The Eternal Memory – Intimate, meandering doc

A sentimental docu-portrait of a Chilean journalist, famed for his reporting on Pinochet's atrocities, whose own memory is leaving him.

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 regime 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.

Published 10 Nov 2023