The First Year: Were We Ever So Young?, by David Bax

For about 50 years, Patricio Guzmán has been chronicling the present and recent past of his native Chile from a leftist point of view, focusing much of his work on the military coup that overthrew and murdered the democratically elected president Salvador Allende and the subsequent dictatorial rule and crimes against humanity of General Augusto Pinochet. If you know his more recent work, particularly the loose trilogy formed by Nostalgia for the Light (2010), The Pearl Button (2015) and The Cordillera of Dreams (2019)–all of which approach Chilean politics through the framing of various aspects of Chilean geography–you’ll know to expect burningly didactic, polemical work from him. Still, for someone who hasn’t seen it before, his first documentary feature, 1972’s The First Year (newly restored and about to make the theatrical rounds in North America), comes with a bit of a shock because it was made before Pinochet’s violent and criminal rise to power.

If you’re new to the film’s entire subject, worry not. Guzman provides plenty of context. The First Year doubles as a history lesson, if one that happens to be biased toward freedom, democracy and Allende’s working class voters. When the democratic socialist’s election causes the stock market to plummet, Guzman–who got unprecedented access to Allende’s first year in office–makes sure to frame it as the panicking of the well-fed bourgeoisie terrified of losing their outsized piece of the pie. But the history lesson doesn’t go much earlier than Allende’s victory. In a kind of foreshadowing of Guzman’s life’s work to come, he essentially treats the Chile of 1970 as a new country, finding a way to cultivate and live off its own resources.

Even in his young age, Guzman’s filmmaking is virtuosic but deceptively so. His rhetorical aims are so straightforward and presented so directly that the initial impression is one of simplicity. He’s almost monastic in his eschewing of cinematic decoration. Yet to step back and consider the furious momentum and sheer volume of footage and information is to realize what a stunning achievement The First Year is. To submit oneself to the film is to undergo an experience not unlike that provided by the work of a montage artist like Chris Marker.

Make no mistake, though. Guzmán is a propagandist, using his considerable talents to persuade the viewer of his political assertions. When Allende’s critics accuse his policies of leading to nationwide food shortages, Guzmán replies with footage of a fully stocked grocery store. But we have no way of knowing the specific circumstances of those shots. Luckily, my bullshit detector has been honed by years of watching Michael Moore documentaries.

There’s also no knowing what would have become of Allende’s presidency and legacy had it not ended in the bloody manner that it did. In the early 2000s, about the time I would have seen my first Guzmán film, The Pinochet Case, I also saw Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain‘s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, about the failed coup attempt against Venezuela’s democratic socialist leader, Hugo Chávez. For many of the same reasons people supported Allende–the lionization of workers; the rejection of wealthy foreign interests and their meddling–Chávez was something of a hero to those of us on the left. Over the dozen-plus years of his rule, though, he became increasingly authoritarian and censorious and ultimately paved the path for his successor, Nicolás Maduro, who has been widely accused of being an outright dictator. Great documentary, though.

So we don’t know what would have happened. But, unlike the Guzmán behind the camera when this footage was shot, we do know what did happen. That gives The First Year, already a stupendous film to begin with, an extra dose of the tragic and of the bittersweet.