Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin (New York Review Books Classics)
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 1590173406
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1973, the film director Miguel Littín fled Chile after a U.S.-supported military coup toppled the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. The new dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, instituted a reign of terror and turned Chile into a laboratory to test the poisonous prescriptions of the American economist Milton Friedman. In 1985, Littín returned to Chile disguised as a Uruguayan businessman. He was desperate to see the homeland he’d been exiled from for so many years; he also meant to pull off a very tricky stunt: with the help of three film crews from three different countries, each supposedly busy making a movie to promote tourism, he would secretly put together a film that would tell the truth about Pinochet’s benighted Chile—a film that would capture the world’s attention while landing the general and his secret police with a very visible black eye.
Afterwards, the great novelist Gabriel García Márquez sat down with Littín to hear the story of his escapade, with all its scary, comic, and not-a-little surreal ups and downs. Then, applying the same unequaled gifts that had already gained him a Nobel Prize, García Márquez wrote it down. Clandestine in Chile is a true-life adventure story and a classic of modern reportage.
since. The conductor informed us that there was a dining car but that regulations required that man. He suggested that we it be sealed we wanted, and our car at the Rancagua stop an hour we from the pull- could go to the dining car before the train pulled out, eat whatever as off later. We return to ran as fast could because curfew had already sounded and the conductors were hustling us along, shouting, "Hurry, gentle- men, hurry, we are breaking the law." At the Rancagua
soon as it was exposed so that Grazia could take the rolls of film with her to Italy all at once. Her departure date had not been chosen casually. For the last week we had been studying the best way to get the material already filmed out of Chile since the underground channels provided in the initial worked out. We were grappling with the problem when it was announced that the new cardinal of Chile, Monsignor Francisco Fresno, would be arriving in Santiago to replace Cardinal Silva
Allende, and completed by the dictatorship, which also dedicated it, so it was a world I had not discovered until then. I was surprised at its cleanliness and efficiency and the readiness with which my countrymen had adapted to traveling underground. We had no cogent reason for requesting a permit to film in the subway, but the fact that the French had built it gave us the idea that Jean Claude and his crew might shoot there. We were discussing the plan as we came into Pedro Valdivia station.
different I didn't about a stone-faced international business tycoon. During my training, an unforeseen problem arose: Pinochet declared a new state of siege. The experiments in a free market economy by the Chicago School, acting at the invitation of the government, had been a spectacular flop in Chile. the severe economic hardships that followed united and various resistance groups into a solid force for The many CLANDESTINE the first time. IN CHILE Even the most progressive
go a burst of machine-gun fire over my head and ordered me to fall in with a group of prisoners being herded toward the Chile Films building where I worked. The whole city was shuddering with the reverberations of dynamite blasts, gunfire, and low-swooping planes. The sergeant was so confused that he asked me what was going on. "We're neutral," he said. At one point, when we were alone, he asked, "Didn't you direct El Chacal de Nahualtoro?" I told him that I had, and he seemed to forget