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The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of an Unarmed People (Spanish: La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas) is a Chilean-Cuban documentary film trilogy directed by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, in three parts: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (La insurrección de la burguesía, 1975), The Coup d’État (El golpe de estado, 1976), and Popular Power (El poder popular, 1979).

A chronicle of the political tension in Chile between 1972 and 1973 and of the military coup against the government of Salvador Allende, it won the Grand Prix in 1975 and 1976 at the Grenoble International Film Festival. The American film magazine Cineaste named it one of the ten best political films in the world. The trilogy was screened commercially in 35 countries and won six grand prizes in Europe and Latin America.

In 1997, Chile, Obstinate Memory was released and followed Guzmán back to Chile as he screened the three-part documentary to Chileans who had never seen it before.^[1]

By 1972, Chile was in the grip of deepening political crisis. President Salvador Allende, who had come to power in 1970 as the head of the Popular Unity coalition with just a third of the popular vote, was attempting to steer the country toward democratic socialism — nationalizing key industries and reshaping the economy along collectivist lines. These efforts provoked fierce resistance from the Chilean right, the business class, and the United States government, which feared the spread of socialist influence in Latin America. Economic instability mounted, strikes paralyzed the country, and the political middle ground rapidly eroded. It was in this atmosphere of escalating confrontation — between a government pushing for radical change through constitutional means and an opposition increasingly willing to subvert those means — that Patricio Guzmán and his small crew began filming in October 1972.

Although the trilogy does not follow a strictly chronological structure — Part Three, for instance, covers events from 1972–73 but was the last to be released — the footage was gathered continuously from late 1972 until the coup of September 11, 1973, capturing the crisis as it unfolded.

The film opens in March 1973 with street interviews, speeches, violent confrontations, and rallies as Chile prepares for its congressional election. Allende’s Popular Unity coalition wins 43.4 percent of the vote, while the opposition bloc holds approximately 56 percent. The film documents how elites, the middle classes, and portions of the working class — under the influence of foreign interference — mobilize to circumvent democratic institutions.

Part One concludes with newsreel footage shot by Argentine cameraman Leonardo Henrichsen during street skirmishes. A soldier takes aim at Henrichsen and kills him on camera; the image spins skyward.

The second part begins with the right-wing violence of the winter of 1973. Army troops seize downtown Santiago in what becomes known as the Tanquetazo, but the attempted coup is suppressed within hours. As one critic wrote of the overall film: “It shows the different elements in the explosive situation with so much clarity that it’s a Marxist tract in which the contradictions of capitalism have sprung to life. We actually see the country cracking open. Step by step, the legal government is overthrown.”^[2]

Allende’s naval aide-de-camp Arturo Araya is killed, and the camera moves through the crowd of funeral attendees — among them General Augusto Pinochet. In July, truck owners, funded by the CIA, begin their prolonged strike, paralyzing the distribution of food, gasoline, and fuel. Calls mount for Allende to resign. Instead, Allende holds a mass rally drawing approximately 800,000 supporters, who nonetheless have no weapons. On September 11, the Navy initiates the coup d’état; the Air Force bombs the state radio station and the presidential palace. The leaders of the junta appear on television announcing they will restore order after three years of what they call “Marxist cancer.”^[3]

The third part takes place in 1972–73, prior chronologically to the events depicted in Parts One and Two. It focuses on the response of the Chilean working class to the employer and middle-class strikes documented in Part One. Workers respond by occupying their factories and, as the strikes are prolonged, attempting to run them through worker self-management (autogestion). This leads to the formation of cordones industriales (“industrial belts,” a form of workers’ council) and opens debates on the left about the future of socialism and workers’ power in Chile. The film features extensive interviews with Chilean industrial workers and documents popular initiatives including land occupations, communal supply committees (Juntas de Abastecimiento Popular), and the music of the Nueva Canción movement.

Guzmán described this installment as “an affectionate evocation of the mass organizations during the Popular Unity government, particularly in 1973.”

Patricio Guzmán originally intended to make a film about the third year of the Popular Unity government under President Salvador Allende, to be called El Tercer Año (“The Third Year”), as a follow-up to his earlier feature El primer año (1972). His crew — dubbed “Equipo El Tercer Año” — initially consisted of Jorge Müller Silva (director of photography and camera operator), Federico Elton (production chief), José Pino (assistant director), and Bernardo Menz (sound director). Filming began in October 1972, capturing, without foreknowledge of what would follow, the escalating class tensions that would culminate in the coup d’état of September 11, 1973.

Guzmán had sought help from French documentarian Chris Marker, who sent him film stock from the United States. The team worked with minimal resources: one Éclair camera, one Nagra sound recorder, two vehicles, and the black-and-white film stock supplied by Marker. Following the coup, the twenty hours of footage were hidden at the home of Guzmán’s uncle before being transported out of the country with the assistance of the Swedish ambassador Harald Edelstam. The reels traveled from Santiago to Stockholm, then to Spain, France, and finally to Havana, Cuba. Cameraman Jorge Müller Silva was subsequently arrested and disappeared; the others fled separately. After an unsuccessful attempt to edit the film in Paris, Guzmán was connected — again through Chris Marker — with the Cuban film community. In March 1974, Guzmán, his editor Pedro Chaskel, and the rest of the collective reassembled in Cuba, where the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) placed all necessary resources at their disposal. Also incorporated into the editing team in Havana were Chilean exile Marta Harnecker and Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, the latter serving as an artistic supervisor whose influence — rooted in his concept of imperfect cinema — left a direct mark on the film’s final structure.

