Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nostalgia for the Light (original title: Nostalgia de la luz) (Patricio Guzman France/Germany/Chile 2010). Icarus Films 2011. Region 1 DVD, 35 mm or HDCAM. us$440.Carl FreedmanAny reasonable short list of the world's great documentary filmmakers would certainly include the name of the Chilean director Patricio Guzman. The auteur of numerous films (the term from Cahiers du Cinema, so often misapplied, is appropriate here), Guzman remains best known for The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile; Venezuela/France/Cuba/Chile 1975-79), a monumental threepart work that traces the tragically brief period of political hope and progress in Chile during the democratic-socialist Popular Unity government (1970-73) of President Salvador Allende; the war against Popular Unity waged by the Chilean bourgeoisie and their allies in the Nixon Administration in Washington; and the destruction of Chilean democracy in the military coup d'etat led by General Augusto Pinochet on 11 September, 1973, when Allende was killed, his government overthrown and a ferociously reactionary dictatorship of mass terror imposed on the country. Made with a tiny crew and with almost risibly meagre equipment and other resources, The Battle of Chile invented new techniques for representing history in cinema: and the film still possesses a scope and a power that are nearly unrivalled among documentaries. Many consider it the most consequential political documentary ever made.Though almost indisputably the greatest, The Battle of Chile is, however, by no means the only important film in which Guzman has sought to deal with the deeply troubled modern history of his country. Chile, Obstinate Memory (Chile, la memoria obstinada; Canada/France 1997) tells the story of Guzman's return to Chile after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship, there to screen The Battle of Chile (which had been banned) for veterans of the Popular Unity days as well as for a new generation of Chileans with little knowledge of their country's past. The Pinochet Case (Le cas Pinochet; France/Chile/Belgium/Spain 2001) tells of Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998 and the elaborate - though ultimately unsuccessful - attempts to hold him legally responsible for the murders and other crimes committed by his government. Salvador Allende (Belgium/Chile/ France/Germany/Spain/Mexico 2004) is a biography of the late president from his childhood until his death.Nostalgia for the Light, Guzman's latest effort, continues to develop his great and overriding theme - but in unusual and rather surprising ways. The film is primarily concerned with three quests for knowledge: the search by astronomers for knowledge of distant stars and galaxies; the search by archaeologists for knowledge of ancient civilizations as revealed in human remains and artefacts; and the search by aging Chilean women for knowledge of their loved ones whom the Pinochet regime secretly kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured and murdered.What do these three apparently quite different quests have in common? One thing they share is Chile's vast Atacama Desert. The Atacama is said to be the driest place on earth, and it provides Guzman with the raw material for some of the most memorable cinematographic images of desert landscape since 3 Godfathers (Ford US 1948), Lawrence of Arabia (Lean UK 1962) and Fata Morgana (Herzog West Germany 1971). Astronomers are naturally drawn to the Atacama, because the almost complete absence of humidity in the atmosphere above the desert means that celestial bodies can be observed with unparalleled clarity and brilliance - as Guzman illustrates with some of the most gorgeous images of outer space since 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick UK/US 1968). Likewise, the dryness of the desert makes the Atacama a magnet for archaeologists eager to study the extraordinarily well-preserved pre-Columbian carvings and other artefacts created thousands of years ago by the area's prehistoric inhabitants. Finally, the Atacama is the location of the Chacabuco concentration camp, the largest such facility in which the Pinochet regime imprisoned and, often, killed Chilean democrats in the 1970s. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".