On September 18, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet reveals himself to the world in his first Te Deum. He has his arms folded, a stern expression, and his glasses that make him as mysterious as he is terrifying. Behind him, another soldier looks more menacing. Dutch photographer Chas GerretsenKnown at the time for covering the conflict as the Vietnamese, he recorded the scene on camera. The image summed up the meaning of the Chilean dictatorship. A face that says it all. Gerretsen is 89 years old and he guarantees that he will never forget it. The same sense of dread remained in the memory of many Chileans, including Pablo Larraín.
The film director was born three years after the coup. Dictatorship is a theme in some of his films; NO, postmortem And Tony Manero. Now Larrain has fleshed out that image taken with Gerretsen’s lens. It’s more about blood than flesh because in his movie To countPinochet, which Chileans will watch in theaters and on Netflix in the coming days, is a vampire. The beast is still there, nothing more Half a century has passed since the overthrow of Salvador Allendeand when the image of the dictator is subject to tolerant scrutiny by more than half the population.
To count accessing screens with keys Black humor, but also as a reminder. It all starts with a voice that tells the story of someone named Claude Pinoche. It is about a boy who grows up in a French orphanage in the 18th century, who later works as an officer of King Louis XVI and leaves the monarchy during the storming of the Bastille. A destructive impulse races within him: Pinoche has no soul, a being who, besides feeding on the fluids coursing through the veins of his victims, transcends time, fighting revolutions from Haiti to Russia to Chile. . . He has a new first and last name in there, and he just adds the letter “t” to it. Since then, General Pinochet, Fly over Santiago and take out the hearts Because it takes advantage of the blessings of technology and crushes them in a blender. First of all, give preference to young blood.
The movie jumps in time. Below is a faded Pinochet (played by Jaime Vadell). He has a servant named Fyodor, a Russian who took revenge on communism by killing hundreds of people in Chile. Like his boss, he’s a vampire and also Lucia Hiriart, the former dictator’s wife, a simple moralist who was never bitten by herself. Pinochet was so damaged that he had to use a walker to get around. Although he claims to be demented in order not to be judged as a violator of human rights, he undertakes this task privately. As for the reports of secret accounts abroad, he thinks these are just accounting errors. That money is what your kids want. The wrinkled Pinochet considers at this point whether it is worth keeping his bloodlust alive.
Pinochet’s transformation into the kind of Dracula that transforms the Carpathian Mountains into the Andes Mountain Range retakens one of the issues that dominate some of the democratic transition, and is in the face of its fiftieth anniversary marked by some convictions against those responsible for that transformation. As in the case of Víctor Jara, deviant behavior came to the fore again: Pinochet was never tried. And this impunity is emphasized in six satires. “I spent years imagining Pinochet as a vampire. a being that never ceases to wander throughout history, both in our imaginations and in our nightmares. Vampires don’t die, they don’t disappear, neither do the crimes and robberies of a dictator who never fails to respond to justice,” Larrain explained in his political satire. The Count is known for re-arranging the former dictator’s place in history. José Rodríguez Elizondo, National Humanities Award 2021 commented: “country worse than the beginning of the transition, Because the polarization of people who were not born during the conflict continues”.
disclose documents
The mockery these days does not contradict the desire for historical truth. Sherry Allende’s thousand daysAdapted from the book of the same name by Miguel González and Arturo Fontain, the film will attempt to approach the trauma of half a century on screens next Friday. In response, the CIPER journalism research center published: Personal documents of General Sergio NuñoA member of the Armed Forces Operational Command (COFA), which led the attack on the Palacio de la Moneda on September 11, 1973. This means that I must betray my conscience by sincerely silencing my denial and denial of the indescribable human rights violations that occurred during the government led by General Pinochet, without him taking timely intervention to stop such extremism.”
At the same time, journalists Juan Cristóbal Peña and Francisca Skoknic also disclosed classified documents. Alvaro Puga CappaCivilian closest to Pinochet speechwriter, censor, and head of psychological operations. Researchers found that, like a character in Larrain’s movie, he was poor and wanted to talk through his personal papers. It is now known that Puga liked to see himself as the fifth member of the Governing Body, who carried out the coup, symbolized by the figure of an insatiable vampire.