Archaeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi, directed and produced by Cruz and Marilyn Mulford, debuted in 2008 and has appeared in many film festivals in the U.S. and abroad, including the Mill Valley Film Festival where it won the Audience Prize. This October, it was shown nationally on PBS.
The International Documentary Association, a Los Angeles-based group that promotes and celebrates non-fiction filmmaking across the globe, recently nominated the film for an award. The film was nominated in the category of films about music. The awards ceremony, hosted by Ira Glass, will take place on Dec. 4 at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles. Mr. Cruz recently spoke to El Tecolote about the film.
What is the Archaeology of Memory?
The Archaeology of Memory is a project that involves a musical suite, a book, a film and an installation. It stems from the work for a dissertation in a program in literature at Stanford University. Theoretically, the project is about the questions of creating beauty out of experiences of pain and the relationship between beauty and aesthetics and how artists who have gone through situations of violence in their lives, where political regimes have committed crimes against artists, have dealt with that pain and how they have created objects of art and put them in the public sphere.
Specifically, the film traces the story of a journey I took from the United States to Chile to talk to friends who had been in concentration camps with me: a painter, a poet, a writer and a ceramicist. I asked them about how they have dealt with being in prison and being tortured and their work as artists. In that journey, I wrote a musical piece that would accompany the film. I kept writing through the whole journey: in the U.S., in Chile, in airports, in former concentration camps, in a museum that had been a concentration camp.
What about the other people who worked on the film?
Film is a very complicated artistic medium. I had no idea. I had been a musician all my life, and I didn’t know how dependent you are on creating a crew, a team of people who are going to tell the story. There were forty or fifty people that worked on the project, including director and producer Marilyn Mulford, cinematographer Vicente Franco, editor Michael Chandler, photographer Adam Kufeld and graphic artist Guillermo Prado.
It must be a challenging experience, first of all, to be exiled to the U.S., which had such an integral part in the Chilean coup, and especially challenging now, in this last decade, when the U.S. has had such a highly publicized role in the use of torture.
I never thought about this as a piece on Latin America history, but a piece on the human condition and the permanence of torture in society and, most importantly, about the role of the artist in depicting the human experience of torture. When we started to make the film ten years ago nobody wanted to talk about these issues. They said, “This is history. It was a long time ago . . . .” We couldn’t get anyone to fund the film. The moment that the U.S. invaded Iraq for the second time and Abu Ghraib came into the news, then our film became contemporary. We got funded right away. We got a grant from ITVS, a branch of PBS that scouts for new films. Through the media I was receiving all this information about the torturing of people, things that I have experienced myself or my friends have experienced. It was difficult to hear about all this. On the other hand, it made the project true and important and very contemporary.
For some reason, because of the relationships of power that are established in this world, some people keep doing the same things: bombing people, torturing people. I interviewed my mother for this film, and my mother, I think, was one of the most eloquent people in the film. She said, “This really didn’t happen only to us, it didn’t happen to you, my son, this happened to many people and it will keep on happening.” And she said it a year before Abu Ghraib.
What kind of reactions have you gotten from viewers of the film?
I didn’t want to make a film where people felt hopeless. What has been surprising, but gratifying to me, is that people have written and said that it’s such a hopeful film.
The next Bay Area showing of Archaeology of Memory:Villa Grimaldi will be at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on Feb. 7, 2010. The documentary is part of a series accompanying Francisco Botero’s drawings and paintings about abuses in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.For more information please visit: www.arqueologiadelamemoria.org, www.quijerema.com