Nostalgia for the Light Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Nostalgia for the Light Blu-ray Movie Review

Cinema of Loss and Remembrance

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 13, 2011

Motion pictures usually tell stories, but there's nothing about the medium that says that's their only use. Words, too, are used to tell stories, but they're also used to give instructions, convey wants or needs, exchange feelings and organize social institutions. Then there's the highly specialized and often baffling use of words known as poetry. One of the mysteries of great poetry is that a careful arrangement of words can convey an underlying meaning that is immediately felt but can't always be explained, just as one hears the harmony in good music or sees the unity in a beautiful painting.

Every so often, a filmmaker will be bold enough to attempt the cinematic equivalent of poetry, and sometimes it works. Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light is one such success, in part because it provides the surface appearance of a traditional documentary narrative to give the viewer a comfortable resting place. Guzmán's film appears to be about the Atacama desert region of his native Chile, but it's really a meditation on memory and the past and how we deal with painful memories and recapture the past.

The English writer Samuel Johnson famously dubbed a group of poets "metaphysical", because in their writing "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together". A similar observation applies to Guzmán's film, but it isn't the filmmaker who yoked the disparate ideas together. That dubious (and violent) achievement belongs to the military junta led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which seized control of Chile in September 1973. In the years following Pinochet's coup, tens of thousands of suspected political opponents were summarily rounded up and disappeared into concentration camps. Many were never heard from again.

The largest of these prison camps was Chacabuco, created from an abandoned mining town in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. The Atacama happens to be one of the most unusual places on earth. So arid that it appears from space as a brown patch on the blue surface of the planet, the Atacama has been a source of many well-preserved archaeological finds; thus, while the Pinochet dictatorship tried to bury history there, archaeologists were laboring to dig up other history. The Atacama is also a mecca to astronomers; so, while the immediate human past was disappearing, scientists were reaching out to capture and analyze the long-distant past of the cosmos.

Nostalgia for the Light serves as a sustained meditation on these contrasting attitudes toward different types of history, much of it set against the harshly ethereal landscape of the Atacama. As Guzmán has said, "The metaphors were already there; I merely filmed them." But his film is more than just reportage. As fellow documentarian Frederick Wiseman points out, it took a visionary of Guzmán's caliber to recognize the metaphors and present them cinematically. (In the same vein, Michelangelo is supposed to have said that his statues already existed in the blocks of marble; all he had to do was chisel away the unnecessary bits.)

Guzmán begins simply with a collection of ordinary household items that remind him of his childhood in Santiago, when he himself first became fascinated by astronomy. This leads him to the Atacama Desert and the unique conditions that make it a perfect place from which to chart the cosmos. A lively interview with an astronomer, Gaspar Galaz, reveals both practical challenges of the discipline and some of its deeper philosophical implications.

From there Guzmán turns to the other scientific pursuit of the Atacama, as an archaeologist, Lautaro Núñez, points out drawings on rock left by vanished civilizations and ancient roads that serve as the foundation of new ones. An engaging conversationalist, Núñez discusses the historical significance of the Atacama region, but in doing so, he cannot help but mention the Pinochet years. It will ultimately emerge that he and various colleagues were able to use their professional expertise to identify certain bone fragments and patterns of disturbed earth as the remnants of mass graves that the Chilean military tried to conceal by digging up the bodies and moving them elsewhere (no one will say where).

To this day, relatives -- all women -- of people who disappeared during Pinochet's reign make the daily journey into the harsh sands of the Atacama to dig for remains of their loved ones. The regime buried numerous bodies in the sand, and many have been recovered; so the quest is not futile, but as the years have passed, it has become more discouraging, and the number of participants has dwindled. Guzmán interviews two, Victoria and Violeta, both now elderly, and they are direct and eloquent in explaining why they have no choice but to continue their pursuit. Gaspar, the astronomer, says that he finds it odd that society seems to understand his rarefied efforts to map galaxies millions of light years away based on emissions that are millions of years old by the time they arrive here, but it seems "reticent" to understand the efforts of these women, when all they want is to say goodbye to the people they love. Gaspar thinks it should be the other way around. "Our search", he says, "doesn't disturb our sleep."

