Dos años en Finlandia / Kaski Vuotta Suomessa
[Two Years in Finland] (Angelina Vázquez, 1975):
Performing Rites and Folklore in Chilean Exile Cinema
by José Miguel Palacios (Universidad Alberto Hurtado) & Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto (San Francisco State University)
“Chilean exile cinema” refers to a corpus of films and videos made by exiled filmmakers throughout the world, primarily between 1973 and 1990, the period coinciding with the military dictatorship in Chile.[1] For the special event of the Orphan Film Symposium held at the Austrian Film Museum in 2019 we gave a presentation on the radical aesthetics of Chilean exile films (Figs. 1 and 2).[2]
Since the themes for this year’s version of the Symposium are water, climate, and migration, we want to focus now on the exiles’ performance of cultural identity and folklore. These rites of longing and belonging are inherent to all kinds of migration. Defined by a particular mode of political displacement in the context of the Cold War, we understand the Latin American and Chilean exile experience of the 1970s and 80s as transnational cultural phenomena that function as a crucial prehistory of our contemporary waves of migration.
The short text that follows introduces Dos años en Finlandia/Two Years in Finland (Angelina Vázquez, 1975, Finland, 16mm, 28’) in order to examine the performative aspects of national identity as inscribed in everyday life gestures and traditions. A digital file of this documentary can be seen here, in Cineteca Online, the online platform of Cineteca Nacional de Chile, Chile’s National Film Archive (FIAF member since 2006). Spoken in Finnish and Spanish, the film has no subtitles. It is important to remind international spectators of this characteristic, since to be a viewer of exilic and diasporic films, as Hamid Naficy has described, is to participate in “multiple acts of translation across cultures and languages” (3).
Prior to the 1973 military coup, Angelina Vázquez had made Crónica del salitre (Chronicle of Saltpeter) (1971, Chile, 16mm, 9’). She was also a member of the Equipo Tercer Año, the team behind the filming of the landmark The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzmán, 1975-1979, Chile/Cuba, 16mm). And she worked as an assistant and translator for EPIDEM, a Finnish production company that made three documentaries about Chile under Allende’s government (Fig. 3).
Vázquez was also a militant of the MIR, Movement of the Revolutionary Left. After two years doing political work for the party, she went into exile (Fig. 4). Vázquez’s previous experience with EPIDEM was instrumental in her choice to seek asylum in Finland. This contact with Finnish producers and filmmakers helped her as she relocated in a foreign media industry. Most of her films were indeed co-produced by EPIDEM and were broadcast on Yleisradio (Yle), the Finnish public television network.3 [i]
Dos años en Finlandia was Vázquez’s first project in exile. Made for Yle TV1, the film is exemplary in its depiction of the experience of displacement. With a voiceover spoken by a female narrator in Spanish, the documentary provides succinct but key information about the lives of exiles.
One sequence shows a series of interviews with refugees who were tortured while imprisoned in Chile (Figs. 5 and 6). Other sequences are shot inside different Finnish factories where Chilean men and women labor while talking to the camera about the difficulties they face as foreign workers (Figs. 7 and 8).
The film also includes a different set of depictions, scenes that concentrate on everyday moments and the quotidian lives of refugees. Clip 1 shows a group of exiles inside a home. The décor, with political posters alluding to Allende and other figures of the Chilean Left, is typical of the homes of exiles. In the clip below, a group of refugees gather in front of the TV, trying to understand what they are seeing (apparently a cooking show).
This moment of domestic life is very clear in portraying the gendered division of labor exiles brought from Chile, with the women sewing and the men simply watching television. But this same moment also points to a sense of community, the configuring of a group that is way larger than a nuclear family.[4] The scene in front of the TV is followed by a Finnish lesson where the struggle of learning a new language is made patently visible in the face of one man.
Near the end of Dos años en Finlandia there is a sequence devoted to the festivities of the Chilean national holiday (September 18). Clip 2 shows children drawing people dancing, which segues into a party where Chileans and a few Finnish guests perform traditional songs and dances.
Scenes such as this one appear quite constantly in Chilean exile films, for instance, in J’explique certaines choses (Rodrigo González, 1975, Canada, 16mm),[5] in Gens de toutes parts…Gens de nulle part (Valeria Sarmiento, 1979, France/Belgium, 16mm), and in Journal Inachevé (Marilú Mallet, 1982, 16mm) [Fig. 9]. This is because “to withdraw into the bosom of one’s community” is a fundamental characteristic of the early phases of exile, as Ana Vásquez and Ana María Araujo described in their landmark book La maldición de Ulises. Repercusiones psicológicas del exilio (41).
The presence of these folk and essentialist elements of national culture is indicative of the many tensions behind the subjective positioning of exiles. Vásquez and Araujo stress that while most exiles reclaim a sense of national identity, some exiles, highly politicized and educated, are more suspicious since they know that terms such as “national identity” and “national culture” are not neutral (66).
Filmmaker Angelina Vázquez discusses something similar in a working document she wrote while preparing a presentation for a symposium on exile and the family that took place in Helsinki in 1982. In this document Vázquez notes that “our cultural identity is not our mountains, empanadas, red wine, and our cueca [folk dance], even though it is all of that as well.” Later in her writing she adds that to “revive smells, songs, and food” is an important part of the cultural identity of a people, but she goes on to warn about the conservative undertones of such an idea.
