Exploring the Vicissitude of Memory through ‘Nostalgia for the Light’
By: Avantika Tewari
Tags: Time, History, Violence, Nostalgia, Cinema

This photo of the moon was taken using three combined exposures that captured the refraction, reflection and diffraction of moonlight from millions of falling ice crystals. Photograph by: Brent Mckean

“Those who don’t remember, don’t exist anywhere.”

— — Patricio Guzmán, Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

To revisit Patricio Guzman’s masterpiece, sitting here in India, at a time when Chilean people have regained power with the strength of their movement to dismantle the legacy of Pinochet, brings a joy that takes refuge in cinema to momentarily escape and keep away the despair and misery of the times, from up close — from the here.

The 1960s in Chile were tumultuous years, belligerent efforts were made by the Alliance of Progress — signed by United State of America’s President John F. Kennedy — who designed the roadmap for the US’ imperial intervention in Chile to ‘prevent the spread of socialism’ throughout the hemisphere. Bloody years followed from 1968 to 1990s, where successive US leaders tried to overthrow the popular democratic government of President Allende in Chile. In 1970 President Nixon of the USA had authorised use of 10 million dollars to prevent Allende from running for election, despite which Allende rose to power over the large-scale support from people. Disgruntled by the victory, a military coup was staged, finally culminating in the violent grab of power by Pinochet’s Junta in 1973.

The resolve of the USA was such that it ordained the Chicago Boys of Pinochet’s Junta with the task of applying Milton Friedman’s policies of unfettered capitalism and quickly helped the regime consolidate its power by recognising and legitimating the military regime. This ended up crushing the poorest of the people under the feet of private interests of the global economic powers led by the USA. Guzman famously made the three part series called “The Battle of Chile,” which traced the violent years of uprising, upheavals, insurrection of the bourgeoisie, people’s struggle and the coup.

In this essay though, we will explore his later film, “Nostalgia for the Light.” The film opens with a frame of dust motes swirling in a ray of light, a sight so familiar, as if a universal metaphor for childhood. Incidentally, this sequence was shot in the house Patricio Guzman, the director of the film, grew up in. The film observes the movement of the cameras to suggest the cosmos through its close recordings of movement of matter — dust, sand, bones and is contrasted with long shots of the landscape, perfectly symmetrical, with the centre of the frame — oddly sticking out, for how do we know if the centre of frame is the centre at all?

‘Nostalgia for the Light’ threads together a narrative of memory as metaphor for mortality. It dives deep into time and buoyantly pushes us high above the surface of the act of remembering. Memory and forgetting get represented on a shared plane — on a continuum of life and death — bodies remain as remains, as remainders, as residues, people live in memory, their traceless traces reconstruct history and leaves an indelible mark on social (un)consciousness.

Still from the film, “Nostalgia for the Light”

However, not all memories find representation or expression, not all is or can be remembered. Some things, best forgotten while others driven out by force. Memory challenges the promise of certitude, accuracy and therefore the myth of a coherent truth — the perfect truth does not exist whether it is told, withheld, untold. The perfect truth exists but as fiction which does not make it antithetical to reality rather renders reality’s structure to that of spectres within spectres which are nonetheless material. Memory is fashioned in the same way as our subjectivities, it is inaccurate. There is no way of verifying it, one must trust the fragment that emerges in the consciousness and must hold to examine it. One must take the word of those who describe their memories as truth. In a way, memory is as post-truth as it can get. Truth isn’t opposed to fiction, far from it, truth is opposed to the empirical. As Lacan said, “Truth has the structure of fiction,” which is probably why memory is one of the strongest weapons of the oppressed against systematic erasure of history. It speaks against the administrative records, deflated figures and inflated lies. It triumphs against civilizations that stand on broken bones, slave ships, razed villages which in turn stand on spectres of production of a sphere of the market that is structured by the subjective destitution and ontological absence of humanity of the labouring body of the slave.

