THE BATTLE FOR CHILE (Patricio Guzmán, 1975, 1976, 1979)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

On-the-spot documentaries can capture the most unshakable things. Patricio Guzmán’s tripartite The Battle for Chile includes a passage in which, as soldiers fire into a crowd of Allende supporters after Pinochet’s September 11, 1973, military coup, a cameraman films his own death.
     The subject of the coup occupies the middle part of Guzmán’s total work, although the first part opens with a snapshot of what after all is the central event toward which the three films thematically gravitate. Through an eclectic collage of materials, including his own footage, news footage, and television interviews of politicians and activists, Guzmán covers populist/socialist Salvador Allende’s election, the organized efforts opposing him, the idea of the coup that crystallizes, the coup and its tumultuous aftermath, including street demonstrations and Allende’s political efforts to effect his reinstatement, the aerial strikes on the presidential palace that kill Allende (“suicide” was the official pronouncement), and organized efforts to overturn Pinochet’s oppressive, murderous rule. Few films convey more powerfully the sense of a nation’s history in and out of the hands of its citizenry.
     One of the emerging themes is the disconnect between Allende and his supporters, whose inspiration by their leader may not match Allende’s own political beliefs. In his last days, for example, Allende denied workers the arms that they sought in order to defend him. It is not a stretch to say, regarding the film’s mosaic in which bits and pieces continually spark connections with other bits and pieces, that the deaths of Allende and the cameraman each reflects the other and, in some sense, become one end—that of Chile. Prosaic causality yields to a national vision—a national graveyard.
     Guzmán’s masterpiece, full of hope for Chile’s resurrection, honors all of Pinochet’s victims, Allende among them, but not Allende alone.

MALUALA (Sergio Giral, 1979)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

The final entry of a trilogy begun with The Other Francisco (1975) and Slave Hunter (1976), Maluala is in the mold of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Queimada (Burn!, 1969)—but without the Brandopiness. Fiercely beautiful, Sergio Giral’s film fictionalizes slave revolts in Cuba in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Its protagonist, called Gallo, leading an army of runaways, petitions the Spanish colonial government for freedom and land; he and his followers are met with brutal reprisals. Their settlement tucked away in eastern mountains, Gallo and the others come to presage Castro, “Che” Guevara and their anti-Batista guerrilla forces in the 1950s. The film suggests that the latter revolution has brought to fruition the earlier movement by Cuba’s most oppressed individuals—a connection that Giral, a black Cuban himself, draws with heartfelt conviction. Indeed, the film ends with a freeze frame that perfectly expresses the historical weight that Giral wishes to bring to bear. After engineering a massacre of blacks, the colonial Spanish general—Gallo’s nemesis—is shown surrounded by a taunting crowd of the dispossessed. They represent the future as much as the present, and the freeze frame captures the general’s howl and bulging eyes, slyly anticipating the end to the power upon which the colonial forces then so ruthlessly relied. This man embodies injustices perpetrated against the Cuban people; with hindsight, then, the film looks forward to his getting his comeuppance. The film’s heightened style—its rich colors, music and touches of primitive folklore—helps the connection drawn between the black slave revolt and Castro’s later defeat of the Batista government appear almost mystical. In this, the film owes something to Battleship Potemkin (1925), where a failed Russian revolution looks ahead to the successful one that has already since occurred. Like Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Maluala is a national epic.

BAARA (Soulaymane Cissé, 1978)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

