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Tracing the winding road of
The Hour of the Furnaces in the First World
by Mariano Mestman
In the last fifty years an extensive bibliography has discussed The Hour of the
Furnaces (1968) and the inseparable proposal of Third Cinema (1969). In this chapter I
will focus on a less explored aspect: the film’s journey in non-commercial, alternative or
militant circuits linked to the student and workers movement in the first world
throughout 1968 and the immediate following years.
The Hour of the Furnaces and the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema can be
inscribed, as it is well known, within a wider period, the so-called long 60s. After the
pioneer essay by Fredric Jameson (1984) on this period – that according to him could be
tracked back to sometime in the second half of the 1950s and could be extended until
1972-1974 – many other authors used the same concept and proposed different
periodizations. As far as I am aware, the ‘widest’ locates the origins of the long 60s at
the beginning of the Algeria War (1954) or the Bandung Conference (1955) and its
ending in the Sandinist Revolution (1979). Of course, it is a periodization that takes into
account also the idea of the global 1960s inasmuch as the 1960s account for the
expansion of a common sensibility at an international level that tries to cover a wide
range of processes of rebellion, revolt, insurrection and revolution in a number of
countries around the world. That temporal extension (long 60s.) and geographical
(global 60s.) is quite apt to think about The Hour of the Furnaces in its national and
international context. Although its world premiere took place amidst the revolts of 1968,
at the same time, it is possible to find the conditions that made the film possible as far
back as the middle of the 1950s. And this not only because its third worldism dialogues
with Algeria and Bandung, but also because 1955 is the year of the civic-military coup
against the government of General Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina and the beginning
of the so-called “Peronist resistance” against successive governments. The whole of the
second part of the film, sometimes disregarded by academic accounts, concerns itself
precisely with Peronism and “the Resistance”. At the same time, we can extend its
‘sixties’ influence until the end of the 1970s. In this respect, we can take also as a
significant fact the almost forgotten dossier organised in 1979 by Guy Hennebelle and
the group CinémAction for the magazine Tiers Monde (1979) about the influence of the
film and the manifesto in several countries around the world.
As it is well known, in the 1980s, and even in later periods, the film and the
document were revisited in new manifestos, events and proposals in different places.
Although, from my perspective, the historical period of The Hour of the Furnaces (and
of Third Cinema) had already concluded even in those years, its ideas (cinematic,
political) could still dialogue without a doubt with oppositional and confrontational to
power initiatives in many countries. In an important essay on the “changing geography”
of Third Cinema, Michael Chanan (1997) reconstructed, among other questions, the
history of the film and of Solanas and Getino’s manifesto; some misinterpretations and
modifications of the original definitions of the three types of cinema; the connections of
the film with parallel movements in different countries; and the “transnational function”
of Third Cinema. The author also addressed the subsequent recuperation of the thesis put
forward by the film and the manifesto and their dialogue with other perspectives more or
less similar in the 1980s. In particular, he wrote of the pioneer recuperation by the
scholar Teshome Gabriel in his works at the beginning of the decade. He also focused on
the well-known Third Cinema Conference held in Edinburgh in 1986, organised by Jim
Pines and Paul Willemen that focused on the relevance of the concept of Third Cinema
for the oppositional practices in film and video in the 1980s in the metropolitan centres
of First World countries.1
In what follows, I will return over some of the testimonies and ideas included in
those two moments of the debate around Third Cinema. (the CinémAction dossier of
1979 and the meeting in Edinburgh of 19862) and I will survey other less well known
sources and documents such as catalogues from parallel distributors, letters, testimonies
or press notes from those days. From there, I aim to look at the place that The Hour of
the Furnaces occupied in the circuit of political and militant cinema in the first world,
the debates it sparked, the polemics in which it took part3. Of course, it will probably be
an incomplete journey but I do not think it is a question of summarising that history but
of continuing to explore it.
Festivals: between Pesaro, 1968 and Cannes, 1969
“I personally lived the strongest expression of the contestazione (protest)
in festivals: the one in Pesaro 68 […] undoubtedly, like probably all
episodes of contestazione, was fairly spontaneous and confusing […] In
any case, I must say that […] all of us were a little stupid in doing a
contestazione so violent and direct against such a progressive and
innovative festival […] Pesaro, I repeat, was the only or one of the very
few festivals that offered so much space to the most innovative
cinematographies and in particular, that had shown […] and openness, an
interest and a predisposition for the presentation of Latin American
cinema that until then it had not enjoyed in any other festival”.4
A particular scene is repeated in the accounts of the international premiere of
The Hour of the Furnaces in the IV Mostra of New Cinema in Pesaro, Italy, in June
1968: after the screening of the first part of the film, summoned by its expressive force,
interpellated from the screen by the facial death mask of Ché Guevara in extreme close
up accompanied by a deafening percussion rhythm, those attending stood up to shout
and carried the filmmakers on their shoulders5. The memories associate this scene to the
concurrent agitation of 1968 in Europe and, in Italy, to the coincidence in the street with a
student-popular demonstration that ended with several people arrested after clashes with
neofascist groups and members of the Italian police. That is, the film turned into a political
act as its directors hoped in each screening and as they will argue for a short time later in
the notion of the film-act and militant cinema as the ‘most advanced’ category of Third
Cinema.
“On my pointy shoulder blades and on the shoulders of dozens, hundreds of
spectators –said Fernando Birri – we carried Solanas and Getino along the aisle in the
jam-packed room for the opening of The Hour of the Furnaces that had just been
screened that night for the first time in Europe. Endless ovations, enthusiastic cheers,
revolutionary chants. A short time before, under the screen still empty, we had pinned
with anything we found at hand, I with the heel of my shoe, a large sheet where in red
letters the words of Franz Fanon had been written: “all spectator is a coward or a
traitor”. That was the beginning of the epic story of a political and militant cinema that
in the following decades changed the virtual potency of those images that want to
change the world”.
Birri sent us these words to be included in an homage to the film during the
Pesaro Festival in 2008, in the fortieth anniversary of its premiere. Who better than the
legendary Birri to evoke those events? A few days before the 1968 edition he had seen
in a private screening a fragment of his documentary Tire Die/Throw Us a Dime (19581960) included as a ‘filmic quotation’ in the film of the newly formed Grupo Cine
Liberación/Liberation Cinema Group. Birri was ‘shocked’ and ‘moved’ by the inclusion
of the sequence from Tire Die. This feeling will also be expressed in his words with
respect to the showing of the film at the Festival since it was in consonance with the
atmosphere of exception that could be felt, the changes in the concept of the Festival
and the opening of Europe towards Latin America: “[…] this is what I think is really
formidable about the function of The Hour […] for the first time, a Latin American film
arrives stating rules of ideological and aesthetic behaviour for a possible European
action in the future. This must be understood also in light of the singular moment
Europe is living and in light of the singular moment Pesaro is living […]”.6
Although in Europe there was already acknowledgement of the so-called New
Latin American Cinema (particularly of Brazilian Cinema Novo and of Cuban cinema),
1968 hastened and radicalised this connection. While in Argentina and Latin America is
possible to track back a previous committed cinema, the bibliography and the
testimonies have dated back, correctly, the origin of the radicalization of militant
cinema in the 60s/70s to that scene in Pesaro. The beginning of an “epic journey” (a
term as grandiloquent as precise to describe the zeitgeist at the time) that in those years
will involve many other films and filmmakers.
But the scene in Pesaro 68 described by Birri had its counterpart the following
year at Cannes, the famous Festival that had to close down because of protests in 1968,
a few days before Pesaro. A year later, in May 1969, during the VIII International
Critics week at Cannes, the three parts of The Hour are screened amidst a huge polemic.
