While watching this video essay, I kept being reminded of Fernando Solanas’ Tangos: El Exilio de Gardel/Tangos: The Exile of Gardel, a mid-1980s film exploring the fragmented lives of Argentine exiles in Paris, desperately attempting to communicate their pain to people (the French) who cannot possibly understand. Throughout the film, the teenage children of the exiles, displaced enough to have fewer attachments or memories of their homeland, rehearse a street performance (in Spanish) about their lives; “Act 2” of the film begins with the girls facing the camera and singing about “tangos de papel,” a phrase which can be translated as both “paper tangos” and “everyday tangos”: “Letters of exile come and go/Bringing us emotions like daily bread/Errands and news that give us/The proof that everyone is still there.” The sequence also shows nearly the entire cast writing, sending and receiving letters – so many letters that they fall down a staircase, or erupt in a flourish from the back of a mail truck.

Letters are an everyday occurrence – and yet they are desperately special, because they are objects that, for the exile in particular, provide tangible proof of a life that persists. Like letters, however, cinema also travels and offers “proof of life” from afar. The story of post-Allende Chile and its cinema depends on countries being far, far apart; as the quoted passage from Hamid Naficy states, “distance and absence drives them both.” The premiere cinematic document from the Pinochet years remains Patricio Guzmán’s documentary La batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile, a movie which would never have been made were it not for many reels of celluloid escaping via Swedish diplomatic pouches bound for Europe.

Palacios and Ramírez-Soto’s essay crafts a new document from old documents about documents, exploring the exilic necessity for tangible objects as proof of a life. I particularly like how the videoessay treats the polylingual nature of these letters: in Spanish, of course, but also German, Finnish, and French, proof (once again) that the exilic is implicitly multi-directional.

A final thought: The video essay does a spectacular job of unearthing films that have fallen out of circulation and might be very unfamiliar to those outside of Chilean cinema; there is no need, for example, for Guzmán’s internationally recognized work in this piece. The materiality of these films, in videotape and celluloid formats, has been transferred into the digital in order to craft the essay – but that the films survived at all depends on the original materials existing as objects in the first place. This is much like the letters-as-objects themselves. This begs the question of representation within the contemporary exilic situation: “proof of life” comes from more ephemeral messages via text and YouTube. In the end, Palacios and Ramírez-Soto might be asking another question: what happens to the exiled – and their representation – when there are no pieces of paper or plastic videotapes to physically hold and treasure?