Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (51) Chile - Allende and Popular Unity

Salvador Allende

 Chile                                                                                                                                                                            

Aldo Francia  b.23   Raúl Ruiz  b.41   Miguel Littin b.42     

 Allende and Popular Unity :  Ruiz, Littin

Filmmakers in Chile came together in the 60s to support the coalition of left-wing parties, Unitad (Popular Unity). The years leading up to the victory of Salvador Allende in 1970 saw a new wave in  both fiction and documentary.  “The essays of the Experimental Film Group of the 1950s turned into a cinema of urgency which combined political campaign films with innovation in filmic technique and language to denounce the marginalism inherent in underdevelopment” (Chanan 746). The same spirit motivated features that fully emerged in 1968-9 with the appearance of five films seen by ordinary filmgoers: Littin's El Chacal de Nahueltoro/The Jackal of Nahueltoro, Francia's Valparaiso mi amor,  Helvio Soto's Caliche sangriente/Bloody Saltpetre, Charles Elsessor's Los Testigos/The Witnesses and Ruiz's Tre Tristes Tigres/Three Sad Tigers. This was the first time in the history of Chilean cinema that such a level of production had been achieved. Ruiz said that “in Latin America at this time, there was a mixture of avant-gardism and the desire to lay foundations among filmmakers who had long been marginalised. In Chile there was both a feeling of rediscovery and a vanguard attitude: filmmakers were excited at the prospect of making real industry films, but lacking the usual technique they had to adopt an artisanal approach […] There were many options and I wanted to try them all! I was completely free to do what I wanted.” (Coad interview)

The pace of political events encouraged activity rather than theorisation and Coad comments that  “there was little sustained discussion of strategies.“ Ideas and practices evolved heterogeneously  linked only by a common commitment to 'the process’." Helvio Soto (1930-2001) looked to American and European commercial cinema and television in the belief that their familiarity with audiences would encourage their acceptance as models “that films must entertain if we are  to succeed in the social-didactic aims we have mapped out for ourselves.” Patricio Guzman (The Battle of Chile), and his group “with almost military planning and discipline, set about recording 'the process' daily and hourly with the objective of returning it to the various sectors of Unidad as a tool for developing consciousness” (Coad).

Aldo Francia

Aldo Francia (1923-96) dedicated himself to a narrative neo-realist exploration of issues during a time of rapid polarisation. Forming a polarity between himself and Soto, Miguel Littin explored popular memory from which he reconstructed events “creating a film language from its images and iconography.” Carlos Flores made didactic political shorts as did many others, including Ruiz, usually sponsored by the state film body Chile Films, university film departments or political parties, Flores then turning his attention to young people - the pressures on them and their attitudes to 'the process’ “(ibid).

Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011), a committed member of Allende's Socialist Party, based his own method “in the language of the Chilean working class and urban petite bourgeoisie,” while describing the popular culture conceived by most artists affiliated with the Chilean left as 'kitsch'. He proposed a cinema of unity which would seek to consolidate the shared positions of the divided left […] and create subjects for general discussion, but his own films were frequently criticized as obscure and divisive” (ibid). “Ruiz was often seen as the 'enfant maudit' who constantly refused to strike a definite line and who questioned all he saw with a hint of polemicism” (Ranvaud uncr.). He was the only Chilean film-maker who regularly produced films - at least 20,1968-73, including 5 feature length and 5 unfinished films, before going into exile in Europe.

Three Sad Tigers

In his first completed project Les Tres Triste Tigres/Three Sad Tigers (1968) based on a play Ruiz described as “an interesting melodrama,” Ruiz saw “the chance to make a film in which Chileans would have a chance to recognize themselves, the first in Chile with its characters drawn from the majority class […] a series of small details from the lives of the majority who live from day to day in small jobs that merely allow themselves to survive. For them the dividing line between legal-illegal, permitted-forbidden is very narrow and often disappears […] At no point did I want to create 'portrait characters'. I am absolutely opposed to this new fashion for 'direct cinema' that is sweeping Latin America [which] leads to 'play within the play'. It leads to filming oneself filming oneself filming – a hall of mirrors” (1971). “While steeped in a more melodramatic mould, Tigers reveals an awareness for camera strategy and cinematic expression far beyond that of his contemporaries” (Ruiz Filmography).

