Clandestine in Chile (1986)

Miguel Littin, a Chilean filmmaker banished from his home country during the Pinochet regime, disguised himself and entered Chile in 1985 with the purpose of shooting a film depicting life under the Pinochet regime. This book is a story about Littin’s foray into doing so.

In his “Introduction” to Clandestine in Chile, Garcia Marquez tells us that he believed there was a film behind the film that Miguel Littin clandestinely shot in Chile in 1985, which was the genesis for the book, Clandestine in Chile. And halfway through Clandestine in Chile, the writer observes that Littin’s goal was “to capture in cinema-verite style what the poor think about the dictatorship and the degree to which Salvador Allende’s memory lives among them.” I think both observations describe the style Garcia Marquez selected for this piece of reporting: that is, “cinema-verite” describes the manner of the written narrative, with its emphasis on scenes, actions, settings, and a point-of-view similar to a camera perched on Miguel Littin’s shoulder.

There is an ambivalence of a sort that hangs in the air throughout the narrative--not exactly doom everywhere but not exactly joy either. Some of the most memorable scenes are ones that register an overall unease and joylessness: people talking absent gestures and expressions, the police acting anxious and nervous, the clean and modern buildings and sidewalks, the friends that do not recognize him in his disguise. There are moments of high tension, but they, too, tend to be written in this ambivalent mode (unease not doom, perhaps comic but certainly not joyful): one such moment is the observation by a cameraman that his film crew were so close to Pinochet in Moneda Palace that “if somebody had come to kill him, it would have been very easy.” So I suppose the extent to which a reader feels tension and responds emotionally to this narrative depends on just what the reader’s relationship to Chile is. I imagine the Pinochet scene, as well as others that depict Littin so close to those wielding state power during this dictatorship, would have been quite chilling for some Chileans to read. Likewise, the good-natured and sympathetic exchanges Littin and his undercover accomplices had with police officers on foot patrols, would have likely resonated with the mixed feelings many Chileans likely had during that time period toward ordinary police and anonymous bureaucrats. Right from the start of the narrative, the reader understands that Littin, home after years of exile, encounters an airport, a city, a place that looks much nicer--on the surface--than he thought it would. It’s an interesting observation and one that seems to me to ring true to the spirit of “cinema-verite.”

Equally true to “cinema-verite” seems to be the manner in which past violent events are related: they are stated, reported, not dwelled upon at length. It’s a telling narrative choice that adds to the gravity of the situations described, for describing violent deaths at length (in prose, or on film) can easily verge into something I would call a pornographic depiction of suffering. In other words, it seems to me there’s something more disconcerting about state violence that is just reported or told, suggesting as this manner does that state violence is commonplace. Deaths of the powerful and the common are worked into the narrative when the places of such grief are film locations. We likely cannot locate the Plaza Sebastian Acevedo on a map of Chile today, but for the people of Chile, Littin (and Garcia Marquez) tells us, that plaza will always bear the name of the coal-miner who set himself on fire in despair at the continued detention and torture of his son and daughter during the Pinochet regime.

Stylistically, this work differs from Garcia Marquez’s other two pieces of reporting I have read (News of a Kidnapping, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor), which is a signature of Garcia Marquez. For he is a writer who has always invented a form, a style, a structure, for each of his book-length works that reveals his incomparable skills as a writer.

A brief note on the preface by Francisco Goldman (author of The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop, which is very well-written and is an engrossing read). I read the preface to this edition after I had completed reading the work by Garcia Marquez. I’m glad I read things in that order. For I’m not sure of the purpose of the preface, for Goldman seems to be providing a context for the original publication from a point-of-view that isn’t very clear. Goldman seems to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing Garcia Marquez’s political beliefs--and often in a manner that does not connect with this particular book. Thus Garcia Marquez is taken to task for actions he did not take--protests he did not lodge, etc. Goldman also questions the adoration still showered on Pablo Neruda as a parenthetical insertion that comes from somewhere, but I’m not sure where. The preface, in places, reads like Goldman is taking potshots at Garcia Marquez and Neruda because of their political philosophies. But then maybe that’s wrapped up in the NYRB and their choice to republish this book now in the US and to select this particular preface writer. In thinking about Goldman’s preface, I thought about something Milan Kundera once wrote. Kundera, in Testaments Betrayed, discusses the tendency we have to look back on past writers and judge them by political and social realities we know in a later time: we tend to forget that we proceed forward into history in a fog--we cannot see forward nor back very far--and yet, when we look back at past writers, we tend to forget that they too traveled as in a fog. Maybe Goldman doesn’t appreciate the fog. Either that, or, for some reason Goldman felt it necessary to use Bolano and Vargas Llosa (two strange pilgrims, so to speak) to write this preface to a work by Garcia Marquez. And now I have perhaps just written from a point-of-view that isn’t very clear. Unless, of course, you’re familiar with the writers just mentioned. ( )

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, famous for his books, 'A Hundred Years of Solitude' and 'Love in the time of Cholera' puts on his journalistic hat again, and produced this summary of 18 hours of interview with Miguel Littín, a famous Chilean film director who had returned to Chile during Pinochet's regime of terror to film the condition of the country and the effects on the people. Miguel Littín had fled Chile after Pinochet toppled Allende in the coup and remained in exile, being on Pinochet's list of 5000 people forbidden to enter the country.

