Director: Carlos Altamirano
Writer: Carlos Altamirano
Running time: 1hr 33mins
Virtual Memories is the tag that writer and director J Carlos Altamirano gives in his submission notes to describe the style of film making he employs in this feature length documentary. The stated goal of the Virtual Memories here is the successful merger of historical and biographical genres.
For your reviewer, Virtual Memories turned out to be an unremarkable approach to making a documentary – a collage of photographic stills, archive news footage, and talking head interviews – all pretty standard stuff. However, what does make Kill Altamirano a remarkable work is the story the director has to tell.
J Carlos Altamirano (‘The Director’) is the son of Carlos Altamirano (‘The Senator’) a leading figure in the early 1970s socialist government of Chile led by Salvador Allende. The Allende regime was overthrown in 1973 by a right-wing military coup led by an army general, Augusto Pinochet. Allende committed suicide in the besieged presidential palace. The military regime went on to institute a reign of terror during which its left-wing opponents were hunted down, tortured and murdered.
The Senator who had represented a hard-line communist faction within Allende’s socialist coalition escaped from Chile with the help of the communist East German government. The Senator was joined by the Director and other members of the family in exile. The family led a peripatetic and what appears to be privileged life in various places – Cuba, cold war Berlin, 80s London and Paris. In France the Senator became a friend of the socialist President Mitterrand. The Senator survived several assassination-attempts by goons sent by Pinochet.
In exile, as a result of the experience of actually living under totalitarian communism, the Senator’s political philosophy became more libertarian, and he went on to play a pivotal role in building the coalition that eventually achieved the transition to liberal democratic government in his home country. After the transition, the Senator returned to Chile to live a comfortable life as a revered elder statesperson. The Senator died in 2019 at the age of 96.
The Director studied film making in London and returned to Chile where he has had a long career in the film and television industry. The Director sees Kill Altamirano as the culmination of his life’s work – a homage to his father and his family.
The Director, as one might expect from an experienced filmmaker, tells his extraordinary story well. The editing and cinematography are first class and the use of the archive material, particularly the still photographs showing us the Senator’s early life and family background, is superb. The scene where the Senator is filmed returning to the border post high up in the Andes to reenact his escape to Argentina, smuggled in the boot of a car driven by a GDR spy, is riveting.
Besides this, there are two other sections of the movie I found particularly intriguing. The first was when the Director alluded to the difficulties he had in his relationship with his father and coming to terms with life as an exile. The archive stills that the Director illustrates his time as a somewhat confused hippie in mid-70s London are beguiling.
The second was the examination of the Senator’s upbringing and inheritance as a member of Chile’s ruling oligarchy. The Altamiranos had money. We visit the boardroom of one of the country’s big banks with sombre oil portraits of former chairmen lining the walls – the Senator helpfully points out the portrait of his grandfather. We see old photos and home movies of life on the family estate, and we are told, without comment, that the family bought the estate from a general who had been awarded the land from the state as a thank you for his successful military campaign against an indigenous people. Both sections are subtly done and vividly convey the Senator’s access to wealth and privilege.
I liked the approach that the Director took in both these sections – the viewer is left to think through for themselves the ramifications of a member of the oligarchy becoming a communist. Earlier in the film, we learn that during his time in government, the Senator was vehemently denounced as a class traitor. Again, the Director leaves us the audience to later make the connection as to why the Senator was deemed Public Enemy Number 1 by the Pinochet regime and why it pursued him in exile with such murderous intensity.
With Kill Altamirano the Director has given us what will, I am sure, go on to be considered an essential historical text for an understanding of the coup against Allende, the opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship, and the eventual restoration of Chilean democracy.
And yet…I wonder how many people without a prior interest in Cold War or Chilean politics will actually watch the work through to the end. For your reviewer, there were two big problems with the movie – the Family and the House.
Kill Altamirano comes in at a shade over 90 minutes and an inordinate amount of that time features the Altamirano family. There certainly are a lot of Altamiranos – the Senator had several siblings and married twice, and fecundity seems to be a family trait. After a while the sheer volume of family faces becomes a wearisome distraction. On numerous occasions we are given long lingering shots of what I assume to be the Senator’s grandchildren, watching footage of the coup against Allende on their laptop. There is no context given, we do not even know the names of the young people – so the reaction of your reviewer was – why are we seeing this. There are few things more boring than watching other people watching a screen without speaking – so at least prod those sitting in front the camera to see what they are thinking.
To an extent, this may be one of the trappings of making a film about your family. It is touching that the Director feels such love for them, that he can assume they will, simply by their presence and without elucidation, be of interest to a wider audience. But as much as they might factor into the Virtual Memories methodology, they sadly do not add anything to the movie. Instead, cutting the 30 or so minutes of the family scenes would probably yield a tighter, better-paced documentary.
Then there is The House. The Altamirano family home is set in one of the most spectacular locations I have seen in a movie – it is right up there with Casa Malaparte on Capri which Jean-Luc Godard used to such stunning effect in his masterpiece Le Mépris. Like Casa Malaparte the house is at the base of a rocky peninsula jutting into the sea but instead of the usually calm waters of the Bay of Naples it has the huge vista of the Pacific stretching out before it with thunderous waves pounding the rocks beneath it and a gigantic range of snow-capped mountains framing the picture. The house is surrounded by the Senator’s tasteful garden. This must be one of the most beautiful places to live on the planet, but it brought to mind the words of the great socialist songwriter Woody Guthrie:
A Garden of Eden, a paradise to live in and see;
But believe it or not, life ain’t so hot, if you ain’t got that doe-ray-me
The problem here is that the Director plainly loves the house with a similar passion to his love for his family and like the family sequences this drastically undermines the credibility of the film. I lost count of the number of times we were shown the house looking beautiful in the changing seasons cutting into the historical and political analysis. I fail to understand what the Director was trying to achieve with this approach.
For me, the shots emphasised that the Altamiranos certainly have the doe and their socialism is very much de haut en bas. While enduring a scene of seals frolicking in the surf, I reflected that in the entire movie we had yet to hear the voice of a working class or indigenous person. We see no barrios, no homeless people. No Haitian migrants or Venezuelans fleeing Maduro’s Fidelist dictatorship. The rural idyll ambience emphasised the fact that the Senator had put himself and his family at the greatest physical distance possible from his beloved proletariat. It comes as no shock when the Senator tells us that late in life, he has discovered that the future of socialism is ecology.
Near the end of the movie, we do finally hear from a solitary member of the working class – the Senator’s gardener and, later, carer who unsurprisingly tells us what a good employer the Senator was. This doesn’t really cut the mustard, though, when proving that all is indeed well in the best of all possible worlds.
If you can make it through the longueurs of the House and the Family, Kill Altamirano is certainly worth watching. One chilling scene from near the start has stayed with me. An urbane and plausible member of the Pinochet regime explains to camera the perceived necessity of hunting down and killing communists. It is not too far to imagine, in a near at hand dystopian future, where an urbane and plausible member of the Trump administration explains to camera the necessity of hunting out and killing abortion rights activists and critical race theorists. Surely that could not happen, or could it?