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 Perhaps 2004 will go down in history as the year the Latin American Left began transforming itself into cinematic images. Films like "The Motorcycle Diaries" by the Brazilian Walter Salles Júnior, "Machuca" by the Chilean Andrés Wood, as well as the Brazilian double-feature of Eduardo Coutinho's "Peões" ("Metalworkers") and João Moreira Salles' "Entreatos" ("Intermissions") share a determination to testify, each in its own way, about the Latin American Left's central moments and about image-making.
One could in fact hope that, sooner or later, the region's cinema would resolve to take on its formulative function. Thus it has begun the delicate task of image-making for chapters of history as complex as Che Guevara's guerrilla adventure, Salvador Allende's popular mobilization and the great ABC strikes in the São Paulo industrial belt of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo and São Caetano.
Nevertheless, a comparative analysis of these films turns up narrative and approximation strategies of the Left political project that are often mutually antagonistic.
Each of these films responds, often involuntarily, to the following question: What does it means to make political cinema today? Each of them also ends up telling us what constitutes a possible political action nowadays.
This question is currently growing more complex since, in the first place, the Left governs in all the most important countries in South America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela, as well as Uruguay and Ecuador). Nonetheless, we do not yet know how to evaluate such a situation.
Class Struggle at the Foot of the Andes
Of all these films "Machuca" perhaps faces the most delicate task: capturing the turbulent Salvador Allende years. This task is delicate because, even today, Chilean society remains divided over how to evaluate this period.
Unlike countries such as Argentina and Uruguay that, in one form or another, defined a version of their recent history that is tacitly accepted by civil society, Chile continues to be marked by profound divisions over the meaning of its past.
In no other of these countries was the obligation of memory such a problematic demand. In no other of these countries did the Right continue so linked to the "glorious memory" of the military regime and did the bookstores remain so full of books exalting the conquests of modernization by the regime and its maximum figure Pinochet.
This behavior would be unimaginable in countries like Brazil, where the Right is sufficiently astute to avoid linking itself to the ruins of a past that it itself produced.
But this Chilean exception can be explained. No other Latin-American country had a political experience of the magnitude of the one set into motion by Salvador Allende.
Anchored in a broad process of popular mobilization spanning decades, the election of Salvador Allende represented the only true 20th century attempt at implanting socialism without changing the rules of the game of parliamentary democracy.
Had it been successful, it would have furnished a renovated paradigm for world action by the Left through the real incorporation of parliamentary democracy and the surmounting of the old reformism-or-revolution dichotomy.
Since the Chilean experience was so important, it would therefore have to be extinguished radically. And it almost was, not only by the unparalleled violence of the military coup and of its everyday "law and order" administration, but also by the enormous U.S. investment in the country's economy during the decades of the military regime.
As has been common in Chile ever since the Argentine José de San Martín's troops turned over independence to the Chilean Bernardo O'Higgins, it was thanks to an external intervention (in this case, Pinochet's imprisonment by the British court), that the Chileans began the attempt to regain their own history.
In this sense, Wood's film has the merit of finding the best perspective from which to relate the Salvador Allende experience: the class struggle. We must remember how easy it would have been to make a film a la Brazilian.
Both sides' excesses would be shown, and the final result would be something along the lines of "Look, everybody, the two sides were wrong in their radicalism; there was much incomprehension on the part of them both. So, it makes no sense to continue blaming one another. What's important is to look ahead, even because life goes on."
This would indeed have been easy to do; instead Wood sends us back to the insistent rationale of the class conflict by centering his story upon the friendship between a poor scholarship student in an elite school and his rich classmate,
True, speaking of class conflict these days may seem the ultimate anachronism. After all, wasn't the very concept of social class inherited from a turbulent time when we could still appeal to proletariat class-consciousness and count on fingerpointing by middle-class intellectuals?
In fact, we are dealing with an "anachronism" here, but if there is only one thing more anachronistic than the class conflict, it is the social dynamic of Latin American societies and the concentrationist rationale of their elites.
Recent studies that link the increase of luxury consumerism in Brazilian society and the worsening concentration of wealth demonstrate how the questions posed by Wood's film are still bitterly current. A certain election in the municipality of São Paulo showed us that the rich and the poor still do not vote in the same way.
All this reminds us that the class struggle must now be linked to the dynamic of wealth circulation and to criticism of it, and no longer to the knee-jerk formation of a social conscience with its problematic notions of identity.
"Machuca" thus serves as a reminder that true political action does not extinguish such conflicts, but, rather, politicizes and exacerbates them, establishing a republican dynamic of demands for equality still ignored by our Latin American societies.
In this sense, perhaps one of the few really relevant contributions of the Venezuelan experience of Hugo Chávez (who, in large measure, is a classic example of a leftwing caudillo) may be its demonstration of the contemporaneousness of class dynamics in the heart of Latin American political conflicts.
