The authors of a film are not just the film-makers or cameraman but the people who figure in the film.1
A collective effort by its three ‘directors’, La Spirale presents sociologist Armand Mattelart’s thesis that the Chilean right formed a reactionary ‘mass line’ to destabilize Chile and wrest control from Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) government.2 Emerging from the auspices of ISKRA, the French Left Bank film cooperative initiated by director Chris Marker, La Spirale, perhaps more than any other film of the period, is a document of the intellectual and cultural crossings of the 1970s radical left in Chile and in exile.3 Conceivably for the same reasons, it is a widely neglected film that, until recently, was almost impossible to see and remains under preservation threat.
Consisting almost entirely of footage retrieved from international television news and film archives cut to a rigorous voice-over, La Spirale is an exemplar of the political principles of cooperative filmmaking with respect to its production, content, form and distribution. Nonetheless, and despite his continued disavowals, the film is regularly attributed to Chris Marker.4 While Marker certainly had an influence on La Spirale, to assign him ‘authorship’ is to too readily disregard the principles of ISKRA, the film’s genesis, and to overlook its most interesting features: the intellectual exchange between the cultural politics of Allende’s Chile and the Rive Gauche, the stylistic influence of the Nuevo Cine Chileno, and its use as a dialectic tool of solidarity and resistance during the early years of the dictatorship.5
This redirection of focus repositions La Spirale within a wider catalogue of work that Juan Miguel Palacios has termed ‘Chilean exile cinema’ and which he has described as
the sum of all the various networks of production, distribution, and exhibition as well as the cooperative ties among national and international organizations, state offices, and exile communities that enabled the production of this oeuvre. In this sense, Chilean exile cinema is a particular form of transnational cinema, born out of global networks of solidarity.6
Palacios’ essay fits within a growing body of work on transnational cinema that focuses on exile. This literature emphasizes exile’s porous geographical and temporal boundaries, and approaches exile as a state of hybridity.7 Where previously Jacqueline Mouesca had identified the end of Chilean exile cinema as 1983, Palacios’ historic rather than narrative approach leaves it indefinitely open and also embraces films made in ‘internal exile’.8 This is a useful intervention and La Spirale certainly built on the ‘various networks’ Palacios identifies. However, it was produced by a team that did not include a Chilean national, although it repurposed a substantial amount of material produced by Chilean filmmakers for the ends of solidarity. It thus raises interesting questions about the distinctions between the overlapping categories of transnational film, a cinema of solidarity and exile film, particularly when examined alongside Mattelart’s intellectual trajectory.
La Spirale emerged from a meeting between Mattelart and Marker in 1973; Marker suggested to the sociologist that his thesis could form the basis of a film, and introduced him to SLON colleagues Valérie Mayoux and Jacqueline Meppiel. Belgian-born, educated in France, Mattelart had recently returned to Europe from Chile, in what Hector Schmucler has characterized as ‘regreso pero tambien exilio’.9 Arriving as a visiting professor at the Universidad Católica de Chile in 1962, Mattelart lived in the country for eleven years, making it his permanent home until he and his family were expelled in October 1973. Mattelart’s time in the country spanned the Alessandri, Frei and Allende governments, a period of rich intellectual convergences that inspired a renaissance in his thinking which is indelibly imprinted in his work.
Mariano Zarowsky identifies a transitional moment that redirected Mattelart away from the humanist sociology of development which broadly characterizes his previous work. Of particular influence was the creation of the Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Nacional (CEREN) at the Universidad Católica, one of several new research centres created in the wake of the reformist drive of the student strikes of 1967 and 1968.10 It was at CEREN, where Mattelart directed the Área de Ideología y Cultura and encountered influential individuals active in the militant left,11 that his analyses shifted focus to critiques of culture and mass communication and in particular to the problematics posed by the mass media to the aims of the political left.12
Mattelart’s thinking was also informed by the latest European structuralist works that he was responsible for acquiring for CEREN, as well as by Argentine academics influenced by Gramsci who sought exile in Chile. While all of these were influential, it is important to recall that the connections Mattelart was making across politics, ideology, mass culture and the concept of ‘underdevelopment’ crystallized in the specific socio-political context of Chile in the late sixties. This intellectual trajectory was subsequently realized under the drive of the Unidad Popular government to incorporate leftist intellectuals in a reassessment of mass communication that proposed a ‘nueva cultura Chilena’.13 It was during this period that he refined the ideas that would later appear in Multinationales et Systèmes de Communication, les Appareils Ideologique de l’Imperialisme,14 and that informed La Spirale.15 Notably, both works are historically grounded analyses that extrapolate from the Chilean context.