The Argentine government hands an official protest through its ambassador in Paris,
Aguirre Lagarreta, where it questioned the screening of a film that it considered
controversial because it distorted the image of Argentina and constituted a call for
violence. It requested also the screening of another film, Invasión/Invasion, with a script
by its director Hugo Santiago and Jorge Luis Borges based on a story by Borges and
Adolfo Bioy Casares. At the same time, the correspondent of the conservative
Argentine newspaper La Prensa, Gloria Alcorta, and other critics protested too to the
administration of the Festival. Alcorta lamented the absence of the directors of The
Hour because she would have liked to talk to them about “a film that misleads and
confuses public opinion and in particular French people badly informed about our
problems (…)”. These are quite peculiar arguments considering the film’s harmony
with the street protest and the police’ repression in those day of May 1969 in cities of
Argentina’s interior as a prelude to the outburst on the 29 and 30 May in Cordoba,
known as Cordobazo.7
To the extent in which The Hour was persecuted and censored in Argentina8,
Solanas and Getino thought that the international recognition of the film would generate
some sort of impact in the local media and the possibility of generating fruitful
expectations for its subsequent clandestine distribution in its country of origin. In this
sense, the impact of the “diplomatic conflict” that took place at Cannes 69 in the
Argentine press was close to realise that objective.
The International Critics’ week at Cannes was created in 1962 as a new section of
the Cannes Festival as a result of the perception that the official selection was far too
narrow to allow for a new cinema in full development. This initiative was part of a new
circuit of festivals and filmic encounters that during the decade opened themselves to
cinematographies from the periphery. For example, for the New Latin American Cinema
these and other events in Western and Eastern Europe represented privileged spaces to
showcase the films, even before the circuit Viña del Mar (Chile, 1967-1969) - Mérida
(Venezuela, 1968) became its launching pad. In that international alternative circuit, the
Pesaro Festival occupies a key place. Its origin goes back to 1965 when it joins those
first efforts to build autonomous events independent from the demands of the film
market. Already in the presentation of the first edition, its director Lino Micciché
acknowledged as antecedents the International Critics’ Week at Cannes and other
previous filmic encounters in Italy (such as the Review of Latin American Cinema at
Santa Margarita and the Encounter of Porretta Terme9) and he stated explicitly its intention
of not creating a “festival of stars” but an Encounter-Forum as a permanent reference point
for the new cinemas of the world.
He also talked of the interest of Pesaro to “awaken an interest, until then unheard
of, on the problems of language and the structural analysis of film, that is, a new film
criticism that was not just a new imposture” (Micciché, 1976). The first three years of
the Mostra, as it is well known, focused on this last idea with the presence of renowned
critics, theorists and intellectuals like Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, Umberto Eco, Pier
Paolo Pasolini, Gianni Toti, Galvano della Volpe, among others.
With these antecedents, the premiere of The Hour of the Furnaces in the 1968
edition took place within the framework of a clear radicalization of the Mostra. In fact,
the space of International Festivals had been strongly questioned a few days before in
one of its core centres, the Cannes Festival, occupied by critics, filmmakers and
students and in the middle of a general strike. The festival shut down on the 19 May
without any prices in parallel with the establishment of the States-General of French
Cinema in Paris. Soon after, a sort of contestazione (protest) will also take place at the
Venice Festival. In between Cannes and Venice, at the beginning of June, Pesaro found
itself in a particular situation. Alternative showcase, perhaps the most advanced in its
search around the international “new waves”, the tensions of 68 could do nothing but
affect its own structure. Thus, the organization of the Festival – with internal
disagreements – establishes an ‘autocontestazione’ (self-protest): it proclaims that
festivals are experiencing an historic crisis, opens the event to its functioning as
permanent assembly and assumes the revision of its organizational structure, extends its
operative criteria to self-management in contact with cultural, artistic and political
groups, expands projections to an emerging circuit in urban areas and working class
suburbs that in the following year will be call “alternative circuit”.10
This peculiar form of ‘self-protest’ taken on board by the organisers of the
Pesaro Festival and expressed in the general assembly is the result of a coalition of
forces expressed there. Firstly, the pressure from groups belonging to the Movimento
Studantesco (Student Movement) that, together with Goffredo Fofi and other radical
journalists from the magazines Ombre Rosse and Quaderni Piacentini, saw in the
Mostra a bureaucratic obstacle to their revolutionary and anti-institutional project11.
They present a document to the plenary session of the Mostra that radically questions
any cultural alternatives within the system. Secondly, a group of important filmmakers
from the left (with a strong influence of the Italian Communist Party but also of the
thirdworldist left) suggests transforming the Pesaro Festival into “a showcase for a free
and oppositional cinema”, committed to confront all other cinematic manifestations,
like the Mostra in Venice, as will happen a few weeks later under the drive of ANAC
(National Association of Italian Filmmakers)12. Thirdly, Latin American filmmakers
(from Cuba, Brazil and Argentina) that shared the spirit of the student protests but that,
somehow, put pressure together with the authorities to have the event taking place
inasmuch as Pesaro constituted a fundamental enclave to exhibit their productions
abroad and even, in some cases, the possibility of reaching the European market 13. The
long review of that year’s Festival by the Cuban Julio García Espinosa for the magazine
Cine Cubano, in the same way as the “Latin American Cinema’s declaration in Pesaro”,
is telling about the balance the Latin Americans were trying to achieve between the
protest of the European revolutionary student movement – that in broad terms they
shared – and the necessity for the Mostra to take place14. Solanas’ words quoted in the
epigraph account to this.
Although the reconstruction of the events in Pesaro is not the object of this
essay , it is important to stress their influence and dynamism because without a doubt
they are relevant in the later impact gained by the Argentine film. Some of the founders
of the Mostra – such as Lino Micciché and Bruno Torri – considered that impact came
out stronger because of the crisis of the Festival in 6816. But overall, it was a very
complex and controversial situation17. Primarily because the groups mentioned above –
and others like the delegations from Eastern Europe – found themselves in a global key
situation for the political and cultural left. In the run up to the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia, the disputes between the communist left and the numerous emerging
new lefts were in vogue. Among many other testimonies on those days, Goffredo Fofi
insisted more than once in the scope of the radical position assumed by the Student
Movement against critics and filmmakers of the socialist or communist (among others
those directing the Mostra) in the last instance ‘social democratic’, ‘opportunistic’ and
‘corporative’ in their interests in film18.
15
In contrast to this position, Valentino Orsini – somehow the intermediary
between the organisers of the Mostra and the rebellious movement – president of the
assembly of filmmakers – recalled his participation alongside other left-wing
filmmakers in tackling the ‘chaos’ and the attempt to sabotage that edition of Pesaro. “A
communist without the identification in disagreement with the political line of the
party” – according to his own memories – Orsini was on those days, together with
Alberto Filippi, finishing a third wordlist film inspired by Fanon and had quite a role in
the origin and in the making process of The Hour of the Furnaces. In reference to those
days, Orsini recalled: “for the Latin American friends, the Festival was extremely
important from a political point of view (…) the problem was Venice, Cannes but it was
not Pesaro”19.
Pesaro 68 resulted then a “baptism of fire” for The Hour of the Furnaces and the
beginning of its entry in the world. In such an scenario, as radical as negotiated, it is
possible to observe almost all the issues that will frame the debates and tensions that will
accompany the international diffusion of the film: the fascination for the impact caused
by the insertion of the image of a dead Ché Guevara; the invitation to a dialogue with the
spectator to transform him into an ‘actor’ or the political process; the criticisms of the
film’s totalising discourse, at times Manichean, ‘short on dialectics’; the
acknowledgment and questioning of its emotive interpellation or of its use of the
languages of advertising, or avant-garde or agit-prop as expressed in the daring montage
of its first part; the almost unanimous rejection of Perón by the traditional left (and
beyond) and at the same time the recognition by the new lefts of the working class and
the revolutionary potential of the Argentine Peronist movement recovered by the second
part of the film; the debates surrounding the call for revolutionary violence20.
Questions that are interwoven tangled together in the numerous commentaries
about the film even since his first international projection at Pesaro 68.