These tensions are implicit in the sequences shown In clip 2. The exiles perform a reified an essentialist version of their own identity, but the performance in itself is a ritual affirmation of their lives, of their very existence as exiles. The clip ends with an interview with a man who talks about the culture of resistance against the dictatorship, both in Chile and in exile. While the man speaks about the political imperative to resist the dictatorship in close-up, the music, dancing, and drinking continues in the background [Fig. 10]. It is a wonderful moment that once again manifests the conflation of realms (social, cultural, political, domestic) that characterizes the lives of refugees.
Bibliography
Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2001.
Palacios, José Miguel. “Resistance vs. Exile: The Political Rhetoric of Chilean Exile Cinema in the 1970s.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 57 (2016).
Palacios, José Miguel and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, “Message from Chile.” [in] Transition. Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies vol. 6, nº1 (2019).
Mouesca, Jacqueline. Plano secuencia de la memoria de Chile: veinticinco años de cine chileno (1960-1985). Madrid: Ediciones del Litoral, 1988.
Pick, Zuzana M. “Chilean Cinema in Exile (1973-1986). The Notion of Exile: A Field of Investigation and its Conceptual Framework.” Framework 34 (1988): 39-57.
_______ . “Chilean Cinema: Ten Years of Exile (1973-1983).” Jump Cut 32 (1987).
Ramírez-Soto, Elizabeth. “Journeys of Desexilio: The Bridge Between the Past and the Present,” Rethinking History vol. 18, nº3 (2014): 438-451.
Senio Blair, Laura. “Atravesando continentes y océanos: La obra fílmica de Angelina Vázquez.” Nomadías. El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Agelina Vázquez, eds. Elizabeth Ramírez Soto and Catalina Donoso Pinto (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2016): 181-206.
Vásquez, Ana and Ana María Araujo. La maldición de Ulises. Repercusiones psicológicas del exilio. Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana, 1990.
Vázquez, Angelina. “October 1982. Notes for an intervention in a symposium on exile and the family. Helsinki.” Fondo Zuzana Pick. Cineteca Universidad de Chile.
Filmography
Crónica del salitre / Saltpeter Chronicles (Angelina Vázquez, 1971, Chile, 16mm)
Diálogos de exiliados / Dialogues of exiles (Raúl Ruiz, 1974, France, 16mm)
Dos años en Finlandia / Two Years in Finland (Angelina Vázquez, 1975, Finland, 16mm)
Gens de toutes parts…Gens de nulle part/People from Everywhere…People from Nowhere (Valeria Sarmiento, 1979, Belgium/France, 16mm)
J’explique certaines choses / I Explain Certain Things (Rodrigo González, 1975, Canada, 16mm)
Journal Inachevé / Unfinished Diary (Marilú Mallet, 1982, Canada, 16mm)
La batalla de Chile / The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzmán, 1975-1979, Chile/Cuba, 16mm)
La femme au foyer / The Housewife (Valeria Sarmiento, 1976, France, 16mm)
Pilsner & Piroger / Pilsner & Empanadas (Kjell Jerselius and Claudio Sapiaín, 1982, Sweden, 16mm)
Pinochet: asesino, fascista, traidor, agente del imperialismo / Pinochet: Assassin, Fascist, Traitor, Agent of Imperialism (Sergio Castilla, 1974, Sweden, 16mm)
Bios
José Miguel Palacios is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Art Department at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile. His essays have appeared in Jump Cut, [in] Transition, Archivos de la Filmoteca, la Fuga, and in various edited collections. He received a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2017. jpalacios@uahurtado.cl
Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the author of (Un)Veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary (2019) and the coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (2016). She received a Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick in 2014. eramirezsoto@sfsu.edu
Notes
[1] For overviews and summaries of Chilean exile cinema, see Mouesca 1988, Pick 1987 and Pick 1988. More recent scholarly approaches can be found in Ramírez-Soto 2014, Palacios 2016, and Palacios and Ramírez-Soto 2019.
[2] Our goal in Vienna was to showcase two rarely seen materials representing different aesthetic paths traversed by exile directors, in order to reveal the shifting nature that notions such as “political,” “radical,” and “militant” cinemas acquired throughout the 1970s. For that event we screened a 16mm print of Pinochet: asesino, fascista, traidor, agente del imperialismo / Pinochet: Assassin, Fascist, Traitor, Agent of Imperialism by Sergio Castilla (1974), courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, and a digital file of Valeria Sarmiento’s La femme au foyer / The Housewife (1976), courtesy of Groupe de Recherches et d’Essais Cinématographiques (GREC).
[3] For an overview of Angelina Vázquez’s career, see Senio Blair 2016. “Atravesando continentes y océanos: La obra fílmica de Angelina Vázquez.” Nomadías. El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Agelina Vázquez, eds. Elizabeth Ramírez Soto and Catalina Donoso Pinto (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2016): 181-206.
[4] With doses of dark humor, Raúl Ruiz offers a critical rendition of this sense of community in his Diálogos de exiliados (1974), recently made available in a 2K digital scan by the Cinémathèque Française’s new online platform Henri. See this clip from 1:12:53 to 1:16:59 for a scene that shows the choreography of everyday life, with exiles repeatedly entering and exiting the domestic space. https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/60316-dialogue-d-exiles-raoul-ruiz-1974/
[5] Folk music and leftist posters function as the background of a gathering of Chilean exiles in J’explique certaines choses (Rodrigo González, 1975, Canada, 16mm). The film is now available on the website of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). See this clip from 8:43 to 11:10. https://www.nfb.ca/film/il_n_y_a_pas_doubli/
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