“You Never Know What You Are Filming”

• Author: Kristi M. Wilson
• Published date: 01 September 2015
• Date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X15587482
• Subject Matter: Film Review

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 204, Vol. 42 No. 5, September 2015, 269–271

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X15587482

© 2015 Latin American Perspectives

269

Film Review

“You Never Know What You Are Filming”

Art, Mentorship, and States of Siege

by

Kristi M. Wilson

Miguel Ángel Vidaurre Marker ’72: Cartography of a Faceless Filmmaker. Chile, 2012.

Marker ’72: Cartography of a Faceless Filmmaker, produced by Factoría Espectra,

is an essay-style documentary about the groundbreaking French filmmaker

Chris Marker’s encounter with Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1972, his subse-

quent mentorship of Chilean director Patricio Guzmán (The Battle of Chile), and

his impact on the Chilean film community after the military coup of 1973. A

legendary recluse and the director of enigmatic film classics such as La Jetée

(1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983), and AK (1985), Marker

arrived in Chile as part of the production team for the filming of Costa-Gavras’s

political thriller State of Siege. According to Guzmán, in spite of the fact that

State of Siege turned out to be one of the largest film productions in Chilean his-

tory, Marker had not come to film anything with Costa-Gavras; “he just wanted

to see Chile.”

Allende’s victory brought well-known people from around the world to

Chile. As the documentary filmmaker and director of the Chilean School of

Cinema Carlos Flores jokingly suggests in the film, Chile saw an influx of all

types of people, from well-known hippies to CIA agents. Marker ’72 features an

impressive array of archival footage, including excerpts from Allende’s final

speeches. A particularly memorable archival sequence features two foreigners

who went to Chile in sympathy with Allende’s movement. Dean Reed, a North

American musician known as “El Elvis Rojo” (Red Elvis), is shown performing

to large crowds, followed by television footage of an interview in which he

says, “It was here in South America, in Chile, that I first saw the enormous

injustices that exist. A tiny minority of people possesses all the privileges, hold

all the wealth in their hands, while the vast majority live in misery under a

dictatorship.” He is also shown speaking out against North American massa-

cres in Vietnam and symbolically washing blood off of the U.S. flag in a Chilean

plaza. Another foreigner, the French philosopher and academic Régis Debray

(author of The Chilean Revolution), is featured on his return to France after

Pinochet’s coup. Archival footage of Pinochet’s soldiers arresting and tear-gas-

sing protesters and spraying them with fire hoses is juxtaposed with clips from

Costa-Gavras’s famous Westerns and scenes from State of Siege, a film about

military death squads and leftist guerrillas in Uruguay filmed in Chile on the

Kristi M. Wilson is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition and affiliate assistant profes-

sor of humanities at Soka University of America.

587482LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X15587482Latin American PerspectivesWilson / FILM REVIEW

research-article2015