Professor Carl Fischer, Fordham University—Masculinities and Temporalities in La batalla de Chile

Patricio Guzmán’s documentary La batalla de Chile (1976-9) starts with the country’s 1973 military coup before looking backwards to document all the events that led up to it; it then ends with images of the popular movements underpinning the democratic Marxism of the country’s Unidad Popular (UP), which it longingly elegizes as a paradise lost. The film also depicts the masculinist nature of the UP’s forward-looking, utopian policies, representing the ideological, economic, and political conflicts surrounding the contentious final period of the UP in the form of primarily male, conventionally heterosexual subjects. The fact that this film begins at the very moment of the UP’s downfall, and ends with an outcome for the UP that never was, is just one of many indicators of the fleeting nature of utopia. Indeed, all of the temporalities represented in Guzmán’s documentary constitute political and economic utopias (and dystopias), whose fragility is reflected onscreen by different masculine subjects who embody them.