Creator's Statement

After the military coup in 1973 and the displacement many had to endure, Chilean filmmakers narrated their own exiles and those of others. More than two hundred films and videos make up the corpus known as “Chilean Exile Cinema,” produced in countries such as Canada, France, Finland, Germany (East and West), Mozambique, and Sweden, among others.[1] We have examined this complex cultural phenomenon from different angles in our previous works, emphasizing the modes of production, circulation, and distribution of this exilic corpus (Palacios 2016) or studying the political and aesthetic features through which these films underscore exile as an experience that never ceases (Ramírez-Soto 2014). Here we adopt a narrower focus, by concentrating on the presence of letters in Chilean exile cinema, as well as a different methodological approach, since the video essay allows us a more tactile engagement with these images and sounds of displacement. Through the cinematic exploration of recurring tropes such as writing, voicing, and reading letters, we suggest that epistolary exchange emerges to mark distance and to inscribe the geographical and temporal dislocation caused by exile and the impossibility of returning to the homeland.

This characteristic should not be surprising. As Hamid Naficy asserted, “exile and epistolarity necessitate one another, for distance and absence drive them both. However, by addressing someone in an epistle, an illusion of presence is created that hovers in the text’s interstices” (2001: 5). In a scene from Wenn wir zusammen lebten…/If we Lived Together… (West Germany, 1983), director Antonio Skármeta posits in voiceover a similar reflection, accompanying the image of actor Oscar Castro reading a letter in the middle of the street: “Absence and distance are an everyday dimension of our lives.” Letters thus become the indelible mark of that distance at the same time that they allow for a potential reparation of absence.

In Chilean exile cinema characters write, expect, receive, and read letters. We see pens moving through various kinds of paper and diverse body postures when sitting to write or when beginning to read. We hear voices which sometimes coincide with what is written in an overlapping of text, sound, and image, as in Fragmentos de un diario inacabado/Fragments from an Unfinished Diary (Angelina Vázquez, Finland/Chile, 1983). Most times, nonetheless, speech moves forward in an oblique direction with regards to the paper, reconstructing words we will never see or anticipating the hands which are about to write these soon-to-be letters.

These two forms of appearance of the epistle, through the surfaces of papers and through the voices that turn a letter into spoken words, constitute the center of our video essay. Our work establishes relations between various films from Carmen Castillo, Marilú Mallet, Percy Matas, Raúl Ruiz, Claudio Sapiaín, Antonio Skármeta, and Angelina Vázquez, among others, to account for the ways in which Chilean exile cinema resorts to the letter in order to represent the unavoidable rift imposed by uprootment. The video essay avoids an excessive fragmentation of these clips. First, because the circulation of most of these films has been scarce, and we want to contribute to their visibility. Second, because we want the letters invoked in these segments to speak in all their political and affective force. We do, however, provoke associations through the editing. For instance, a letter written in paper (Three Crowns of the Sailor, Raúl Ruiz, France, 1983) connects to another one read out loud (Los transplantados, Percy Matas, France, 1975). The voice of a Swedish child saying farewell to a Chilean friend at the airport (Eran unos que venían de Chile, Claudio Sapiaín, Sweden/Chile, 1986) gives way to that of a returnee teenager in Chile who reads in German the letter he receives from an old friend (Aquí donde yo vivo, Carlos Puccio, Germany, 1994). Music appears in all its therapeutic power to deal with family losses, as in Fragments from an Unfinished Diary and Recado de Chile/Message from Chile (Collective, 1979), one of the first Chilean films with testimonies of mothers of the disappeared.

Our video essay borrows its title from this documentary, made by a collective formed by Chilean filmmakers residing in Chile, who shot the images, and by Chileans in exile, who edited the material in Cuba. Even if we do not explicitly explore this kind of exchange in our video essay, we rescue this memory in our title in order to stress that Chilean filmmakers, in addition to turning to letters in their narrative and documentary work, also exchanged epistles, audio recordings, and 16mm and 35mm footage themselves. This dialogue between “inxiles” and exiles is represented metaphorically in our video, by superimposing a letter written in Recado de Chile with one that is received and read in Eran unos que venían de Chile.

Lastly, the video essay is punctuated by three brief sequences. These have neither voice nor text, but are accompanied by the same music by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, extracted from Unfinished Diary (Marilú Mallet, 1982). In these fragments we see a desk in which a typewriter occupies a central place, the reading of an old letter, and fingers feverishly pressing the keys of yet another typewriter. These scenes point to the key role the act of writing and reading letters plays in breaching the aching distance of the far-away homeland. The typing fingers in the last image from Calle Sante Fe (Carmen Castillo, France/Chile, 2006) end our audiovisual proposal to suggest that exile always remains an open and unfinished experience.

Works Cited:

Mouesca, Jacqueline. Plano secuencia de la memoria de Chile: veinticinco años de cine chileno (1960-1985). Madrid: Ediciones del Litoral, 1988.

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2001.

Palacios, José Miguel. “Resistance vs. Exile: The Political Rhetoric of Chilean Exile Cinema in the 1970s.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 57 (2016). Access October 1^st, 2018. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc57.2016/-PalaciosChile/index.html

Pick, Zuzana M. “Chilean Cinema in Exile (1973-1986). The Notion of Exile: A Field of Investigation and its Conceptual Framework.” Framework 34 (1988): 39-57.

------. “Chilean Cinema: Ten Years of Exile (1973-1983).” Jump Cut 32 (1987). Access October 1^st, 2018. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC32folder/ChileanFilmExile.html

Ramírez-Soto, Elizabeth. “Journeys of Desexilio: The Bridge Between the Past and the Present,” Rethinking History nº18, vol.3 (2014): 438-451.

Bios:

José Miguel Palacios is a postdoctoral fellow in the Art Department at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile. His essays have appeared in Jump Cut, Archivos de la Filmoteca, la Fuga, Iberoamericana: América Latina-España-Portugal, and in the collections Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema (2015) and New Documentaries in Latin America (2014). He received a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2017.

Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (2016). Her essays have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Rethinking History, and in the collection Doing Women’s Film History (2015). She received a Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick in 2014.

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