Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Invite resubmission with major revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

Hidden Treasures/Películas escondidas (2013) contributes to the visibility and re-evaluation of the so-called “DEFA-Chile films.” Despite some circulation within Chile in recent years, these films made by the East German state production company DEFA in collaboration with Chilean refugees remain largely overlooked both by local scholars and audiences alike. The most significant contribution of this documentary is, therefore, the visibility it grants to the DEFA film archive by featuring a number of neglected films such as Blonder Tango (Lothar Warneke, 1986), Hitler Pinochet (Jörg Hermann and Juan Forch, 1975), and Isabel auf der Treppe (Hannelore Unterberg, 1984) via the incorporation of large sequences as archival footage. However, the overall approach is deeply problematic.

In her statement, co-director Claudia Sandberg writes that the debates about the past in former East Germany “still happen mostly in binary opposites and in simplified understandings,” thus aligning her film with the work of German scholarship trying to move away from such limited perspectives. Unfortunately, Hidden Treasures reproduces a similar simplistic approach to the deeply complex cultural memory debates in post-dictatorial Chile. Indeed, the documentary opens with the question: “Have the marks of Pinochet’s dictatorship disappeared from the collective memory?” Such a question was recurrent throughout the 1990s but since then the critical discourse has moved beyond the opposition between memory and forgetting. As argued by Steve Stern in his trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile, struggles over the past are better understood in the form of a battle of “memory against memory”.

Sandberg’s film is strategically structured so as to reach an affirmative answer to this opening question by showing these materials to an audience simply described as “Chilean students.” Herein lies perhaps the deepest weakness of this work. These young Chileans, Sandberg’s voiceover tells us, are “students from a local university.” Little information is provided about the University Adolfo Ibañez, a private institution where students speak fluent English and seem rather “surprised and provoked” by the DEFA films. Forty years after the coup, one of them even claims that “we read in books that the people who were abroad in Germany, because of the Pinochet incident” were “usually pretty happy to be there…. [But the character of the film] seemed very miserable.” The student’s inability to say the words “coup,” “exile,” or “dictatorship” is quite suggestive. What the documentary withdraws from the viewers is that this private University is renowned for its historic connections to the Chilean political right, with professors who are staunched Pinochet’s supporters. The “sample” of students emerges therefore as one that is opportunistic and biased, for the responses could have been very different had Sandberg chosen a different audience. The directors should explicitly acknowledge this shortcoming and provide the necessary contextual information to the intended spectator to be able to understand the reactions of this limited circle of students from the Chilean conservative upper class.

And who is the intended viewer in this case? The documentary seems more attuned to a German audience, but it does not acknowledge the imbalances of power behind perpetuating the image of an “amnesiac” Chile in a work led by a German co-director for German viewers, or even a wider international audience. This rather unreflective position of enunciation further complicates the political dimensions of the work, as can be seen from the uncritical re-appropriation of cinematic codes extensively used by Chilean exile directors, such as the act of return, the use of the first-person narrator, the shock of encountering the wealthy neighborhoods of Santiago, as well as of the Andes mountains seen from an airplane, including the usage of folk songs associated with the revolution and resistance. The title leads to further confusion. Sure, these films can certainly be seen as precious materials, real gems; but who has been hiding these treasures? Have these films been actively kept out of sight by someone; or have they been just largely neglected, like hundreds of films related to the turbulent Chilean recent history? And what role has access to foreign archives played in this lack of attention? These are timely and important questions that could be tackled at least by the accompanying statement.

Review 2: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

The project touches on a fascinating subject in the DEFA-Chilean films (one which I was not aware of) and aims to go beyond just relating this interesting filmic and political-historical body of work in its engagement with those involved in the production, and by following Guzman’s lead in gauging today’s Chilean student’s reaction to the films.

These are clearly all three of these are worthwhile strands of research, however to bring these all together in an 11min film is very challenging.  While the research statement provides valuable context, and acts as a clear, well written, guide for the aims and intentions of the project, attempting to weave these together into one film provides moments where the project seems to become unstuck. While the work clearly accommodates the theme of how the DEFA film material is met by a young Chilean spectatorship, and thus opens ideological, cultural and temporal conflicts this raises, the brevity of this aspect of the film, of around 4mins at the end of the film, limits its impact. As the filmmakers acknowledge, this approach has its roots in a number of similar films, including within a Chilean context, so originality in approach is not the goal. However, the voices of the students are limited to three, including one of which is read via an email, and while they provide a brief interesting insight, the limited nature of the footage (I assume there was further conversations with the group of students) struggles to create a strong indication of the frontiers with the young Chilean students and the film material that the project aspired to investigate.

The middle of the film, which engages with an actress and producer of the DEFA-Chilean films, was potentially very interesting, as the opening third of the film had provided a film essay style introduction to this material that also helped to lead us into this. But the limited production quality of the material became problematic. While the two film professionals are interesting when positioned against their work, the limited nature of the discussion with them included in the film, and production quality raised a question of the original intention of this part of the project, i.e. was this material actually meant to be part of a film in the first place? or were these filmed as merely archive of interviews conducted as part of a wider traditional research project? The stories of those working in these films is a very interesting subject however, and is something that seems to provide an opportunity for much wider research.

The filmmakers have also taken the step to use the co-director’s role as film historian travelling to Chile to undertake the project as a partial narrative structuring device. However, as acknowledged in the text, this was clearly a decision taken late in the production, and its function in the film, especially within the presentation of the DEFA film material, seemed to result in the effect of a film lecture, rather than the personal story of the German film historian traveling to Chile that perhaps may have offered the narrative link the filmmakers were looking for. This lack of more personal details of who the voice is that is that is leading us also doesn’t help this and resulted in a lack of emotional engagement with the voice over, and often raising more questions on why we they were telling us what was being presented. The production quality of the sound also did not help this. Voice over in documentary film is notoriously difficult, and while I understand the decision to attempt to take this approach to help bind the various elements of the film together, I would have recommended to relook at the script if this was still possible (which clearly, as the film was released a number of years back, it isn’t).

Finally, I return to my opening comments, that the subject the project engages with is very interesting, and the historical, production, and young Chilean spectatorship themes all were fascinating aspects in their own right. However, combining them together into a short documentary film is a big challenge, and one that at times created questions in the viewer as to the value of some aspects the filmic approach the authors chose. The written statement was strong, and as the film clearly is not able to be changed, I am happy to recommend the work for publication.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.