Quote:
A lyrical, if Peronist adaptation of the José HernándezMartin Fierro (1872-9). One of the more essential Latin American films in my opinion.

Summary:
Directed by Fernando Solanas, produced by Cine Liberación group , which openly appeared as the film arm of the Peronist movement , it is a militant and passionate film, but whose passion does not stop producing a remarkable analysis of the political period that goes from Peron’s fall to await his return from Spain. Solanas’s film is structured around a mix between the figure of Martin Fierro and that of Juan Domingo Perón , a mixture in which the verses of the poem, symbol of the wisdom of the Argentine gaucho, intersect with the word in Peron’s speeches . In this gesture of mimicry with the figure of Fierro, a wise man and adviser draws a characterization of Peron as natural political guide, something like a political father of the nation, only figure capable of routing for Argentina. Aesthetically abiding to documentary realism, it manifests an ideological and political consciousness so passionate, that at times the film seems a call for immediate action. Filmed in 1974, black and white, in conceptual continuity with “The Hour of the Furnaces” , considered one of the most important political films in movie history, is “Children of Iron” (or “The children of Peron “), one of the most lucid and complex reflections made by the Argentine film about their own history. This film was shot between 1972 and 1978, but was released only with the arrival of democracy in 1984, but by then three of the actors had died who participated in the film, including July Troxler , who was saved from the Leon Suarez slaughter in 1956 had died. Troxler died at the hands of Argentina Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA) on September 20, 1974. The film was interrupted during the military coup of 1976 and completed by Pino in exile in Paris.

2.22GB | 2h 06m | 1280×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/08F671B44CA33ED/Los_hijos_de_Fierro.1978.720p.Web-DL.KG.mkv

Language:Spanish
Subtitles:French

The post Fernando E. Solanas – Los hijos de Fierro AKA Fierro’s Children (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

After the end of the military dictatorship in Argentina in 1983, Floreal is released from prison. Instead of returning to his wife, he wanders through the night of Buenos Aires. He meets some people from his past–most of which are only imaginary–and remembers the events of his imprisonment.

3.20GB | 2h 07m | 757×568 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/5BB2B430DCCAD3C/Sur.1988.DVD.AC3.2.0.x264-SaL.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English, French, German

The post Fernando E. Solanas – Sur AKA The South (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A young man living in a cold southern village in South America, decides to start a trip looking for his father. By doing this he discovers unexpected facts about his latin American essence.

3.80GB | 2h 12mn | 2h 12mn | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/31A2B79B64A1B57/The.Journey.1992.SPANISH.1080p.WEBRip.AAC2.0.x264-NOGRP.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English, French, German

The post Fernando E. Solanas – El viaje (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Nicole Brenez for BFI wrote:
Made in Argentina in 1968, The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos) is the film that established the paradigm of revolutionary activist cinema. “For the first time,” said one of its writers, Octavio Getino, “we demonstrated that it was possible to produce and distribute a film in a non-liberated country with the specific aim of contributing to the political process of liberation.” The film is not just an act of courage, it’s also a formal synthesis, a theoretical essay and the origin of several contemporary image practices.

Working from within the Cine Liberación Group they formed with fellow documentarian Gerardo Vallejo, Getino and director Fernando Solanas made a 208-minute film divided into two parts (88 and 120 minutes) and three sections: Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation (Part I/section 1); Act for Liberation (Part II/section 2); and Violence and Liberation (Part II/ section 3). Part II mainly consists of advocacy for the Argentinian politician Juan Péron and therefore does not concern us here. This article focuses entirely on Part I, the part that develops a critical analysis of the situation in the Latin American continent during the 1960s.

The Hour of the Furnaces: Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation is a didactic essay organised into 14 chapters: ‘Introduction’; 1) ‘The History’; 2) ‘The Country’; 3) ‘Daily Violence’; 4) ‘The Port City’; 5) ‘The Oligarchy’; 6) ‘The System’; 7) ‘Political Violence’; 8) ‘Neoracism’; 9) ‘Dependence’; 10) ‘Cultural Violence’; 11) ‘Models’; 12) ‘Ideological Welfare’; 13) ‘The Choice’. In other words, the film conducts a comprehensive analysis of the history, geography, economy, sociology, ideology, culture, religion and daily life of Latin America. Each dimension and source of oppression is documented and pondered, as is each link between determinations and their consequences.

Headlines, captions and title cards punctuate the film like riffs in a musical composition. The quotations are from leaders of liberation struggles and inspirational figures from world history, such as the 19th-century Cuban revolutionary José Marti (the phrase “hour of the furnaces” is his), the radical activist Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz (Argentina), Che Guevara (Argentina/Cuba), Frantz Fanon (Martinique/Algeria) and Aimé Césaire (Martinique), among others. But perhaps the major structuring influence is the Peruvian revolutionary poet, philosopher and political leader José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), whose analysis of Peru’s situation was the first systematic attempt to adapt Marxist concepts and methodology to a Latin American context. The chapter headings of his Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928) prefigure the film’s conceptual framework: ‘The Economic Factor in Peruvian History’, ‘Colonial Economy’, ‘Regionalism and Centralism’, ‘The Land Problem’, ‘The Indian Problem’, ‘The Religious Factor’ and ‘The Literature of the Colony’.

