The Cordillera of Dreams (Patricio Guzmán, 2019) (Patreon)

As Guzmán states in the voiceover of his latest essay film, this is the twentieth film he has made about his native Chile, most of them having been made from the distance of exile. As he has gotten older, his work has gotten more philosophical and reflective, shifting away from the more straightforward testimonial approach of works like Chile, Obstinate Memory and Salvador Allende. One could perhaps say that his vision of Chile and the September 11, 1973 coup is growing ever more distant, taking on a cosmic, even geological aspect.

The Cordillera of Dreams is a highly suggestive film about varying categories of memory -- those that exist at the human as well as the trans-individual level. The overarching premise is that the Chilean cordillera -- the long curtain of the Andes that forms the nation's eastern edge -- has been a silent witness to the struggle and violence of the Pinochet regime, somehow knowing what the dictatorship has attempted to hide.

While this may be a poetic notion, Guzmán doesn't really follow it through. Cordillera of Dreams begins by speaking with a number of Chilean artists, discussing how the cordillera operates in the Chilean imaginary, and considering its role as an image in painting and as a physical presence in sculpture. But before long, Guzmán is conducting interviews with writers, intellectuals, and activists who are speaking more generally about the abuses of the dictatorship.

The Cordillera of Dreams concerns itself with the ruins of Chilean history. Guzmán takes us through the now-abandoned Santiago skyscraper from which Pinochet's junta controlled the nation. (During this sequence, he mentions that Chile was the first nation to directly implement Chicago School neoliberalism.) He also shows us the dilapidated remains of his childhood home. These sequences are punctuated with grand cinematography of the cordillera, its snowy peaks, lichen-covered valleys, and hidden copper mines.

The main focus of Guzmán's film is cinematographer Pablo Salas, a radical who (unlike Guzmán) remained in Chile and documented the dictatorship from the ground. We see his massive archive of hundreds of videotapes, each implied to contain minutes or hours of human rights abuses that have gone unseen for years. But the archive remains, a defiant monument against official forgetting. This is the metaphor Guzmán is really looking for, and it's unclear why he struggles to use the mountains to give shape to this rambling film. It's as though the filmmaker has a sincere desire to make a different kind of film, but reverts to his default mode. Guzmán is open about the trauma of exile, the desire to reconnect with the cordillera. What comes across, sadly, is an even greater distance.