Nostalgia for the Light (2011) (Thursday, January 5, 2012) (132)

I feel like watching Werner Herzog's The Cave of Forgotten Dreams should be a requirement for anyone watching Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light. Part of this is due to the fact that this film is one of the most Herzogian films not made by Herzog that I've ever seen. Furthermore, both films deal with the concept of researching and discovering the unknown past in similar ways. Both director's films look at physical and celestial things, but investigates the metaphysical along the way. They both look at the very small in a greater search for answers to the very big.

Guzman's documentary looks at the Atacama desert, a high desert in northern Chile, where, due to an unusual lack of any humidity, astronomers have found it to be an ideal place for observing the night sky and extraterrestrial bodies. In addition to this, it is also a bleak landscape where, due to it's salty soil, pre-Columbian human history for tens of thousands of years is evident. But this is not the only history that lies inches beneath the surface. During the 19th century, this area was the home of a massive mining industry that relied heavily on slave or indentured-servant labor. Most importantly it was also the home of several concentration camps for political rivals during the Pinochet regime. Thousands of people were "disappeared" to the desert, many of them were buried there for a time, until, it is suggested, their bodies were exummed and subsequently dumped in the ocean to cover the state murderer's tracks.

This film is a look at people who study several things and several points in history from the same place on earth. There are scientists who look up at the heavens through their telescopes and search for evidence of the beginning of the universe. There are archeologists who look at the pre-Columbian, prehistoric human record. There are political historians who look at the Pinochet era. Finally there is a group of women who visit the desert looking for human evidence of their lost or missing loved ones who might have been buried in the desert, even for only a short time.

The connections that Guzman makes from one person's testimony to another's is wonderful. He asks the astronomers about their thoughts on the desert itself, as a harsh, almost-extraterrestrial landscape and beautifully connects what they say to shots of women digging in the dirt for signs of human bone fragments. At one point he takes two of those women and sets them up inside one of the oldest telescopes in the area, brought there by German scientists in the late-19th century. The connection between old and new, celestial and terrestrial, known and unknown is powerful and elegant.

The film is shot on DV camera and looks more like a home movie, than a internationally funded documentary. Still, there is a homemade intimacy here that is very powerful. I appreciate that this is a very personal, human story of trying to wrap one's head around difficult matters. Of course, this is a movie that is trying to gather material about people who are trying to gather material, and I think Guzman is aware of the cheekiness of such a proposition.

The title, Nostalgia for the Light, suggests that we are all searching for some sort of light, either literal (as in the astronomers) or metaphysical (as in the women who look for their loved ones). There is also the suggestion by Guzman that seeing some of the old telescopes in this high desert is a return to the Chile of his youth, a nostalgia for the pre-Pinochet eden of his childhood. This is a totally wonderful and brilliant film that should be seen by anyone interested in great documentaries about ontological dilemmas and the human condition. This is easily one of the best films of the year, of any genre or format.

Stars: 4 of 4

Project Nim (Tuesday, July 5, 2011) (50)

Project Nim, a documentary by James Marsh (who made Man on Wire and Red Riding: 1980, both very good films), tells the interesting and heart-breaking story of Nim, a chimpanzee who was raised from two-months-old to age five by (human) grad students studying language and communications in chimps. Nim's raising was anything but scientific, but not entirely surprising considering the early-1970s era in which he lived.

At Columbia University in 1973, Linguistics professor Herb Terrace enlisted grad students (and his sometimes paramours), to raise the chimp, cleverly named Nim Chimpsky. Over the first three years of Nim's life, he had no fewer than five human minders and teachers, each one different in style and scientific method than the last. He was taught American Sign Language and was ultimately able to express his basic desires ("I want a hug," I want a banana," "I need to use the toilet"), though his ultimate ability to "cummunicate" his emotions or anything other than his wants was debatable.

Shuttling between humans who had very different ideas of the project, Nim was either closely minded or let to roam free and "be an ape". (One of his human minders, a grad student in psychoanalysis, apparently was interested in his masturbation and breast fed him from her own breast. Ew.) Ultimately, around age 4 he started acting like the chimp he really was the whole time, biting people who he perceived as threats and becoming less and less fun and cute. At this point the Columbia project ended and Nim's life as a post-experimental chimp began, moving from medical research labs to chimp jails.

This is a very interesting examination of the scientific method gone wrong, and how humans being humans are sometimes more animalistic than an ape being an ape. The film is largely unsentimental, although, there are several moments when Marsh relies on our connection to Nim and our anthropomorphizing of his plight to pull our heartstrings. I could have done without these moments (mostly because such things are so banal and shallow).

Still, there is a lot of interesting material that forces us to ask ourselves interesting questions. If humans are able to smoke pot, why can't chimps? Is it at all humane to test medicines on chimps if it will save human lives? At what point in a non-physical psycho-sexual relationship between a chimp and a human should administrators step in to block it? All very difficult and interesting questions....

Stars: 3 of 4