From Mali, Baara—the title translates as Labor, or Work—is by Soulaymane Cissé. Its three main characters are on a capitalistic collision course. Balla Diarra is an impoverished street porter who lands a job at the local textile factory owned by Makan Sissoko, a man so intent on riding Africa’s westernized wave of the future that he has only one wife at a time. (Sissoko is currently in his fourth marriage.) Between them stands Balla Traoré, who newly manages Sissoko’s factory and institutes a shorter work week and higher wages. He seeks to protect its workers from both their corrupt union and Sissoko’s plans for a massive layoff. Unlike Sissoko and Diarra, Traoré doesn’t quite know his own place yet, nor is his level of confidence sufficient to forge a clear path of action through the morass of his good intentions. Moreover, he is conflicted, as his marriage demonstrates; tied to old ways, he refuses his wife her independence, keeping her at home. By contrast, Sissoko’s wife runs a boutique (another part of her husband’s—forgive—empire); but her freer life encourages her adultery. We have here a symbolical jumble of post-colonial attitudes and uncertainty.
     Tribal results ensue, including Sissoko’s sense of betrayal upon learning that Traoré has met with workers (he thus has Traoré killed), and his burst of lethal violence upon catching his wife and her lover together. The police assault on striking workers is, indirectly, another outcrop of his lethal violence. Sissoko’s center does not hold.
     In detail the film shows, moreover, the workers at work—work, here, that’s excrutiating to perform as well as monotonous.
     Baara is a tad clumsy, arty and melodramatic—but powerful. It shows colonialist imperatives, assimilated by post-colonial capitalism, finding ways of reasserting themselves through greed and lust for power.

DE CIERTA MANERA (Sara Gómez Yera, 1977)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Sara Gómez Yera was 30 when asthma took her life in 1974. Both Cuba’s first woman filmmaker and first Afro-Cuban filmmaker, the former documentarian was making her first feature. (France’s Agnès Varda had been a mentor.) The film was completed by Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who would pay homage to its style, a fusion of documentary and fictional elements, in his Up to a Certain Point (1983). Gómez’s film, called in the States One Way or Another (In a Certain Way might be more accurate), was partly based on her love affair with a sound technician. In the film, Yolanda is a middle-class schoolteacher; Mario, a factory worker. Moreover, Mario, who is racially mixed, is misogynistic, tied to machismo; by contrast, Yolanda embraces the new sociopolitical order. The divide between lovers may be characterized as past versus future, pre-Castro and post-Batista. Yet Gómez is sharply critical of Cuba’s persistent attachment to elements of classism, racism, sexism; some of this she lays at (what she sees as) Castro’s authoritarian door. These elements are explored in various interruptions of the main story, including newsreel footage, interviews, direct addresses and related elements. Jean-Luc Godard may be a direct influence (or, through Varda, an indirect one).
     On the one hand, the film records improvements in the Cuban human landscape. For instance, a principal setting is a housing project that has replaced one of Batista’s horrific slums. Also, Yolanda’s pupils are from the underclass, which Batista had banned from schooling. However, worrisome cultural behaviors persist, such as the Cuban penchant for indolence. A moral crisis for Mario arises when he considers reporting a fellow worker who has taken off from work to have sex.
     Both leads are nonprofessional. Yolanda is played by a Yolanda; Mario, by a Mario.

CANOA (Felipe Cazals, 1976)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Canoa is based on an actual event. In 1968, in San Miguel de Canoa, a rural Mexican village, the local Catholic priest, who pretty much controlled the place, incited his parishioners into a murderous frenzy against innocent visitors, whom they mistook for Communist agitators at a time of widespread students protests. The priest insisted that the invaders’ mission was to close the church. The young men, all of whom worked at an urban university, were in fact on a hiking excursion to a volcano. Heavy rains, however, brought them into the village where things erupted.
     Canoa is a study, then, of the anti-Communist hysteria in whose grip some of the world was held at the time, largely incited by the United States and the Roman Catholic Church. The film’s focus, however, is on Mexico, its institutions and cultural habits. Seeking to unravel a mesh of convolutions, it has no interest in enforcing dogma or in scoring geopolitical points. The film is framed as a news investigation correlative to its documentary impulse. Felipe Cazals, who directed from Tomás Pérez Turrent’s script, is a former documentarian.
     This is not a paper-thin “message movie.” Rather, it is a rigorous attempt at deconstruction; it shows how a range of elements—social, religious, political—came together to produce the monstrous result. Felipe Cazals interrupts chronology for pertinent juxtapositions and asides, and prods the viewer into an analytical mode by the application of considerable wit. The terrible power of the communal event is enhanced by this approach, partly because of Cazals’s ability to direct crowds—in this case, a crowd that turns into a thunderous mob. Apparently Cazals can distance us or bring us up close to the action at will, shifting purpose even in consecutive shots. Canoa is, among other things, a dazzling tour-de-force.