the so-called progress of ‘civilisation’.

The power of memory is illustrated in a string of moving reports, recollections and interviews with the survivors and victims descendents of the ruthless purges, punctuating the documentaries magical realist designs (like the work of Guzmán’s countryman Gabriel García Márquez) with some sobering, earthbound realities, from the inmate who in European exile reproduced the dimensions of  his remote prison through an almost autistic display of recollection which stunned the regime as they had been extremely efficient in obliterating any physical or photographic evidence of the concentration camps, from the now adult offspring of a duo of dissidents who were arrested and never seen again, their non-political parents given a Sophie’s Choice instruction to divulge the location of their children in hiding or their grand-daughter will also be shot – it’s painful and distressing viewing even for a grizzled old cynic like me. In an early portion Guzmán makes the compelling observation that I’ve always had trouble processing, that when we look to the stars we are observing a literal time machine, of how the universe was hundreds of thousands of years before our species even existed, given the speed of light and the vast stretches of time it takes for those protons to be glimpsed by our primitive technology. Astronomy then is a mirror to archeology, two competing instincts of our scientific method, of sifting through both the literal and physical sands of time, the incremental erosion of the topsoil to divulge its buried horrors and woe that the regimes living victims are unable to transcend, an almost internal replication of the external  search for meaning and purpose conducted by the vast arrays that gaze away from the earth, and the skill with which the filmmakers repeatedly make these compelling ellipses is a wonder to behold. It’s the best screen documentary I’ve seen since Cave of Forgotten Dreams and is unquestionably one of the most powerful and moving films of the year;

Just a quick word on the Hackney Picture House as this was my first visit – it’s a fantastic cinema that is immediately cemented on my list of establishments to catch slightly more left of centre material such as this. It has a decent bar and seating arrangements in an airy foyer, and although I saw this on Screen 4 it was still a good-sized projection with the most important element being those plush, immensely comfortable reclining seats that they’ve also installed in the Greenwich location. It was about £7 for  matinée which is good value for London, and most conveniently for me I can jump on a 277 bus from near my flat and be dropped off directly outside the cinema on Hackney High Street in about twenty-five minutes – sweet. Like all Picturehouses they programme an excellent selection of Q&A’s and alternate screenings – they recently got Fassbender along for a detailed interview after a screening of Shame for example (it’s an extra on the recent Blu-Ray) – so this may be my ‘alternative’ cinema of choice going forward, I’ll have to check out the other three screens….and tomorrow I’ll be getting into nothing less than the recently announced Ten Greatest Films Of All Time® – so nothing too daunting there then eh….