One of the greatest documentaries ever made is to be given a rare screening in Britain. John Pilger reveals how The Battle Of Chile records Pinochet’s crimes against humanity.
The documentary film struggles to survive. In the United States, it has all but disappeared from the mainstream. In this country, the docu-soap is put forward as a counterfeit alternative. The justification is the Murdoch one, that the public is interested only in a moving belt of patronage, trivia and false emotion. Yet when a documentary breaks a silence and challenges authorised wisdom, elevating its audience almost to participants, people respond in their thousands. Next week, there is a rare opportunity to see such a documentary: in my view, one of the finest ever made.
This is Patricio Guzman’s The Battle Of Chile: The Fight Of An Unarmed People, an epic of reportage on the events that extinguished democracy in Chile in 1973, to be shown at the
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 12 Feb 1999