Sometimes learning history means a quick jaunt to the library, if not Wikipedia. But digging into an archive—neglected, incomplete, decrepit, and assembled, cataloged and managed by human beings with their own hang-ups and biases—can mean straying further still from the established “facts”; the further you go, the likelier you are to get lost. Here lies the subject of Jerónimo Rodriguez’s EL VETERANO (The Veteran): the narrative is structured around the travels in Chile and the United States of two filmmakers named Julio and Gabriel who are neither shown nor heard—their activities instead recounted in a monotone third-person voiceover. Gabriel becomes obsessed with a rumour, first heard in the town of Curepto, that an American named Thomas J. Maney lived further north in Licantén, and was in fact responsible for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Later in life he became a missionary, serving in Chile before retiring in Ecuador, where he died in 2004.
Rodriguez’s film wrings its drama from the realization that “simply by becoming a priest, (Maney) had traded one form of conquest for another”.
Evidence of a struggle
At first this proves an irresistible premise, with South America famous as a hiding and sometimes resting place for the criminals of World War II: an internal investigation by the postwar German government would reveal that an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 Nazis fled to Brazil, 500 to 1,000 in Chile (not to mention over 5,000 in Argentina). By investigating the life history of Maney, Gabriel sees an opportunity to flip the script on the long-established regional awareness that Axis Power war criminals (whether captured later or otherwise) hid south of the equator under assumed names. Maney’s no-questions-asked reputation as a hero in his home country (after two decades of the “War on Terror”, one shudders at the thought of using the word homeland) becomes a compass for EL VETERANO’s serpentine path. Rodriguez’s film wrings its drama from the realization that “simply by becoming a priest, (Maney) had traded one form of conquest for another”—even if, as one Licantén resident recounts, Maney never discussed his wartime experiences “although everyone thought he became a priest out of guilt".
EL VETERANO is a tragedy of incompleteness.
Gabriel learns that, after flying B-29s over Japan, Maney studied economics at Iowa State University before joining the seminary—according to the voiceover Gabriel isn’t sure “if it was the violence of the War or the cruelty of studying business that triggered something in him.” Here, again, history is impossible to catch up to yet impossible to outrun: the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State is but one of many research sites where the bomb was developed as part of Roosevelt’s Manhattan project. A good-faith reading of Maney’s reemergent history suggests him as yet another everyday American who tried to put his traumatic wartime memories behind him; Gabriel’s clues begin to suggest otherwise. In any community (let alone one forced to do business with gringo missionaries), rumour has a way of becoming colloquial history. The allegation, at once widespread and impossible to corroborate, that Maney was “the one” who dropped the bomb becomes an immovable object in Gabriel’s path, even as he tries to work around or through it. And this question alone opens up several more: wasn’t President Truman the “one” who dropped the bomb? Weren’t the American GIs flying those missions “just following orders” (the defense that would not hold for Nazi criminals tried in Nuremburg)? What makes EL VETERANO suspenseful is the question of Gabriel’s progress in both unearthing a story as well as trying to decide, per his floundering conversation with the increasingly skeptical and disengaged Julio, if the story is worthy of a film.
Past and present erasures
EL VETERANO is a mosaic of titles, place names, established “histories”, and perimeters that circumscribe engagement with the uncomfortable question, always, of what actually happened. Those with privileged knowledge of history are the most burdened by it, but collective amnesia is no answer either. The U.S.-dominated second half of the century would indeed reveal economics as just another tool of war, Chile being the prime Cold War example of neoliberal economic intervention vis-a-vis the “Chicago Boys” who deregulated Chile’s economy under the military dictatorship of Agustin Pinochet. That dictatorship goes unmentioned in Gabriel and Julio’s discourse on history, but evidence of a different struggle with its own intricacies emerges by way of mention of a faded Communist newspaper “exposing” an American missionary as having dropped the bomb. Gabriel’s discovery of a lead in his inquiry also gestures towards a broader political past maybe only recently forgotten, but long since relegated to the realm of flea market collectors.
Like Rodriguez’s prior feature RASTREADOR DE ESTATUAS (2015), EL VETERANO is told entirely in not-quite-static frames (nearly all of them devoid of human faces) as it traces Gabriel’s journeys, the voiceover recounts the story of his investigation with disarming, sober clarity. While the earlier film embraced Raúl Ruiz and his practice of digression as a fine art (and, duly, traded on the precarity of human memory), EL VETERANO is a tragedy of incompleteness, lacking in human faces but for a small fragment of archival footage found early in Gabriel’s investigation. A late tour of Santiago ostensibly springs from a fascination with architecture, but political graffiti—and its brazen, conspicuous erasure by the state—recentre the narrative on Chile’s past and (by implication) its future. If the frames are static, the images are anything but, incorporating natural shifts in wind and sunlight—reminders that, long after the names and faces have been forgotten, there’s no separating history from geography.
Steve Macfarlane is a film programmer and writer, originally from Seattle, now based in Queens, New York.
