Class Viewing 1: Nostalgia de la Luz

The last three weeks have involved us, as a class, watching a documentary that has used specific conventions and techniques to achieved a required effect. Each of these techniques are meant to make us think about how we want to make our documentary and think differently than the usual TV docs we are used to.

The first film we watched was called: Nostalgia de la Luz, translated as Nostalgia for the Light. It was a Chilean film by a man named Patricio Guzmán. The film largely deals with the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

This film is very interesting because it combines two things: the search into the past of humans by astronomers and the search by the Chilean people who had relatives killed during Pinochet's reign.

 The film opens with a telescope looking at the moon. It takes us on a journey that leaves our world and into the beyond. We are then taken back down to the earth again and shown different pieces of technology, telescopes, that allows us to see into the void that is space. We see the desert, an abundance of history. We finally see a house that someone lives in and lets us known that there is life.

It is a mesmerizing opening and lasts a solid four minutes and could pass for a short film. It speaks volumes itself with the journey it takes us on. I see it as a journey of showing us that there is much more out there than we think. We live on this planet but there is so much more and so much that we do not know. The cosmos is massive and much bigger but these telescopes allow us to see what is beyond us. The desert, dry and no life, could be viewed as an indication that even though we are full of life, we are surrounded by places that aren't. 

These places, like the Atacama desert, are the location of these majestic telescopes that allow us to see what else there is in the universe and it can also be seen that before we existed this already existed.

The opening is also unique in that it is solely visual images and the sounds of the machines, all natural. No voiceover required to tell the story which leaves it open to interpretation, a powerful tool. One that I really want to use in my documentary.