Nostalgia for the Light constantly challenges the viewer with such juxtapositions and counterpoints. Guzmán's interviewees include: an astronomer involved with the construction of a radio telescope array in the Atacama, who says that he feels himself to be Chilean, even though he was born and educated abroad, because his parents were exiled by the Pinochet regime; a former inmate of the Chacabuco concentration camp, who was part of a group that built their own instruments for mapping constellations, using astronomy as a way to feel free while imprisoned; an architect, who passed through five different concentration camps, committing the layout of each one to memory, so that he was able to draw astonishingly detailed maps of each one after his release, at a time when the military was attempting to dismantle the camps and erase their existence; and an astronomer who was raised by her grandparents, after her parents were arrested and never heard from again.

All the while, Guzmán shows you one beautiful image after another, even as his narration or the comments of his interview subjects tell you about the terrible things that happened in this mysterious and magical region where destruction and preservation exist side by side.

Nostalgia for the Light Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Nostalgia for the Light was shot on high-definition video, and although the AVC-encoded Blu-ray is 1080i, the interlaced formatting does not interfere with the crystal clarity of the images captured by Guzmán's cinematographer, Katell Dijan. Colors are rich and accurate (judging by fleshtones), blacks are solid, and the only video noise is occasional aliasing on very fine patterns. Detail and depth of field are remarkable, which is as it should be, since these are the great strengths of digital image capture. I did not see any compression or motion artifacts. An occasional faint blue halo is detectible around an object in the frame, but this appeared to be an effect of the intensely bright desert sunlight (akin to a lens flare) and not edge enhancement (which would be a white halo).

Nostalgia for the Light Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's soundtrack is stereo presented in DTS-HD MA 2.0. Guzmán narrates in Spanish with English subtitles that cannot be switched off. His voice and those of his interview subjects are extremely clear. The subdued instrumental score credited to Miguel Miranda and José Miguel Tobar is reproduced with appropriate restraint and musicality.

Nostalgia for the Light Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras consist of five "bonus" films by Guzmán. All of them appear to have been created out of material shot for Nostalgia for the Light, but not used in the final film. All are in Spanish, but, unlike the main feature, the English subtitles are optional.

• Chile, A Galaxy of Problems (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 32:28): This is the longest of the five bonus films and the one that most directly addresses the situation in Chile today through interviews with various subjects, including Juan Emilio Cheyre, a former commandant in Pinochet's army. Guzmán's opening question is the crux of his inquiry: "Why is it that today, in Chile, so much is forgotten?" In one way or another, everything that follows is an attempt to answer that question.



• Oscar Saa, Technician of the Stars (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 10:16): Oscar Saa is an engineer at the Tolodo observatory. Here he explains some of the technical intricacies of its huge telescope. Guzmán calls such engineers the most earthbound of astronomers, the ones who open the gate for others to reach out to the stars.



• José Maza, Sky Traveler (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 12:51): Maza, an astronomer and professor, discusses a wide variety of subjects, including "dark" energy, supernovas and the "big bang".



• María Teresa & The Brown Dwarf (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 11:51): Teresa is an astronomer with an extraordinary eye for detail that manifests itself in three different passions. The first is for investigating the cosmos, where her attention to detail made her the first astronomer to discover a so-called "brown dwarf", a star too small to have achieved nuclear fusion and "caught fire". (The existence of such stars had been theorized but never previously demonstrated.) Tereas's second passion is for finding agates among the thousands of stones at the seashore. Her third is for creating portraits of loved ones by "drawing" in tapestries composed of thousands of tiny stitches.



• Astronomers from my Neighborhood (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 14:09): The bulk of this short film chronicles the extraordinary Guillermo Fernández, a devoted amateur astronomer who built an entire observatory in his back yard, using spare parts and mechanisms adapted from other machinery. It took him seven years.

Nostalgia for the Light Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Guzmán made his reputation with the three-part documentary The Battle of Chile, which documented the Pinochet coup with the immediacy of on-site news reporting and unfolded with breathless urgency. The meditative tone of Nostalgia for the Light is altogether different. This is not a film that you can put on lightly or watch distractedly, but it will amply reward your attention. The issues that initially prompted Guzmán to make the film may have been local to his homeland. But if we have learned anything from recent history, it should be that there is no such thing as a "local" issue anymore. (And that's without even taking up the question of the U.S. role in the Pinochet coup, which readers can easily research for themselves.) Both the film and the Blu-ray are highly recommended.