THE SCREEN: Battle Cry
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
BATTLE CRY THE SCREEN Until a few years ago, all .most of us knew about Chile was that it's a country souch of the equator which has winter when we have summer and viceversa. The other thing we...
...It is as if he is trying to establish with special emphasis that this is synchronized, wild sound in his film, sound that issues from the events themselves...
...This political disorientation is unfortunately greatest when we need most to get our political bearings-during .the film's opening sections, which deal with Allende's relationship ~o the national assembly...
...The other thing we know now, of course, is that a Marxist who was duly elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende Gossens, was murdered in a coup d'~tat aided by the C.I.A...
...And democracy failed abysmally, not only in Chile but in the United States...
...The film depicts these tactics on the part of the right as being conspiratorial, outrageously obstructionist and of questionable legality...
...He causes, us to mistrust both his cinematic methodology and his political ideology...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...For instance, at the funeral for Allende's most trusted military advisor, who was assassinated to prevent his arousing Allende's suspicions of a coup, we are shown other officers joking and relaxing as .the Funeral Dirge is played on the sound track...
...I don't know whether this is so or not, but it certainly makes clear .that Guzman understood his own film...
...In a series of man-in-the-street interviews during the film's opening section, each interview is begun by footage of the interviewer rapping his hand against the microphone...
...The film begins as AUende is facing mid-term elections for the assembly where a strong challenge to his ruling Popular Unity Coalition is being mounted from the right by the Christian Democrats...
...But it is hard for us, who have recently learned to be Commonweal: 309 gra~eful when our own Congress stands up to the President, to grasp Guzman's point of view...
...As Guzman himself explained in a long, very informative interview in 1977 in Socialist Review, the difficulty in making the film was that "events occur only as the result of a long process--a process which, in the last analysis, often seems invisible...
...There was a contradiction inherent in what Allen.de attempted to do--an historical contradiction, a Marxist would saymbetween being the elected head of a democracy and being a Marxist revolutionary...
...Commonweal: 311...
...what you see is imperialism reflected in the attitu~s of the middle class...
...In the end this contradiction forced you to choose between political policies a~d economic ones...
...Yet the film is a.t first very disconcerting because under Allende Chile's political climate, like the weather itself, was the opposite of what we normally expect...
...By seeming to neglect or withhold some of the facts, Guzman jeopardizes his analysis of the facts he does reveal...
...agents had a direct, important role in overthrowing Allende, as Guzman repeatedly charges...
...This is a standard practice in making documentaries so that the editor will have a benchmark at which the film footage and the sound track, recorded separately on tape, can be synchronized...
...The events themselves--the ones Guzman is able to get access to, anyway--almost never reveal their inherent significanoe, and often, as I said before, the significance we would take them to have is the opposite of how the commentary is telling us to interpret them...
...The perfectly legitimate reason for this is that the film wasn't made for non-Chileans...
...The key to his feelings about what happened in Chile is in the .title he gives to his film...
...But responding to The Battle o] Chile in "this fashion will make you feel like a rather inappropriate knee-jerk liberal...
...In other words Allende's presidency was, above all, a test of democracy, not Marxism...
...That position seems to be the same one that is occupied in the film by MIR, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, a faction ,that was too far left even to join Allende's Popular Unity Coalition...
...All the same, though, when we see a worker on strike against Chile's largest copper mine asserting, "We voted for the President to de~end the rights of the workers," it is as hard for us as it must have bee.n for him to accept the notion, propounded in the film's commentary, that his strike was only part of a right-wing conspiracy to topple the government by causing a balanceof-payments crisis...
...During the interview mentioned before, Guzman explained, "The criteria we used to make the film were not a-partisan or 'objective' "m the traditional bourgeois sense . . . . Our objectivity was based upon a militant position within the struggle...
...Nevertheless, this skimpy exposition creates difficulties for the audience the film does have in .Europe and America...
...His country's tragedy and the loss of political freedoms are 12 May 1978:310 just one "battle" in an international war of Marxist revolution...
...yet we aren't surprised that he was unable to get footage of those agents at work...
...There are some moments later, however, when questions about the simultaneity of the sound and the footage arise...
...As strong a document of Allende's betrayal as The Battle of Chile is, if we finally cannot help feeling there are disparities between it and Chilean history, they no doubt occur because Guzman's politics are further to the left than were Allende's own...
...In part the problem here is that the film doesn't do enough exposition of the Chilean system for nonChileans to follow the political in-fighting...
...This is not enough to impeach Allende, but does seem sufficient to oust several of his ministers and block almost all the legislation he proposes...
...Usually that part of the footage is deleted from the finished film, but Guzman leaves it in a half dozen times right at the beginning to differentiate interviews edited together...
...Guzman's desire to make Allende a martyr of the Left therefore seems in a way inappropriate, almost exploitative...
...That knowledge ought to make us a very sympathetic audience for Patricio Guzman's remarkable documentary, The Battle of Chile, which details the constitutional crisis in Chile leading up to .the coup...
...But perhaps Guzman knows this already...
...and by money from American corporations...
...We don't a~tually see the band playing, and the scene raises an uneasy question about whether Guzman was willing to caricature facts in order to make points...
...I,t's at first hard to get used to the way that all the controls are reversed when a Marxist becomes presiden~ of a .bourgeois republic...
...Guzman's poim is that these men were glad to have the dead officer out of the way, but were they openly disrespectful enough to behave like this While the Dirge was played...
...Indeed, Guzman may even feel they were a battle it was necessary to lose, for as he tells us in his i~terview, the Allende government "was just one stage, one phase, one period which has to resolve itself by assuming the offensive in order to move on to its next period, which is of necessity one of confrontation...
...Though we are only rarely apprehensive about Guzman's having taken liberties of this sort, we still have cause to wonder in general about the relationship between the sound track and the film image...
...None of us in the United States can now doubt that C.I.A...
...In the union meetings where this choice manifested itself, MIR always seems to have advocated stepping up the expropriations of the factories...
...While he wanted to show his audience "what fascism looks and feels like," he found out instead "how invisible imperialism can be --because in Chile you don't see Phantom jets spewing napalm as in Vietnam...
...For it is from the narration on the track primarily that we get Guzman's interpretation of events...
...Guzman made it for his own countrymen, even though he knew when he was editing it in exile that few Chileans would have a chance to see it...
...The latter are hoping to gain a 60 percent majority, and apparently do come within a few points of that...
...This is unquestionably true...
...But Allende chose to curtail the expropriations instead because he was unwilling to do anything unconstitutional that would give his opposition grounds for charging him with illegality...
...When we see newsreel footage of the police battling in the streets with student demonstrators, or see workers on strike against mine owners, or the national assembly defying the power of the administration, our sympathies instinctively go to the students, the strikers and the assembly...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 10