Littín spent 6 weeks in Chile disguised as a Uruguayan businessman. Precise and detailed planning with 3 European film crews who were unaware of each other for security, filming different sections of Chile, was necessary and made possible only with the assistance of the underground resistance. In order to escape detection, Littín had to stay in character the entire time he was in Chile, keep an eye out for the carabineros paying attention to him, avoid calling on friends and family, make sure his teams were kept safe, the film footage smuggled out of Chile into Italy, and that they all get out before the game was up.

His adventures were very cloak and dagger, meetings were a series of complicated passwords and his guardian angel was clearly working overtime because he had some incredible luck in getting out of more than a few potential dangerous situations where his disguise could have been uncovered. ( )

This book is pretty incredible. Going in, I knew only the most basic details about Pinochet's coup, along with the portrait painted in Bolano's 'By Night in Chile', and now I know a lot more.

I really want to track down this documentary now. The Allende cult of personality stuff is not very interesting, but the madness of Littin's provocation would make for an amazing film. Littin's behavior is so bizarre throughout the whole thing, and he repeatedly puts himself and others in danger. Reads like fiction... ( )

In the introduction to the NYRB edition of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Clandestine in Chile, Francesco Goldman makes the claim that the book is most rewarding when read, not as the tale of adventure and political intrigue it seems at first glance, but instead as a study of the times (1985), the place (Chile), and the specific person: Miguel Littín, exiled middle-aged film-director who returns to his native country disguised as a Uruguayan businessman, to film a documentary about life under the Pinochet dictatorship. I tend to agree with Goldman's claim. As a gripping tale of resistance fighters battling a frightening adversary, and equally as an exposé of the horrible living conditions resulting from the Pinochet regime, the piece is undeniably lacking. As Goldman writes,


[Even] Littín briefly finds himself reflecting that he could easily live in this country. He and the teams of filmmakers he deploys like a spymaster throughout the country never seem to be in any real danger. There is some suspense over Littín's being unmasked, but one senses it would lead to nothing graver than his expulsion from the country; the reign of terror in this locked-up Chile seems to have subsided. There is little in this book that might disturb the tranquility of those who argue that, on balance, the coup and the Pinochet dictatorship were worth enduring because of the relative prosperity and stability, and the return to democratic rule that was its undeniable result.

Nothing, that is, unless you count Littín's subjective disagreement with such an argument, based on his memories and the stories he's heard about life in Chile since 1973. The filmmaker enters the country convinced of what he will find there, awash with nostalgia and traumatized by the time, twelve years before, when he and his wife and children were forced to flee the country under real pain of death. Almost from the opening pages, though, the Chile Littín actually discovers is a severe anticlimax. He expects to find Santiago devastated and depressing; instead, he is disappointed to find, at least on the surface, a "radiant city":


The new Pudahuel airport, however, lies on an expressway with a modern lighting system and that was a bad start for someone like me who, convinced of the evil of the dictatorship, needed to see clear evidence of its failures in the streets, in daily life, and in people's behavior, all of which could be filmed and shown to the world. But now my disquiet gave way to frank disappointment. [...]

         Contrary to what we had heard in exile, Santiago was a radiant city, its venerable monuments spendidly illuminated, its streets spotlessly clean and orderly. If anything, armed policemen were more in evidence on the streets of Paris or New York than here.

Of course, the true test of a city's quality of life is not measured by the illumination of its monuments or the cleanliness of its streets, and Clandestine in Chile does not make the argument that life in Chile under Pinochet was devoid of repression. Neither, however, does it come up with first-hand accounts that prove very condemnatory. Littín has a stable of second-hand or twelve-year-old horror stories about repressions under the regime (professors arrested in front of their children and later killed, a father setting himself on fire so that his children be released from torture), but the actual events that occur within the book prove, at the most surreal, and more often merely routine. Littín and his crew, for example, are convinced it's a trap when they are granted permission to film inside Moneda Palace (Pinochet's headquarters), and they collaborate with their undercover contacts to make sure of several contingency plans before entering, but the filming proceeds in an uneventful, non-threatening way. Similarly, reports of one of his crews getting arrested turn out to be false; ticket inspectors on the airplane turn out not to be looking for him; even the carabineros (policemen) of whom he is so obsessively paranoid in the beginning of his trip turn out much more often helpful and sincere than sinister.