The film was made clandestinely under a dictatorship, and signed by the Cine Liberación Group. Each screening was a risk and created a “liberated space, a decolonised territory” (in Getino’s words), within which the film could be stopped for as long as necessary to allow discussions and debates (hence the compartmentalised structure). Argentinian scholar Mariano Mestman recalls that several screenings lead to military confrontations. To attend a screening was in itself a political act, transforming spectators into responsible historical subjects, not because they did or did not agree with the content of the film, but by virtue of the very decision to attend, despite the threat.

A demonstration and a lesson, The Hour of the Furnaces imports into cinema the affirmative aesthetics of the written political treatise. A collective ideal informs the whole film. It anticipates a liberated time. It’s not the product of a single voice but of a chorus of poems (Marti, Césaire), manifestos (Fanon, Guevara, Castro, Juan José Hernández Arregui) and films (by Fernando Birri, Joris Ivens, Nemesio Juárez). It conjoins the powers of didacticism, poetry and agogy (the agogic qualities of a work concern its rhythmic, sensible, physical properties – a notion suggested by the French aesthetician Etienne Souriau). Stylistically, the film uses all possible audiovisual techniques, from flicker to contemplative sequence shots (for instance, the final three-minute shot that reproduces a picture of the dead Che Guevara’s face with his eyes wide open), from collage to direct cinema, from blank screen to animated effects, from the rigours of the blackboard to the hallucinogenic properties of the fish-eye, from classical music to anglophone pop hits. Cinema is an arsenal and here all its weapons are unsheathed.

The film’s elegant radicalism inspired many later visual essayists such as Chris Marker, the Dziga Vertov Group, the Cinéthique Group, Patricio Guzmán, Alexander Kluge and films such as The Spiral (1975) made by Armand Mattelart, Jacqueline Meppiel and Valérie Mayoux (with the help of Chris Marker). In fact the analysis of conditions in Chile found in The Spiral and Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile (1977) can be considered fourth and fifth chapters of The Hour of the Furnaces.

A great tradition
The visual economic-political treatise is an important and rare form in cinema, one grounded in the theatrical agitprop tradition. Its historical highlights include Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Dziga Vertov’s The Sixth Part of the World (1926), René Vautier’s Afrique 50 (1950), the Dziga Vertov Group’s British Sounds, Pravda and Struggles in Italy (all 1969), Santiago Alvarez’s Stone upon Stone (1970), I’m a Son of America… And I’m Indebted to It (1972), Raymundo Gleyzer and Cine de la Base’s Mexico: The Frozen Revolution (1970), L.A. Newsreel’s Repression (1970), the Cinéthique Group’s A Whole Program (1976), Vautier, Brigitte Criton and Buana Kabue’s Frontline (1976), Robert Kramer’s Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977) and Straub/Huillet’s Too Early, Too Late (1982). The translation of an economic-political analysis into images remains a fascinating source of cinematic reinvention. In such a brilliant tradition, The Hour of the Furnaces stands out for its powerful balance between its strong literary structure and its many audiovisual innovations. These establish the film as a central reference for cinematic activism.

Such films give us the tools with which to understand, discuss and transform a historical situation: concepts (neocolonialism, imperialism, class struggle), logics (how to relate one phenomenon to another, for example the arts to neo-colonialism, religion to the economy, the working day to the nature of leisure) and proposals (slogans about revolution). In the context of the political responsibilities of culture and of film itself, The Hour of the Furnaces forms an indivisible diptych with Solanas and Getino’s written essay Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World (1969). This text can be seen as a genesis, a generalisation and an extension of the film.

Towards a Third Cinema defines a triad that generates many new questions: industrial cinema (the first cinema); auteur cinema (the second cinema, an alibi and safety valve for the existing system); and guerrilla cinema (the third cinema, contesting the other cinemas and the world order they support, acting as the cinematic insurgent patrol in the armies of liberation fighting colonialism and imperialism). Third Cinema reinvented each constitutive element of film practice: production, organisation, aesthetics, art and audience. This manifesto emphasises the unfinished dimension of The Hour of the Furnaces: “Until now, we have put forward practical proposals but only loose ideas – just a sketch of the hypotheses born out of our first film The Hour of the Furnaces. We therefore don’t pretend to present them as a sole or exclusive model but only as ideas which may be useful in the debate over the use of film in non-liberated countries.”