Politics relies heavily on representation — re-imagination of fictive imaginaries, social reconstruction of historical ‘facts,’ which are all always already mediated by ideology. Just as the light we see is always already permeated with time. Yet, how do we separate the triumph over memory as a tool for resistance against that of a manipulation of the same by oppressive systems that control the production and subjection of the body, the memory and reality? I will not bore you further with my explorations and will take you through what I think Guzman wants us to see by showing us what he sees.

In the film, the search for the remains of the lost ones is also a voyage in search for a residual time; forgotten — struggling against erasure — even as time, as such and by itself is ungraspable and perhaps, even meaningless. The quest doesn’t end with conquest, it begins where the latter ends. This memory of collections of remains, at once eludes and adds to the history of a massacre. It is in this dialectic that we must place memory, as a forever incomplete task that may never be completed, and yet its incompleteness is what constitutes a need for history even if it is fragmented, disfigured, distorted, dismembered. The matter that we are made up of is the matter in the Universe. The visual rhyme between the surface of the Mercury and the cranial skull is used in the film to indicate that the calcium in our bodies comes from the stars.

Still from the film, “Nostalgia for the Light”

Mohenjodaro (Vidrohi’s poem translated from the Hindi by Somrita Ganguly) “I am Simon, standing on the stairs that lead to the dock — With Nature and Man as my witnesses, I speak to you from the last step to the pond at Mohenjodaro On which lies A woman’s burnt body; And in the pond, lie scattered, human bones. You can find the body of another such woman burnt, in Babylon; And in Mesopotamia, scattered human bones. I have wondered, and wondered often, why In the crevice of ancient civilizations lie The body of a woman burnt, and Scattered human bones, and Their successors continue to die From the forests of Kanha to the jungles of Savannah, From the rolling plains of Bengal to the Scythian cliffs high. […] The outcry Of my ancestors rend the skies. I would have bashed my head against the burnt body Of this woman and killed myself, If I were not the father to a daughter. And my daughter — She says, Papa, you get needlessly emotional about us. We are girls, born to become Firewood when we grow into women. And these scattered human bones — They could be the bones of Slaves from Rome, or Weavers from Bengal, or Children from Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine. An empire is an empire — Be it British or Roman or Neocolonial, American. And empires have only one end — To scatter human bones on mountaintops And plateaus; By riverbanks, plains And seashores. And empires claim to summarise History in three lines — That they have set the earth on fire, That they have set the earth burning, That they have scattered across the face of the earth Human bones.

Calama Women

Photographer: Paula Allen

Our director travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, where atop the mountains astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent that it allows them to see the threshold of the earth and the universe spreading into infinity. The astronomer in the movie is shown to be in a simultaneous and contradictory search for the originary moment in history where time first assumed meaning, while knowing that all knowing is but occurring in a time lapsed. Everything known then has already slipped and it is only the residues which we are coming closer to. Therefore the question of knowing and not knowing remains entangled with the existence of Being — as being near or far from knowing — as an inhabitant of the borders that define knowledge by marking the limits of grasping knowledge. Lapsed time that enraptured the astronomer charts the cosmos, resembling the archeologist’s quest to recover a buried past; between the two impossible quests for knowledge of infinitude — by astronomers and archeologists — are Calama women.

Atacama is also the driest desert in the world, where under the harsh sun lay the shining bones of invaders and miners; political prisoners and those ‘disappeared’ by the Chilean army after the military coup of September, 1973. Calama women know their lost one’s are gone because they existed even if their memories have been erased yet for their loss to get translated into a collective memory against historical forgetting requires that it be recorded. The erasure of particularities of killing fields draw visual landscapes of violence, descriptive and detailed yet exceeding the humanity of loss, love and longing.

Photographer: Paula Allen, on whose picture I morphed the dialogue from the film.

