The Materiality of Memory: Touching, Seeing, and Being the Past in Patricio Guzmán’s Chile, Memoria Obstinada

Abstract

In 1996, exiled Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman returned to his home country for the first time in 23 years. In his suitcase, he carefully packed copies of his internationally renowned three-part documentary, La Batalla de Chile (The Battle for Chile), in the hope of showing it in Chile for the very first time. This essay focuses not on La Batalla de Chile, although the film plays a central role throughout, but rather on the profound historiographical implications of the film Guzman created as a chronicle of his return visit: Chile, Memoria Obstinada (Chile, Obstinate Memory; hereafter referred to as Memoria Obstinada). Made six years after Chile’s official transition from dictatorship to democratic governance and halfway between Chile’s first and second truth commissions, Memoria Obstinada is a complex film that reflects on the role of the past in the present. It is about the interplay between individual and collective memory and the dangers of forgetting, or never knowing in the first place. Writing in the wake of the fortieth anniversary of the 1973 coup about a film made in 1996, I am primarily interested in exploring the following questions: what tactics does Guzman employ in order to intervene in national consciousness and memory during Chile’s post-transition period; how does the film process, negotiate, and map memory; and, finally, how might a close reading of this documentary film allow us to think about the possibilities the materiality of memory offers as a historiographical strategy?