Militant distribution of the film in the First World
“Dear comrade: two months have gone by since we send you the
film The Hour of the Furnaces for a number of projections in your
region […] In all this time, in spite of repeated demands, you have
not send us the results of the political work carried out, as you
promised us to do […] As such, you do not offer us any guarantee
of a rigorous political work in the discussion of the films with the
proletariat”.21
In the year that goes between the IV Mostra of Pesaro (June, 1968) and the VIII
International Critics’ week at Cannes (May 1969), while in Argentina Cine Liberación
starts the clandestine projection of The Hour of the Furnaces during the military
dictatorship of general Onganía, the film visits numerous international events such as
festivals, mostras, cine-clubs, cinemateques and film libraries (and it is bought by some
European public televisions). It is well known the notable impact the final images of the
first part of the film had on these and other places: the television sequence of the dead
body of Ché lying on a stretcher over a large cement sink-trough in the laundry room of
Vallegrande hospital (to which his remains were taken after his execution in La Higuera),
crisscrossed by a revolutionary-third wordlist discourse proposed by the voice-over
narration, followed by the photograph of Ché’s face in extreme close up, with a
deafening soundtrack rallying to action22. Probably less known is the also important
interest raised by the sequences of the struggles carried out by the workers and other
people of the Peronist resistance seen in the second half of the second part of the film.
Although festivals and even the alternative circuit exhibited primarily the first part of the
film, those other images of the mobilizations and factory occupations in Argentina
entered also in a dialogue with a global spirit of revolt and achieved and fulfilled a
function, in no way less important, in the militant circuits of exhibition (students,
neighbourhoods, trade unions).
The European ‘parallel’ or ‘alternative’ circuit
configured since 68 was in itself heterogeneous. Perhaps as expression of that
phenomenon we call 68: in between counter-culture and workers and popular
insurgency; in between the new subjectivities of the sixties, armed action and third
worldism; in between rebelliousness and revolution. In an essay on third cinema written
for the Third Cinema conference at Edinburgh 1986, Paul Willemen recuperated the
three categories proposed by Solanas and Getino (first, second and third cinema) and
observed that in Europe, the vast majority of films from the Third World were consumed
or read in a “second cinema way”. That is, displacing their political dimension and
favouring, however, their dimension artistic-auteurist (Willemen 1989: 9). Of course, it
is an affirmation valid in many cases which includes the recurring phenomenon of
‘discoveries’ from peripheral cinematographies to the centres of cinema in the world, the
‘recuperation’ of filmmakers or films that in those years (and from well before) came
from the emergent Third World and were read as ‘auteur films’. However, in the case of
The Hour of the Furnaces, its distribution in the First World is a paradigmatic example
of the fact that the type of reading/consumption highlighted by Willemen coexisted with
a militant use, as it was even reflected in a known French political fiction film,
Camarades/Comrades (1970), by Marin Karmitz. In this film, a scene included (recorded
live) shows the screening by a union committee of the famous fragment of the ‘factory
occupations’ (ten minutes) from the second part of the Argentine film. The workers and
militants watching the projection debate over their own experiences of strikes and
occupations in France. It is an important scene in the development of Karmitz’s film
since, as Christian Zimmer perceived, it is situated in a key moment in relation to the
problem of awareness-raising of the protagonist in relation to class solidarity23. In the
same years, other well-known political filmmakers (like the French Chris Marker or the
Indian Mrinal Sen) incorporated minor fragments of The Hour of the Furnaces and other
films by Cine Liberación. But the interesting aspect of Karmitz’s case is that he put on
the screen precisely the experience of a militant use of The Hour that was taken place in
similar circumstances in France.
The manifesto Towards a Third Cinema was published for the first time in
France and The Hour of the Furnaces had an early recognition between militant cinema
groups in 68. According to Sébastien Layerle (2007: 156), the film was cited as example
of a possible ‘project of synthesis’ by several representatives of the different tendencies
within the General States of French Cinema formed in May25. In the same way, the
majority of film magazines devoted important pages to The Hour of the Furnaces26.
Some articles, like those from Positif and Cahiers du Cinema (end 1968, early 1969)
gathered attention for its projection at the French cinemateque as well as in an alternative
and militant cultural circuit. If in March 1969 the critic Guy Hennebelle denounced that,
although screened at the French cinemateque and at the Locarno Festival (Switzerland),
the Argentine film was prohibited in France and, consequently, it had been impossible to
screen it during the fortnight organised by the magazine Positif27, a little later on in May, it
will be screened within the International Critics week at Cannes (sparking the ‘diplomatic’
scandal mentioned above) and will be distributed in Paris and other French cities.
24
A particular characteristic of the post 68 period was the inclusion of political
films by third world filmmakers in the catalogues of the principal non-commercial and/or
militant distributors in the world such as The Other Cinema (London), Third World
Cinema Group, Tricontinental Film Centre and Newsreel (United States), MK2 owned
by Karmitz (France), Cinéma d'Information Politique-Champ Libre (Canada-Montreal),
El Volti (Spain), Collettivo Cinema Militante, San Diego Cinematográfica and Centro
Documentazione Cinema e Lotta di Classe (Italy), among many others. The Hour of the
Furnaces occupied a significant space in the activity of many of these collectives.
The Third World Cinema Group, for example, was created by students and young
Latin American in the city of San Francisco who had been in contact with films from the
region in a solidarity trip to Cuba in 1970 and then with the films that arrived in 1971 to
the San Francisco Festival, like The Hour of the Furnaces or Sangre del Cóndor/Blood
of the Condor (Jorge Sanjinés and Ukamau group, Bolivia, 1969). In this last event, they
had contacted the Uruguayan distributor Walter Achugar who they considered as a
promoter of the organization. Almost from the start, the group had installed a distribution
office in the West Coast (Berkeley) and another in the East Coast (New York) with the
objective of showing films in cine-clubs they could reach followed by the forming of a
distribution company and the screening of the films to community organizations,
theatres, schools, trade unions or churches28. A short time after starting their activities,
its organisers will remember that the origins of the group had been shaped “around The
Hour of the Furnaces”29. Some years later, in the answer to a poll included in the dossier
by CinémAction mentioned above, Gary Crowds – then editor of the magazine Cinéaste
and member of the Tricontinental Film Centre in New York, a group that followed from
the experience of the Third World Cinema Group–, will also recall the importance of The
Hour of the Furnaces (also of Sangre del Cóndor) in the construction of a distribution
network for films from the Third World in the United States. In the case of the Argentine
film, Crowds said that – despite its main audience coming from art house cinemas and
universities (intellectuals, left wing militants, students) and not managing to influence in
the creation of new “models for distribution” – without any doubt the film had impacted
progressive filmmakers and it had received a “incredibly favourable” reception in the
United States, even by ‘bourgeois critics” for its cinematographic power and political
sharpness, contributing in this way to the increased respectability of the so-called cinema
from the Third World in the critical sphere 30.
Responding to the same poll, the Canadian André Pâquet pointed out the
important influence of the Argentine film in left wing circles in Quebec. Pâquet recalled
the similarities and convergence between the film and the manifesto Towards a Third
Cinema and progressive Québécois filmmakers but he complained about those who tried
to impose the Argentine film as an ‘ideal’ type of militant cinema without recognising
the differences between the national situations (Argentina and Quebec). Furthermore, he
dismissed the appropriation of the film by militant groups from Quebec with the
objective of confirming their own radical positions in their disputes with other
progressive filmmakers in Quebec equally important – in his view – who were also
sympathetic to the general spirit of The Hour of the Furnaces31. Although Pâquet did not
mention which militant groups he was criticising, there is no doubt he is thinking of the
Comité d´Information Politique/Committee of Political Information (CIP) that had
incorporated The Hour to their catalogue in 1971. CIP produced ‘accompanying’
materials about its general activity of film distribution precisely with a summary of the
Argentine film, the completed titles and subtitles, comments by Solanas and the group
Cine Liberación. In Champ Libre, the magazine edited by the Committee, it was
mentioned that the dossier was intended as a starting point for a “political debate” about
the film in Quebec, and two chapters of the dossier were highlighted as “hypothesis for
further work”. They were proposals for discussion. The magazine affirmed: “the
analyses done to verify those hypotheses come from groups ‘in situation’ during the
discussions”, that is, they come from the practical experience of exhibition in the
region32. Beyond critical comments on the film, it is interesting that the group put the
film in such a central position in relation to their activity. In the article cited, CIP
commented that the Argentine film could be used not only in relation to Latin America
(and in particular, Argentina), but also in relation to their own circumstances: Quebec in
the middle of initiatives for its political, cultural and linguistic ‘decolonization’ from
Canada33. The testimony of scholar Zuzana Pick about her own experience as spectator
of the film somehow confirms the last point: “I had the opportunity to attend a full
screening of the film in Montreal during the spring of 1971 and in London in the winter
of 1977. Although no provisions were made for discussion, the breaks between each
section gave rise to all kinds of debates. In Montreal the denunciation of neocolonialism
in the first part of The Hour elicited debates on the status of Quebec in view of the events
of October of 1970 and the suspension of civil rights by the federal government of
Canada” (Pick, 1993: 207).
