In the opening scene of Oscar-nominated Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s 90-minute documentary, Eternal Memory, we watch as a woman wakes up a sleeping man to begin a new day. She introduces herself to him – her name is Pauli. His name is Augusto. She is an actor and was a government minister, and they have been together for 20 years. They built the house they are living in together. He receives each piece of this news delightedly, as if a present is being slowly unwrapped for him.
Pauli is Paulina Urrutia, former minister of the National Council of Culture and the Arts of Chile under post-Pinochet president Michelle Bachelet. Augusto is her husband, Augusto Góngora, part of the underground television news service Teleanàlisis, which chronicled abuses under the dictatorial regime. Augusto was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2014 at the age of 62 and agreed to Alberdi’s film in 2018. It covers decline intimately over the next four years – perhaps more intimately than was ever envisaged, as the pandemic means that Pauli herself has to take over the filming while lockdown rules apply and neither family, friends nor Alberdi can visit. If so tight a focus makes viewing feel a little claustrophobic and airless at times, that is surely no more than the truth.
In the beginning, the situation is heart-rending but also rather beautiful and in a way almost romantic. The mutual devotion is so clear, his love for her so clearly untouched as his physical capabilities lessen and his mental faculties come under further and further attack from the unforgiving nightmare of this disease. Their present-day situation shows Pauli helping Augusto to shower, Augusto watching Pauli rehearse a play and Pauli reading a book to Augusto as they walk together through a park (or possibly the garden of the beautiful home they created together out of a virtual ruin, seen in family video footage during their first visits there). He can still follow a narrative, make jokes and, when they watch old newsreels, still remember reports he did and friends they lost.
The contemporary is interwoven with archive footage of Augusto at work with Teleanàlisis, interviewing literary and cultural figures, and even acting (not well, says Pauli, which he greets with a laugh and acknowledgment of its truth) in a Raúl Ruiz film. There are family videos of Augusto with his two children from a previous relationship and footage of holidays in the early days with Pauli, their delight in each other bursting from every frame. We see how much change in Augusto has already been wrought, how much he’s lost. And – because of the intensity of the format and the content – we almost equally clearly see how much his partner has lost, which is almost always a part of the agony the disease causes.
As the film continues, the precious remnants of the “real” Augusto start to fall away as he inevitably becomes more forgetful, more confused (“I want to go home,” he says in his sitting room), angrier (“Such bullshit! What is happening to me please?”), more despairing (“I can’t go on like this … I can’t take it any more. What’s wrong with me?”). One of the few times we see Pauli express what must surely be her frequently overwhelming grief in front of him is when he fails to recognise her for nearly a whole day. But her unfailing gentleness does almost more than anything to throw the relentless savagery of the condition into full relief.
The entire film is suffused with what it means to remember, not just as a person but as a nation. Augusto’s professional life was dedicated to recording the Pinochet regime’s barbarities and ensuring they could not be forgotten or ignored. We see 1984 footage from the launch of a book to which he contributed, La Memoria Prohibida, a record of Chile’s years under dictatorship. In his speech, he says that the book’s aim was: “Constructing memory as an act for the future”; not just collecting facts and figures, but the more ineffable task of keeping alive the emotional memory of the times. Without it, “we don’t know who we are. This book is only useful if it helps us to recover our identity.”
There is, alas, no book that can arrest the war of attrition of Alzheimer’s disease against even a brain as mighty, amusing and curious as Augusto Góngora’s. The film is respectful and profoundly compassionate, but remains a portrait of an inexorable decline, if one ameliorated to the greatest possible degree by love. In the last moments of lucidity we see, he murmurs to Pauli that he is not himself any more. But, he adds, “Gracias para todo” – thank you for everything. Augusto died just after Eternal Memory was first screened, in May 2023. Pauli will have this, and all her memories, to keep.
Storyville: The Eternal Memory aired on BBC Four and is available on BBC iPlayer.