Indeed, on the few occasions when Littín does seem in real trouble, he has invariably brought the problem on himself, through his almost comical compulsion to test the boundaries of his own cover. And in fact, this ties in nicely with the quality that, ironically, I found to be Clandestine in Chile's saving grace: Littín's irresponsible and (there is no other word for it) dickish behavior is so odd, and the rest of his character so contradictory, that the reader can easily remain engaged throughout the book's 116 pages solely in trying to figure him out. What to make, for example, of his decision to seek out and provoke two carabineros working on his film site during one of the first shoots in Santiago, therefore making it more likely that they would examine the very false documents about which he was endlessly anxious? How to react to his claim that he "accidentally" ended up out after curfew with a crew member in the neighborhood of his childhood home and "unknowingly" directed the car to his mother's house, thereby enabling himself to visit his mother and uncle despite previous strict warnings not to go near them for fear of blowing his cover? There is the odd compulsion he feels to carry a huge number of packs of Gitanes cigarettes into the country, and his paranoid inability to get rid of any of the used-up packets. One of his most asinine moments comes shortly after his entrance into Chile, when he is beset by a sudden wave of nostalgia and jumps out of the taxi—ignoring the imminent curfew, abandoning his ostensible wife and generally calling both their cover into question; when she gets angry at him upon his return and then the female head of the Italian film crew requires him to go through all their pre-arranged passwords rather than just letting him in because she recognizes his voice, he seems to think her thoroughness threatens his manhood:


         But with the same rigorousness she was to display every moment of the days to follow, she would not open the door until the password game was complete.

         "Goddammit! I muttered to myself, thinking not just of Elena but of Ely [his real wife] too. "They're all alike." And I continued to reply to the interrogation in the manner I most detest in life, that of the housebroken husband.

Bizarre, right? I mean, if you didn't think so many passwords were necessary, why agree to them in the first place? It reflects very little on gender roles that one partner in a collaboration would expect to go through the full password exchange as rehearsed, rather than abandoning the plan just because the other person says "Stop screwing around and let me in." Throughout the book, Littín displays this odd mix of petrification at relatively innocuous setbacks, and a cavalier dismissal of the safeguards his collaborators think necessary.

Not that Littín is entirely unsympathetic; there were many scenes when I found him to be quite likeable. But this behavioral discrepancy reinforces the impression that Littín himself is unsure how seriously he takes his political work in Chile—it often seems that, although genuinely critical of the Pinochet regime, his true motivation stems more from a desire to explore his personal nostalgia than to criticize his political opponents from the inside. Paragraphs about the film's political raison d'être sometimes collapse at key points to give way to sentences like "I had lost the image of my country in a fog of nostalgia" and "now, for the first time, I had to question whether this harvesting of my nostalgia was worth the trouble." It is characteristic of the Littín character as crafted by Garcia Marquez, that he would refer to a political exposé as a harvesting of nostalgia.

And indeed, the authorship of the book—Littín as filtered, or crafted, by Garcia Marquez—is one of the most interesting things about it. After Littín's real-life trip to Chile, he was interviewed by Garcia Marquez about his experiences; Garcia Marquez then whittled the long interview down to a novella-length piece of reportage, claiming to use only Littín's own words. To me this brings up quite interesting questions about what it means to "author" a work, since what Garcia Marquez did would more often be referred to as "editing." At the same time, sampling, cutting, and rearranging preexisting interview footage into a cohesive narrative is an approach to nonfiction that mirrors some of the cut-and-paste methods of the Beat poets—a cool application that would certainly not have occurred to me.

All in all, a curiosity, and one that I found compelling albeit for different reasons than I originally assumed.

The first thing I think of when I hear the name Gabriel Garcia Marquez is magical realism, particularly the wonderful One Hundred Years of Solitude. With Clandestine in Chile, Marquez has gone back to his roots as a journalist to write this nonfiction account of a filmmaker's return to Chile to make a documentary of life under Pinochet.

The filmmaker, Miguel Littin, had been exiled, barely escaping with his life, when Pinochet took power. Several years later, he altered his looks and his accent to return to Chile under an assumed identity. We learn how he managed to sneak into the country and remain undetected for the long period required for filming, how he directed the filming on location by posing as an innocent bystander, instructing the cameramen by coded signals, how permission was obtained to film even in forbidden places, how he handled chance (and possibly dangerous) encounters with friends and acquaintances from his past.

The book provides little of substance about life under Pinochet (for that we will have to view the film), other than as it affected Littin's freedom of movement. Marquez has written this account in the first person. Although the words are presumably not always those of Littin himself, Marquez states that he "respected the narrator's way of thinking" in condensing 600 pages of taped interviews into this slight volume (barely more than 100 pages).

This is a quick read, but you will not learn anything substantive about the political and economic upheavals in Chile during the 1970's and 1980's ( )