Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

This extraordinary documentary essay film examines recent human history through the lens of the outer reaches of space. Patricio Guzman, celebrated documentarian whose work has always focused upon the hidden past of Chile, takes the opportunity here to consider the nature of time and memory by juxtaposing two seemingly incompatible investigations that are taking place in the Atacama desert of Chile. This desert, the driest place in the world, is home to some of the largest telescopes in the world, where astronomers take advantage of the arid skies in order to gaze at the cosmos, in hopes of unlocking the mysteries of the universe. At the same time, this desert is home to other, more unsettling mysteries, since it is believed that the bodies of political prisoners from the Pinochet era were buried here. As the astronomers research the stars, the families of victims examine the earth. As the astronomers look to the lights that shine in the midst of the darkness of the heavens, these intrepid women seek to cast light on an era of secrecy and corruption.

In a conversation at the Cannes film festival, where this film was first screened, Guzman described it as "metaphysical, mystical or spiritual, astronomical, ethnographic and political." You might add "environmental," since the film asks us to consider ourselves in relation to our environment both in the broadest sense, as we are inhabitants of a small rock hurtling through the immensity of an inhospitable space, and in the most immediate sense as we are political creatures, who make for ourselves an uneasy home among others like us. Above all, though and this is what I take to be the decisive feature that makes us different from all other animals what surrounds us, our true environs, is not some place, but it is time itself, or history. Time is our habitat, insofar as our way of life is not something fixed. We live out of and upon our own past; we do not inhabit nature directly, rather we inhabit nature insofar as it has been transformed by our predecessors. Yet, the problem is that it is so easy to be oblivious to that history to forget that the world we inherit is not the way it has always been or always will be, but the way that we have made it. One way to recover a sense for the ephemeral nature of the human species is to reflect on those realities for which changes take place on a much longer time scale, the stars and celestial bodies. Another, equally important, way to remember how quickly we change is to engage in the painstaking process of history, of attempting to remember what we have been and what we have done, and not allow what some might prefer to forget to drift into oblivion.

This film has us look at images of the skies, and of the instruments through which they are seen, and of the people who care for and use these instruments. At the same time we look at and listen to women who are searching for the remains of their loved ones. What struck me as most intriguing about this film is its meditation on time, both in its universal sense as measured by the clock or the movements within the cosmos, and its much more personal and intimate sense of the times we remember and the times we forget. An astronomer in the film points out the implications of a remarkable fact, that when we observe a star we are not observing the present but the past. As soon as the light from an event has reached our eyes, that event has passed away. We might say, in general that we can never actually experience our own time, because as soon as its significance is clear it is no longer the present. At the same time, we cannot truly move on, we cannot overcome the past until it has become clear, until it has come to light for us. The title of the film "Nostalgia for the Light" points to this paradox. Nostalgia is the feeling of loss that accompanies what is no longer present, what has been left behind. It might seem strange to be nostalgic for the light, unless one finds oneself in darkness but as the film suggests, to be in the presence of light is also to be in the presence of loss, it is to be in the presence of an unremediable past, the confrontation of which can alone provide the clarifying insight necessary to move into the future.

Very few films have affected me the way that "Nostaligia for the Light" has. I am haunted by its images of the barren Atacama desert, of the otherworldly moonscape on which both enormous telescopes and concentration camps have been built, of the crude rock carvings of the prehistoric inhabitants of the region. The way that the film ties these -and many other -images together is nothing short of triumphant.

Add to this the thematic explorations of the film -time, grief, mystery, memory, human (and humane) frailty, the transience of all things, the genocide of political protestors during Pinochet's brutal tenure, and the search for meaning in an otherwise indifferent setting -and you have a film that moved me beyond words. I have reviewed only a few products or books for Amazon, and generally don't place much stock in overly enthusiastic ramblings such as this one. Somehow, though, I felt compelled to comment on this film, which shed a great deal of light on a great many subjects without once becoming heavy-handed or digressive.

As the film points out, we are such stuff as the universe is made of. Stars contain the same elements as the bones of those buried in mass graves in the Atacama. The same light that ennobles the best of our intentions (an understanding of who we are as human beings) also reveals cruelty, torture, and murder on a scale that is almost impossible to understand.