When he made Tigers, Ruiz acknowledged that he was influenced by the nouvelle vague rather than neo-realism. The idea was “to put the camera not where it would be best, but where it should be, in the normal position […] things are not seen from an ideal standpoint […] The aim was not just to produce the nouvelle vague style.” There was also an attempt to tackle the embarrassment of Mexican melodrama [in the play] by a kind of inversion, as if the camera were in the opposite position, showing the secondary characters, extras waiting for the big scene to take place.”

In La Colonis Penal/The Penal Colony (1971), Ruiz said that he “wanted to devote myself to a personal “irresponsible” film quite divorced from Chilean reality [in a] free interpretation of a story by Kafka […] If I had to defend myself […] I would say it's a metaphor on conditions in Latin America. It takes place on an island in the Pacific 200 miles from the coast of Peru and Ecuador. The place, once a leper colony, later became a penitentiary, then in 1950, a pilot community financed by the UN and finally, in 1972, a free territory. However, in this kind of Latin Switzerland divided into cantons, the prison rules are observed […] a sort of self-ruled penal colony. The inhabitants behave like convicts, have customs of the sub-proletariat […] their language is completely invented. One day a journalist arrives […] and discovers that some terrible things are going on. But these episodes of torture and violence are part of a description she herself has invented for her paper. The island, instead of producing copper, produces news […] paying for everything.” (1973, Filmography).

The Expropriation

Ruiz's last Chilean film, La Expropiacion/The Expropriation (1972), filmed in 4 days in 1971 and completed in Paris, runs 60 mins. “The film tries to explain the aims of Popular Unity by adopting a sort of self-criticism style” (Ruiz). An agronomist has to expropriate an estate. He is received by the landowner with every honour. The two discover they were at the same college and are of the same social class. At night a dance is held in the honour of the agronomist which is attended by the landowner's ancestors, a parade of ghosts who have died in defence of their property. The agronomist adopts the same political tactics as President Allende. Like him, he falls back on sophism [deliberate misrepresentation], using the intrigues invested by the bourgeoisie against the bourgeoisie itself. If the bourgeoisie decide to break with this reality, the agronomist reassures himself, he will call upon the people to help. He talks to the peasants, a real discussion, the film turning to realism, to a denunciation. The peasants tell the viewer that the landowner has hidden the machines explaining why they are forced to take action. The agronomist explains why the law is on his side. The following day the peasants oppose the expropriation. They kill the agronomist. The landowner escapes.

Ruiz explained that The Expropriation was not finished in time “because it was considered more of a provocation than a constructive intervention which the party did not want to be widely shown although it was seen by some militants in double-head form. It was made at a time when the far left MIR had become critical of Popular Unity. I was trying to show what happens when general theory is contradicted by reality and social paradoxes emerge from generalisations. When land is given to the peasants they are supposed to be happy but often this is not so and great damage is done, as in La Vendee during the French Revolution […] As in most of my films there was a satirical attitude developed by working with the actors. None of these films was scripted in advance: they were improvised on the day of shooting.” (ibid)

Miguel Littin

On the strength of his first feature, Miguel Littín, a young Chilean-born filmmaker of Greek descent, was named by President Allende in 1970 (he participated in Allende's election) to head and reorganise the state film enterprise, Chile Films. After the CIA coup and death of Allende, Littin made another 11 feature films and 3 documentaries,1975-2014, mainly co-productions, while based in Mexico.

El chacal de Nahueltoro/The Jackal of Nahueltoro (1969) is based on an actual case. José who had been adopted into their fold by a recently fatherless family, in a spell of drunken psychosis ends an argument with the mother by chasing her and fatally striking her down with a piece of wood and then proceeds to bludgeon her four children to death, one by one. Later woken up from a drunken nap by a baby's crying José proceeds to crush the baby under his boot. The case deeply affected public opinion. It was fully researched by Littin who was under strong criticism in the press while making the film. He  said that the character of José, an illiterate of poor peasant origins, his life reflecting the widespread problem of alcoholism in Chile. His character disappeared becoming immersed in public mythology as he became a cult figure. José entered into a long period of rehabilitation which transformed him and was then executed by firing squad. (Littin interview, Cineaste Spring '71).

