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Nostalgia For The Light

NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT directed by Patricio Guzmán. An Icarus Films release. 90 minutes. Subtitled. Opens today (Thursday, January 13) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. See Times. Rating: NNNNN


It seems appropriate that TIFF Bell Lightbox is screening Patricio Guzmán’s magnificent documentary on the heels of its 70mm revival of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the limited run of Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme.

Nostalgia For The Light sits squarely between the two. As a meditation on where we’ve been and where we’re going, it’s as evocative and ambiguous as Kubrick’s masterwork, and as a cogent, coherently organized essay film, it puts Godard’s facile polemic to shame.

In an observatory in Chile’s remote Atacama desert, 10,000 feet above sea level, scientists use cutting-edge technology to gaze into the distant past of the universe, searching for light from the Big Bang.

Not far away, a more terrestrial archaeology is being carried out by women whose husbands, brothers and sons were disappeared during the Pinochet regime. The region’s elevation and lack of humidity create the perfect conditions for preservation, which means the desiccated remains of bodies dumped into mass graves are still out there to be found.

As Guzmán knits these two disparate groups together, he slowly widens the scope of his inquiry, examining the way humans perceive time. A scientist explains that the events of our present have already become our past by the time our senses register them this is contrasted with the remarkable story of a political prisoner who memorized the dimensions of the entire concentration camp in which he was imprisoned. He could recreate the blueprints from memory upon his release.

Just about every choice in Nostalgia For The Light is as carefully considered as that juxtaposition. Guzmán is a remarkably gifted filmmaker his three-part documentary The Battle Of Chile, recently released on DVD in an excellent special edition, is one of the greatest journalistic accomplishments of the 1970s. His work has grown less urgent in the subsequent decades, but no less vital.

Nostalgia For The Light can make you swoon at a glorious high-definition image that seems to be a desert landscape, and turn that awe to horror as you understand what you’re really seeing. It can make you feel the haunted sorrow of a 70-year-old woman who’s been searching for her vanished husband for half her life. And it can make you wonder at the idea that the mysteries of outer space might be a convenient distraction for a nation terrified, even now, to cast its gaze inward.

An exhilarating, wonderful, invaluable piece of work.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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