FILM INTERVIEW: MIGUEL LITTIN

Chilean Director of 'Dawson Isla 10' Talks About Realism & Carving Films From the Wind

By: Team Buzzine

January 16, 2010

Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin directed Dawson: Isla 10, Chile’s submission for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. It’s the story of a group of prisoners held at a detention camp on Dawson Island back in the early days of the reign of fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Various cabinet ministers who served under democratically elected Socialist Salvador Allende — overthrown by Pinochet’s military (with the help of the CIA) in 1973 — were imprisoned on Dawson, a desert island at the tip of South America.

Based on Sergio Bitar’s 1987 autobiographical book Isla 10, Littin’s film chronicles the stories of a group of men, played impeccably by an excellent cast. Bitar, a former minister in the Allende government, is currently Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s minister of public works. He and Littin collaborated on the screenplay.

I interviewed Miguel Littin via e-mail. Littin was a political refugee in the 1970s and is the director of the Academy Award-nominated films Letters from Marusia (1976) and Alsino and the Condor (1982).

Translation by Amber Noelle Burg

Jeanmarie Simpson: I am haunted by the last line of the film, and I’m paraphrasing: “This wasn’t the most heroic experience we had, but it was the most dignified.” Dignity is a very strong theme in the film. How did you come to that choice? Is it prevalent in the source material?

Miguel Littin: Yes. How human dignity is capable of resisting and overcoming strong forces is the theme of the film. Dawson’s men, with their intelligence, produced admiration among their guardians.  Along with establishing their rights, creating a university in Dawson, and a medical doctor’s office, they learned languages, played chess and established a radio system that allowed them to communicate with the world. The truth is that Dawson’s Republic amazed its captors, surpassing them.  The dignity of the small, daily acts converted them from the conquered to the conquerors.

JS: When you created this film, was it story-boarded and really designed before you shot it? It does have such a documentary feel to it at times that it seems like a brilliant mosaic crafted from thousands of hours of footage.

ML: I worked a long time with my immediate collaborators: director of photography, art director…I rehearsed with the actors.  When we first started filming, set against the tremendous landscape and the weather challenges, that first early morning, it snowed with a fury, and the winds almost dragged us to the ground, yet everyone took their places, and with nearly no talking, we began to film. It is possible that the anguish was transmitted to the film. It is possible that nature determined the behavior.  The truth is I live the cinema as a subconscious experience that is stronger than the conscious, as if to say Freud and Jung have crisscrossed in one’s soul.  It is urgent to say that the present is already past and the future is rapidly escaping us. It is possible to trap reality — the reality between what we invent and the answers life gives us, which is to say that I can create a climate and send a strong message to those who listen to me, but in front of the camera, each have free space where they can express their feelings and their personal truth. From there, the correlation of the story, the same one from Picasso’s Guernica that forever marked the 20th century: The individual is the essential unfinished particle of the whole, even if it is not noticed.  The cinema breaks the photographic structure, and the film brings about a retrospective.

JS: The cast is absolutely stellar. Your directing is like the sharp edge of a knife.

ML: Thanks. That’s an insightful metaphor. It is a film carved in winds and feeling in that which is real and abstract.

JS: I wouldn’t change a thing about the film. Would you?

ML: No, I don’t believe so.  What is there is a living body with nerves joined together, impossible to separate.

JS: The photography is gorgeous — you shot the film in 35mm. That’s so expensive these days, isn’t it? Why not shoot in video and then transfer it?

ML: We filmed in 16mm and also we utilized super 8, video, photographs and paintings to say everything. We filmed with Bolex cameras like those of the 1960s. The 16mm gave us depth and textures of the past that video could not seem to give.  We did some tests and arrived at the conclusion that, with Ion, the photography director, this material was more accurately transmitted in an impressionistic environment and atmosphere, that man is lost and reappears in the geography — in Earth, snow, rain, rugged landscape — viewed from on high like the Brueghel painting, the old man…that is to say, the look of God — a harsh Cyclops of one eye. The real correlation broken once and again by the presence of Father Allende’s subconscious, like in Hamlet, comes over and over again to the crushed memory, broken like a mirror at the bottom of a river — a river that whispers. A river that cries.  The wind that cracks reality and transfers man and element to the only reality possible after so much pain. The will is that which changes history. The will of Dawson’s men was much stronger than the ability to forget. Ethics and aesthetics, concepts argued by philosophers and charlatans, yet I assert that aesthetics bring about ethics. Does not a great filmmaker declare that the camera should be at the height of man’s sight?

JS: Can you tell me about the process of submitting your film for consideration as an official entry for Best Foreign Film by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences?

ML: It wasn’t my decision but that of a commission of Chilean filmmakers who make this decision based on the solid argument that established the values and the excellence represented by Dawson to represent the cinematography in this event.  In this situation, I am only an instrument of the common good protecting Chilean cinema.

JS: You have been awarded a lot of very prestigious awards and prizes. I’m curious about the way that might affect your work. Is it liberating?

ML: The prizes and awards are instruments, contributing, at times, decisively in the projection to the public of the film and, in this way, help to accomplish the larger objective of reaching the minds and hearts of the public. Nothing is more devastating than an empty theater. Nevertheless, the public should not determine one’s work.  This is the dilemma and the challenge: to maintain one’s independence, even while on the precipice with the possibility of solitude.  Know the solitude of a runner and accept the depth of the challenge.

JS: Having been born and educated in Chile, having lived through the most harsh times, how is life in Chile today? Has the world economic disaster had a huge impact there?

ML: It is not easy.  Chile hurts.  A poet once said that “Chile is long as a rancher’s lasso and thin as the poor man’s cot. We live between the mountain range and the sea, balancing like drunks. With our hands clinging to the mountains and our feet wet from the sea, more cold than this world.”  What makes the Chilean an insistent, uncontrollable, stubborn persistent being?  I don’t know.  Perhaps it is the extraordinary mix of races and cultures that gives us an extravagant air, much of the time dark, frugal with words, and brief with incoherent actions and behaviors. The fact is that the whole world waited so long for the compromise that governs after the dictatorship and despite the fact that the parties have made many notable advances for its history today, Chile wants more to the point where we are being devoured by our appetites and uncontrollable desires of consumption only compared to a global level. History has passed through this world without leaving any obvious tracks or traces.  Chile also is a country of oversight — a land of negligence and sudden insanity.  In this Utopian land reigns under customs disguised as a bad carnival of pragmatism and Cartesiana reason. The reality is that Chile is a line in the air.

JS: What is next for you? What are you working on now?

ML: I am working on a script about Allende’s last hours defending with bullets a constitution that condemned him to death, defending with gunshots a congress that had sold its soul to fascism, the right to be the option that pressed the trigger that bombarded the government. The dark, sticky hounding of a man who did not share his glory with anyone; paradoxically, a man of peace who dies as the last warrior, a tightrope walker between death and life, a furtive lover, ancient schools of courtship perfumed with roses and wine — a man that died by the machine gun of pragmatism. Now, as if from traitors and dark men, they obey the orders of a distant empire managed by a psychopath.