In Italy, in the weeks before Pesaro 68, the editing of the Argentine film had been
finished in Ager Film, a small production company owned by Giuliani De Negri –
renowned figure of the Communist resistance, Valentino Orsini and the Taviani
Brothers. While in one moviola the film was taking shape in another Orsini, who had
developed with Solanas and Getino in Buenos Aires a previous project three years
before, was finishing the editing of the fiction film I danatti della Terra/The Wretched of
the Earth, made with Alberto Filippi. It is not coincidental, in this sense, that together
with the Third Worldism inspired by Fanon, both films shared precise proposals or
formal expressions: the use of intertitles, titles about violence or flashes over a black
screen and even the unique appeal to political action on the part of the spectators34.
As in France, since the revolt of 68 it is possible to find among Italian filmmakers
and films references to Solanas, Getino and their film. The document, mentioned above,
handed in Pesaro by the Student Movement together with the magazine Ombre Rosse
(titled “Culture at the Service of the Revolution”) includes a radical critique of the
“cinematic institution” with arguments close to those of Cine Liberación. Furthermore,
the idea – obviously of its time – of articulating “cultural struggle” and “political
struggle” includes an explicit reference to Solanas.
Many other links between Italian political cinema and the Argentine film could
be mentioned35. In relation to its exhibition, Goffredo Fofi – director of Ombre Rosse
and co-author of the document – will go with Solanas to Trento to introduce the film at
the university, at that moment occupied by students. In the months that followed, The
Hour of the Furnaces will continue its journey through the militant circuit in universities
in the North of Italy. In February 1969, for example, the powerful Colletivo Cinema
Militante screened in Turin, with the presence of the filmmaker, the completed film (the
three parts) within the framework of a political work with the groups of the Student
Movement that included cities like Perugia, Turin, Trento and Milan. In the years that
followed, The Hour continued to be used in militant projections in several Italian cities.
One of the groups that quite often included the film in its activities was the Centro
Documentazione Cinema e Lotta di Classe coordinated by Vico Codella. This group had
appeared from internal dissent in the Rome branch of the Collettivo Cinema Militante
and for a while worked linked to the production company San Diego Cinematográfica of
Renzo Rossellini, key figure in the promotion of Latin American and Third World
cinema. Proof of the systematic approach to political work with the films by the Centro
Documentazione is the letter cited in the epigraph. In this respect, Vico Codella
remembers that in the projections in working class neighbourhoods of the periphery of
Rome it was possible to notice an effective interest and a “very intense participation” by
the workers convened. According to Codella, among the foreign films the group
screened, The Hour of the Furnaces was one of the films projected more often in those
years “because it was useful to organise debate”36.
In Spain, The Hour was also used with a militant intent towards the end of
Franco’s dictatorship and then during the period called ‘transition’, as remembered by
the political filmmaker Andrés Linares, the journalist Ignacio Ramonet and the historian
Román Gubern37. Most probably, the film was shown in Madrid by collectives like the
ones formed by Linares or Tino Calabuij. However, it was incorporated in a more
systematic way in Catalonia, where it formed part of the catalogue of the collective El
Volti, whose materials will later on end up forming part of the better known Central del
Curt. The activity of El Volti reached its peak between 1969 and 1975, that is, still
during Francoism and in a context in which, at the same time, the Comissió de Cinema
de Barcelona (Barcelona’s Committee for Cinema) was formed. El Volti was formed by
a group of professionals, linked to the Communist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), although
not in any organic or systematic way, and organised a repository of militant films and a
clandestine distribution company. El Volti, who had relations with similar groups in
Barcelona or Madrid, worked together with other collectives (particularly those of the
Communist trade union Comisiones Obreras) to carry out dissemination work in
religious schools, semi-legal cine-clubs, private homes or in spaces facilitated by
neighbourhood committees in Barcelona and other parts of Catalonia. These
organizations had the responsibility of convening the public, sometimes in small
gatherings but sometimes in large numbers38. In this context, Román Gubern –
associated to El Volti – remembers that the copy of the Argentine film (the first part)
was in high demand.
This reconstruction (partial and incomplete, of course) of the use of The Hour of
the Furnaces by militant cinema collectives in Europe and North America demonstrates
an aspect very often put aside in the textual and historiographic analyses of this type of
films: their inscription in the international film festival circuit, and their political use in
the militant circuit to generate discussions and political actions. These experiences,
around the social intervention of the films, are the ones that, in the last instance, define
the so-called militant cinema and are fundamental when evaluating the value and
meanings associated with the films in each place and historical moment.
Although some of these filmmakers and militant groups that disseminated the
Argentine film also moved away from its hypotheses and even from its formal aspects 39,
it is well known that the thirdworldism promoted by The Hour of the Furnaces as well as
its audacious editing and its avant-garde language (the first part) were celebrated almost
unanimously due to their agreement with the explorations associated with 68 around the
world. There was even talk in reference to Eisenstein of a new Battleship Potemkin.
However, the film gave way to a number of debates. Perhaps the most important were
those associated with its support of general Perón and to the Peronist movement.
The “Damned fact”
-
-
Augusto Martínez Torres: “This defence of Peronism, is it really
because you think is ok or, maybe, is it an instrumentalization
(…) is it a sort of infiltration of leftist groups within Peronism?”
Octavio Getino: “No, no, there is no trap here”.40
As we have seen, although the first part of The Hour of the Furnaces (we could
say the least Peronist) was the one more often exhibited worldwide, the history of
Peronism and of the workers’ struggle of the ‘Resistencia’, included in the second part41
occupied an important place in the militant circuit (less diffusion had the third part, a
radical call to the revolutionary violence in the Third World which was rarely screened).
The decisions about what parts of the film to screen – either in the parallel circuit or in
festivals – sometimes had to do with technical reasons, or just pure chance, but many
other times they had to do with specific reasons. It is true that the long duration of the
whole film (more than four hours) inevitably meant the screening of separated parts. But,
at the same time, it is evident that the decision of privileging the first part was linked not
only to its formal appeal and its revolutionary potency, but also to the suspicions about,
or direct rejection of, Peronism (second part of the film) by an important section of the
European and North American left that, with far too much ingenuity and lightness,
related it to the fascisms of the old continent.
In the previous section I mentioned the insertion of The Hour of the Furnaces in
the French militant circuit. In the already mentioned dossier by CinemAction in the
magazine Tiers Monde, Guy Hennebelle (1979: 642) remembered that with Solanas’
agreement, the sequences perceived as ‘too’ Peronists had been cut from the first version
of the film circulated in Paris although, later on, the film was exhibited in its complete
version. This difference between the first version and subsequent ones in the memory of
Hennebelle seems to be plausible because other critics42 refer in passing to a shorter
French version and even Solanas does too: towards the end of 1969, he sent a letter to the
director of the Cuban film institute (ICAIC), Alfredo Guevara, about possible changes to
the original version of the film for its exhibition in Cuba. In that letter, Solanas wrote
about the placement in the film of the reels about the “Chronicle of Peronism (19451955)” – where it was explained the successes achieved in the economic, social political
spheres – and affirmed: “without the analysis of Peronism in power, it is not possible to
understand what the movement has been, nor its actions or its transformation from the
moment of its fall until today. For example, in France, due to necessities of shortening
the time of the exhibition, we cut that part and the experience was negative because it
created more confusion”.