The Jackal of Nahueltro

Littin chose this particularly heinous and notorious crime to place the spotlight on the evils of capital punishment in the most extreme circumstances similar to Richard Brooks' intent in the film version of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1967). Littin chooses to broadly expand the thesis: that killers like José are the result of a brutal poverty-stricken childhood in a corrupt society, challenging the standard  conservative view that people should always be required to take full responsibility for their own actions. To reinforce this, there follows “the taming by education” sequences with a shifting from the protagonist's eyes dirtward, to a more dignified gaze. This is combined in a narratively simple but relatively complex time-shifting structure in the blurring of the distinction between fiction and documentary involving scenes from José's youth and inquisition, and the filming of the murders.

As has been said of El Chacal, when such a murderer in vulnerability rivals that of his victims it is proof of the filmmaker's talent. It struck a chord with audiences; at the time it was the most widely seen motion picture film in Chilean history.

In Littin's Latierra prometida/The Promised Land (1973), a rich socialist José Duran gives up his wealth and becomes leader of a socialist Chile. Duran in the film is based on Marmaduke Grove Vallejo who created a short-lived Socialist Republic of Chile in 1932. In a time of economic crisis, social tension and turmoil the film follows an itinerant band of unemployed workers and landless peasants through the Chilean countryside. The army intervenes taking power, massacring the people who fight back. The film broaches a variety of issues including both a celebration and critique of popular culture and of indecisive leadership. Intense emotional involvement alternates with distancing devices introducing a critical perspective. Mythical motifs are mixed with revolutionary imperatives. Allegorical and legendary dimensions sometimes mysteriously contrast, sometimes fuse, with a more realistic mode in the presentation of historical events.

 Littín saw the film as what he termed a 'political activator', set in the thirties but informed by the internal problems facing Chile under the Popular Unity government such as the problem of popular education and politicisation, the need to decisively expropriate the entrepreneurial and landowning classes, as well as the role of the army and religion. Julianne Burton comments that one of the major strengths of the film is how these themes merge organically from the narrative. Completed in Cuba after Allende's overthrow, The Promised Land never fulfilled Littin's conception of it as a “political activator” in the arena for which it was intended. “ In Chile,” Burton concludes, “its technical mastery […] would have been fused with the contextual urgency which informs all militant Third World cinema viewed in its place of origin. What is essentially a critical curiosity […] would there have become a weapon in the struggle.”

Patricio Guzman’s extraordinary mix of observation and investigative reporting, a record of the months leading up to the coup in 1973, The Battle of Chile (1975) is in three parts, edited from the extensive footage smuggled out immediately after the coup, edited in Cuba at ICAIC. “Chileans became the leading practitioners of a cinema of exile in Latin America and Europe.” According to one count they made 176 films 1973-83, including 56 features. Chanan comments that “the political imperatives of the Popular Front period underwent a gradual transformation as the overtly militant gave way to a personal and ironic stance,” in the case of Ruiz, a continuation of his cinematic provocation in Chile, a continuum, not so well received, at least initially, by the community in exile.

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Michael Chanan  “New Cinemas in Latin America”  World Cinema ed. G. Nowell-Smith pp 746-7                                        

Michael Coad  “Great Events and Ordinary People”  Afterimage 10  Autumn 1981                                                     

 __________   “ Between Institutions: interview with Raul Ruiz Afterimage Autumn 1981.                                                                   

Donald Ranvaud  “Latin America 1: Chile”  Framework 10  Spring 1979                                                                               

Benoît Peeters  “Annihilating the Script: A Discussion with Raul Ruiz” Raul Ruiz: Images of Passage  eds. Helen Brandis, Adrian Martin, Grant McDonald  2003                                                                                                                                         

Various   “Ruiz Filmography” Afterimage Autumn 1981                                                                                                                

Justin Stewart  “The Jackal of Nahueltoro”  Reverse Shot  May 28 2006                                                                              

Julianne Burton  “The Promised Land”  Film Quarterly  Fall 1975

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso

6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia

6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia

6 (41) - The Soviet Union

6 (42) - Asia - Japan - Part One

6 (43) - Japan - Part Two

6 (44) - Japan - Part Three - Shohei Imamura

6 (45) Asia - India Pt 1 - Satyajit Ray

6 (46) Asia - India Pt 2- Ghatak, Dutt, Sen, Parallel Cinema

Asia - 6 (47) China  (To be published shortly)