The Limitations upon Ethicizing Politics
To some extent, these questions also appear in Walter Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries" but with different results. Determined to make a film about the development of Che Guevara's revolutionary consciousness, Salles mobilized all the aesthetics acquired from his years of directing publicity commercials and used them to film the trip made by Guerva and a friend towards the profound misery of South America.
The solidarity that made Guevara dedicate his life to the revolutionary cause would have thus been born from this contact with misery and exploitation, allied to a sense of innate ethical integrity.
In this sense, Salles does not even fear to furnish us with a "Christian" metaphor of this passage by employing the image of an asthmatic Che Guevara, who, during his birthday party, swam across a river to celebrate his rebirth on the other bank, together with a legion of poor lepers.
Nevertheless, at least as the story of the political education of someone from the upper middle class who embraces the revolutionary cause, Salles' film is absolutely problematic.
At the end, we simply still do not understand why Che Guevara became a revolutionary instead of a doctor volunteering with Médecins sans frontières or someone who joins Bono Vox and Sharon Stone in raising donations from millionaires for starving Somalians.
Linking the revolutionary act to solidarity with the poor is as great an error as placing engagement with a guerrilla group on the same level as volunteering with an NGO that helps the needy.
It is always worthwhile to remember that all of us are "in solidarity" with those in misery and not for this do we resolve to embrace the revolutionary struggle with all its consequences.
Upon "humanizing" Guevara, Salles' film winds up circumscribing the revolutionary act to the dominions of the ethical judgment. Nevertheless, perhaps the revolutionary act may be closer to the religious act, such as Kierkegaard conceived it.
Kierkegaard reminds us that, in order to comprehend what is in play in the religious act, we must counterpoise the dimensions of ethics and of aesthetics.
He takes as a paradigmatic example the act of Abraham, ready to sacrifice his son in the name of faith. Such an act demonstrates how the religious is beyond ethics, since, from the point of view of ethics, Abraham's act (killing his own son for a faith) is a violent, frightening aberration.
Nevertheless, it is at this point in which the intersubjectively distributed ethical judgments must be suspended that we unexpectedly encounter the dominion of the religious.
The same can be said of the revolutionary act, which always carries with it the problem of legitimizing violence that suspends juridical laws with their aspirations to establish ethical judgments.
In this sense, we could at the same time say that the passage over to the revolutionary act presupposes, on the contrary, a certain annulment of the links sustained by solidarity in favor of a certain indifference to suffering and to the ethical. This is perhaps why, for us, the revolutionary act seems something so distant and difficult to understand.
In this sense, "The Motorcycle Diaries" appears to be symptomatic of a certain Latin American Left seeking to reconcile its former admiration for figures like Guevara with the belief that a certain unfocused solidarity with poverty - solidarity preferably sponsored by private enterprises - can ease our bad conscience.
It is as if the political dynamic of the class struggle must be replaced by victimization of the excludeds awaiting solidarity. In other words, from the politics of revolution to the politics of victimization.
Messages in a Bottle
Both "Machuca" and "The Motorcycle Diaries" challenge us to confront our evaluation of the legacy of the Latin American Left's central experiences.
The first insists upon the perenniality of societal divisions on our continent; the second involuntarily winds up preaching the gospel of solidarity between classes and of victimization politics.
On the other hand, Eduardo Coutinho's "Peões" is, above all, a rare film about popular mobilization and its consequences.
Coutinho's film takes as its principal focus the destiny of some anonymous protagonists in the great Brazilian ABC strikes in 1979 and 1980.
This is a singular historical event because, from the point of view of its demands, the strike was a fiasco. Almost none of the demands were met and a good part of the strike organizers were fired.
Their later jobs were worse: taxi drivers, bus conductors, owners of bankrupt micro-enterprises. Almost all of them speak with nostalgia of their time at the factory.
Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves: What transforms a failure into a major historical moment in Brazilian society with currently decisive consequences?
To some extent, Eduardo Coutinho set up this question and permitted his interview subjects to respond to it. The pride that they show, 25 years after the fact, for their strike participation is an expression of the perenniality of the changes brought by an organic process of popular mobilization.
The indestructible sentiment that nameless, unimportant persons can transform themselves into the heirs of a desire for emancipation was what made this fiasco a success from the point of view of its historical consequences.
Illustrative here is the testimony of a mother who says she is sad she dedicated more attention to the union than to her children, but, after all, she affirms, "They will understand."
In other words, they will understand that they received a more valuable education. Because, she says, referring to what was learned by the children of those who were once nameless, they are bearers of republican demands.
This legacy of popular mobilization is usually like reason, which, according to Freud, is a voice that speaks low but never stops talking.
Originally published as "Imagens da esquerda latino-americana" on www.uol.com.br/tropico
Vladimir Safatle vsafatle@yahoo.com is a professor in the University of São Paulo philosophy department.
Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome LinJerome@cs.com.
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