The Pinochet Case
Guzman opens The Pinochet Case, receiving its Chicago premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week, with several neutral conventional shots. The first shows the Chilean desert from a moving car, the next two the car moving through the landscape from afar. But at the end of the third shot a voice-over delivers a rude shock: “Each body we find…” There’s a cut to a group of walking searchers, and we hear that two nude corpses were found at this nondescript spot. Our sense that a terrible past can be present in even the most ordinary locale haunts the rest of the film.
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We learn a bit later that Pinochet’s military dictatorship used techniques against its presumed political opponents modeled on those devised by the Nazis, whose victims were often made to disappear without a trace as a way of terrorizing the population. Chileans were arrested by plainclothesmen in unmarked cars; if the family didn’t witness the arrest, they weren’t told of it. When inquiries were made about a person who’d vanished, the reply was “That man was never born”; when it was asked if someone might be in the notorious torture compound Villa Grimaldi, the reply was “Villa Grimaldi does not exist.”
Much later, in the moving final image, Guzman returns to the group portrait but with the camera no longer moving. Part of what’s affecting is the divided meaning the image carries: it both reminds us of the horrors no “justice” can ever undo and reunites individual sufferers in a stable shot no longer linked to a courtroom. Immediately following accounts by two survivors speaking with pride of their visibility, this image invokes restoration achieved, a society made whole again.