6 (48) - Brazil Pt 1- Cinema Novo, dos Santos, Rocha

6 (49) Brazil Pt 2 - de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra

6(50) - Latin America - Argentina

Adelaide's Mercury Theatre Cinematheque is brought back to life - Veteran cinephile David Donaldson curates the opening program

MetaMovies Vol.1

Four choice US films about film-making as finale 2025 for Cinematheque Adelaide - 

From 3 to 19 Dec.             

Consider the new Mini-Membership $20 starter.

BARTON FINK, MEDIUM COOL, THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, SUNSET BOULEVARD

The Mercury 08 8410 0979 - 13 Morphett st - Bar open

 

Here's the link to all the details 

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison enthuses over ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2025)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s current hit One Battle After Another's notion of the US divided into armed camps may seem very much of the moment but it goes way back - President Walter Huston having the army firing squad line up gangsters against a wall in sight of the Capitol Dome in the 1933 Gabriel Over the White House, campus riots in Richard Rush's 1970 Getting Straight, Robert Kramer’s 1970 ICE (prescient) or Jeremy Kagan’s 1975 Katharine through Spike Lee’s 2018 The Blackklansman, all anticipating Eddington, with it’s discussion of “Whiteness”. This one also goes back over ground covered in the Lumet Running on Empty and its fugitive sixties activist family.

It’s hard to pin down Anderson’s style. I find I forget his films, though it is easy to pick up their first run-throughs of ideas used here - agitated Adam Sandler, playing a reel with the telephone he yanked out of the wall still in his hand in Punch Drunk Love, foreshadows ego-free lead, unshaven Leonardo De Caprio “stoned, disheveled and wearing a robe & department store glasses.”

 

Star Leonardo is first seen instructing his black lover Teyana Taylor on wiring bombs for their U.S. underground “French 75” Unit for a raid on the (ICE) Otay Mesa Immigration Detention Centre, situated in the shadow of a massive Trumpy Border Wall, which they penetrate with their briefcase bombs to plant in the toilets. However Sean Penn’s U.S. Task Force Commander S. J. Lockjaw (an action movie in which both the hero and the villain are comic  misfits) catches her in the act and turns her, with a bit of added sex blackmail which he will spin as “reverse rape.”  He arrives  with a bunch of flowers, at the house she has fled to reappear with a battering ram. Penn conspicuously adjusts his military version Donald Trump hair-do  at one point.

 

Taylor bales, leaving Leonardo to raise the baby, who grows to be Chase Infiniti, laying low with disintegrating dad Leonardo in a Chicken Shack owned house in the Baktan Cross California woods. Just when we are sure where our sympathy is being directed, it’s the transgender member in her teen age peer group posse that rats out Chase, when they are captured at their high school  dance by Penn’s off the books military. 

   

Benicio del Toro, the sensei at the small town Dojo, proves to be the leader of the local underground cell. The rug there is programmed to roll back over the trapdoor, after the fugitive unregistered immigrants have exited into its tunnel. When Leonardo, crawling across the floor to avoid a passing cop car, asks for a weapon, Benicio offers nunchuks. 

 

How desirable it is to put up the image of America divided between a massive, cheery Antifa underground and secret so-rich Christian elite lodge brothers is questionable but it does make for a great night at the movies. 

 

Two brilliant chase sequences give this one the edge on most competition - the sustained piano-backed roof top parkour escape, from the ground level military by skate board fugitives, fields De Caprio, caught after crashing to earth only to be turned loose by the co-conspirator hospital nurse, who just tells him the way out. The action moves on to the set piece long lens travelings on the remote undulating highway, where the cars dip  from view. It would be interesting to know how they obtained those steady moving telephoto images. We get the surprise appearance of a third element in the chase, which this lot may have spotted when it worked a treat in Ron Howard’s 2003 The Missing.This is the first time I’ve seen a DNA analysis used to provide suspense. 

 

The final Coda showing our protagonists’ later life is agreeable.

