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Friday, September 13, 2024

Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

Nostalgia de la luz, France / Germany / Chile / Spain, 90 minutes
Director/writer: Patricio Guzman
Photography: Katell Djian
Music: Miguel Miranda, Jose Miguel Tobar
Editors: Patricio Guzman, Emmanuelle Joly
With: Luis Henriquez, Gaspar Galaz, Lautaro Nunez, Miguel Lawner, Victor Gonzalez, Vicky Saaveda, Violeta Berrios

Nostalgia for the Light is a thoughtful documentary that teases us with wonders of the universe as seen from the sophisticated, internationally funded telescopes in Chile’s Atacama desert, conflating them with the atrocities of the Augusto Pinochet fascist regime. It attempts an elegiac exploration of the past on many levels, including explorations of exploration itself. Interviews with Chilean astronomers are included—perhaps because the conditions of the Atacama offer such opportunities, a fair number of Chileans take up the discipline. There’s a good deal of heady star-gaze cinematography too, suitable for dropping jaws. Then, later, there are also interviews with grieving relatives still looking for the remains of their disappeared loved ones. On the science side, archeologists and geologists are also heard from. A strong sense of the eerie, disquieting history of the desert grounds a sense of suspense.

But too often the two sides of this picture—the wonderful universe and the hideous humanity—struck me as strained, however sincere. The conceit is that everyone here, scientists and Pinochet victims alike, is looking into the past one way or another. Looking for the light, literal and metaphorical. And, indeed, the light from most of the stars we see at night is millions of years old by the time we see it. All those stars and galaxies might have burned out or got together and staged a musical before human beings even existed and we still wouldn’t know anything about it yet. One scientist here notes that, even between two people standing close the image they see of one another is in the past—millionths of a fraction of a second, but in the past. Moonlight takes a minute to reach us, sunlight eight minutes. So on so forth.


That’s fair enough, obviously, if a bit cerebral (and obvious). Similarly, people here are looking into the desert’s past on more recognizably human scales—into the slave-like mining operations that left behind the infrastructure for Pinochet’s concentration camps, into ancient petroglyphs etched in rock, into the fine telescopes built there for the excellent viewing conditions, and into remnants of the camps and what went on there. It’s all in the past and we’re all looking at it, presumably with some nostalgia—for enlightenment? Is that what the title is meant to suggest?

Nostalgia for the Light is full of spectacular photography, including many thrilling starry skyscapes in a geography where the cloud cover and light pollution are minimal. But I’m dutybound to report, after much of a summer spent watching How the Universe Works episodes wherever I could find them, that the awe-inspiring feelings that Nostalgia for the Light strains for are altogether more effective in that venue. And so are the cosmic ideas, about black holes and neutron stars (imagine!) and dark matter and dark energy, space itself somehow expanding faster than the speed of light. The ceiling regarding scientific information here is relatively low—most of what we get is related to “looking into the past.”

It takes a while before the picture gets to Pinochet, and then, as with all stories about fascism, it becomes enraging and hard to watch with a cool temper. The stories the survivors tell are searing. Some have spent decades on their searches. They wish the telescopes could be turned to the desert floor and penetrate it. Some have found only parts of their loved ones—a foot, still in a sock and shoe, pieces of skull, remnants of shattered bone. “So that the bodies could never be found,” we are told, “the dictatorship dug them up, and disposed of the remains elsewhere or threw them in the sea.” Busy busy, agents of chaos. Parts of the desert floor are scattered with tiny human bone fragments. What does that mean? How did that happen? All the disappeared, so many. It’s heartrending.

For comfort, the movie inevitably harks to the “we are stardust” idea, which is a hopeful and appropriately cosmic note to sound. Nostalgia for the Light operates on a seductively slow pace, almost relaxing, setting up a meditative mood that lets us absorb the information at our own pace. But the universe is so deeply, weirdly complex and beautiful, and human degeneracy so ultimately dreary, as all corruption is, that the pairing comes up short for me. I love the high wild reckless universe the more we learn about it just as I abhor fascism in all its forms. Yoking them together by way of the nature of light, with the specter of life forever looking into the past, doesn’t entirely work for me. But the heart of this documentary is certainly in the right place.

1 comment:

  1. Frederich Hayek, apostle of free market ideology, crusading scourge against government planning and the regulation of business, supported Pinochet's murderous dictatorship over Allende's democratically elected so-called collectivist nightmare. Too much democracy and the virtues of "free market discipline" were Hayek's case. The latter based, essentially, on coerced labor and violent purges. I needed a second viewing and Wikipedia to fully appreciate The Battle of Chile (1976) but that sprawling documentary mess does get at Pinochet's (CIA backed) coup and the creation of police-state 'shock doctrine' capitalism in Chile.

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