Nostalgia for the Light

On the same day, another continent. The Atacama is one of the driest places on earth; its sky is thin and clear, which is why astronomers gather there to look at light emitted billions of years ago. And because it is so dry, the desert also preserves mummified remains, ancient shells — and, after 1973, people buried in secret. On All Souls' Day the film offers an almost cruel symmetry: the better a country becomes at seeing its past, the harder it becomes to pretend it has none.

影片从一个很小的动作开始：导演帕特里西奥·古斯曼说他从小热爱天文学。然后他把镜头转向智利北部的阿塔卡马沙漠。 在那里，三组人同时在工作。天文学家在观测宇宙最古老的光；考古学家在沙层里读人类留下的痕迹；还有一群上了年纪的女性，拿着小铲和筛子，一寸一寸地找——她们找的是1973年军政时期被处决、被秘密掩埋的亲人，剩下的骨骼碎片。 影片没有把这三组人剪成三条平行线，而是让他们彼此照亮。它问的是一个简单的问题：过去到底在哪里？

In 2010 it won the European Film Award for Best Documentary; in 2014 the BFI's Sight & Sound listed it among the fifty greatest documentaries ever made. Guzmán's method is not accusation but juxtaposition. He places astronomers searching for calcium as the residue of stars beside women searching for calcium as bone — the image cuts from meteorite to bone fragment until the two are nearly indistinguishable. That cut is the sharpest gesture in the film. Two survivors of the Chacabuco camp also appear: one learned constellations at night from a fellow prisoner who knew astronomy, and recalled that everyone felt enormously free; another paced out the camp and drew it to scale from memory, tearing up the paper each night and hiding it, then rushing to the toilet at dawn. The army later banned the astronomy classes, on the grounds that prisoners might navigate by the stars. The film's pivot is a paradox: Chile is the country where the past is most accessible, and Chileans still cannot acknowledge their own.