A blackboard
In October 1969 Jean-Luc Godard interviewed Solanas and Getino in Paris, and then published the following pronouncement in the Maoist magazine Cinéthique: “During the screening of an imperialist film, the screen sells the voice of the boss to the viewer; the voice flatters, represses or bludgeons. During the screening of a revisionist film, the screen is only the loudspeaker of a voice delegated by the people but which is no longer the voice of the people, for the people watch their own disfigured face in silence. During the screening of an activist film, the screen is just a blackboard or the wall of a school providing a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.”

In 1984 Octavio Getino published Some Notes on the Concept of a ‘Third Cinema’, offering a precise depiction of the Latin American economic, political, military context and the relationships between the visual essay and the written one. Getino explains: “Cine Liberación was, before anything else, our fusion as intellectuals with the reality of the working class. This determined the tentative and inconclusive nature of our proposals… Both Solanas and myself, while making this film, amassed a considerable amount of theoretical material. It was for our own use, as reflections on our ongoing practical work. It was this material that we drew upon when we developed the theories which were published between 1969 and 1971.”

Taking the Marxist concept of praxis seriously, The Hours of the Furnaces wages its battle not only on the Argentinian political front but also on the aesthetic and theoretical fronts. Considering its modest underground provenance and its growing historical influence, the film seems to have fought victoriously because it attacked all three areas with equal energy and ingenuity. As Jean-Luc Godard once said about Solzhenitsyn: “We already knew all about what he wrote, but he was listened to because he had style.” The film’s renewal of the economic-political treatise as cinematic form can be traced in many subsequent films whose activism operates through similarly diverse experimental energies: Godard’s Le Rapport Darty (1989), Raoul Peck’s Profit & Nothing But! Or Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle (2001), Erik Gandini’s Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers (2003), Alexander Kluge’s Notes from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital (2008), Lech Kowalski’s The End of the World Begins With One Lie (2010) or John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010).

Having proved its power to inspire, The Hour of the Furnaces remains incendiary because it affirms its thesis as if it were throwing grenades, accepting that the wind of history drives some of the flames back towards the thrower. Among its arguments urging armed struggle there is one slogan, however, that’s proving false in these times of lethal neoliberalism: “No social order commits suicide.” Let’s hope that some collective, somewhere in the world, is preparing the tinder.

https://nitro.download/view/08ECD60171CCE15/La_hora_de_los_hornos_-_Section_I.mkv https://nitro.download/view/139B7BCCD2C0CA8/La_hora_de_los_hornos_-_Section_II.mkv https://nitro.download/view/DE556ECD93ECC92/La_hora_de_los_hornos_-_Section_III.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English, Spanish, French

The post Octavio Getino & Fernando E. Solanas – La hora de los hornos AKA The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Part 3 of the series preceded by Memoria del saqueo & La dignidad de los nadies, and followed by La tierra sublevada.

Quote:
Two years ago I very favorably reviewed the Argentinian documentarian Fernando E. Solanas’ Dignity of the Nobodies, shown at the 2006 SFIFF. This new work by Solanas deals with exploitation of his country from outside and how Argentina can get out from under that and become a strong, rich, independent country. My heading for Dignity was “Chaotic and grainy, but for some of us, essential viewing.” This one isn’t so grainy, and it’s still essential.

Solanas maintains a frankly socialistic, anti-neoliberal position. He focuses on resistance to privatization and points out that Argentina has enormous power that it has relinquished, but can reclaim. He beings simply with the great size and rich natural resources of the country. Then he works through a series of areas.

The aeronautical industry was established in the Thirties but completely disbanded in the 1990’s, when the country’s biggest family was turned over to Lockheed. The automotive industry got its energy in ARgentina from the great enthusiasm for car racing in the Fifties, when the Argentinian driver Juan Manuel Fango was the Formula One champion. After producing economy cars, off-road vehicles, trucks, and tractors, again the country shut down factories to join Chile as a raw materials provider to the US and the multinationals. Solanas visits car factories in Argentina and talks to workers, where now only a few continue and much of the production is done by robotics manufactured in Japan. If only the robotics were at least manufactured in Argentina, one worker laments.

Some degree of recovery from all these concessions to the US and multinationals came after 2001 when local production became necessary to to a breakdown in monetary exchange. Solanas visits a factory as he did in Dignity which the workers themselves took over and began operating themselves on a more primitive level when the owners went bankrupt and could no longer pay them wages. In a metals factory that now has huge orders from Johnson & Johnson, a socialist spirit reigns and decisions are made by consensus, not from the top down.

The scientific and industrial base of the country was most severely damaged because of the spread through Latin America of neoliberal policies, which reached its peak in the Nineties. This led to privatization and market-oriented training at the professional schools, and in turn to emigration of the best brains and talents.

