Re-Viva la Revolución! Part 4
Remediating the past
Bearing in mind the nostalgic tone of Good Vibrations, some of its sequences can also facilitate critical re-evaluation of the past. Its opening implements accelerated archival footage showcasing Northern Ireland’s products and industries that then capture the sense of nation-/region-hood beginning to fragment as collectives splinter off in the transition to civil conflict. While No economically tells the politics of Chile’s recent past, Good Vibrations shows two decades of Northern Ireland’s industrial, cultural, religious and political histories. Both of these compressed accounts serve as backdrops to the individual men on which the films centre, with René and Terri both embodying the fictionalized truths the films (re)present.
Whereas Good Vibrations uses the archive to show Northern Ireland’s transition into conflict, the opening sequence in No consists of text outlining a brief contextual synopsis of the 1973 military coup d’état that violently ousted the socialist president Salvador Allende, and the plebiscite held fifteen years later when the right-wing junta faced international pressure to legitimize General Augusto Pinochet’s regime.1 Narrowing down to the campaign, the text explains that the referendum was announced in July 1988, and that lobbying would last for the 27 days preceding the vote on 5 October, including an allocation of fifteen minutes of television advertising air space for each side. The text appears as if it is printed on sheets of flip-chart paper which are turned to progress the text, accompanied by the sound of flipping the large sheets, signifying the materiality and tactility of the film’s analogue production methods.
Having pithily explained the film’s title and context, the word NO remains onscreen for eight seconds, creating a pensive moment to regard the blurred colour refraction of the black text on a white background apparently due to the older low-resolution camera apparatus. As Caetlin Benson-Allott states, from the outset ‘neither the campaign nor the movie’s politics will ever be black and white’.2 It also blurs the rainbow colours from the campaign’s logo, the six of which represent the range of coalition parties in power during the film’s production and release and their views. A blank sheet is flipped over this, and the fade to black marks the separation between the real world and the world of the film. The fleetingness of the flip chart and the flow of concise/reduced information mimics the flow of televisual reportage. Before it has begun, this is a film which warns against placing trust in it, and it reiterates this warning through a series of reflexive jumps in location during otherwise unbroken conversations between characters, an instance of which occurs in No after the first appearance of archival footage, discussed shortly.
While the subjective creative license over memory, history and experience in Good Vibrations has rarely, if ever, been met with negativity, tensions arose from the historical inaccuracies and omissions in No. Importantly, unlike Good Vibrations, No does not claim to be based on true stories. Irina Dzero explains that the play El Plebiscito was a positive celebration of No’s successful marketing campaign, whereas the film criticizes the movement by suggesting ‘that the democratic transition is a simulacrum devoid of referent’, ‘an empty shell of democracy that has been perpetrated ever since’.3 No questions whether the referendum’s outcome really was best for Chile.
After losing the 1990 general election, Pinochet retained power as the Chilean Army’s Commander-in-Chief until his retirement in 1998, after which he became a senator for life until his death in 2006. Although he was arrested in London in 1998 for human rights abuses and faced additional charges for embezzlement, he was never brought to trial. The traumatic legacy of the violence perpetrated under his governance has never been satisfactorily addressed, save for a few preserved memorial sites which are more of a display for tourists than a contribution to national healing. Successive administrations have avoided entering talks over reparations and truth-seeking, preferring instead, according to Teresa Meade, to attempt to ‘reconcil[e] the goals of Allende’s democratic socialism with Pinochet’s brutal neoliberalism’ by increasing spending on addressing social issues while fostering the thriving free-market economy.4 This union shapes the sequencing and narrative structure in No as René – a returned exile embodying a dual insider/outsider identity – infuses a campaign driven by national social consciousness with advertising techniques that embody and facilitate conservative globalizing neoliberalism. As well as using García Bernal’s Mexican accent to make a point about forced and voluntary exile because of the 1973 coup, René as an amalgam of several real people is uniquely positioned to draw various points of view together to both represent and critique the successful campaign.
The concept of ‘freedom’ as embodied by the ‘free’ market and attached to René is marked out for criticism in No’s opening minutes, establishing its overall examination of how ‘happiness’ was sold to Chile using the very neoliberal techniques of persuasive buying and selling introduced by Pinochet. The concepts of freedom and happiness are established as essential products made available to consumers with the financial means to make such choices. Shown in ‘talking heads’ televisual-style close-up framing, highly sought-after adman René Saavedra delivers a marketing pitch to a group of executives off-screen:
What you’re going to see now is in line with the current social context. We believe that the country is prepared for communication of this nature. We must not forget that the citizens have raised their demands in regard to truth, in regard to what they like. Let’s be honest: Today, Chile thinks in its future.
Following the serious tone of the film’s opening text, René’s speech appears profound. He is accompanied by his boss Lucho Guzmán (Alfredo Castro) positioned to his right, and who goes on to head the Yes television campaign. Without cutting, the handheld camera follows their movements to the videotape player and box monitor (including some retro product placement for Sony, the film’s global distributor and initial developer of U-Matic video technology) in which they play a lively, carefree, youth-driven advertisement for Free cola.5 As René and Lucho explain, the ad promotes a vision of youth that is rebellious and fun-loving, but in a quirky way that never poses a threat to the establishment. As such, it maintains norms of privilege in a world where the young and white are served happily by the middle-aged and people of colour, a world in which young men represented by the soft rock band’s lead singer are persuasive leaders charged with selling a desirable sense of freedom and being true to oneself within invisible boundaries of normative respectability.
