The Battle of Chile (1975-9, Patricio Guzmán)
Saturday 1st of April 12pm-6pm, Richard Hoggart Building cinema (Room 104)
Join us on Saturday the 1st of April from 12pm (screening starts at 12:15pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema (Room 104) for an unmissable screening of all three parts of Patricio Guzmán’s masterpiece of documentary cinema, The Battle of Chile (1975-9), which depicts and analyses the events in Chile leading up to the military coup on 11 September 1973 led by General Augusto Pinochet against the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup.
The film is in three parts: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (1975) is 97 minutes and will finish at around 2pm. After a half an hour break, part two, The Coup d’État (1976) will start at 2:30pm, run for 88 minutes and finish at 4pm. After another half an hour break, part three, Popular Power (1979) will begin at 4:30pm, running for 78 minutes and finishing at 5:50pm. Afterwards we’ll go to a pub nearby. There will be some printed copies of Ralph Miliband’s seminal 1973 essay “The Coup in Chile” available at the screening.
The Battle of Chile can reasonably be claimed one of the most important films of the twentieth century: it stands alone as a comprehensive document of a moment of democratic socialist transformation, and then of a counter-revolutionary mobilisation against that transformation. It is also an extraordinary portrait of a popular political culture whose contrast with the trivial and moribund spectacle of politics at Westminster could hardly be more stark or refreshing – in that respect, at least, truly a tonic for the depressed and exiled Corbynite.
In 1970, Salvador Allende became the first democratically elected socialist leader in Latin America when he won the Chilean presidential election. Allende, and the Popular Unity coalition of left-wing parties he led, proposed a ‘Chilean road to socialism’ that would use legal, legislative means in combination with social movements to bring about socialism in Chile. (See here for his first speech to the Chilean parliament after his election.) Yet almost as soon as Allende and Popular Unity were elected, the US government under Richard Nixon – with Henry Kissinger as his National Security Adviser – began to seek the downfall of Allende’s government. Initially, regime change was pursued by financing a campaign of economic sabotage which it was assumed would lead Chilean voters to kick Popular Unity out: the US goverment secretly paid $2 million to Chilean truck drivers to go on strike and bring the economy to a standstill. The Allende government nevertheless pressed on with a transformative programme of socialist measures, including the nationalisation of key industries (many owned by foreign companies) and the healthcare system, land redistribution including the exproporiation of the latifundios (the biggest landowners), expansion of housing and the welfare state, progressive educational reform, measures to promote gender equality, political and trade union rights and the development of Project Cybersyn – a pioneering attempt to development the computational means to organise a democratically planned economy.
The first part of The Battle of Chile begins in March 1973 on the day of the Chilean congressional elections when Popular Unity is re-elected with almost the exact same number of seats as in 1969, defying the hopes of the Chilean right and the US State Department that the campaign of sabotage would lead to Popular Unity’s ejection from power by democratic means. The policy of the US government and the Chilean right henceforth shifted towards creating the necessary conditions for a military coup against the regime, culminating in the coup of 11 September 1973 which led to the death of Allende, the murder of over 3,000 Chilean leftists and trade unionists, and the right-wing Pinochet dictatorship – a key early test case for the economic policies of Chicago School neoliberalism. And today, 50 years on, the US government continues to keep classified the contents of President Nixon’s presidential daily briefings around the date of the coup, which are believed to contain intelligence reports informing him on the Chilean military’s coup preparations. For further reading on the coup, see Christopher Hitchens’s essay “11 September 1973” from the London Review of Books in July 2002 as well as Ralph Miliband’s October 1973 essay “The Coup in Chile”, which analyses the lessons of the coup for socialist strategy.
The Battle of Chile is a meticulous, immersive, on-the-ground documentary portrait of the crucial six months leading up to the coup – arguably the most momentous period in the modern history of Chile. The filmmakers were extraordinarily courageous in their efforts to be present on the scene of every major political event of the period – even the most dangerous – resulting in a number of stunning visual sequences. The film reels had to be smuggled out of Chile after the coup and edited for six years in Cuba. But the film is more than just a documentary record: its political analysis is incisive and rigorously Marxist. The black and white stock on which it was filmed was sent by the French documentary maker Chris Marker, as Patricio Guzmán recounts here. Marker also contributed to another film about the Popular Unity government and the 1973 coup – La Spirale (1976, Armand Mattelart, Valerie Mayoux and Jacqueline Meppiel) – and produced a four-hour, essay-film magnum opus on the political mobilisations of the late 1960s and 1970s, A Grin Without a Cat (1977).
Patricio Guzmán has gone on to direct a number of documentary films about Chile’s political history and present situation, including his acclaimed recent trilogy Nostalgia for the Light (2010), The Pearl Button (2015) and The Cordillera of Dreams (2019), which reckon with the legacy of the 1973 coup for modern-day Chile, as well as My Imaginary Country (2022), his document of the 2019 uprising in Chile.
One of the most popular anthems of Popular Unity was “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (“The people united will never be defeated!”), which was written and recorded in June 1970 by the composer Sergio Ortega and the Nueva Canción Chilena (New Chilean Song) folk group Quilapayún. In 1975, as a tribute to the struggle of the Chilean people against the Pinochet regime, the American radical composer Fredric Rzewski wrote The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, an hour-long piano cycle of 36 variations taking the anthem as its starting and concluding theme. Go here for the 2016 recording by Igor Levit.