Nostalgia for the Light

A movie that goes through a delicate drama going on in the Atacama desert.

Until I watched it, I honestly didn't know that the best place in the whole world to search for light from the universe, also possesses the remaining of a mass tragedy that Chile went through. The movie brought these two things coherently, and it has this incredible comparison between a two distinct opposites, the beauty of the universe, and the ugliness of ourselves.

Somewhere in the movie one has to ask himself many questions. In a universe this vast with endless dots spreading all over its unbelievably ample space, with each dot as a whole star, smaller, similar or larger than the Sun; why do teeny tiny humans on Earth act so blindly to each others?! What is the purpose of knowing what's up there a million light years away while we still can't understand or deal with what's just beneath our noses? How come we were able to develop such powerful telescopes to look deep into outer space but not being able to develop a clearer insight to our own kind? And, how absurd it is to seek political power at any cost.

This beautiful movie provokes such questions and more, using the hardest way imaginable. Beautiful, but sad documentary.

This beautiful film will capture you emotionally, visually and intellectually. Patricio Guzmán's examination of light—its relationship to the past and what it illuminates of the future—is stunningly beautiful, insightful and very well shot. A scientist states early on in the film that there is no present only the past and future as the words he is forming with his mouth have already happened by the microsecond it takes for his voice to travel from his mouth to his subject's ears. It is this sort of abstract thought that permeates the films dialogue creating the mood.

The Atacama Desert in Chile is believed to be one of the driest places in the world. Some of its river beds have not seen water for more than 120,000 years. Because of its high altitude, nearly non-existent cloud cover, dry air, and lack of light pollution and radio interference from the very widely spaced cities, the desert is one of the best places in the world to conduct astronomical observations.

As a result, the world's astronomers flock to the Atacama to gaze out into the universe and to search for evidence and artifacts from the beginning of time. These "archaeologists of time" decompose the stars into their constituent elements one of which is calcium.

Elsewhere in the desert, other "archaeologists" search among the pebbles and dust for evidence of calcium. They are looking for bones. Or at least fragments of bones. They are the mothers, brothers, sisters and wives of Chile's disappeared. During Pinochet's military dictatorship many thousands of Chileans were abducted and killed and their bodies disposed of in the Atacama. Forty years later their relatives still search the desert for any sign or bone fragment that might give a clue to where their loved ones lie.

Patricio Guzman juxtaposes these two sets of archaeologists in his beautiful documentary, "Nostalgia for the Light". In many ways they both seek answers to the same question. They try to find the true meaning of life.

There are some very moving scenes in this movie. In one, a lady in her seventies sits in the desert, in tears, and proclaims that she will never stop looking for the remains of her loved one. In the other, a young Chilean astronomer, whose parents were killed by the government when she was only one, clutches her new born baby (this scene is just wonderful). She displays the transcendent wisdom of someone of far greater years as she explains how she has, through her work and observations, come to terms with their murder.

An unmissable movie.

http://sofia-notes.blogspot.com/2011/09/nostalgia-for-light.html

I had heard this was a documentary about the Chilean Disappeared of the Pinochet regime and as such it took me a while to decide to watch it since one does tend to lean towards easier viewing after a day at work. I had recently been on a run of documentaries about heavier subjects and decided that this would be next, expecting it to be very much about pain, death and loss. I was a bit thrown when the film opens and appears to be about astronomy but I went with it as I figured it was best not to let what I assumed guide the film but rather let it lead me!

What I found was that this isn't really a documentary in the traditional sense; yes it is real life and fact based, but we don't have a specific subject revealed or examined in the way you would expect from a historical documentary. Instead what we get is more of a musing or mediation that plays like a combination of documentary, poetry, art and science (non) fiction. This sounds pretentious but it really isn't and the way it is presented means that discussions about how there is no actual "present" and that our atoms come from the stars sit comfortably next to discussions with a woman whose parents were disappeared when she was 1 year old and a 70 year old who goes daily into the desert endlessly searching for bones of those dumped there decades prior. All of it works and is equally engaging and, more importantly, compliments each other in a way I didn't expect.

Content-wise the film has a real peaceful beauty to it while also looking at terrible situations with a lot of pain and loss. It is fitting that the film is also visually beautiful. The use of shots of galaxies spinning through the clear sky over the desert is a real help to this, but even smaller moments of a woman picking through dirt are really well shot and do not contrast with the shots of space. The visuals add to the content really well and I was surprised by how engaged I was; it wasn't that it informed me about a lot (although it did a bit) but more that it invited me to think with it, to muse with it and I really enjoyed that sensation.

As an idea it really shouldn't work at all and experience tells me it should have come out as a pretentious piece of soul searching like an art student did it, but it is nothing of the sort. It is beautiful, engaging, thought-provoking and really well filmed and constructed. Go with it – it is very good.

"Nostalgia for the light" takes us on a journey through Chile's Atacama's desert. Throughout this documentary, Patricio Guzman becomes a key interlocutor weaving images, interviews and poetics. This story of a nation's history, pain, joy, discovery and the unknown pulls us into a well of thought.

A group of women search for their beloved ones killed during Pinochia's Military dictatorship. Astronomers discover the early beginnings of life. Archaeologists narrate the history of lost civilizations. They revisit the desert each time in search for answers to the same questions.

We shift through two realms through the ethereal sounds and sights that form throughout the film. The past, present and future constitute our lives. Amnesia is a nation's curse up until front- liners revive history.