Maite Alberdi
10 November UK; Streaming in the US
SOMETIMES, to really understand a process, you have to follow it, without flinching, even if it upsets you, even if it breaks your heart.
Oscar-nominated director Maite Alberdi won a Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury prize this year for The Eternal Memory, a documentary partly made from original footage, home movies, newsreels and videotapes smuggled out of Chile during the darkest years of General Augusto Pinochet鈥檚 17-year dictatorship.
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Its subject is Chilean writer and journalist Augusto G脫ngora, who is living (and by the last reel, very obviously dying) with Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. G脫ngora died earlier this year aged 71. Between 1973 and 1990, as part of an attempt to document and share Chile鈥檚 national turmoil and horror, he edited an opposition newspaper and made VHS recordings of life and the struggle under Pinochet.
It was dangerous work. In 1985, a fellow journalist on the project, Jos茅 Manuel Parada, had his throat slit. This haunts G脫ngora, whose sense of self comes to depend increasingly on the presence (real or imagined) of friends and family.
From 1990, he spent 18 years interviewing writers, film-makers, artists and musicians for TV 鈥� people he believed could help bring the newly democratised nation out of its forced (book-banned, movie-less) forgetfulness and reawaken its once vibrant culture.
Diagnosed with Alzheimer鈥檚 disease in 2014, G脫ngora readily embraced the plan proposed by his wife, the actor and politician Paulina Urrutia, to record his physical and cognitive decline. Such a record would, at the very least, be a testament to 25 years together. Assembled, edited and capstoned with new footage, The Eternal Memory is that and more: it is a meditation on what we can and cannot expect from memory.
The spine of the film is an honest, frank, never voyeuristic account. Early on, we see Urrutia taking the couple鈥檚 portrait off the bedroom wall before they sleep. If she doesn鈥檛, the sight of two strangers staring down in the night might send G脫ngora into a panic.
His deterioration is relentless: soon he is talking to the stranger in mirrors and glass doors. 鈥淪omething very strange is happening here,鈥� he muses. Soon, he won鈥檛 even recognise Urrutia.
Her plight is given its proper due. Tirelessly, she recites the facts of her lover鈥檚 life to him and, for a while, this brings comfort. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e always with me,鈥� he mutters, over and over, 鈥渁nd they love me, every day.鈥� But no respite lasts, and the toll on Urrutia is shocking.
What鈥檚 extraordinary is that, even as the film records the disintegration of memory in an individual, it celebrates the way memories 鈥� in books, spoken to camera or transmuted into art, drama or music 鈥� work collectively to bring a nation back to life.
Because, for all the sadness here, G脫ngora, through his films and the written collection of remembrances La Memoria Prohibida (The Forbidden Memory) kept the memory of his country alive and preserved its identity. One line from the collection echoes throughout: 鈥淲ithout memory, there is no identity.鈥� Near the end of the film, G脫ngora weeps: 鈥淚鈥檓 not myself any more.鈥� But even as he loses his identity, Chileans are seen regaining theirs.
At a time when the idea of national identity is often little more than a political football, it is worth remembering that a people鈥檚 idea of itself is a living thing, worth defending against the amnesia of tyrants.
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Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on聽Instagram @simon_ings
