Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light was a heartbreaking film depicting the grief and dissatisfaction amongst the survivors of Pinochet’s dictatorship seen through the metaphorical perspective of studying the stars. In the Atacama Desert, the film juxtaposes the astronomers with the women creates a visually striking narrative between looking up at the stars and looking beneath the earth for answers from a past that grows ever distant. Following Chile, Obstinate Memory, this film unpacks the horrors of Pinochet from an even more distant vantage point, making the frequent motif of space pertinent to the feeling of time passing and memory lost. The subjects he interviews who were directly impacted by the dictatorship are now aging and the country losing direct connections to this time. The most striking image of the film was the cut between the women in the desert looking for remains of their loved ones dissolving from a large group in black and white to a group of less than ten. This visual theme of connections to the past lost was also seen in the former prisoner Guzmán interviewed who could still remember the names of former inmates although time wore down the ink and plaster where they first wrote it decades earlier. Nostalgia for the Light echoes the importance of memory from his previous film through the lens of direct sources and how telling their stories while they can still tell it is crucial to linking the past and the present.

Patricio Guzmán’s Chile, Obstinate Memory examines the generational impact of history and trauma while pondering the fragile nature of memory and experience. In his return to Chile following his exile after the coup, Guzmán finds himself in a country still timid to acknowledge the horrors they experienced during the dictatorship of Pinochet. The film’s editing was very impactful to me, particularly the dissolves between images from 1997 and 1973. The translucent images wordlessly create a dialogue between the past and present and creates a striking visual of recollection. We see the middle-aged soldier reflecting on his time in 1997 simultaneously with an image of him as a young man standing by Allende. His subjects range from aging revolutionaries attempting to recollect what they were not allowed to speak of to young students with no memory of such recent history. These varying perspectives offer not a complete narrative, but the possibility for them to create their own. These subjects tell the same events with drastically different experiences and feelings towards them, but all lead to the same question: with all these memories, what do we take with us as we move forward? Rather than seek to completely answer this question, Guzmán instead urges the public towards acknowledgement of the past as a first step to coming to a collective understanding and narrative for their past.

Black God, White Devil was a fascinating exploration of how a society in flux can either resist or succumb to authoritarian control. I saw Manuelo’s journey as a man who lacks the self-actualization to truly be free. Despite his newfound state of being a man on the run, he spends his time in the film trying again and again to replace his oppressor with a new one. From his initial rebellion against his tyrannical boss, Manuelo’s journey begins bleak but hopeful that he may have escaped the oppression that kept him and his family in poverty. But rather than seek freedom, he continuously finds himself bound again in again. Through religion and the Cangaceiros, he is subservient. First in Sebastian and then in Corisco, he is trapped This film bleakly examines the cyclical nature of radicalization on both a personal and national level. I liked the point made in our class discussion about how Rosa is the one who sees things as they are. Although she suffers immensely under the decisions of her husband, she never falls victim to his subservient mentality. Watching this through a feminist lens posits interesting questions on how the feminine experience (or an identity other than the default) may change ones view on economic subjugation since they experience it twofold.

In Glaber Rocha’s 1962 film Barravento, I was struck by the narrative’s conflicting ideals: the tensions between urban/rural, religious salvation/revolutionary salvation, and tradition/education. Firmino was fascinating to me as a character who simultaneously utilizes and rejects the customs of the oppressed class he was born into. He absolutely could have been written as a savior of sorts, an enlightened member of his community sent to save his people. But Rocha makes clear the contradictions of this kind of trope, setting apart Firmino from the community he is attempting to educate by literally having him wear the clothing of the oppressor. Although his intentions are meant to be helpful, his actions bastardized their way of life, using a spell to rid them of their veneration of Aruã and slicing the net. The film left us with an ambiguous ending without a clear answer. It would have been simple for Rocha to have insisted on either side, but in keeping the nuances of the story, he abides by the balance between didactic and epic he wrote of in “The Revolution is Aesthetics”. I enjoyed our class discussion on the role of women in this film. It was interesting to me how women held the religious power in this community, yet still were not quite viewed as people. It seemed that women were relegated to two boxes: the respected yet impersonal, stock, group of older women, and the individual yet sexualized attractive women.

It’s fascinating to me how ahead of her time Gómez was in the intersectionality of her film’s themes, and watching these after reading the essay by Devyn Spence Benson was greatly helpful in providing historical and artistic context. Although each documentary had its own distinct focus, Gomez never shies away from showing a diverse range of people and how their experiences differ from one another. Of all the Sara Gómez documentaries we watched this week, Mi aporte stuck with me the most. The film begins in the typical didactic fashion of the revolutionary cinema of the time as a news reporter takes mostly positive conformist interviews of women discussing their new roles in the workforce. But through Gomez’ eye, we descend into the more complicated aspects of such a drastically changed society. She shows us a man’s more shallow perspective on the issue of women’s work, followed by an open dialogue between a wide range of women speaking to each other about their individual opinions and experiences at this time. The conversation of gender roles between the women is so topical today, I found the discussion itself more revolutionary than the government mandated changes stated at the beginning of the film. This stark shift reminded me of a quote in the Benson article from Gómez herself where she says, “We [filmmakers] have a vast public, including urban workers, rural campesinos, children and adolescents . . . for them and with them we have to make films without making concessions. Films that touch on their interests. Films that are capable of expressing contradictions.” It is this willingness to express contradictions that makes her work so captivating.