Each face buried under the debris — each life had its own specificity and singularity. The return to photographs of loved ones is a reminder of the face that got permanently lost in the rubble. The photograph holds space for a name that was denied in death. Their death is not a mere evidence of the brutality of the system. Their life is not a proof-of-a-concept, rather their life is an embodied representation of systemic violence and even so, more than its symptom. This ‘more than’ being is unrepresentable which finds itself as being addressed and approached through different logics. From an onto-theological perspective, life, for the sake of itself is divine, we are all children of God — one before the One. For a human rights approach, life inherently possesses equal value as we are all children of (wo)men.

As if As if we are the beforehand fallen debris of some colossal seemingly imperishable desires. As if someone is searching for something under this debris – someone who’s not God but acts like one. As if the debris could be put together once again. As if we won’t be cleared off the ground of our own bodies just like levelling the old graveyard with new soil. As if life has always been an order within order. As if we believe their lies. As if we don’t know how to scribble – in the face of imminent death – Life in cursive writing. As if… (Andres Neuman, ‘How to Travel without Seeing’)

The Calama women, walk on the Atacama desert, as though walking on a minefield of memory, carefully and calculatedly placing their feet over what might be the ruins of their own — fearing both the eruption and explosion of a past into the present that might disrupt their modes of coping with the reality of loss as well as obsessively work towards retracing the foregone. Carefully they glide their feet over the scorching sand, aware of the impossibility of uncovering the infinity that lay buried beneath their feet. They sought to retrieve as much as human remains as they could without accidentally damaging them with their quest. There is not a self-absorbed melancholia, attached to dead objects, not a love for the symptom more than the cure, nor an attachment with the past to overcome the grief of the present. Rather, the search is also simultaneously geared towards altering the present as well as the past which was inflected with loss of memory.

To the Calama women — the expectation from a nation to remember its history, the expectation from the State to compensate for losses, the work of human rights activists — is all important but secondary. The families know what they can expect from placing such demands on the military. It’s the well-kept secret beneath the open sky where the history of the massacre and its aftermath bore witness to loss — wrapped in the silences and whispers — as mere knowledge empties its own shroud to expose the limit of knowing.

The absence of dignity in death that their ancestors received provoked in them, a desire to give those who didn’t receive proper burial, redemption as an afterlife of death. Their abjection is produced in and condemned to shame. The shame and oppression that the prisoners of Pinochet had to endure outlives the massacre — with a casual ease, they could lump together dead bodies on the back of trucks and dump them in open graveyards — leaving a lifelong imprint on the future scarred of lives scarred by trauma and loss.Vicky (aged 70 when the movie was shot), who is shown looking for the remains of her brother in the desert, asserts, “We are a problem. For society, for justice, for everyone. We’re the lowest of the low. We are the leprosy of Chile…”

The Pinochet government turned old mines — who were made with the sweat and blood of enslaved people — into camps, by throwing in some barbed wires and dumped the remains of the oppressed indigenous people in the desert. The turn towards the historical past is not without investment and commitment, Calama women searched the sand for human remains with their bare hands for over twenty years gathering shards of shattered glass pierced by the historical cycle of violence with their care and pain. So what made them carry on their search for twenty long years? The condemnation itself, the long shadow of shame that continues to animate life and deny history? The compulsion to bring back remnants of life — that could be reduced to dust — with a careless disregard is a stinging reminder of the continued subjugation; of their marginal presence and enforced absence in/from history.

The remains of the bodies that lay buried communicate something — as embodied histories. Bodies that were embedded in socio-political relations of the time in which they were dismembered. The clash of history and memory finds itself manifesting as a rejection of the script of memory as a mere weapon of transformation, indicative of the doubleness of remembering — the inability to forget and the need to know more — as both grounded in a structuring absence that persists on forms of forgetting.

Still from the film, “Nostalgia for the Light”

“There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary… and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery.”

— Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1992)

Administrative death count might remain a mere figure in history through which loss can be indexed to quantify its scale and proportion, very often these numbers too are forged, compromised, inaccurate. To dig out the remains of those lost from earth is not just the task of those whose dear ones lay buried underneath, but of a larger collectivity — which is opposed to fascism, exploitation, oppression. The reconstruction of memory of life from its residues is simultaneously deconstruction of a history that progresses by overwriting itself and also a production of history that is more than a reference, a citation, a footnote.