And yet, all is tied together through this terrific work of filmmaking. Seeing it was, truly, a life changing experience. The final scenes are so powerful, both in terms of the human spirit and its capacity for great good in the face of true evil, that words simply can not describe the majesty they convey. See this film: you'll be a better person for having done so.

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a fantastic film that i highly recommend. unexpectedly, perhaps, it pulls together several strands, all fascinating in themselves, into one beautiful and humbling, touching story.

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"Nostalgia" seems to me the wrong word here, a somewhat sentimental term where the film is certainly not sentimental. This documentary connects two groups of searchers in the Atacama Desert in Chile: astronomers studying starlight for clues to the history of the universe, and grieving relatives of murdered and disappeared victims of the Pinochet regime who are searching the huge desert (on foot!) for traces of their loved ones' remains. So both groups are looking for "light'" on the past, both recent and unimaginably distant. Valuable as an introduction to a little-known extreme environment, and as an exploration of the ongoing trauma from the Chilean dictatorship's cruelties.

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Patricio Guzman, Chile's poet-documentarian, remains haunted and riveted by what happened in his country during the revolutionary years of Salvador Allende's administration and the US-backed fascist coup which ended it.The coup d'etat was depicted in the great political film,The Battle of Chile.and the long period of amnesiac forgetting takes us up to Nostalgia for the Light,his present filmic essay taking in archaeology,astronomy and recovery of the disappeared.Art must confront its Guernicas and 9/11s.We get the scene of dust particles swirling in a sunbeam, a Lucretion settling of the thoughts about our being and origins.He takes us back to the Chile of his youth,where he "loved science fiction stories, lunar eclipses and watching the sun through a piece of smoky glass".We get tableaux of nostalgia,"Only the present moment existed".A dissolve follows setting out the cosmological and historical parameters,in the specific setting of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, visible from space,the driest place on Earth.This humanist document unites idealist skysearchers and realist earthsearchers.

The translucent sky allows astronomers to see the boundaries of the universe,light from the past takes millions of years to reach us.The desert is also home to pre-Columbian shepherd's bones and rock carvings, and the place where Pinochet buried bodies in mass graves,following imprisonment,torture and murder.The desert is a palimpsest of the past,ossuary and observatory.Elderly women search among its stones for murdered loved ones.Balancing philosophical reflections on human memory and the matter of the stars,the calcium of our bones comes from the stars." The present doesn't exist",according to Gaspar Galaz,a young astronomer,'Now' is a mental construct.We get an extraordinaryshot of a constellation.Guzman uses poetic intuition to connect his subjects,associations of thought.Although at times you feel he's edging one subject in via another,he claims to be obsessed by the 100 years life of the Chilean republic,the miners in the Atacama(19C),the disappearance of the indigenous Indians. Lautaro Nunes archaeologist, reveals the depth of the amnesia.The images are beautiful.The telescopes with their fabulous visibility contrast to the invisibility of the lost ones,beneath ones feet.

Guzman gathers testimonies from Luis Henriquez,survivor of the Chacabuco concentration camp(mines adapted by the military+barb wire)relates how the inmates felt totally free due to astonomy lessons they took.Another veteran Miguel memorises the exact dimensions of each camp and makes architectural scale drawings of them when in exile,so their existence could not be denied.The heart of the film shows women from the town of Calama,Vicky Saavedra, finding her brother's teeth,skull bit and footbone in a sock,or Violetta Berrios,tenaciously searching for her husband,or the unearthing of shards of bone and mummified body parts by the diminishing band of bereaved relatives of the `disappeared'.Only memory Guzman says allows us to live in the `fragile present moment'.Valentina Rodriguez, unites the two halves of the film,a mother of two in her 30s who works at the astronomical organisation.Brought up by her grandparents when her parents were `disappeared',they taught her to observe the stars.Astronomy has helped give another dimension to her pain." We are all part of a current of energy,of recyclable matter...nothing comes to an end."Nostalgia is counter-atomist,bringing together the worlds of science and human affairs and Guzman reactivates the `gravitational force of memory'against the atrocities.Truly moving transcendence of materialism.

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