As David Featherstone has argued, solidarity has a ‘generative, transformative character… [and] solidaristic practices can shape new relations, new linkages, new connections’.16 Certainly, Mattelart’s intellectual, political and personal journey in Latin America conforms to this characterization, and is illustrative of how solidarity is an active process that involves an unbounding of identity. However, despite Mattelart’s immersion in Chilean cultural, political and intellectual life, his return to Europe remains that: a return to a geo-political space and culture with which he was familiar and in which he had the protections of European citizenship. Is Schmucler correct, then, to assert that Mattelart was also an exile and, concomitantly, is La Spirale Chilean exile cinema?
Schmucler’s claim follows the unbounded and generous logic of solidarity. It positions Mattelart as being on the receiving end of solidarity, an act that, coming from those who are in a more precarious position (Argentine and Chilean exiles, who are only and not also in exile), is a clear articulation of the agency involved in creating solidarity’s empowering and generative characteristics. It recognized that he had shared in their political struggle as well as their trauma and that, in doing so, he was transformed. Mattelart’s hybrid also status thus made him particularly well-placed to act as a cultural mediator,17 and participate in ISKRA’s collaborative radical filmmaking practice, which had, in turn, been influenced by encounters with global radical movements, including in Latin America.18 These exchanges convey the fluidity of transnational cinema and of global solidarity. However, while the application of the term ‘Chilean exile cinema’ to La Spirale articulates the agency in and creativity of solidarity, is something central to the experience of exile lost in this usage? Certainly solidarity fundamentally alters the nature of exile, but if we are to take an historical rather than a narrative approach to exile cinema, it becomes important to more closely examine the (admittedly porous) boundaries between an ‘exile film’ and a ‘solidarity film’.
While Mattelart’s intellectual influence looms large in La Spirale, he had no prior experience of filmmaking and Valérie Mayoux and Jacqueline Meppiel, both of whom had worked in an editorial capacity on previous SLON productions, were integral to its construction.19 The film’s two hours and eighteen minutes consist almost entirely of primary footage that was acquired in a year-long trawl through approximately twenty international news archives.20 Indeed, Mayoux identified the vast quantity of international footage on Chile as one of the driving forces behind the production, explaining that the focus placed on the Allende-led UP during its three years in government, particularly by American and European television channels, created a need to ‘rassembler les documents’.21
The reinterpretation of news footage produced by ‘la métropole impérialiste’ (La Spirale) goes to the heart of the film’s project: the analysis and illustration of mass media as a tool of imperialism in the downfall of the UP. It is perhaps unsurprising then that Mattelart identified such footage, precisely because of its focus on the Chilean middle classes, as being more useful for his purposes than either leftist documentaries by filmmakers such as Patricio Guzman and Saul Landau or news footage by ChileFilms and Cuban news sources.22 The authors of La Spirale, then, extended beyond the immediate production (editorial) team to incorporate, as Marker suggests, the subjects: ‘the people who figure in the film’. Given one of the film’s driving concerns with the processes of the media, the subjects are both onscreen and behind the camera.
