Patricio Guzman's Documentaries

I'm taking a class about the military dictatorship in Chile and my professor is amazing. She keeps on bringing this stellar guest speaker who are just the coolest, most inspiring people. I had to moderate a debate yesterday with filmmaker Patricio Guzman. Guzman started filming as a student a documentary with 5 friends about Chile's political situation before the Pinochet coup (Salvador Allende was the first democratically elected socialist president, an it was after a period of extreme tensions and polarization between the left and the right that the Pinochet/CIA coup happened).

Anyways this is not a history class, I wanted to say how incredible it was to hear from him about things like: how they manage to smuggle the films out of the country after the coup happened, how he escaped his arrest in the National Stadium, how he edited his first film using that material (La Batalla de Chile, a trilogy) while in exile in Madrid, how it was to return to Chile after the coup, interview victims and torturers, etc.

I was glad we had also a lot of time to speak about film making, particularly about documentary film making and the role it has in creating memory and shaping how we see history. This he writes in his website: "A country without documentary films is like a family without a photo album".

I asked him lots of questions, specially because it had been thinking about this street photography thing (I just wrote a little comment about it on an earlier post, and then had a big FB discussion with Iri and Chris!) and I guess in some ways documentary film is very similar to street photography: trying to let the subjects speak for themselves, this aim to "expose"... (This is just my opinion on it, of course).

When I was thinking about street photography I was telling Iri and Chris that this really annoyed me because in a way, I felt like street photography seemed to claim that it was this objective medium for showing the "real" an the "raw" an did not acknowledge the inherent presence of a person with an agenda behind the lens, choosing what an how to present these "truths". I felt like this style, unlike more in-your-face-this-is-what-i-think ways of doing photography, was appropriating the subjects in the same way, in order to convey a photographer's vision, however it still tried to hide under the pretense of a certain objectivity.

Walker Evans, epitome of the street photo man (writes in a book the photographer is a "reporter", a "spy")

Floyd and Lucille Burroughs, Hale County, Alabamal, 1936, gelatin silver print.

VS.

I took this picture we we did the street photo field trip with my class, I said
"I don't know them" at the risk of sounding too dramatic

Therefore I was having all these ideas in my mind while discussing some if these issues with Patricio, but the first thing he said was: there's nothing objective about making a documentary, that it was a completely personal mission. It was his artistic work, his ideas... He said the producer can not be neutral because that is impossible, and that there is a script that is written before the interviews are done. Some might feel a little cheated about hearing this but I felt a very refreshing honesty in his answers. Of course he contradicted himself a little bit, but I'll leave that out for the sake of my own mental sanity, and because I find myself so motivated once again go for the documentary film path.

Why do I even hate stree photo so much? What has it done to me? Haha, I'm sure if I talk to a street photographer they'll tell me their work is completely subjective and its just their own interpretation of what's around what their showing, a completely egotistical activity, then I'll be happy...

But for now I can try to feel comfortable in a middle ground between crazy conceptual abstraction and a naive attempt to expose universal "truths" and "peoples" (street photo, sorry for trashing you so much) by sticking to Patricio's notion of the documentary.

Patricio's new film is showing in Paris now, I saw it with my class on Tuesday.