Written, Directed & Narrated by Patricio Guzmán
Produced by Renate Sachse
Released by Icarus Films
Spanish with English subtitles
France/Germany/Chile. 90 min. Not Rated

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. It essentially derives its force from a false remembrance of history. Nostalgia, the longing to return home, is never about a real home, but an idealized one, flushed of the nuances. More than an ache, it’s a desire for a past that existed, but perhaps not entirely. Drained of its complexity, the ideal past becomes a symbol, powerful for its shared meaning but also for its ability to become something unique and meaningful to each person. And in this way nostalgia takes a shared history and renders it personal, enshrouding us in melancholy.

In this way, Patricio Guzmán’s documentary Nostalgia for the Light plays with both time and memory. Guzmán, as film critic Michael Koresky calls him, is “the cinematic memory of Chile.” His body of work, including The Battle of Chile trilogy and many other films,  documents the trauma of the U.S.-backed 1973 coup that installed the genocidal dictator Augusto Pinochet and the horrors he produced.  Nostalgia as trauma and violence, both cosmic and human, are very much the topic of his new film.

The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest on earth. Due to the cloudless nature of the space, along with other factors, it’s one of the best areas for astronomical observation. It’s also the burial place for many of the disappeared from the Chilean coup, and in this shared space the two main themes of Nostalgia are woven together. Studying the stars is studying history. By the time light emanating from a star hits earth, the star has already changed. One astronomer notes that even objects that are right in front of us are in the past by the time we actually see them, due to the delay from the light bouncing off the object and hitting our retinas a fraction of a second later. Thus, we always, at all times, live in the past.

The big bang was a trauma our universe never recovered from. The leftover background radiation from the event is present everywhere in the universe. As the traces are found all over, so do the traces of the coup irradiate Chile—the woman whose parents disappeared; the survivor of Pinochet’s concentration camp; women, stuck in the past, continually searching the desert for the remains of their lost family members. Guzmán notes, “Memory has a gravitational force.” It can also pull us inward and double up on itself, creating a singularity that threatens to drag us in and tear us apart. With signs of trauma all around, it’s difficult for these people to escape.

As serious as the subject is, though, Guzmán is playful with his choices of images: from dust motes in random motion to achingly beautiful shots of cosmic bodies and desertscapes. The gravity of the subject is never overwhelmed, but there is more here than a merely somber tone. The visual and metaphorical analogies suffusing the film add a dimension that many other documentarians might have left by the wayside in favor of heavy-handedly scoring a political or philosophical point. Nostalgia takes a simple simile and investigates every fractal edge, without a linear story or a pedantic tone. Like the actual past, it’s messy and full of loose ends—a poetic mess connected together by a creative spirit.