An individual’s life history is as much contained in a collective history of a nation built on violence as is the social system’s logic contained in its burial — dressed in the language of martyrdom, sacrifice, righteousness punishment, necessity, scarcity, self-preservation. These bodies aren’t just metaphors of the dictatorship, they are bodies of loved ones whose lives remain entangled in brutal histories of loss, trapped in its interstices. There is a personal curiosity of tracing back the roots of one’s family, a need for redemption, a truth to build futures upon. The military knows what it won’t reveal. The bodies are kept hidden under the open sky. In depriving the nation its prehistory, the hyphenated nation-State negates to affirm its own state, by subduing memory which also paradoxically saves them the burden of confronting naked reminders of a historical trauma of the violent underbelly that constitutes political society. By depriving people and distancing them from the proximity of their trauma, the system preserves its own apparatus through concealment.

Guzmán’s double-plot is a restless exploration, pushing the borders of knowing as well as provoking a humbling and limited point, of the world being an ensemble of social relations that is animated by its relationship with a shared impossible and infinite ontological abyss. Recall, Matthew Arnold: “Everywhere there is connection. Everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.” Melding the celestial quest of the astronomers and archeologists and the earthly one of the women, the profane and the sacred overlap to present the vastness of infinite potentials. In a similar vein, the Portuguese word “saudade” may somewhat capture the content of these explorations of time, being and knowing, as marking ‘a nostalgic longing for an absent person or object.’ The absence here is not a negation of a possible presence, nor does it mark the absence of a possibility of a presence unbeknown, rather it is a search for something that remains unknowable until it is realised. Something which is both here and there, while also stretching itself out into the beyond — beyond realisation.

Still from the film, “Nostalgia for the Light”

Archeologists — because of the lack of humidity — are able to excavate the remains of mummified bodies, discern symbols inscribed from another time. Lautaro Núñez Atencio, the archeologist interviewed by Guzman says that the astronomers concern themselves with “the origins of everything and the past of everything we are today. They receive the past today and the most distant past of all.” The astronomer also admits that time is experienced; always disappearing from the scopic field of inquiry. There is always a lag in the time for light to reach Earth and for the light to be reflected back by the camera lens towards the eye. Even from the most arid plateau with the most unobstructed view into the cosmos — a “fleeting moment,” is nonetheless a moment escaped, lost, disappeared, slipped into the beyond. The same ‘beyond,’ which, perhaps, the archeologist also conceives as an over determining presence that animates the present — past upon past — discovered in passing and disappearing as passed. It is apparent in the desert of Atacama that the impossibility of knowledge figuratively and literally glares back at the astronomers who spend their nights staring into the cosmos. All of life then is living in the past and passing as lived.

The stargazers who squint skywards and those who dig up the earth are all bound by the history of the mass grave that lays beneath their feet, sharing it with the wives and sisters of those whose family’s bones have become a carpet for political illusions and deceptions as with the rest of us. These remains remain, cutting across temporalities and space. That which exceeds hope, transformation, shame, love. The un-representability of memory and the search for representations is an overlapping one even as it may be ‘removed’ from itself. The Calama women are not satisfied in living without memory, until they are able to piece back a fragment of their past which morphs their present and onto a future — for it to finally assume the shape of history. Until they are able to give a legible form to the truth about the murderous Pinochet regime. Even though they know that the closest they may be able to come to the full truth is the farthest they may seem from it but there is hope in search itself.