In an account related by editor Pedro Chaskel, the team had already completed what amounted to “a documentary of an hour and a half” when Guzmán expressed dissatisfaction, feeling the material could be more fully developed. Espinosa’s response was simply: “Well, then, start over.” Chaskel recalled laughing at the memory, noting that “nowhere else in the world would that happen after a film was finished.” The result of those additional months of work became the first and second parts of The Battle of Chile.

The first appearance of the films in Latin America was in October 1979 at the third São Paulo International Film Festival at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP). In Spain, the third part was released in 1980. The trilogy premiered in Santiago, Chile in 1997 — seven years after the return to democracy. The last recorded international debut was in Ecuador in 2011.

The complete film was released on DVD in multiple markets, including Chile, Brazil, and France. It has also aired on broadcast television in countries such as the United Kingdom. In Chile, it was broadcast on open television for the first time on channel La Red on September 10, 11, and 12, 2021.

In 2018, the Cineteca Nacional de Chile organized a film marathon of the complete documentary series.

The Battle of Chile has been widely regarded as one of the landmark political documentaries in film history. Tim Allen, writing in Village Voice, called it “the major political film of our times — a magnificent achievement.”

Andy Beckett, writing in The Guardian, read the film as “a study of conservatism and what happens when it is threatened,” singling out a brief glimpse of Pinochet — sunglasses on, helmet pulled low, dressed as an ordinary soldier — as a telling illustration of his political cunning. Beckett also noted how the film quietly dismantles the right-wing caricature of Allende as a Soviet-style authoritarian, pointing to a scene in which a crowd of left-wingers chants for him to shut down parliament. Allende refuses; the whistles of protest are fierce, then gradually the crowd falls silent and listens.^[4]

Pauline Kael, reviewing the film in The New Yorker, marveled at what the team had managed to accomplish under such constrained circumstances, questioning how five people — some with no prior film experience, equipped with a single Éclair camera, one Nagra sound recorder, two vehicles, and film stock sent by French documentarian Chris Marker — could produce “a work of this magnitude,” answering that it must have been, “partly at least, through Marxist discipline.” Kael praised the result as aesthetically significant, and called for it to be broadcast on public television — with the U.S. government officials who had shaped policy toward Allende on hand to explain themselves.^[5]

The trilogy won six grand prizes in Europe and Latin America and was distributed commercially in 35 countries. The American film magazine Cineaste named it one of the ten best political films in the world.

• Nominated among the 10 best films of Latin America, 1970–1980. Los Angeles Film Critics. United States.
• Nominated among the 5 best films of the Third World, 1968–1978. Take One magazine (United States), 1978.
• Nominated among the 10 best political films, 1967–1987. Cineaste magazine. United States.^[6]
• Prix Novas Teixeira. Association of Film Critics. France, 1976.
• Grand Prix, Festival de Grenoble. France, 1975.
• Grand Prix, Festival de Grenoble. France, 1976.
• Grand Prix of the Jury, International Film Festival of Leipzig. Germany, 1976.
• Grand Prix, International Film Festival of Brussels. Belgium, 1977.
• Grand Prix, International Film Festival of Benalmádena. Spain, 1977.
• Grand Prix, International Film Festival of Havana. Cuba, 1979.

In Chile, Obstinate Memory, Guzmán explores the idea of identity and memory as they relate to the Chilean public. As opposed to The Battle of Chile, Chile, Obstinate Memory focuses more on the personal reflections of the filmmaker on returning to his home country. Whereas the original documentary employs cinéma vérité, Chile, Obstinate Memory is a personal essay film.^[7] Guzmán interviews people involved in the making of The Battle of Chile, speaks with Allende’s former guards, reflects on his own time being held by the military government, and overall focuses on the individual experiences under such a regime.^[8] The film explores the identity of the Chilean people in relation to the political changes of the nation during and after the Pinochet regime.^[9]

Guzmán struggled with the decision to make a personal essay film. In an interview with Jorge Ruffinelli, the filmmaker stated that he had planned to return to Chile and that producer Yves Jeanneau suggested that Guzmán make his trip the subject of a new film. According to Guzmán: “This frightened me too much, however, to appear as the central focus of a film. So I made the suggestion it would be better to take advantage of my trip looking for the original characters of The Battle of Chile. That jelled and so the project began. I wrote the first synopsis, with a real lack of confidence because the ‘personal tone’ wasn’t convincing me.”^[10]

Eventually the filmmaker found the way to tell this story. Before production began, while giving a seminar on documentary film at a film school in Santiago, Guzmán screened The Battle of Chile one evening. When it ended, no one turned on the lights and no one applauded. Assuming he had misjudged his audience — that these students were perhaps children of parents who resented the Allende period — he began walking to the back of the room to turn on the lights, already trying to think of some way to continue the class. He recalled: “How great was my surprise when I discovered the faces of these young people, all crying, without exception. No one could articulate a single word. In that moment, I understood that the main device of the film had to be the showings of The Battle.”^[11]

Guzmán wanted to film the reaction of young students to screenings of The Battle of Chile, just as he had experienced before the production of Obstinate Memory. He requested permission from 40 schools to do this but only 4 agreed. According to Guzmán, the rest refused because they were concerned about traumatizing the students, and some suggested it was better to forget the past.^[12]

• Cinema of Chile

• The Battle of Chile at Icarus Films
• The Battle of Chile: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie at IMDb
• The Coup d’État at IMDb
• The Power of the People at IMDb
• The Obstinate Memory at IMDb