Connectedness In Film

The idea of connectedness, of history repeating itself, of scenes that play out over and over again, lies at the heart of Nostalgia de la luz. Although the film is personal in style, the viewer feels that Guzmán reaches outward (beyond the self) to make visible connections among history and human experience, to create awareness that, ideally, might form the basis for reconstituting broken communities. Of course, we don’t see anything in this film akin to the pueblo of Third Cinema, but what we do see are groups of people (the wives and mothers of the disappeared, young scientists, new generations, etcetera) seeking ways to mitigate human isolation and affirm a connectedness that, as all of Guzmán’s cinema shows, is abundantly lacking in our

Yet, overall, Guzmán’s treatment of the collective is subtle and, in general, manifests fragmentarily; the collective does not appear onscreen as a multitude demanding social change, but rather as a phantasm that has not managed to fully coalesce and revive in postdictatorial times. Gone, for example, are the militant throngs of La batalla that undulate in the streets as if they were one body. Instead, in Guzmán’s postdictatorship cinema, the collective is something to be mourned, desired, celebrated, or intuited. By contrast, Pino Solanas’s post-2001 films return us to the political of Third Cinema—mass street action and overt, incendiary ideological discourse—in ways that Guzmán’s films do not. This move toward citing a Third Cinema aesthetic to revive its potential in the present is the second move I want to examine. Whether Solanas is successful in his attempt is what concerns me