 

One Battle After Another distinguishes itself on every level - as an action entertainment, as a demonstration of superior film craft and as a think piece on the condition of the America we are seeing  in the TV News. If there hadn’t been a recent burst of superior films, I’d have thought it was a clear choice for movie of the moment.

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (50) Argentina - Repression and Resistance: Third Cinema

       

                                                                                                                     

Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (1967) b.24    Fernando Solanas b.36    Leonardo Favio b.38    

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Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (1924-78), son of Leopoldo Torres-Rios, a prolific, “occasionally very interesting film director” from the 30s to the 50s, was the only internationally known Argentinian director at least until the late sixties. Leopoldo worked as an assistant from the age of 15 on his father’s and other director’s films being more interested in a literary pursuits (he was a published poet) until making Dias de Odin/Days of Hatred (1954), co-scripted with Borges from his short  story “Emma Zunz” the film described by Edgardo Cozarinsky who worked as a writer on some of Nilsson’s films, “as the most exciting film ever made in Argentina - proof that, on native ground. you could work imaginatively with sounds and images, ellipses and voice-over.”

Torre Nilsson directed 21 features, 1954-74, the fifth El Protegrido/The Protégé (1956), one of his personal favourites, was the only film he made from his original script. Roy Armes notes that many critics found the influence of Antonioni in his harsh portrayal of the film world. Nilsson’s next feature, La Casa del Angel/The House of the Angel (1957), the first screenplay collaboration with his wife, writer Beatrice Guido, was well received at Cannes and was widely screened on the developing international film festival circuit. The central theme of the destruction of an adolescent girl’s virginal innocence, contains a sharply critical portrayal of upper middle class life and institutions in the 1920s. In contrast, his following film, El Sequestrador/The Kidnapper (1958), is a study of poverty “comparable in some ways to Bunuel’s Los Olvidados”  (ibid).

Leopoldo Torre Nilsson

Made at the beginning of a period between 1957-63, when a Iiberal cultural policy allowed a short-lived energetic attempt at independent production, Angel established Nilsson's international reputation but it was not followed by any general circulation of Latin American cinema. Nilsson nevertheless followed The House of the Angel with a succession  of  baroque features often in collaboration with Guido as scriptwriter returning repeatedly to “themes of sexual initiation and political and religious hypocrisy.”  Corazinsky claims that Nilsson “rejected Peronism even when latter-day opportunists tried to make it look fashionably left-wing.”  Richard Roud describes Guido's “truly Gothic sensibility” as combining with Nilsson's “Wellesian mise en scène” in the Columbia Pictures financed, Eo Ojo de la Cerradur /The Eavesdropper (1964), in a fusion of two major themes: “the denunciation of Argentinian fascism and a scathing examination of a self- destructive claustrophobic world” (Critical Dictionary vol 2 1006)

House of the Angel

Nowell-Smith reminds us that not only were films from Latin American countries not circulating in Europe or North America but they did not circulate much in Latin America outside the country of origin either. From 1960 this began to change. In Argentina during the left-wing presidency of Arturo Frondizi (1958-62) a small new art cinema developed, more a new ripple than wave, dismissed as 'bourgeois' by radical detractors, but nevertheless a significant breakthrough. In addition to Torre Nilsson new filmmakers emerged, although still marginal in the industry, such as David Kohon (Tres veces Ana/Anna Three Times Over 1961), and Miguel Antin (La cifra impar/Odd Number 1962) or, if established, changed course, at least temporarily as in the case of Fernando Ayala, for example ( 'Making Waves' p.177).

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino

During a time of the restoration of increasingly severe censorship under restoration of military rule, between 1966-73, Fernando Solanas (1936-2020) and Octavio Getino (1935-2012) worked clandestinely to film more than 180 hours of interviews with intellectuals, labour leaders, workers et al. Most of the time they were using only a non-synchronous 16mm spring-wound Bolex. Vast amounts of newsreel footage were also gathered, documenting Juan Peron's rise to power and presidency 1946-55, and overthrow by a military coup. Solanas and Getino supported Perónism, despite its failings, as “an enemy of the interests of the neocolonial system.” They denounced the cultural colonialism that normalised Latin American dependency. Neo-colonialist ideology, they argued, functioned even at the level of cinematic language, leading to the adoption of the ideological forms inherent in the dominant cinema aesthetic.

