{"id":3788,"date":"2023-11-01T12:38:50","date_gmt":"2023-11-01T12:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3788"},"modified":"2023-11-04T12:42:43","modified_gmt":"2023-11-04T12:42:43","slug":"something-very-strange-is-happening-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3788","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSomething very strange is happening here\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Watching Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory for New Scientist, 1 November 2023<\/a><\/p>\n

Sometimes, to really understand a process, you have to follow it, without flinching, even if it upsets you, even if it breaks your heart.<\/p>\n

Oscar-nominated director Maite Alberdi won the Sundance Grand Jury prize in 2023 for The Eternal Memory, a documentary made from original footage, home movies, newsreels and tapes smuggled out of Chile during the darkest years of General Augusto Pinochet\u2019s 17-year-long dictatorship. Its subject is the Chilean writer and journalist Augusto G\u00f3ngora, who\u2019s living — and by the last reel very obviously dying — with Alzheimer\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n

G\u00f3ngora (who passed away earlier this year aged 71) spent the years between 1973 and 1990 editing an opposition newspaper and shooting and smuggling VHS recordings out of Chile, as part of a desperate attempt to document and share years of national turmoil and horror. It was dangerous work. In 1985 a fellow journalist on the project, Jose Manuel Parada, had his throat slit from ear to ear for his trouble. This violent episode haunts G\u00f3ngora, whose sense of self comes to depend increasingly on the presence (real or imagined) of friends and family.<\/p>\n

From 1990 G\u00f3ngora\u2019s films recording \u201c17 years of death\u201d were succeeded by 18 years of cultural programming, as he went about interviewing writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians — people he believed could help bring his newly democratised nation out of its forced (book-banned, movie-less) forgetfulness, and reawaken its once vibrant culture.<\/p>\n

Diagnosed with Alzheimer\u2019s in 2014, G\u00f3ngora readily embraced his wife\u2019s plan to record his physical and cognitive decline. Such a record would, at very least, be a testament to their 25 years together. Assembled, edited and capstoned with much new footage, The Eternal Memory is that and more: a meditation on what we can and cannot expect from memory.<\/p>\n

The spine of the film is an honest, frank but never voyeuristic account of how Augusto Gongora succumbs to his neurodegenerative disease. Early on we see his wife, the actress and politician Paulina Fern\u00e1ndez, taking the couple\u2019s portrait off the bedroom wall before they settle to sleep. If she doesn\u2019t take it down, the sight of two strangers staring down at him from the wall in the middle of the night might send Augusto into a panic.<\/p>\n

Gongora\u2019s deterioration is relentless: soon he is talking to the strangers in mirrors and glass doors. \u201cSomething very strange is happening here,\u201d he muses. Soon he will not even recognise Paulina\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

Paulina\u2019s plight is given its proper weight. Tirelessly she recites the basic facts of her lover\u2019s life to him, and for a while, this litany brings comfort. \u201cThey\u2019re always with me,\u201d Augusto mutters, over and over, \u201cand they love me, every day.\u201d But no respite lasts for long, and the toll all this takes on Paulina is shocking.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s extraordinary about this film is that, even as it records the disintegration of memory in a single individual, it celebrates the way memories — set down in books, recorded on videotapes, delivered as witness statements or transmuted into art or drama or music — work collectively to bring an all-but-broken nation back to life.<\/p>\n

Because for all the sadness here, this, too, must be said: that Gongora, through his films and through the three volume collection of remembrances La Memoria Prohibida (published at last in 1989), kept the memory of his country alive, and by doing so, he preserved its identity.<\/p>\n

One line from that three-volume work of national renaissance echoes through the film: \u201dWithout memory, there is no identity\u201d. \u201cI\u2019m not myself any more,\u201d Gongora weeps, near the end of the film. Even as Gongora loses his identity, however, his people are seen regaining theirs.<\/p>\n

At a time when the idea of national identity is little more than a political football, it is worth remembering that a people\u2019s idea of itself is a living thing, worth defending against the amnesia of tyrants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory for New Scientist, 1 November 2023 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[1118,1119,989,167,348,1116,1117],"class_list":["post-3788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-alzheimers","tag-care-givers","tag-chile","tag-documentary","tag-media","tag-pinochet","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3789,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3788\/revisions\/3789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}