Deeply self-aware with a laconicly ironic tone, the film’s voice-over immediately explains the internal logic of the team’s editorial decisions: ‘queremos explicar como la derecha chilena hizo de esos tres años una maquina infernal que arranca antes de la elección de Allende una espiral ascendente hacia la explosion’.23 Interspersed throughout are a series of seven intertitle sequences that are built around a US government strategy game called ‘Politica’, which was used by the CIA to predict and control social insurrection in Latin America. These short sequences use animated figures to represent aspects of the game as it applied to the Chilean situation. They are the only sections that do not use archival footage, and they function as the main structuring device for the narrative of the ‘espiral ascendente’. Notably, these sections provide critical commentary on the then-present post-coup situation, in contrast to the archival film which is primarily used to evidence an alternative interpretation of the recent Chilean past. As a consequence, the film’s dialectic of solidarity and resistance is at its most apparent in these segue sections.
As Carolina Amaral de Aguiar has pointed out:
After the military coup, like their makers, the images of the Chilean activist documentaries and of Chile Films, recorded during the Unidad Popular government, were exiled. In other words, they left the country clandestinely and in a diffuse manner. Gathering the recordings made by both leftwing filmmakers and rightwing television networks, was also a means of challenging this exile which through prohibition and destruction sought to consign the years of the Unidad Popular to ‘oblivion’.24
There was, therefore, a clear political justification for producing La Spirale: to unite the voice of the Chilean left in its disparate and multiple geographical exiles, to ensure the documentation of its history was preserved and commented upon, but most urgently to raise awareness of and support for the left’s cause. This was active and radical memory-making borne out of an immediate political necessity. La Spirale was a tool of solidarity, designed to build consciousness, strengthen political opposition and unify the displaced Chilean left, and was used for fundraising activities by solidarity campaigns. The ‘people who figure in the film’ were thus also the audience.
That the means of producing, distributing and accessing culture should be egalitarian is central to Mattelart’s sociological work and La Spirale’s thesis, Chilean nueva cultura and the Chilean solidarity movement, and was of paramount importance to SLON and later ISKRA. As William F. Van Wert points out, Chris Marker’s political films are ‘about and for his subjects, for committed (and restricted) audiences that can see the films outside of the normal distribution system, that can use the films for internal analysis and that can become film-makers themselves’.25 Certainly these criteria can be applied to La Spirale’s political production and distribution practice. Unsurprisingly, it was not widely released in the conventional sense but nonetheless made a broad geographical imprint in its dissemination via networks closely tied to its subject, in particular through leftist organizations linked to solidarity campaigns and through cultural organizations and events including film festivals.26
Culture was an integral component of the international solidarity campaign and it is a testament to its connectivity and influence that the English-language version of La Spirale was translated by Susan Sontag and the voice-over provided by Donald Sutherland. Subsequently, the film remained widely unavailable for a long period. A single public VHS copy that was available to view in the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information (BPI) at the Centre Pompidou was worn out by repeated viewings by Chilean exiles who heard of its existence by word of mouth.27 While the producers retained a copy, including a Betamax of the English-language version, arranging the rights for a widely available French-language version has proven problematic.28 Indeed, it was due to the efforts of a group of exiles in Belgium working on a committee against impunity and for democracy in Latin America that La Spirale re-emerged from virtual oblivion. The group arranged to have the film subtitled, and La Spirale was screened in Chile for the first time in 2006. Subsequently, the Agrupación de ex presos políticos Corporación Parque por la Paz ‘Villa Grimaldi’, together with the leftist international publication Le Monde Diplomatique, which has offices in Santiago, produced a DVD as part of a series of films that had long been unavailable in the country. La Spirale’s cultural desexilio consequently was heavily dependent on transnational networks of solidarity that formed in the seventies.29
The process of discovery described here followed in the footsteps of Chilean film archivers’ efforts to repatriate, restore and exhibit films of the period that had been ‘lost’.30 Indeed, the history of Chilean film archives is one of cultural renewal, cultural blackout, cultural exile and negotiated, transitional revisiting of the recent traumatic past that the nation has undergone. La Spirale thus continues to exemplify the political filmmaking principles of ISKRA, the historical processes associated with Chilean exile cinema and, more broadly, cultures of solidarity of the era.