Re-Viva la Revolución! Part 5
Reframing Violence
Just before the paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland in 1994, David Miller pointed out that since the end of World War I in 1918, ‘[t]he guiding light of British policy […] has been to try and push Ireland to the margins of British politics. This was managed quite successfully until 1968, when the North exploded on to television screens around the world. Since then, British policy has been directed to containing the “troubles”’.1 The constructed concept of the ‘Troubles’ – a term which connotes a containable and manageable group of homogenous events – was coined by the British press in the 1980s and spread into common parlance. All the while, that parallel containment of the conflict in politics and journalism, Miller continues, emphasized the ‘criminality’ of the Irish Republican Army which, as Miller points out, only served to raise the ‘news value’ of the political violence (pp. 2–3). What it also achieved, though, was the deflection of accountability away from a government which insists on retaining sovereignty over part of its neighbouring island while treating it so much as a place apart that its most loyal subjects feel disenfranchised. The localized violence that erupted closer to home turf in a year of large scale revolt across the world may have come as a surprise to Britain, but the social and civil rights issues at the heart of the conflict were brewing long before the region was established in the 1920s, and were continually side-lined as reportage of the conflict was reduced to ‘newsworthy’ sectarian divisions and paramilitary violence.
Media censorship and spin underpin Larraín’s ‘Pinochet trilogy’ in which No was preceded by Tony Manero (2008 – two years after Pinochet’s death) and Post Mortem (2010). The pacifying and deflecting nature of Chilean national television during the regime is satirized throughout the first of the three, the title of which immediately evokes mediatized simulacra. Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro, playing divisive characters in all three) will go to any lengths to appear on a daytime lookalike show as his hero, the eponymous character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (dir. John Badham, 1977).
Raúl’s individual extremism is first shown when he comes to the aid of an elderly woman (Marta Fernández) being mugged. He helps her home, where she reveals that she has a colour TV because she is a military widow. As Pinochet appears onscreen, she becomes caught up in a sentiment that is shockingly disrupted when Raúl smacks her head, then beats her vigorously with his open hand. The character epitomizes Pinochet as military dictator: a surface appearance of a benevolent and caring middle-aged male leader who in fact poses a more severe and hidden threat than the ghettoized youth who stole from, but did not hurt, the loyal and trusting vulnerable woman. Furthermore, Raúl’s violent murders and forceful appropriation of property (the colour television is the first of many thefts the film shows him committing) occur in secrecy in broad daylight, just like the thousands of disappearances, murders and commandeering of land since 1973. In No, the production team are faced with threats, stalking and intimidation, and take evasive action to ensure their tapes are not leaked or tampered with, and that they’ll actually be broadcast. And what was broadcast re-appropriated the surface image of democratic choice and liberty back from the neoliberal regime.
Around twenty minutes into No, René is shown No’s initial attempt at their first 15-minute promo which uses archival footage of military actions and violence since the coup to construct a negative portrayal of Pinochet. In a similar way to Good Vibrations, this is reframed on the television as René watches while the leftist consortium awaits his response, which is not what they hoped for. He tells them that their chances of winning are low if they take a negative approach, inferring that truth is not a viable product, while something conveying a sense of happiness is. When early polling statistics emerge, there is a clear lean to Yes but with most voters feeling unable to declare their position. The lack of freedom to think for oneself in a range of demographics is identified as a gap in the market, and the No campaign begins to take shape.
The apparently affluent No group thrash out the thematic design of the campaign during a liberal barbecue at a beach villa. Summery non-diegetic ukulele strumming disjunctively accompanies them referring to the pain they’ve suffered under Pinochet’s regime. This incongruous scene calls back to an earlier formal round-table Yes meeting in which it is mentioned that even his greatest critics must concede that Pinochet modernized Chile and created an economic climate in which anyone – not everyone, but anyone – can become rich. As the No group refine the product of happiness they aim to sell while the film depicts them performing a middle-class vision of happiness, it is hard to see a distinction between what the rightists already provide economically to many and what the leftists want to replace it with. The scene even includes an exchange with Carmen (Elsa Poblete), Simón Saavedra’s (Pascal Montero) nanny who is called from her servitude to give her opinions of Pinochet, which are positive thanks to the educational and employment opportunities benefiting her adult children. Given that victory for No has the potential to make anyone, but not everyone, happy, the film re-presents the campaign as a cynical marketing battle between two sides prepared to win at the expense of ethical responsibility and truth.
From then on, No recreates and reveals the production of the promos with studios, set-ups and crew consistently appearing in frame. Following a sequence showing, usually in long blurry zooms, the filming of picnics, dancing, passing the Chilean flag on horseback, recording catchy jingles in which women say no to things they don’t want, and playful allusions to the finger-wagging ‘no’ gesture, among others, the real footage consisting of these elements is played.2 The scene reverses René’s first meeting with the coalition with his initial ‘draft’ of the campaign materials meeting resistance with one member refusing to endorse an unethical ‘campaign of silence’ that ‘looks like an ad for Coca-Cola’. The promo indeed includes images taken from global popular culture and US-style ads, such as the Free cola mime artist. Notably, Ricardo (Alejandro Goic) criticizes the campaign for being about winning rather than revolution, in contrast to Hooley in Good Vibrations who is concerned with revolution, not success, to the detriment of many around him; no one truly wins in either film. As René claims, he does address silence and absence, but in appealingly familiar ways that are not ‘a drag’. As such, No begs the question: rather than eradicating violence and inequality, was the impact of the No campaign’s success only violent in a different way to Pinochet’s regime? Because here lie similarities with the pressure to move on and forget about the past in Northern Ireland, collective and individual traumas be damned for the sake of progress – a progress that in all areas of life seems only evident in the machinations of capitalism in both places.
