Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

“Those Who Don’T Remember Don’T Exist Anywhere:” Historical Redemption In Patricio Guzmán’S Nostalgia For The Light (2010), Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera

Journal of Religion & Film

The poetic aesthetic of Patricio Guzman’s documentary Nostalgia for the Light (2010) ponders the nature of memory and history. The film uses a metaphysical approach to explore the traumatic past of Chile, creating a sense of historical redemption as defined by Walter Benjamin (1940). Contemporary Latin American documentaries have abandoned the idea of objectivity to focus on subjective portrayals of memory as a way to capture the plurality of personal experiences of historical events. As a result, these documentaries have become more artistic and formally innovative than the previous epic informative films of the region. In the case of Guzman’s …