The American critic Gary Crowds and the German Peter Shumann also referred to
these issues. Crowds remembered that in general, in the political scene of the United
States, only the first part was screened precisely because “the sequences about Peronism
were widely thought of as unacceptable for the North American public”43. Schumann
considered the absence of a profound debate of the film’s arguments in Germany in part
due to the problem with Peronism. That is, to the misgivings expressed by the left in
relation to a phenomenon that it suspected to have “fascist roots”. Consequently,
according to Schumann, the German left never fully assumed the Argentine film while
sharing some aspects of the political line of the film around revolution and violence44.
The rejection of Perón and its Movement was particularly frequent among the
critics of the European communist left. The Italian case has its peculiarities because
together with the groups of the new left, many individuals and institutions linked to the
PCI – some already mentioned above – supported the film, even at some point
incorporating it to the catalogue of ARCI. Even so, from its startling premiere at Pesaro,
both the Peronist question and diverse aspects of the language of The Hour of the
Furnaces (the tension between the emotive and the rational, for example) were themes of
different Italian reviews and, in some cases, criticised45. In any case, the
acknowledgement of the film is present in almost all the film magazines and it is
highlighted – not without polemic – in the pages of Guido Aristarco’s Cinema Nuovo (“il
film piú importante della rassegna di Pesaro/The most important film of the Mostra at
Pesaro”; “grossa lezione di honesta política e di correttezza socialista/great lesson of
political honesty and of socialist correctness”). It was also highlighted in comments in
Ombre Rosse or in Cinema 60 –where together with an extended interview by Lino
Micciché with Solanas, there was an early and profound analysis of the film by Alberto
Filippi which reached Latin America when it was translated in the first number of the
Uruguayan magazine Cine del Tercer Mundo in 196946.
On the other hand, some of the harshest criticisms of the Argentine film came
from the French and Spanish critics close to the communist sphere47. The critic Fernando
Lara, who attended the 1968 Pesaro Festival for the Spanish magazine Nuestro Cine,
acknowledged the importance the Argentine film had (“made a little into the symbol of
the festival”) but he considered that the projection of the whole film was “a big
disappointment” because “it is just a Peronist pamphlet (…) whose success is the most
horrible contradiction the Pesaro Festival could fall into”. In his anger, Lara went further
in the next article of the magazine, where in direct reference to that Peronist option in the
film, he wrote “ethical and political immorality”, “ideological careerism”, “lack of
information and of an honest approach to Latin American reality”, “craziness” and
“fascist-like act”. Furthermore, for the Spanish critic, Solanas used dishonestly “‘Ché’
Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, Sartre, Lenin or general San Martín to produce a
big pamphlet in favour of Peronism and to present Perón as a precursor of the Cuban
revolution of 1959”. And he sustained that “in Pesaro we hoped to find anything except a
debate around Peronism, Argentine movement unanimously considered as a
degeneration of European fascism not only seen like this – as the directors of the film
intended – by the left wing intellectuals victims of cultural neo-colonialism”48.
Contrary to these positions of radical rejection of the political option of the film,
other critics and filmmakers associated with the ‘ruptures’ of 68 shared the thesis about
revolutionary violence and even accepted the left wing reading of Peronism the film
defenced as one more of the ‘national paths’ towards socialism. Some also highlighted
the new analysis of Peronism the film proposed49.
In fact, in several articles in newspapers and magazines, Solanas and Getino
insisted on how the film argues for a critical reading of the historical experience of
Peronism (1946-1955) showing its multi-classist character and only recuperating its
‘more advanced’ aspects. In an early interview by Louis Marcorelles in Cahiers du
Cinema, for example, Solanas recuperated the importance of nationalisms (among them
Peronism) in the processes of Latin American liberation and pointed out that many
people had not understood the critical analysis and the thesis the film formulated: on the
limits of bourgeois nationalism, on the impossibility of a democratic-bourgeois
revolution if at the same time it did not project itself onto a socialist revolution; on the
Latin American horizon of the national struggles50 (see also Javier Campo’s chapter in
this volume).
Getino too debated these issues explicitly with Spanish critics51. In fact, after the
already mentioned review by Lara in 1968, Nuestro Cine interviewed Getino in 1969 as
a sign of ‘openness’ on the part of the magazine with the objective of “clarifying certain
aspects (although) our positions and yours remain opposed”, as the critic Martínez
Torres commented in the introduction. In the article, they insisted that viewing the film
during its premiere at Pesaro, the first part was interesting, although debatable, while the
second had deeply outraged the journalists of the magazine. In this sense, they asked
Getino what was the reason why, after Pesaro and in other festivals (such Karlovy Vary
in Czechoslovakia, Manheim in Germany or Mérida in Venezuela), only the first part had
been screened, if “it is evident that the first part functions, isolated, in one way and in
another together with the second part”. For Nuestro Cine, the defence of Peronism was
“debatable”, but the defence of Peron was “unacceptable”. Getino’s answer was forceful:
“We do not understand Peronism without Perón (…) for us, at that stage, Perón could be
for Argentina what Castro has been for Cuba”, he asserted.
Some years later, the Spanish political magazine Triunfo, subtitled another
interview with Getino with the telling subtitle: “The Reception in Europe: Peronism, a
fascism?” In it, Joaquin Jordá went back over the debates generated in other magazines
around Peronism. Getino rejected – as a mix of ingenuity and dirty tricks – critiques like
those of Lara in Nuestro Cine or the one by the French communist party through La
Nouvelle Critique but, in spite of everything, he considered logical the discussions arising
from the film because to a large extent, they were linked to the “disinformation” about the
Latin American reality in Europe as a consequence of the limitations and deformations
imposed by “imperialist mass-media” and also due to “a vision from a left that, in general,
did not understand, has not investigated or gone deep into the reality of the national
movements of liberation in most parts of the Third World”. He carried on: “and even less
has understood the process of Peronism in Argentina, confusing the external and anecdotal
forms of this process or the anecdotal nature of the discourses of its leader with the essence
and the clearly anti-imperialist and revolutionary t direction hat is the one present in the
mass movement, in the Argentine working class, fundamentally Peronist” (13-14).
This idea of ‘disinformation’ or of ‘incomprehension’ on the part of European
intellectuals of the political processes of the Third World (like the Argentine Peronism)
became the common threat in those years for the defence of the film not only by its
makers but also by other militant filmmakers that promoted the film. In the case of
Spain, for example, Andrés Linares – who dedicated several pages of his book on
militant cinema to The Hour of the Furnaces – associated the criticisms of the second
part of the film outside of Argentina to the fact that “the phenomenon of Peronism is
almost always badly understood and worst interpreted”52.
If in the late 1969 letter mentioned above to the director of ICAIC Alfredo
Guevara, Solanas had insisted in the inclusion of the reels on the history of Peronism for a
better comprehension of the film in Cuba, towards the end of the period we have been
studying – perhaps as a corollary of some of the criticisms that we have followed –
Solanas justified the projection of only the first part at the Benalmádena Festival in
October 197753 because it was directed to a wider public “even ignorant of the conditions
of Argentina”, while the rest of the film was “a material developed and conceived for a
political and militant work on the specifics of the Argentine political practices” which,
when it was projected outside of its country of origin, it had not achieved the “results we
hoped for” 54.
During the period under discussion the highest point, the culmination of the
polemic about the “Peronist question” was reached in June 1974 during the Rencontres
Internationales Pour Un Nouveau Cinema (International Encounters for a New Cinema)
in Montreal organised by André Pâquet and the Comité d´Action Cinematographique.
For a week it gathered together over 200 filmmakers, critics, producers and distributors
of political cinema from Europe, North America, Latin America, black Africa and the
Maghreb. The debates that took place there in search of a political-cinematographic
international alternative were varied but the theory of Third Cinema and the presence of
Solanas took an important role.
