For the first in an end-of-year extravaganza of episodes, we're back to discuss the work of legendary Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzman. 

Active since the early '70s, Guzman started out as a chronicler of the Allende years, capturing the right-wing backlash and subsequent coup on camera before going into a decades-long exile in Europe. Since then, his films have dealt almost exclusively with the painful memory of the junta and its victims, the violent injustices of the Pinochet years and the condition of his homeland, turning away from the conventional third-cinema documentary form of his early work towards something increasingly poetic, metaphorical and personal.

With Guzman's latest film, MY IMAGINARY COUNTRY, having its UK premiere at LFF 2022, and THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS (the final part of a trilogy alongside NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT and THE PEARL BUTTON) also going on general release this year, we (belatedly) take the opportunity to appraise his seminal filmography.

Featuring covers of Victor Jara's El Cigarrito (Sam) and Manifesto (Emmett)

Episode art by Sam. 

FILMOGRAPHY

The Battle of Chile (1975-79)

Chile: Obstinate Memory (1997)

Galaxy of Problems (2010)

Nostalgia For The Light (2010)

The Pearl Button (2015)

The Cordillera of Dreams (2019)

My Imaginary Country (2022)

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Patricio Guzman, 'Politics and Documentary in People's Chile' (1977) in Cinema and social change in Latin America: conversations with filmmakers, ed. Julianne Burton (Austin, 1986).

Inez Hedges, 'Obstinate Memory: Chris Marker's and Patricio Guzman's Pictures for a Revolution' in World Cinema and Cultural Memory (2015)

Paula Lagos Labbé, 'Political and Affective Shifts in Contemporary Chilean Documentary' in Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Carl Fischer and Vania Barraza (Detroit, 2020)

Belinda Small, 'Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film: The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button' in Beyond the essay film: subjectivity, textuality, and technology, ed. Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams (Amsterdam, 2020)

Valeria Valenzuela, 'Giro subjetivo en el documental latinoamericano: De la cámara-puño al sujeto-cámara' (2011), https://www.lafuga.cl/giro-subjetivo-en-el-documental-latinoamericano/439

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Produced by Sam Storey and Emmett Cruddas