The Eter­nal Mem­o­ry – Inti­mate, mean­der­ing doc

The inex­orable slow-fade of per­son­al mem­o­ry is a tragedy to behold for any­one suf­fer­ing from a range of cog­ni­tive ail­ments. There’s some­thing bit­ter­sweet about the fact that we spend our lives men­tal­ly index­ing emo­tions, tastes, joy­ful instances, painful rec­ol­lec­tions, and, like a great movie, all of it just slow­ly drifts out at the end. What’s more, there’s lit­tle we can do to stem the flow of this con­stant­ly-reced­ing tide.

Augus­to Gón­go­ra, who passed in March of 2023, was a mas­sive and beloved media celebri­ty in Chile – a TV jour­nal­ist whose per­son­able man­ner and avun­cu­lar on-cam­era pres­ence was used to exe­cute the dead­ly seri­ous per­son­al mis­sion of mak­ing sure that the atroc­i­ties of the Pinochet régime remained front-and-cen­tre of the pub­lic consciousness.

For a per­son who ded­i­cat­ed so much of his life to keep­ing the can­dle of civic mem­o­ry burn­ing, so we remem­ber to ensure those same total­i­tar­i­an hor­rors nev­er occur again, it’s cru­el­ly iron­ic that his own capac­i­ty for retain­ing such vital mem­o­ries is depart­ing from him. And Maite Alberdi’s film, The Eter­nal Mem­o­ry, is about this notion that the past is a for­eign coun­try, and in an age of hyper-infor­ma­tion, we’re los­ing our con­nec­tion to it faster than ever before.

Along­side smat­ter­ings of con­tex­tu­al archive footage, the film cap­tures the dai­ly tra­vails of Augus­to and his lov­ing wife Pauli­na Urru­tia (also a pub­lic fig­ure in media and pol­i­tics) as he takes each day in its stride and some­times strug­gles to mas­ter sim­ple tasks. For the most part, his mood remains calm and he appears to be tak­ing his con­di­tion with an admirable light­ness, but lat­er on it’s sug­gest­ed that the psy­cho­log­i­cal weight of his dete­ri­o­ra­tion is too much to bear. Urru­tia, mean­while, remains his rock, and in her attempts to train and cul­ti­vate his mem­o­ry, she may be be more cen­tral to the themes of the film as a whole.

It’s a pleas­ant film, albeit one which makes its point fair­ly ear­ly on and then restates it in var­i­ous, some­times sen­ti­men­tal ways. The film lacks for a strong nar­ra­tive arc, and instead opts to fil­ter sto­ries and his­to­ries through the present moment. As such, there’s no struc­ture or a sat­is­fy­ing sense of how the big­ger themes devel­op. That said, it’s love­ly to mere­ly be in the pres­ence of the film’s pro­tag­o­nists, to expe­ri­ence the inten­si­ty of their love at such a test­ing moment.