Images of the Itinerary of the Group Cine Liberación and “Third Cinema”

Figure 1.

Fernando Solanas works on his writings after The Hour of the Furnaces, c.1968–1969. Courtesy Pablo Guallar and Victoria Solanas.

Figure 2.

Octavio Getino during the filming of The Hour of the Furnaces, c. 1967. Courtesy Pablo Guallar and Getino family.

The Hour of the Furnaces was shooting between 1966–1968 in Argentina and had its international premiere in June 1968, just a few months after Che Guevara’s capture and murder in Bolivia (October 1967). Its total runtime of 4 hours 20 minutes is structured in three parts. The first, “Neocolonialism and violence,” was conceived as an Essay-Film, which discusses the neocolonial condition of Argentine and Latin American dependency throughout 13 sections. The well-known images of Che Guevara’s corpse and face appear at the end of this first part of the film (Figures 3 and 4) to call to continue struggles in Latin America.

The political-ideological perspective of the whole film combined a historiographic revisionism that contested the liberal version of Argentine history, the main issues discussed in the Havana Tricontinental Conference (1966) and an uncompromising Fanonian-rooted third worldism. In many exhibitions, a sign with the quote borrowed from Fanon, “Every spectator is either a coward or a traitor,” hung below the screen (Figure 5). This phrase refers to the idea of the film-act (the construction of a film event during the screenings) and the explicit call for the spectator to continue the film through a collective discussion and a transforming praxis, that appears in intertitles also in the second and third parts of the film.

The second part, “Act for liberation,” is subdivided into two large periods: “Chronicle of Peronism” (about Peronism government, 1946–1955) and “Chronicle of Resistance” (1955–). The last one included images that also made a strong impact in those years, mainly referring to workers’ struggles, especially the occupations of industrial factories. These historical actions were integrated into the agitation plan of the General Labor Confederation of Argentina (1963–1965) that carried new features for the time: their mass character, national scope, centralized direction and planning, and common program. The film incorporates this workers experience from newsreel footage, press photos, and testimonies. (Figures 6, 7, and 8)

Facing the military dictatorship of the time (1966–1973), the film was shown in clandestine screenings in Argentina. During 1968–1970, that activity was carried out in coordination with the Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos (better known as CGT de los Argentinos), the combative workers union guided by the graphic worker Raimundo Ongaro. There converged many political activists, artists groups, and intellectuals, such as the well-known writer Rodolfo Walsh. All appear in Figure 9. While Walsh directed the weekly newspaper CGT (the union’s press) between 1968 and 1969 (Figure 10), some members of the Cine Liberación group—Getino, Gerardo Vallejo, and Nemesio Juárez—made a newsreel: “Cinema Reports of the CGT.”

The last image (Figure 11) shows the cover and first page of a political magazine organized by the group Cine Liberación in 1972 with a screaming face on the cover, the iconic image that was used for the promotion of The Hour. This magazine (a single issue that appeared in August 1972) expresses the journey traveled in a first stage of the Group Cine Liberación and marks the beginning of a new stage linked to the return of Peronismo to the government (which happened in 1973).

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