GUZMAN’S ALLENDE
[“Only fascist mummies don’t jump.”]
Goodbye to thirty years ago,
us. Like the front page of a newspaper,
Z’s
method of working [Muralist or Street Brigade]
amnesia. Memories emerge--they resonate under the skin.
“Now begins the most difficult time.”
Something very intimate shared among everyone:
as much a stranger in your own country.
Life and his political orientation,
Leninist. I’m absolutely certain that he was not.
Even convinced his enemies.
No one speaks about it.
Doors remained open.
Exactly what they tried to do again.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 12-21-05 (7:44 PM)
Written in the dark at the National Gallery of Art during the Washington DC
premiere of the expatriate Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzman’s 2004
film “Salvador Allende”. One hears the words I chose for my inscription
from an unidentified voice on the soundtrack describing historical footage
of an Allende rally in which the participants jump up & down in place to
manifest their support. Though Guzman clearly sympathizes with Allende and
had to leave Chile after the coup, he includes a wide variety of voices
within his film, even the talking head of the U.S. ambassador during the
early seventies, who at one point cites Nixon’s vulgar opinion of Allende
(“a bastard and/or an s.o.b.”). The Chilean perspective which emerges from
the film is that Allende was a “gentleman” and a doctor, and I was
interested to hear a former Bolivian diplomat who had not seen the film use
that same word “gentleman” in conversation later that day.
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