THE  STATE  POLYTECHNIC   UNIVERSITY’S  (UTE) NOTEBOOKS

From 1971 to 1973, I made my most serious attempt to free myself of my scientific profession—which I felt already as a real slavery—and to pursue a professional degree that would enable me to work in the humanistic or the artistic creativity areas.

It was in this path that in 1971 I applied—among more than five thousand candidates—to the student’s admission search  for the recently created School of Cinema and TV of Santiago’s Polytechnic State University (UTE). There were only 20 student places for the freshman year of professional studies, to form technicians, movie script writers and movie and television directors. I was admitted to the School after passing a demanding screening evaluation of cultural background  and creative potential.

This experience was one  of the more important in my life, because I was immersed  into a world to which I always had the ambition to be a part of. Above all, it set the base —which I later would complete in my doctoral studies with professor Ivan Schulman—for a complete, broad  and comprehensive theoretical knowledge of  the language phenomenon, both written and cinematographic, under the structuralist theory’s point of view.

Outstanding professors such as Carlos Núñez, Antonio Ottone, Mariano Casanova, Rubén Sotoconil, Edgardo Bruna and Jaime Ortiz,  were teaching there at a level totally comparable to the best cinema Schools at an international level. Despite the tragic end  of the School that  prevented our first promotion to graduation,  some students such as Jacqueline Mouesca, Demetrio Psijas, Susana Cáceres o  Jaime Beltrán, became respected teachers, artists or researchers in the area of audiovisuals, with some of them pursuing their careers outside Chile. Jacqueline Mouesca is at the present a prestigious Chilean Cinema historian, with several books published in this area.

I never fulfilled my desire to become a cinema professional, but I was the only student of that first and only promotion, who filmed a movie during the UTE School years, the medium length 16mm. movie Nosferatu, a Creole Sketch (see the respective section).

The School of Cinema and TV of Santiago’s UTE (now University of Santiago) ended bluntly with the military coup September 11,  1973.  It destroyed not only our dreams but the school’s movie library and its unique program, a pioneer  in the  Chile of the time.

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