A Transmitter of History

Still from the film, “Nostalgia for the Light”

“At a certain point I lost track of you. They make a desolation and call it peace… when you left even the stones were buried: the defenceless would have no weapons. […] My memory keeps getting in the way of your history. […]Your history gets in the way of my memory. […] Your memory gets in the way of my memory…” — Agha Shahid Ali, ‘Farewell’

The bodily fragments of the missing victims of the Pinochet regime, symbolize the hidden truths of an empire that concealed its own misgivings and with every search comes a finding which throws open another set of enquiries — another field of unknowns towards the building of unknown knowns. In the movie, Luís Henriquez, a former prisoner of the Pinochet regime’s concentration camps drew up maps of the prison he inhabited from his memory — as an approximation of the experience of the regime in and through his art. He is seen talking about the telescope as the source of freedom during his days in the camp.The telescope is that which transforms the enclosed field of the camp by opening it up to the limitless sky.

He talks of freedom while recounting his days of being held captive, as though the possibility of freedom itself translated into experiencing freedom even while being caged. He later reads out the names of his comrades whose names had chipped away with the wall that was falling apart. He read out the names regardless of the diminishing imprint of the inscription. The wall was a mere referent for us to verify his truth claim but there was nothing left to read the substance of truth against, nothing to verify. Guzmán comments: “He remembers traces that are erased. He is a transmitter of history.”

Luis as the symbol of dignity is shown looking at the sky superimposed with the image of floating dust particles for he is in possession of memory — not just his own but of an entire society structured by the ontologically silenced position of the slave, of the witches, of the queer, of the Black person, of the indigenous person — experienced in the shared brutalities of the Camp. He is connected with the past as they film captures a frame of him with his wife — who suffers from Alzheimer — plays on the screen. The narrator suggests that this sequence is a reflective representation of and a metaphor for Chile — — recovering its own memory in the struggle against forgetting. A nation was placed on the continuum of unearthing the birth of a past, untold and death of a past, foretold.

In time collective memory’s own traces fade and perniciously change one’s relation with their own anger — that is rendered productive through history and memory but not memory alone. Nonetheless, the weight of repressed memory and reverberation of its agonies go on silently felt by Chile’s people. Just like how his wife’s Alzheimer’s’ cannot erase the experience of the regime — as she embodies it, similarly, despite a collective forgetting and political amnesia of the brutalities of the Pinochet regime, it lives amongst us as those having survived it — in death and life, as remains and remainders, a residues and evidence, as matter and memory, as substance and history — and the distance we have from the truth is the same as that between light and sight — a millionth second and yet, the deeper we dig, the deeper the earth gets. An infinitude like memory itself, that contains within the act of remembering, a forgetting. Just like distance is required to be able to perceive touch. In the same way as the act of ontological forgetting is required to perceive reality in and as present — the realisation of living always already in the past is a knowledge temporarily suspended to be able to grasp the experience of reality as it is unfolding.

Here, memory is more than mimesis, insofar as it is embodied in life and death, and as a remainder caught in the movement of a sinister repetition of political dismembering of history. Sociologically, forgetting engenders its own resistance, ordaining those being forgotten with the task to remember, replenish and recreate memory from the gnawing realisation that time was never in their hands but the future could be. The manifestations of loss of life and memory stripped by the knife of history are many being many and thus, the ontological position of the occupants of plantations, prisons, camps, lynchings, witch-hunts index a constitutive absence and an immanent condition that orchestrates the terms of political engagement and its violence.

Still from the film, “Nostalgia for the Light”

Maria Popova observes, “A reflective tune goes past all racial conflict and all kinds of conflicts,” for Nina Simone [in her song, “who knows where the time goes,”] it deals with the unifying force of all human existence: the shared experience of time’s inescapable flow.”

It is through their subjective lack of history and the use of memory that freedom can be redeemed from the clutches of a history of erasures that paradoxically condemns violence to become both — an unspeakable haunting and a well documented reality — a fragment of its own misgivings. To be free to imagine a life toward freedom requires that we reckon with an absence that was constituted through violence — which insists on mere subsistence purposed toward the survival of a system of unfreedom as the epitome of liberty. In reckoning with this lack of freedom in a system of self-perpetuating unfreedom lies a deep optimism which would then coexist with nihilism that stems from confronting an overwhelming historical task that animates reality, one should not be misled by the weight of such a productive nihilism.