Through Rose-Tinted Glasses?

Week 44 : Notes

Remember beautiful French actress Brigid Bardot in the 1960ies, before her political views took a sinister turn? Remember all the nice objects that surrounded our childhood? Till today US-American Laci Fay and her husband live as if they were in 1958. Nostalgia is an emotion that edits memory of the past to re-package it as a period full of positive associations. Indian filmmaker Geetha J.’s longing for a past dates back to a time in the 1950ies when the Soviet Union attempted to form closer relations with ‘Third World’ countries. The people of the Cahuilla Nation in Southern California look back on life before the coming of the Europeans in 1774. Today their language is listed as critically endangered. Nostalgia for the Light is a documentary film about the Atacama Desert in Chile. It tells the story of the driest place in the world, a favoured location for astronomers to study distant galaxies and a test site for future Mars missions. Aside from the aspirational implications, it can also tell the tale as the place where political prisoners who were disappeared under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet are buried. Pinochet came to power after a CIA engineered coup d’état on Sept. 11, 1973 toppled the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende and his civilian government. Under Pinochet 2,279 persons were reported to have disappeared or assassinated for political reasons, 31,947 were tortured and 1,312 exiled. Patricio Guzmán, the Chilean film director lives in Paris. After this gruesome report, Suzannah Lipscomb, British historian, academic and television presenter asks us to consider why popular historical reports pervasively present the past as a familiar and cosy place…