Although I have written about this event and the polemics around Peronism
somewhere else (Mestman, 2014 and 2015), it is worthy to come back here over the
issue because it accounts for the dynamics of the political process navigated by militant
cinema in those years, both in the national arena as in the Latin American and around the
world. In the Argentine case, I am referring to the insertion of Cine Liberación in the
Peronist Movement –under the exclusive leadership of Perón – that took place via The
Hour of the Furnaces, the filmed interviews carried out with the leader in his exile in
Spain as a communication tool with his followers in Argentina (1971/1972), and the
final insertion of the group into the State and its progressive policies for cinema with the
return of Perón to government for its third presidency of Argentina (1973/1974).
In this sense, Solanas’ conference in Montreal 1974 – on the history of the group
Cine Liberación from its opposition to the military dictatorship (1968-1972) to its
participation in Peron’s third government (1973/1974) – was harshly attacked in the
debate that followed by two key figures of the New Latin American Cinema in exile: the
Uruguayan producer/distributor Walter Achugar (founder of the Third World
Cinemateque in Montevideo and linked to the Tupamaros) and the Chilean filmmaker
Miguel Littin (ex-director of Chile Films in the first months of Salvador Allende’s
government and associated to MIR). Also the director of the Pesaro Festival, Lino
Micciché, attacked Solanas’ position. In fact, Micciché headed the most aggressive
criticisms against the director of The Hour of the Furnaces since he questioned the lack
of acknowledgment of the obvious movement to the right by Perón and his third
government. The interesting point is that the Italian legitimated his attack remembering
that six years before, as host of the international premiere of the film in Pesaro 68, he
(Micciché) had been in charge of defending the Peronist option, explaining to his
colleagues in the Italian and European classic left (communist and socialist) the
complexities of the Argentine Peronism, the importance of its working and popular base,
as well as the process of revolutionary radicalization that the Peronist movement was
experiencing at the end of the decade of the 1960s. However, six years later in Montreal,
Micciché questioned Solanas precisely for the lack of dialectics in his presentation, the
lack of acknowledgement of the contradictions within Peronism between its left and right
wings, as well as of the increasing influence that, in 1974, the latter had gained with
Peron’s support. Micciché questioned ironically, and in a provocative way, the confusion
of comparing the “dictatorship of the proletariat” with “the dictatorship of general
Perón”.
This polemic of 1974 – long and including other personalities of political cinema
from all over the world attending – accounts for the endurance of the debates on
Peronism in years after Pesaro 68. In this sense, it is important to realize that, beyond
these and other arguments or maybe precisely because of them, in this period, The Hour
of the Furnaces and the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema gained a strong level of
influence in the debates about political cinema worldwide. It is significant that the
Rencontres in Montreal – perhaps the largest event of political cinema worldwide in this
period (the long 60s.) – used as epigraph of its announcement a citation from the
Argentine manifesto: precisely the one that linked together the struggles in the Third
World with those that were taking place inside the First World55. In fact, the organisers
and several critics proposed the event as the General Estates of Third Cinema, a sort of
widening to militant cinema worldwide of the notion originated in France around 68 and
that it had already been considered in Solanas and Getino’s manifesto.
Although by 1974 the rise of the Third World was reaching its peak, the
thirdworldist influence and with it The Hour of the Furnaces and the manifesto Towards
a Third Cinema, will last a little bit longer. The dossier of CinemAction in 1979 testifies
to this. At the end of his life, Guy Hennebelle remembered that it was in Montreal 74
where he met Solanas, whose film was considered by all as the “archetype of militant
cinema of the time” said Hennebelle. In spite of the differences that he and Solanas could
held, some expressed in Montreal too56, Hennebelle will become Solanas’ friend and
from then on a ‘propagandist’ for the manifesto57. To a greater or lesser extent, with
greater or lesser differences with respect to the Argentine Grupo Cine Liberación, the
same will happen with other protagonists of political cinema worldwide mentioned in
these pages.
-------------------------------------------
References
Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico di Roma Aamod, Il Pci e il
cinema tra cultura e propaganda (1959-1979), a cura di Antonio Medici. Roma, Aamod.
2001.
Buchsbaum, J. “One, Two … Third Cinemas”, Third Text, Vol. 25, Issue 1, n.108 (2011).
Chanan, M., The Politics of Documentary, London, British Film Institute, 2007.
Chanan, M., ‘The Changing Geography of Third Cinema’, Screen, Special Latin American
Issue, vol. 38-4 (1997), p. 372-88.
Del Valle, I. ‘Hacia un tercer cine: del manifiesto al palimpsesto. El ojo que piensa’, Revista de
Cine Iberoamericano 3-6 (2012).
Elena, A. and M. Mestman, ‘Para un observador lejano. El documental latinoamericano en
España’, in P. A. Paranaguá (ed.), El documental en América Latina, Madrid, Editorial
Cátedra, 2003, p. 79-92.
Fofi, G., Il ’68 senza Lenin, Edizioni e/o, Roma, 1998.
Fofi, G., Servi e padroni, Roma, Feltrineli, 1971.
Francia, A., Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano en Viña del Mar, Santiago, Ediciones Chile América,
1990.
García Espinosa, J. (1968) Pesaro y la nueva izquierda, «Cine cubano», nn. 49-51, pp. 85-92.
Gubern, R. Viaje de ida, Barcelona, Editorial Anagrama, 1997.
Guevara, A. ‘¿Y si fuera una huella. Epistolario?’, Madrid, Ediciones de Autor, 2008.
Hennebelle, G., ‘L´influence du Troiséme Cinéma dans le monde’ (dossier de Cinéma Action),
Revue Tiers Monde, Vol. XX, n.79 (1979)
Jameson, F., ‘Periodizing the 60s’, in S. Sayres, A. Stephanson, S. Aronowitz, S. and F. Jameson
(eds.), The 60s Without Apology, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 178-
209. The volume corresponds to a special issue of Social Text, 3:3 and 4:1 (Spring-Summer,
1984). Reprinted in The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 2 (1988), p. 178-208.
Layerle, S., ‘À l´épreuve de l´événement. Cinéma et practiques militants en Mai 68’, in C. Biet and
O. Neveux (eds.), Une histoire du spectacle militant (1966-1981), Paris, L´entretemps, 2007,
p. 145-157.
Linares, A., El cine militante’, Madrid, Castellote Editor, 1976.
Mestman, M., ‘Estados Generales del Tercer Cine. Los documentos de Montreal’, Special Issue of
Cuadernos Rehime, n. 3, (2014) Buenos Aires, Red de Historia de los Medios-UBA and
Editorial Prometeo.
Mestman, M., ‘Algiers-Buenos Aires-Montreal: Thirdworldist Links in the Creation of the Latin
American Filmmakers Committee (1974)’, in M. Mestman and M. Salazkina (guest eds.),
Montreal, 1974: Rencontres Internationales pour un Nouveau Cinema, Special Issue of
the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2. (2015).
Micciché, L., ‘Pesaro 1965-1976: Una mostra e le sue contraddizioni’ (Opening of the 12th
edition of the Mostra), 1976.
Ramonet, I., La Golosina Visual, Barcelona, Editorial Debate, 2000.
Stam, R., ‘The Hour of the Furnaces and the Two Avant-Gardes’, Millennium Film Journal, n.
7-9, Fall-Winter (1980-1981).
Willemen, P., ‘The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections’, in J. Pines and P. Willemen
(eds.), Questions of Third Cinema, Londres, BFI, 1989.
Zimmer, C. Cine y Política, Salamanca, Editorial Sígueme, 1976.
Notes
1
Chanan provides a detailed commentary on the ideas of Gabriel and of the tensions
during the conference in Edinburgh. On the conference, see Pines and Willemen, 1989.
They are two ‘final’ moments of discussion, still under the influence of the third
worldism of the long 60s. (particularly in the first case); this influence will be more and
more displaced in the world scene, as Chanan (1997) observed in reference to
Edinburgh 1986. On the eclipse of the Third Cinema model, see also Chanan, 2007: 11.