The resultant film is a chronicle and impassioned denunciation of western imperialism in more than four hours and three parts, La Hora de los Hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) which was screened 'underground' all over Argentina often on Super 8mm with the aim of opening a dialogue with the audience. The first part “Neocolonialism and Violence” (95 mins) is dedicated to Che Guevara in an analysis of the daily violence, neo-racism and ideological war in Argentina and the rest of Latin America. The second part, “Act of Liberation” (120 mins) with notes, testimonies and debate in a chronicle of Perónism (1945-55), is dedicated to the Argentinian working class*, followed by “Chronicle of Resistance” in the violent decade (1955-65). The more subversive and committed third part, “Violence and Liberation” (45 mins), is dedicated to the “New Man” born out of this war of liberation. At the end, following the death mask of Che Guevara held on the screen for several minutes, a banner was shown proclaiming “Every spectator is a coward or a traitor” (Frantz Fanon). The film was intended “as a Film Act” played out in Argentina accompanied by tapes of songs, marches and poems preliminary to debate and prelude to audience participation.

Solanas and Getino followed up the film with a manifesto, 'Towards a Third Cinema' - of which The Hour of the Furnaces is a paradigm of Third Cinema first advanced as a rallying cry in the late 60s for an anti-colonial cinema of liberation, not just directed against neo-colonial oppression in Latin America and Africa. Solanas and Getino declared that this cinema of the struggle against imperialism as “the most gigantic cultural, scientific and artistic manifestation of our time.“ As the antithesis of First Cinema which is any cinematographic expression […] likely to respond to the aspirations of big capital,” the paradigm of which is the ubiquitous 'Hollywood movie’, not confined only to the First and Second worlds. Second Cinema,politically reformist, formally experimental or radical auteur-based cinema, is dismissed by Solanas and Getino as expressive of the concerns and aspirations of the middle stratum, the petit bourgeoisie, but of little relevance in the face of repression of the kind unleashed by neo-Fascist forces like the Latin American military.  “Nihilistic, mystificatory, it runs in circles… cut-off from reality...As in the first cinema you can [also] find documentaries, political and militant cinema […]. Both good and bad auteurs may also be found in Third Cinema which, generally speaking, gives account of reality and history in political terms, for the expression of a new culture […] an open category, unfinished, incomplete […] a research category […] What is required is to make Third Cinema gain space in all its forms […]” (Cinemaction 1979).**

“Third World film theorists, in their revolutionary enthusiasm and their synergistic approach to theory and practice, recalled the 1920s montage theorists from the Soviet Union. Like them, they too were filmmakers as well as theorists and the questions they asked were at once aesthetic and political.” In a 1958 essay Glauber Rocha suggested that Latin American cinema could be invented dialectically, on the basis of a fusion of two apparently antagonistic models proposed by Zavattini and Eisenstein. “Indeed, the Third World theorists made frequent reference to the Soviet theorists, while rejecting the “socialist realist” model that emerged in the 1930s” (Stam 101). The third worldists developed an ongoing programmatic, summarised in his book Film Theory by Robert Stam, in a set of 20 interrelated questions (p.101-2) ranging from : “how could cinema best give expression to national concerns? ” and “what areas of social experience had been neglected by the cinema? ” to “what was the relation between Third World filmmakers (largely middle-class intellectuals) and the “people” whom they purported to represent?” 

Following the manifestos of the late 60s, in Latin America, Third Cinema did gain some traction in the 70s and 80s, in Europe, the UK and North America, as a specifically dynamic concept which was  absorbed/relocated in a transformed mediascape.    

Because based on “the assumptions of Third World’ intellectuals expressing only ‘local concerns’,” Stam suggests, “or, because their essays were so overtly political and programmatic, this body of work has rarely been seen as forming part of the history of “universal” - read Eurocentric- film theory.”

