Banned in Chile for 22 years, The Battle Of Chile is an urgent, epic, gripping chronicle of a crucial moment in 20th century politics: of Chile's open, peaceful socialist revolution and the violent counter-revolution against it. A landmark in documentary, this trilogy - each part tracing events from different perspectives - was made against great odds with little support, combining a mix of investigative reportage, political analysis and direct cinema.
Schedule:
The Battle of Chile: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie | 1975 | 96 min | 2pm
Tracing the confrontations between Allende’s supporters and middle class Chileans' violent rebellion which helped the military justify their efforts to ‘restore order’.
The Battle of Chile: The Coup d’État 1976 | 88 min | 4pm
An examination of Allende’s position as it diminishes after the attempted coup of 29 June 1973.
The Battle of Chile: Popular Power |1979 | 79 min | 6pm
This final part of the trilogy follows the loose coalition of citizens and workers who self-organise at a grassroots level in support of Allende’s visionary politics.
On September 11, 1973, Chilean president Salvador Allende's democratically-elected Marxist government - the first in the world - was overthrown in a bloody coup by General Augusto Pinochet's army.
Patricio Guzman (Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button), a young filmmaker who returned to Chile in 1970 after studying film in Madrid, abandoned his ideas for fictional films and instead turned to documenting the love affair between Salvador Allende and the Chilean people.
Filming in the nine months leading up to the coup, Guzman and his five-man crew captured the mounting tension and aggression that Allende's Popular Front was suffering at the hands of right wing sectors, culminating in the bombing of the presidential palace that would send Chile into a 17-year military dictatorship.
Completed only when footage in Chile could be smuggled to Sweden where an exiled Guzmán waited for the reels, it was then edited in Havana at the famed ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Artes e Industrias Cinematográficos) before premiering at the Cannes Film Festival where its debut saw Guzmán instantly hailed as the vanguard of political filmmaking in Latin America.
Presented by Wavelength
F: facebook.com/wavelengthdocs
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dir. Patricio Guzman
year: 1975/1976/1978
country: Chile-Cuba-France
run-time: 263 minutes (individual films’ running times opposite)
Joint ticket £15
Single Tickets £6
Doors: 1.30pm
“Not only the best films about Allende and the coup d’etat, but among the best documentary films every made, changing our concepts of political documentary within a framework accessible to the widest audience... The result is of an extraordinary passion”
“The look and structure act as reminders of a more risk-taking, expansive time in film-making... An example of a valuable but increasingly rare kind of political film-making, which links the rise and fall of ideologies and politicians directly and dramatically to the society around them. It is hard to watch The Battle of Chile and still see “politics” in the modern way, as just an unappealing abstract noun”
“Great films rarely arrive as unheralded as The Battle of Chile”
“A rare glimpse at a revolutionary process in its most heightened period of crisis... Guzmán’s film thrusts the viewer immediately into this political pressure-cooker”
“Shows a hidden history of workers in struggle and allows us to draw important lessons from their catastrophic defeat... a masterpiece of political documentary”