The cola ad has no known connection to those involved in producing the No campaign videos that I can find and its inclusion serves the dual purpose of providing period pop culture nostalgia with appeal for a contemporary audience. More clearly than the documentary and journalistic footage elsewhere in both films, the ad is at once an artefact from the real world and a simulacrum. In the film, it markets a product which had been available since 1986 – two years before the film’s action begins – as if it were a new brand.6 Such narrative compressions of time and facts are usual and necessary in adaptive film-making, and this instance also economically characterize René’s abilities as an advertising executive, including the extent to which he is prepared to commodify truth-seeking and socialist ideologies.
The film’s narrow aspect ratio, the low-resolution U-Matic’s lack of clarity and refraction of colour, and the consistent selective focus shot using long lenses, all befit René’s arm’s reach concern for the success of his marketing strategy over political stance or a sense of social responsibility. The evidence indicates that he embodies individualist capitalism: his fascination with the microwave oven, his at times emotionally vacant relationship with his son and nanny, and his consistently distanced, corporate relationship with the campaign he largely designs. Notably for the latter, his pitch includes recycling the above Free cola speech that appeals reassuringly to the explicitly incongruous notions of nationalism and socialism to promote his marketing agendas for commodity items and entertainments. René’s world is mediated through this language; he knows that the best way to gain momentum for No is to communicate abstracted concepts through levels of mediation in which the implied audience is unknowingly fluent. As with promises of peace, reconciliation, equality and shared futures in Northern Ireland, happiness and freedom in Chile are difficult products – read ideologies – to turn down, making them highly sellable and marketable, and appealing for global celebrities to endorse.7
As the scene continues, the Free cola representatives draw attention to the mime artist who features in the ad, and who reappears in No videos shown later, as an unwelcome inclusion. Perhaps it is too revealing of the artifice of the glossy surface image of the product. The voice of the middle-aged male executive is heard before the image cuts to a long shot of the room in which everyone is enclosed by the dark wooden table and wall panelling. Returning to the admen in tighter shots maintaining the televisual feel, Lucho helps himself to a Free cola while René tries to convince Carlos (Diego Muñoz) of the originality – outside of the USA – of their ad and the product it promotes: it is a national product made specifically to replace a US import, and one which invites consumers to be young and brave, proclaiming confidently that ‘if you’re brave, you’re Free’. Lucho supports René, stating ‘this is everything that our youth needs: music, rebelliousness, romance, but with order and respect’, that is, freedom controlled within set boundaries.
These characters’ rightist and leftist leanings are indicated and affirmed by Lucho’s questioning when René is called away to a meeting with José Tomás Urrutia (Luis Gnecco), a socialist and major figure in the No campaign. The involved conversations René has with each of these men in succession in this early establishing act of the film are depicted in sequences which, more than the seamlessly integrated archival footage, reveal the film’s cinematic construction as an edited document consisting of fictional set-ups filmed at different times in different places. With no breaks in the dialogue and the camera keeping them framed in medium close-ups whether on short or long zooms, René and Urrutia are transposed from an office to leaning on a car to walking down a street and catching a bus, and then sitting on the bus as Urrutia tries to recruit the resistant René to No’s media campaign. This is followed by a similar sequence in which René is questioned by Lucho about his relationship with Urrutia and who is involved in designing the No campaign as René tries to focus on their strategy for advertising a new appliance called the microwave, or rather, tries to satisfy his curiosity for how this new commodity item works – another product for which René designs marketing with the same attention and level of appeal as the soft drink, a soap opera and voting No. René recycling the same speech in each pitch are acts of repetition that Dzero points out equate each product and taints the No ad campaign with neoliberal cynicism (p.120).
Again, the unbroken conversation begins in an office, moves to a restaurant with cuts to wider shots revealing a jungle theme and murals featuring native tribesmen in the establishment populated by white European descendants, to long-zoom roving close-ups in an exterior location, ending with a disagreement over which side the US is supporting. The film’s transgressions of space and time with pointed allusions to colonialism stress early in the film that it is a fictional document, a compression and a re-presentation of history that also implicitly through the mise en scène acknowledges the exclusion of indigenous peoples’ voices while commodifying their bodies. From the outset, No reveals the artifice involved in conveying plural impressions of history and memory through who gets to be represented and how, and suggests that cinema can be an unreliable mediator of ‘truth’, but also a tool through which the past can be critically examined.
1 Paraphrasing and quotations from No are transcribed from the English DVD subtitles.
2 Caetlin Benson-Allott, ‘An Illusion Appropriate to the Conditions No (Pablo Larraín, 2012), Film Quarterly, 66.3 (2013), pp. 61–63, p. 62.
3 Irina Dzero, ‘Larraín’s Film No and Its Inspiration, El plebiscito: Chile’s Transition to Democracy as a Simulacrum’, Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura, 31.1 (2015), pp. 120–32: p. 120.
4 Teresa Meade, ‘Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile’s “Sitios de Memoria” and the History of Torture, Disappearance, and Death’, Radical History Review, 79 (2001), pp. 123–39: p. 124.
5 This real ad can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDmuRt62yOs [accessed 17 September 2020].
6 The cola was the first produced by the CCU, the Chilean beverage and beer company. It was introduced to replace imports of Pepsi.
7 The real recorded pleas in support for No by Hollywood Jane Fonda, Christopher Reeve and Richard Dreyfuss all appear in the film.
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