Solidarity and World Cinema Otherwise
The word solidarity is much alive these days in the vocabulary and political actions of social movements. Solidarity is at work when people take to the streets to join Black Lives Matter in protesting police brutality; in women’s decision to cut their hair in the middle of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” feminist movement; and in today’s widespread support of Palestinian lives struggling against Israel’s genocidal project in Gaza. If these global phenomena have enjoyed any success in mobilizing action, it’s because solidarity has the capacity to promote shared practices of resistance and political alliances despite national, cultural, racial, and linguistic barriers. There, no less, is where its potency resides.
Due to this potency, solidarity has been amply discussed in sociology, geography, feminism, and human rights studies. Cinema studies, however, have been late to the academic interest in solidarity. My book, Transnational Cinema Solidarity: Chilean Exile Film and Video after 1973, joins a growing body of work that questions what solidarity might mean and do for film and media studies. What would film history look like if we set a geography of solidarities into motion, if we studied its transits across continents and decades? Transnational Cinema Solidarity examines this question through the history of Chilean exile film and video, from their global emergence out of networks of solidarity in the 1970s to their ongoing return to Chilean archives in the last two decades.
After the 1973 military coup that put an end to the socialist government of Salvador Allende, more than two hundred thousand Chileans, including filmmakers, were forced into exile. As supporters of Allende’s project, the political stance of Chilean filmmakers made them part of the so-called “Marxist cancer” that the military Junta attempted to eliminate after the coup. Facing real danger, a handful of filmmakers stayed in Chile, but most went into exile.
In their host countries, exiles encountered the solidarity of peers and strangers. It was a form of transnational solidarity that had emerged as an expression of support to a nation going through a unique revolutionary process, but that had been multiplied and transformed after 1973 into a huge worldwide solidarity movement, now in support of a people resisting a military dictatorship.
Chilean exile cinema is indissociable from this broader context. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there were about forty Chilean exile filmmakers who made over two hundred fiction films, documentaries, animations, videos, and works for television in countries as varied as Brazil, Cuba, Canada, Finland, France, East and West Germany, Mexico, Mozambique, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the United States, and The Soviet Union. The making and circulation of these films were often the direct result of solidarity actions—like smuggling footage, helping filmmakers obtain visas, doing boycotts, or organizing screenings. If not directly tied to solidarity efforts, all these films participate from a cultural sphere where solidarity is the keyword in anything related to producing and exhibiting Chilean exile cinema. Rather than singling out individual films or filmmakers, in this book I am thus more interested in tracing a transnational history of cinematic exchanges shaped by exile and solidarity.
Take, for instance, the three-part landmark documentary The Battle of Chile (1975—1979), made by Patricio Guzmán and Equipo Tercer Año. The range of efforts that led to its completion included French filmmaker Chris Marker sending film stock to circumvent the economic blockade faced by Allende’s government; Guzmán’s uncle hiding the reels after the coup; officials from the Swedish embassy in Santiago moving film and sound materials through various places until the reels sail for Sweden in a ship called Rio de Janeiro; ICAIC, the Cuban Institute of Cinematic Arts and Industries lending their facilities for the team to do the slow labor of editing during almost a decade; and programmers and audiences who celebrated the documentary everywhere it played: in Parisian theaters; in festivals in Leipzig and Pesaro; in special programs in London, Mexico, and Madrid; and in film clubs, unions, and universities in different corners of the world.
The implications of this anecdote—how an exile cinema moves across several nations, cultural contexts, modes of production and circulation, exhibition settings, and historical periods—constitute the heart of Transnational Cinema Solidarity. The example of The Battle of Chile evidences my interest in how film reels were smuggled out of Chile after the coup, but the book lingers on other facets related to this example. It emphasizes the many movements through which networks of solidarity are formed and exercised: how the specific routes followed by exile directors shape their careers and films, how different ideas of exile and political cinema travel across film festivals and other gatherings, and how the transits of film prints provide new meanings to the notions of homecoming and return.
This is a different kind of transnational and world cinema history, less concerned with the economic and industrial forces of media globalization and more invested in cinematic alliances traversing borders of various kind. I understand Chilean exile cinema not as an experience in the margins of other cinemas elsewhere (be it Canadian, German, French, or Mexican) but as an experience that rearranges the geopolitical, aesthetic, and disciplinary parameters behind such partitions. My main argument throughout this book is that a historical and critical appraisal of solidarity does not merely expand the geography of world cinema. It altogether redefines it, in that it imagines a different global articulation of film history based on political friendships and struggles of cinematic resistance.