Here Solanas visits a school in a poor area. The result of neoliberal policies is that the rich have 30 or 40 times richer than the poor instead of only 6 0r 7 as in the past. Still teachers perform a heroic effort to instill humanistic values in the young. The greatest enemies of progress and social equality, one teacher declares, are poverty and television.

Natural and especially mineral resources, Solanas points out, are still being turned over to the multinationals, despite a huge stock of available raw materials that Argentina has the potential and right to utilize locally and achieve more self sufficiency. And this is something that can come about, he says, through simply applying existing laws. One speaker says being self-sufficient requires first and foremost cheap energy–and so must begin with taking control of its oil.

Human resources are in effect being discarded by Argentina, Solanas shows, because the country isn’t paying its specialists, technicians and scientists enough (one young local nuclear engineer, though he chooses to remain, says he makes $3 a hour); this is equivalent to simple expelling the best trained people from the country. Argentina has no national plan, a lady scientist says. It isn’t financing scientific research. Researchers have the choice of leaving or working for multinational corporations that will have their best research done elsewhere. When ideas are originated at home, Argentina doesn’t hold onto the patents. all this goes back to the fact that the nation has no vision for its future.

Consequently Argentina continues to follow a “colonialist” model, which in this context means behaving and thinking like a colony. Through the course of the film we see dozens of factories and research centers, nuclear reactors, fields of windmills, vast tracts of unexploited land–you name it. It’s all there: not only the possibility of industrial growth, but already means of developing solar and wind power.

Solanas uses a wide angle lens throughout, which helps give a feeling of vastness. Even most interiors feel huge, whether of factories, offices, or classroom. One has a sense of room to grow, of wealth untapped, simply from the camera work. A nuclear scientist at a satellite center is enthusiastic about the creativity of the young people he works with. He says the country needs more interdisciplinary integration. Having come to Argentina from Italy at the age of nine, he is bursting with pride with what he describes as a “can-do” (se puede) nation. As an example, he cites what he worked on himself from his thirties: a uranium enrichment program that Argentina developed independently. At the end, Solanas returns to his theme: this is a country that has everything and only needs to make independent use of what it’s got.

Once again, in the third film in his trilogy, “Pino” Solanas has given us a documentary full of enthusiasm and hope. Does he look much at disadvantages and obstacles? No. His aim is to inspire rather than deeply analyze. And he succeeds: his films have a tremendous drive and never lose their thrust or their focus.

1.80GB | 1h 39m | 862×466 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0CBD238B681744E/Argentina_latente.mkv https://nitro.download/view/D1F86FD38C40F17/Making_of.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English, Spanish

The post Fernando E. Solanas – Argentina latente AKA Dormant Argentina (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Memoria del saqueo” – literally, “Memory of the looting”, but it’s worth stopping here for a second because there’s an intention there that’s lost in translation. During the 2001 crisis, sensationalist media loved to show images of common looting taking place (people taking stuff out of supermarkets – if it’s a big TV, all the better). The title of the film subverts this common usage of the word “looting” in this context, to direct it to the systematic looting of the national riches by the ruling classes, as explained below.

Part of a sequence of four documentaries: Memoria del saqueo, La dignidad de los nadies, Argentina latente and La tierra sublevada.

Quote:
After the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983, successive democratic governments launched a series of reforms purporting to turn Argentina into the world’s most liberal and prosperous economy. Less than twenty years later, the Argentinians have lost literally everything: major national companies have been sold well below value to foreign corporations; the proceeds of privatizations have been diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials; revised labour laws have taken away all rights from employees; in a country that is traditionally an important exporter of foodstuffs, malnutrition is widespread; millions of people are unemployed and sinking into poverty; and their savings have disappeared in a final banking collapse. The film highlights numerous political, financial, social and judicial aspects that mark out Argentina’s road to ruin.

Extra – Making of (no subtitles):

1.87GB | 1 h 54 min | 700×393 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/48805AA965EFE85/Memoria_del_saqueo.mkv https://nitro.download/view/03BC4A4F13651F1/Extra_-_Making_of.mkv

Language:Spanish
Subtitles:English, Spanish, Portuguese

The post Fernando E. Solanas – Memoria del saqueo AKA Social Genocide [+Extra] (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
An eclectic group of actors struggle to save their theater from being demolished and replaced with a shopping mall. Max, the leader of the troupe, is a workaholic director who abandoned his family to build his career and is forced to confront the daughter he deserted. Then there is Enrique, the playwright-poet who is reduced to pawning his belongings to sustain his livelihood when his state pension is severed. Finally, there is Fulo who is driven to succeed so that she can bring her daughter from Rio de Janeiro.

1.74GB | 1h 53mn | 708×382 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/B62EC9C09F782D2/Fernando_Solanas_-_(1998)_Clouds.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Fernando E. Solanas – La nube AKA Clouds (1998) first appeared on Cinema of the World.