The approaches René considers too downbeat include a sequence that pensively slows down, stills, rewinds and replays archival footage of military violence against a civilian – a moment with several levels of appropriation – and the metatextual filming of Patricio Aylwin, playing himself. Aylwin, who became Chile’s first post-dictatorship president elected following the 1990 general election arrives to record a speech describing Pinochet’s human rights abuses. His statements are grounded in statistics, and indeed he led the commission that quantified the number of politically-motivated killings, torture and disappearances under the regime. His appearance, even more so than the real Hooley’s subtle cameo in the recording studio in Good Vibrations, collapses any sense of separation between the past and present by positioning him within the fiction in a similar way, in the same space and at the same time as archival footage of him addressing voters directly to camera. René finds the resulting talking head of a middle-aged lawyer and politician citing abstract figures to be detrimental to the marketing of happiness achieved through saying no. When Urrutia challenges René about silencing the truth, René insists that he agrees truths need to be told, but in a more engaging way.
The film cuts to a sequence featuring a group of women performing La Cueca Chilena, Chile’s national dance centred around a heterosexual courtship. Cutting from showing the filming set-up to the real final sequence reframed on a television set, the scene shows a group of women of different ages taking turns to perform the female part of La Cueca alone, intercut with medium close-ups of them each stating to camera their relationship to a disappeared man.3 The compression of the list using rapid cutting and overlapping voices as each woman identifies as a mother, wife or sister of the missing men they name is indicative of the vast number of personal stories of loss and trauma due to violent death and disappearance at the hands of the regime, particularly when notable dates of disappearance such as 13 October 1973 are given, just a month after the initial coup. The segment on full-screen bridges a time ellipse from its implied filming to René watching it as it airs. This more emotive way of expressing absent presence signifies the cynicism and manipulative marketing tactics of the campaign, and, via René, holds the campaign’s moral ambiguity up for scrutiny.
As a researcher passionate about giving voice to marginalized groups including women, victims and survivors of conflict, it gives me no pleasure to draw attention to the film’s implication that these women’s painful experiences were used to win a referendum, particularly as silence prevails around these very problems, as the recent films of Patricio Guzmán demonstrate. My feeling is that the inclusion of this sequence adds to what could be considered as the film’s overall comment on Chile in the early twenty-first century rather than Chile in 1988, that little has changed, and that transgressive film culture is encouraging its global viewers to engage critically with such ambiguous morality. It also embodies that incongruous alliance between social consciousness and neoliberalism identified in contemporary Chile.
When security attempts to manage civil rights marches gave way to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, a dilemma arose in that the conflict being screened weekly and daily indoors on television sets was the same as the one brewing just outside the door or down the road for many viewers – it was doubly domestic; at once mediatized and all too real, depending on your social class or where you lived. It is no wonder that such pervasive violence was met with resistance from youth and punk counter-cultures who shunned the segregation that increased throughout the 1970s for a sense of community and place alternative to those offered by feuding sectarian factions and security forces.4 The Chilean context presents a different complication to the notion of mediatized violence of the censorship and self-aggrandizing propaganda imposed by the right-wing junta, also in the 1970s. In this respect, what has been mediatized is more clearly the systematic whitewashing and forgetting of the past, with the filmed evidence of this only appearing in the work of exiles and outsiders such as Patricio Guzmán and Chris Marker5 until Larraín’s allegorical and retrospective Pinochet trilogy.
The notable absence of ‘difficult’ archival material in No while it appears in abundance in Good Vibrations is also indicative of the contrast between the intensified mediatization of the Northern Ireland conflict and the control exerted over the media throughout Pinochet’s dictatorship. It is likely that the few instances of screened violence in No are more impactful for its relative absence while viewers could become accustomed to the real bloodshed and simulated torture and beatings in Good Vibrations. Speaking for myself, as a native of Belfast, seeing the destruction of its buildings, streets and people never gets any less upsetting even after multiple and close viewings, so it’s an idea perhaps too subjective to be conclusive in this analysis, but worth putting the thought out there as I refine this analysis.
1 David Miller, Don’t Mention the War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda, and the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1994), pp. 2–3
2 I suspect some of the actors used reprise their original roles in the videos, and often in the same locations in Santiago. For example, in the intercutting between the six women singing in the real promo and the representation of its filming, the actors do appear to be versions of their archival counterparts. Also, the man dancing at the top of an outdoors concrete stairway is shown briefly in close-up perhaps deliberately to indicate it is the same man, who appears much younger in the promo. If this is the case it adds a further dimension in considering actors and locations, and even the matched costumes, as revived archival materials alongside the moving image documents, that is, the elements of No which have been re-appropriated.
3 Many thanks to Francisca Sánchez Ortiz for pointing this out to me.
4 As is referenced only vaguely in the film by Pat in the Harp Bar (Dylan Moran), punk is also associated with the LGBTQIA+ community. Bearing in mind the religious conservatism still rife in Northern Ireland, alternative subcultures often provide a haven and sense of belonging for those persecuted for their ‘non-traditional’ sexuality and gender identity as well as the young who resisted the political and ideological clashes of the conflict.
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