The Battle of Chile: The Coup Will Be Televised, by David Bax

Not that long after making his hopeful documentary The First Year, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán was compelled to embark on its follow-up, the masterwork that would come to be the defining document not only of its time and place but of its maker’s career. While clearly still the work of the same director–due to both its subject and its style–the most immediately noticeable difference between The First Year and The Battle of Chile is the chaos. The earlier was kinetic, to be sure, with its endless montage. But here, there’s a very real sense of catch-as-catch-can, with Guzman and his tiny crew grabbing footage and man on the street interviews wherever they can. And the reason it feels that way is because that’s how it was made. Fast, cheap and out of control, with the footage immediately smuggled out of the country to be edited in exile. Eventually, Guzmán was forced to remain away from his beloved home country and the nearly four and a half hour film (initially split into and released in three parts) wasn’t shown in Chile for decades.

Like The First Year, The Battle of Chile serves as a history lesson for non-Chileans and later generations. Unlike The First Year, though, it’s an overwhelming education, a bit like cramming a whole semester’s worth of studying into the night before the exam. The First Year had time for moments of grace. Even at three times the length, The Battle of Chile is breathless in its constant employment of narration, broken up only by interviews. If you don’t understand Spanish, you’ll spend more time reading here than during any other film that comes to mind.

And it should be noted–as I did in my review of The First Year–that Guzmán is a highly subjective filmmaker. Essentially the polar opposite of a documentarian like Frederick Wiseman, Guzmán is very clearly, even emphatically, insisting that you experience these events as he did and that you see the world through his eyes and the lens of his politics.

With The First Year (yes, I’m going to keep invoking the previous film; perhaps it ought to be considered a crucial prologue to this one), Guzmán was given access by then newly elected president Salvador Allende. Here, he has to steal that access. It can bowl you over thinking about the danger into which he and his crew were putting themselves when they, for instance, sneak in behind the police to capture footage of them firing what appear to be tear gas canisters at protestors.

Ever since its release, critics and others have been describing The Battle of Chile as one of the most important political films of all time. It’s as true now as it was then because it’s not simply a record of what happened in this particular instance but because it details a playbook that will be immediate recognizable to anyone who’s following politics in the present day. The losing party, starting by making baseless accusations of election fraud, seeks to sabotage the more popular winner and his new administration at every turn. This is a common strategy to right wing political parties across the world; undermine and destroy the parts of government you don’t like so that you can then turn around to the voters and point out how those institutions don’t work.

Dishonest tactics mixed with brute force are how the battle–Guzmán did not choose his title casually–was lost. By the end of the film, a blanket of existential sadness has started to settle over Guzmán’s Chile. It’s even harder to bear for those of us living in the film’s future who know, with Augusto Pinochet about to take over, that things are going to get worse than The Battle of Chile can even imagine.