Nostalgia for the Light. A Film about Infinite Searches

During the first seconds, images of a huge telescope in motion are shown, then a gray surface covered with craters (perhaps the Moon?) and then the rays of sunlight filtering through the window of a house surrounded by trees: three ways in which light makes itself present. Then we hear the voice of the Chilean filmmaker himself, Patricio Guzmán: “The old German telescope, which I have seen again after so many years, still works in Santiago de Chile. I owe my passion for astronomy to it”.

And to that passion we, the viewers, owe this beautiful documentary entitled Nostalgia for the Light, in which the sky and the Earth, the memory of the universe and the human memory dialogue.

The planisphere shows a great ochre stain: the Atacama Desert. With an approximate surface of 105 thousand square kilometers, it is the most arid non-polar place on the planet.

ALMA, the world’s largest astronomical project, was born there. Science and poetry seem to converge in its name and maybe also in its passion: the observation of the universe. ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), built by a group of countries from Europe, North America and Asia, along with the Republic of Chile, is an interferometer consisting of 66 antennas of seven and 12 meters in diameter for the observation of millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. Its qualities make it possible to study the formation of stars at the beginning of the universe and to obtain detailed images of stars and planets in the middle of their birth process. They are the gateway to the cosmos.

Atacama is also a privileged place to study human memory. There, the properties of the ground cause human remains to mummify. This is why it is possible to read, as the filmmaker says, “the great book of memory, page by page”. Astronomers look up to the sky while archaeologists look down to the ground, but both are observing the past. Despite this, Chile is a country in which much of recent history is kept “undercover”. Little is still said about the miners who populated the area at the beginning of the 20th century, little is told about the repression against the indigenous peoples over the decades, and almost nothing tells about Pinochet’s crimes, who tortured and “disappeared” over 40 thousand people. Guzmán himself says:
We see images of the firmament of an at once imposing and moving beauty. In front of them, the pain that the earth holds. “Near the observatories, in the middle of this vast emptiness, are the ruins of Chacabuco, the biggest concentration camp of Pinochet’s dictatorship”, built on the remains of a 19^th century mine, “when the mining industry was like slavery”, says the voice-over, while the camera flies over the rigid rows of barracks where the most atrocious crimes were committed. But there, too, the “nostalgia for light,” for freedom and for space, led the prisoners to observe the universe. Guided by a doctor who knew some astronomy and thanks to the clarity of the sky, even without a telescope, with a simple instrument of incredible precision made by themselves, they were able to learn to recognize and study the constellations. “Looking at the sky, we felt absolutely free,” says one of the survivors.

In the same area where ALMA is located, where archaeologists and astronomers from all over the world live together, a group of women with a sieve and a rake have been searching the soil for decades for the remains of their loved ones buried there by the Chilean army. They are the so-called Women of Calama. Violeta Berríos knows that she will not stop her search as long as she is alive: “I have always thought that I wished telescopes did not just look at the sky, but that they could also see through the earth so that we could find them.”

An American astronomer looks for traces of calcium in celestial bodies. The same calcium that forms our bones. The same calcium that is in those human fragments that populate the desert. “We are star-stuff pondering the stars,” Carl Sagan said, and while this might read like pure poetry, it is actually a scientific reality:
Premiered in 2010 and having won over 30 awards, the Cannes Film Festival among them, Nostalgia for the Light—whose title was taken from the book by French astrophysicist Michel Cassé, Nostalgie de la lumière: Monts et merveilles de l’astrophysique—is a moving and poetic testimony of the strength of memory: the memory of the universe and the memory of history. “Everything is stored in the memory. Dream of life and history,” sings León Gieco.

We started with a poet, let us finish with another one: Octavio Paz.

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am writen,
and at this very moment
Someone spells me out

Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger.

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