2
3
In this essay, I will only refer to the distribution of The Hour of the Furnaces in
Europe, USA and Canada, following Festivals and militant use of the film. I have
explored the film’s place in Latin America and the third world in other texts elsewhere.
Fernando Solanas’s interview in the magazine Cinema 60. Anno X (1970), n.73-74:
19-20.
4
5
See Ruberto and Wilson’s chapter in this volume.
6
Birri, 1968.
7 In any case, the reporter at Cannes centred her main questioning on the Argentine
Institute of Cinematography "that insists in not answering the invitations of the
president of the festival and does not send any official films, as if our country had died
and our talents disappeared”. See "La Prensa", 21/5/69. Also the newpaper: "La
Nación", 18/5/69 and "La Razón", 15/5/69.
8
The directors looked for a certificate of nationality for the film in other countries with
the objective of distributing it beyond alternative circuits. A few months after its
screening in Pesaro, Solanas wrote to Alfredo Guevara, director of the Cuban film
institute ICAIC: “(…) After coming back from Havana, serious news awaited me: they
don’t give us the certificate of nationality in Belgium either (…) The problem is at
breaking point (…) We have tried in different ways in Italy, France, Sweden and there
is no way given the political nature of the film and the fact that all those countries have
reciprocity agreements with the Argentine government and friendly diplomatic
relations. The object of this letter is to ask about the possibility that you could recognise
it as a film originating in Cuba and with Cuban nationality (…). I am aware that I am
asking for a lot but I do it with the trust typical among comrades (…)” (letter from
Solanas to Guevara. Rome, 10/1/1969. In: Guevara 2008; 180).
9
The Conference (Reseña) of Latin American Cinema at Santa Margarita Ligure was
promoted by the Centre for Studies Europa-América del Colombianum in Genoa. In
1960 and 1961 it took place in Santa Margherita, Ligure; in 1962 and 1963 in Sestri
Levante and in 1965 (last edition) in Genoa. For its part, the New Latin American
Cinema attended the Muestra Internacional del Cine Libre de Porretta/International
Encounter of Free Cinema in Porretta since its first edition in 1960, particularly in those
in 1962, 1964, 1966 and 1969.
Micciché, 1976. On the discussions on the ‘alternative circuit’ in Italy, see the text of
Mino Argentieri, “Il circuito alternativo”, in Cinema 60, Anno X (1970), n.78-79-80:
98-109.
10
11
Author’s interview with Goffredo Fofi, Roma, 11/9/2000.
12 The proposal developed these issues in 11 points and was presented to the assembly
by Valentino Orsini, Pio Baldelli, the Taviani brothers, Alberto Filippi and Gianni
Amico, among others.
13 The organisers of Pesaro had been preparing the 68 edition with an important and
varied participation of Latin American films in projections and round table discussions.
One had been programmed on “Latin American Cinema, culture as action”. At the same
time, there was a special programme of American ‘Newsreels’ curated by Robert
Kramer and the urgent militant practice of Cesare Zavattini was also present with his
"Cinegiornali liberi" as well as cinematographies from Eastern Europe.
García Espinosa, “Pesaro y la Nueva Izquierda/Pesaro and the New Left”, Cine
Cubano 49/51: 85-92 and «Declaraciones del Cine Latinoamericano en
Pesaro/Declarations of Latin American Cinema in Pesaro», p. 84.
14
I wrote about the The Hour of the Furnaces’ presence in Pesaro 1968 in other essays.
Recently: Mestman, M. “L´ora dei forni e il cinema politico italiano prima e dopo il
15
‘68”, in: Imago. Film studies and media, Roma, Issue 15, 2017 (Ivelise Perniola and
Luca Caminati guest editors).
16
Comments by Micciché and Torri to the author, Rome, 2000. And Micciché, 1976
17
Mino Argentieri was one of the members of the board of the Mostra of Pesaro,
director of the magazine Cinemasessanta and responsible for the film committee of the
Italian Communist Party (PCI) since 1964. In an interview by Antonio Medici,
Argentieri gave many details of the 1968 events at Pesaro. He spooke about the revolt
during that edition of the Mostra and the subsequent agreement of the organizers of the
Mostra with the demonstrators to continue with the Festival and the projections in
parallel with the activity of the assembly. In this sense, Argentieri remember his
negotiations (and those of Giuliani De Negri) with the prefect of the city for the
liberation of Orsini and the other Latin American filmmakers detained in jail because of
the initial protests in Pesaro city. He also remembered his demand to the Communist
Party in Rome to send a student leader to infiltrate the demonstrators in the assembly of
the festival in order to calm the atmosphere (Conversation between Antonio Medici and
Mino Argentieri, in Aamod [2001: 64–87]).
See an immediate reading of Pesaro 68 in Fofi, 1971 (specially the chapter “Después
del 68/After 68). Subsequent texts show more nuanced revisions, but always critical, of
the traditional left wing parties in those years and their filmic referents.
18
19
Interview with the author, Roma, 2000.
20
See Humberto Pérez-Blanco’s chapter in this volume.
21
Letter from Rodolfo Pasquali (from the Centro Documentazione Cinema e Lotta di
Classe de Roma) to the director of the Centro Universitario Teatrale di Urbino. Roma,
4/1/1972. Vico Codella Archive.
22
See Clara Garavelli chapter in this volume.
23 Zimmer, 1976:178. Karmitz held The Hour in high esteem. See the interview with
the director in Cinéma 70, n.47, June 1970: 75-84.
24
The manifesto was published in issue 3 of the French edition of Tricontinental
(1969), the internationalist magazine published by the Organization of Solidarity with
the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In recent years, Jonathan Buchsbaum
(2011) and Ignacio del Valle (2012) highlighted the diverse emphasis and content found
in the different versions, in several languages or in new documents supporting the same
theses.
25
We need to remember also the dialogue between Solanas and J.L.Godard published
from 1969 in several magazines.
26 Among them: Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, Jeune Cinéma, Écran, Cinétique, Le
Monde, La Nouvelle Critique, Afrique-Asie, Cinéma d’Aujourd’hui, Cinéma Politique.
As example of the impact of the film and of the manifesto among French militant
critics, it is worth noting that the last magazine mentioned, publication of a collective of
the same name, published in 1975 the completed manifesto Towards a Third Cinema
and carried a debate for four editions.
27 Guy Hennebelle, “Argentine à l´heure des brasiers”. Jeune Cinéma nº 37, March
1969, pp.6-10.
28 “La Otra Puerta de la Distribución. Entrevista con Rodolfo Broullón/The Other Door
of Distribution. Interview with Rodolfo Broullón”, in Cine Cubano, nº 98, p.87-89. On
the history of the group, see Buchsbaum, 2015.
29 Letters by Gino Lofredo and Rodolfo Broullón (Third World Cinema Group) to the
Argentine filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer in April 1972.
30 In Hennebelle, 1979: 627-629.
31 He mentioned as example the film by Arthur Lamothe, Le Mépris n´Aura qu´un
Temps/Hell no Longer, that had been distributed in trade unions in Quebec and also
recognised as ‘militant cinema’ in international events but that was questioned,
however, in its own country by comparison with the model of The Hour of the
Furnaces. In 1974 André Pâquet invited Solanas and will give a prominent place to the
theory of Third Cinema during a big event on political cinema worldwide in Montreal to
which I will return later
32 Magazine Champ Libre, Montreal, nº 1, July 1971, p. 134-135.
33 “Pratique de diffusion. Catalogue de films politiques. L´heure des brasiers”.
Magazine Champ Libre, Montreal, nº 3, November 1972; p. 97-99. And “Luttes
ouvrieres. Fiches critiques: L´heure des brasiers”, Champ Libre, Montreal, nº 4, spring
1973, p. 83-84.
34
See del Valle Dávila’s chapter in this volume.
