‘Not Like the Stories I am Used to’: East German Film as Cinematic Memory in Contemporary Chile

Abstract

This paper is concerned with East German films which deal with the subject of Chile in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d’état in a contemporary Chilean cultural framework. Conceived in the charged political atmosphere of the Cold War, this material is valuable in Chile today because it reflects East Germany as a cultural and social environment for Chilean émigré artists during the 1970s and 1980s. The author explores the films’ potential as a form of cinematic postmemory for younger Chilean audiences, focusing on two feature films, Die Spur des Vermißten (1980) and Blonder Tango (1985). Do young Chileans accept these images as truthful and do they inspire a rethinking of the controversial subject of the Pinochet regime? The results suggest that the DEFA films, due to their narrative and aesthetic textures, present this audience with challenging perspectives, uncover misconceptions and evoke empathy with antagonistic social and political agents. Based on this case study, the author argues that the DEFA films are audio-visual materials which can be highly productive in cultural and educational contexts and can complement efforts to revive collective memory in Chile.

Keywords:

• Transnational film
• reception study
• postmemory
• neoliberalism
• Chile

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the DEFA foundation Berlin, which has generously supported my research on this topic. Many thanks go to Geoffrey Kantaris, who invited me to the symposium Chile on Film which took place at the University of Cambridge in 2013, and whose feedback has helped shape my ideas. The generous comments of the anonymous reviewers have much improved the form and content of this essay.

Notes

1. DEFA international. Grenzüberschreitende Filmbeziehungen vor und nach dem Mauerbau (2013), DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture. A Companion (2014) and Re-Imagining DEFA. East German Cinema in its National and International Contexts (2016) are three recent volumes that examine East German film linked in with contemporaneous international cultural trends and traditions, and connected to social and political issues in Europe, East and West.

2. See for more information on DEFA Film Library’s current projects and activities: https://ecommerce.umass.edu/defa/.

3. The work of the prominent East German documentary filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann (Studio H&S) was closely linked to an East German political agenda. The H&S Chile cycle includes the short films Mitbürger! - Zum Gedenken an Salvador Allende (1973), Psalm 18 (1973) and Geldsorgen (1975) and the documentaries Der Krieg der Mumien (1974), Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein (1974), El Golpe Blanco: Der weiße Putsch (1975), Eine Minute Dunkel macht uns nicht blind (1976), Die Toten schweigen nicht (1978), Im Feuer bestanden (1978) and Hector Cuevas (1986). Though tinged with Cold War rhetoric, Heynowski and Scheumann’s work is important in Chile for different reasons. The documentaries investigated, highlighted and analysed the crimes committed by the Pinochet regime. Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein contains the only existing images of the prisoner camps in Chacabuco and Pisagua, which has led to the footage being part of investigations into the whereabouts of disappeared persons, and used in murder trials. Chilean journalist Isabel Mardones, co-author of Señales contra el olvido (2012), remarks about the H&S documentaries: ‘Even if the statements use a language more common in the past than today, the images have a great testimonial value and are historical documents about our recent past.’ See Isabel Mardones. Documentalista desmiente a viejo loco español que queria quemar imagenes historicas de la dictadura. In: The Clinic, 14.3. 2012. www.theclinic.cl/2012/03/14/documentalista-desmiente-a-viejo-loco-espanol-que-queria-quemar-imagenes-historicas-de-la-dictadura/.

4. In 2009, an educational reform regulated that the subject should become integrated into the school curriculum, but many schools opt out of it because of a lack of consensus between teachers and the administrative staff. See Veronica Smink. Como se enseña el golpe de Pinochet en las escuelas de Chile. In: BBC Mundo, Cono Sur, 10.9.2013.

www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/noticias/2013/09/130909_chile_golpe_escuelas_vs.shtml.

5. Laura Podalsky suggests in The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (2011) that ‘certain works encourage their spectators to feel in ways that acknowledge alternative ways of knowing (about) the recent traumatic past of the 1960s and 1970s’ (2011, 8). In her book she examines affect and emotion as a wider trend in current Latin American film.

6. Among the artists who participated in DEFA films were actors Alejandro Quintana Contreras, Aníbal Reyna, Irina Gallardo and Óscar Castro. Ángel Parra, Roberto Rivera and Inti Illimani composed music for DEFA films. Authors Omar Saavdra Santis and Carlos Cerda collaborated on film scripts; Vivienne Barry and Juan Forch worked on short animations for the DEFA Trickfilmstudio.

7. Orlando Luebbert was the only Chilean artist who had the chance to direct a feature film for DEFA. In 1972, he had started, together with Gastón Ancelovici, to work on Los puños frente al cañón, a documentary about the history of the workers’ movement in Chile. Luebbert’s exile brought him via Mexico to Germany, where he finished this film in 1975. Luebbert lived in West and East Germany. Besides the DEFA-produced Der Übergang, he made films for West German television, among them Die Kolonie (1985), to date the only film made by a Chilean filmmaker about the infamous torture camp Colonia Dignidad. Luebbert returned to Chile at the end of the 1990s. His first feature film after his remigration, Taxi para Tres (2001), draws a sinister picture of Chile as a ruthless society where everyone is after their own fortune. The film won the Concha de Oro prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 2001 and is an important contribution to the Chilean filmscape of the beginning of the second millennium (Mouesca and Orellana 2010, 203).

8. Bachelet lived in East Germany between 1975 and 1979, and during this time studied medicine at the Humboldt University. See for an investigation of Eine chilenische Hochzeit Rocio Montes’s article: Fragmentos de la vida de Bachelet en la RDA. Un casamiento olvidado. In: Caras, 30.7. 2015. http://www.caras.cl/sociedad/fragmentos-de-la-vida-de-bachelet-en-la-rda-un-casamiento-olvidado/. Montes identifies in this wedding party, besides Bachelet, artists and former members of Chilean socialist and communist political parties.

9. For more extensive research about the DEFA film Blonder Tango see Byg (2003), Jamie Trnka (2011) and Claudia Sandberg (2016).

10. The other DEFA feature film dealing with this subject is El cantor (1977), a biopic about Víctor Jarra, directed by Dean Reed.

11. For a further discussion of DEFA film in contemporary Chile and the reception of DEFA film in Latin America, please refer to Peliculas Escondidas. Un viaje entre el exilio y la memoria (2016), a documentary which the author of the current essay directed together with the Argentine filmmaker Alejandro Areal Vélez.