35
In another text I referred at greater length to this links. Together with the already
mentioned above, here I only remember other examples: such the acknowledgment of
the value of the film in the same circumstances by renowned political filmmakers such
as Marco Bellochio, Ugo Gregoretti, Ansano Gianarelli, among many others. The Hour
is mentioned also even as a possible alternative in the conversations between
filmmakers recorded at the Cinegiornale Libero número 1, of Cesare Zavattini (1968).
36
Comment to the author, Rome, 2000. Also, in the correspondence sustained by the
Centro Documentazione with the groups from other parts of the country (as the one
cited in the epigraph) it is possible to read a request, not infrequent, for the Argentine
film. Renzo Rossellini remembers that San Diego distributed a version of two hours of
The Hour of the Furnaces, a synthesis of parts I and II. In 1971, San Diego will lend its
equipment for the completion of three films by Cine Liberación (Renzo Rossellini’s
comment to the author, Rome, 2000).
37 Andrés Linares (1976) stresses the interest for the call to the active participation of
the spectator. Ramonet (2000: 147-149) mentioned the influence of the film on Spanish
filmmakers. Gubern (1997: 276) commented its inclusion in the militant circuit in
Catalonia. (The comments here about The Hour of the Furnaces in Spain are taken and
in some cases expand those on a previous article co-written by the author and Alberto
Elena: 2003).
38 Author’s interview with Joan Antoni González i Serret (organizer of El Volti) and
with Adonio González Mateos (militant of the trade union Comisiones Obreras).
Barcelona, June 2000.
39 It is not possible to mention here all those differences. But, for example, one of the
groups that used the film more often in the militant circuit, like the already mentioned
CIP in Quebec, criticised the film for “resolving little of what was explained” and to
propose a “romantic and abstract” idea of Revolution. (“Luttes ouvrieres. Fiches
critiques: L´heure des brasiers”. Champ Libre, n.4, 1973, pp.83-84. The North
American critic Gary Crowds, founder of Third World Cinema Group, mentioned the
“disastrous romanticism of guerrilla cinema” defended in the Manifesto Towards a
Third Cinema. (Gary Crowds in: Hennebelle and Mignot-Lefebvre 1979: 627–29).
Other examples could be mentioned.
40
Interview by the critics Augusto Martínez Torres and Miguel Marías with Octavio
Getino. Nuestro Cine, n. 89, Madrid, September 1969; p.45.
41
See Clara Kriger’s chapter in this volume.
42 That year, in a review in the Spanish magazine Film Ideal, Ramón Font, who had
seen the film in France, commented that its actual duration (1969) was much shorter
than the one exhibited at Pesaro.
43
Crowds in Hennebelle, 1979.
44 In those years, Schumann had frequent contacts with the so-called New Latin
American Cinema and he places the first showings of the Hour of the Furnaces by the
German Cinemateque in the days immediately following Pesaro 68. That is, three
months before its official participation in the Manheim Festival. The screenings had a
great impact in both cases. From there, he remembers its distribution by the circuit
created by the Cinemateque that privileged the first part (the others were screened not
very often). But, at the same time, he mentions that the television showings (shown
several times until the end of the 1970s with a total audience, he estimates, of 400,000
to 500,000 spectators) included a summary version of 40 minutes of the second and
third parts (In: Hennebelle, 1979: 331-333).
45
See, for example, the review by Piero Spila in Cinema e Film (Vol. II, núm.5-6, 1968:
49-50) on the screening in Pesaro. A few years later, the critic Ciriaco Tiso will reject
the film for placing its axis on ‘the visceral’, on the passionate and irrational
participation that will end up falling into sentimentality (since “the revolution must be a
logical and rational fact”), and of course, for its exaltation of a Peronism that “is pure
fascism” according to him (Filmcritica, n. 222, February 1972: 84-104).
46
See Pablo Piedras’ chapter in this volume.
47 In the first case, for example, some of the opinions expressed in a debate organised
by the magazine La Nouvelle Critique (“´L`heure des brasiers´. La lutte des classes en
Argentine et la stratégie révolutionnaire”. La Nouvelle Critique, n.28, september 1969,
pp. 31-36). In later years a filmmaker and key theorist of the French communist party
like Jean-Patrick Lebel remembered the arguments generated by the film within the
communist movement about the traditional parties of the left’s strategies of ‘creating
fronts’, the primary value of armed struggles and, of course, Peronism (CinémAction,
n.101, 2001: 48).
48 Respectively, Fernando Lara, “Pesaro, año IV. Un festival violento y confuso día
tras día. Crónica de los incidentes de la Mostra del Cine Libre y de Oposición” (Nuestro
Cine nº 74, June 1968, p. 29); and Fernando Lara, “Pesaro, año IV. En busca de una
nueva dialéctica” (Nuestro Cine nº 75, July 1968, p.22). It should not be strange the
radical anti-Peronist of this review if we take into account that Perón was in exile in
Spain, under the rule of Francisco Franco, although the relations between Perón and the
dictator were more complex than it is generally believed.
Other Spanish reviews took a very different direction from Lara’s. For example,
Ramón Font in “Situación del Nuevo Cine”, Film-Ideal, n.214-215, 1969; pp. 23-25).
Font characterised the film as “the first film for a new society”, “passionate and lucid”,
“a crucial film in the history of cinema and in History”. And in opposition to Lara, he
argued that the film “extracts from the Peronist experience linked to the popular classes
the guidelines for its future overcoming”.
49
50 Louis Marcorelles. “F. E. Solanas: La hora de los hornos. L’épreuve du direct”, in
Cahiers du Cinéma, Paris, nº 210, March 1969. See also, for the Italian case, another
important interview with Solanas in Ombre Rosse, where the problem of the “European
look” on Peronism is discussed (“Fernando Solanas. Il cinema come fucile / Intervistamanifesto col regista”, a cura di Gianni Volpi, Piero Arlorio, Goffredo Fofi e
Gianfranco Torri; Ombre Rosse, n.7, april 1969, pp.3-23, particularly pp.16-17). Away
from those years, some scholars dealt with the issue of the treatment of Peronism in the
film. Although these works are not the topic of this essay, it is worth mentioning that
after its earlier work on The Hour of the Furnaces and the two avant-gardes, Robert
Stam will return to the film (Stam and Shohat, 1994) and, among other issues, he
affirms: “The film rightly identifies Perón as a Third World nationalist avant la lettre
rather than the “fascist dictator” of Eurocentric mythology”. And he also pointed out
that the film mentioned the historical mistakes of Peronism.
51 Interview by Augusto Martínez Torres and Miguel Marías in Madrid, May 1969, in
Nuestro Cine nº 89, September 1969: 40-47; and interview by Joaquín Jordá, in Triunfo
n 473, 26 June 1971: 12-16.
52 Linares, 1976: 144
53 Its projection in this small festival of committed films (in line with Pesaro), in the
middle of the Spanish transition, was still striking. Carlos Heredero, for example,
considered the film “the zenith of the Latin American contribution” to the event. In
Cinema 2002, n.35, January 1978; 30.
54 In: “La Hora de los Hornos. Tres Preguntas a su Realizador”, mimeo, 1977, 2ps.
Mimeographed document in boxes of the Festival de Benalmádena held at the archive at
the library of the Spanish Cinemateque (Filmoteca Española) in Madrid. In the same
direction goes the memories of the festival director about that decision. Julio Diamante
(interviews with the author, Madrid, August 2000).
55 The chosen fragment reads: “The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third
World and of their equivalent inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis
of the world revolution. Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognises in
that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time,
the possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting
point – in a word, the decolonisation of culture.” (programme to announce to the
Rencontres, quoted in:“Rencontres Internationales pour un Nouveau Cinema. Cahier 1.
Projects et résolutions”, Montreal, 1975, p.3.)
56
The distance (political and cinematographic) expressed there will be reflected a little
bit later in the prologue Solanas wrote for the Spanish edition in two volumes of
Hennebelle’s “National Cinemas Against the Imperialism of Hollywood”. In spite of
this, he stressed his friendship and “basic agreement”.
57
Cinémaction, n.110, 2004; 16.