Juan Moreira

The brief return of popularly elected Peronist government produced some popular quality films such as Juan Moreira (1973), written and directed by Leonardo Favio (1938-2012), based on the life of a legendary gaucho folk hero, the film breaking box office records. Favio began his career as a director with two critically successful ‘films of the year’:  Crónica de un nino solo/Chronicle of a Boy Alone (1965), the realistic portrayal of an 11 year old boy’s struggle to deal with harsh conditions, inside and outside reform school, and El Romance del Anticeto y la Francisca (1968) in which a young man, accustomed to solitude, finds himself romantically entangled in relationships with the sweet-natured Francesca and the provocatively alluring Lucia. Favio, after beginning as a  successful writer-director also embarked on a career as a singer who became immensely popular in Argentina but also across Latin America. *

Leonardo Favio

The relaxing of censorship restrictions in 1973 meant a peak year for the film industry of 36 features and record box office receipts. There was talk of a “new Argentine cinema.”  Hour of the Furnaces was given limited commercial screenings during the political “thaw.” The Marxist Grupo Cine de la Base clandestinely produced and independently distributed  Las Traidores / The Traitors (1973) directed by a founding member of the Group, Raymondo Gleyzer, innovatively incorporating documentary footage in a layered fictional narrative critiquing union corruption. The return of Perón from 20 years exile in Franco's Spain and his election as president was short lived. Following his death from cancer after only 9 months, a junta again seized power in the midst of political and economic crisis in 1976, instituting 8 years of repressive military rule. Gleyzer was abducted from his home in May 1976 by a military death squad, one of many thousands who were tortured and murdered. In 1983 popular insurrection and general disaffection compelled the junta in to step down.

Raymondo Gleyzer

Solanas returned to Argentina from exile in1983, making several features in the late 80s. In Sur/South (1988) the central character is released from prison in 1983 at the end of military rule and comes to terms with anger at his crushed life in prison through a series of largely reimagined encounters with his past. In El exilo de Gardel/Tangos (1985) A group of Argentinians exiled in Paris decide to put on a tango-ballet dedicated to Carlos Gardel, a legendary tango star. (Solanas collaborated with tango composer Astor Piazzolla on several film soundtracks). El viaje/The Journey (1992) follows the journey of a young man by bicycle from snow-bound Tierra del Fuego to the Amazon in search of his 'real' father, an anthropologist working somewhere in the  Amazon, during which the teenager comes to understand more about his Latin American past. Solanas later served as a senator in the national parliament 2013-19, and was appointed as Argentine ambassador to UNESCO in 2019. He died of Covid-related illness in November 2020.

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 *  Four polls for the top 100 Argentinian feature films conducted at intervals between 1977-2022 along the lines of the Sight and Sound decennial world poll by various cultural institutions including the Mar del Plata Film Festival and the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts. About 1000 participants voted by invitation. In the most recent of the four polls in 2022, two of Leonardo Favio’s sixties features were still in the top ten - El Dependiente/The Store Assistant (1969) number 4, The Chronicle of a Boy Alone (1965) at no. 5 - with Juan Moreiraand The Romance of Anicito and Francisca at 11 and 13. Hour of the Furnaces was (1969) 6th and Raymundo Gleyzer’s The Traitors at 17. Lucrecia Martel’s La Cienega/The Marsh (2001) was voted no.1 by a wide margin, with Martel’s Zama (2019) at no.19. Torre Nilsson’s The House of the Angel number 2 in 1977, was placed 22nd in 2022.

**  Solanas and Getino stated the goal of Third Cinema is to “dissolve aesthetics in the life of society.”    Third (‘research’) Cinema examples : Terra em transe, Os Fusis, and Macunaima see Brazil part 2, 6(49) ;  The Traitors, The Hour of the Furnaces , see Argentina 6 (50) above; Forthcoming entries will include Allende and Popular Unity,  see Chile 6 (51) ; Sanjines and the Ukamaru group  see Bolivia 6 (52);  One Way or Another  see Cuba part 2, 6 (54) ;  Sembene see Senegal  6 (57)

Addendum: The legacy of Perónism                                                                                                                          

From 1930-76 Argentina experienced six army coups. The 1943 coup supported the Axis powers - the Argentinian government was modelled after the Fascist Italian government. Juan Perón was one of the coup leaders but as Secretary for Labour and Social Welfare he veered off the path set by the conservative army by setting out to improve the living and working conditions of the working class by supporting the unions including positions in the government.  Perón was briefly jailed but was released after mass protests and was subsequently elected President of Argentina 1946-55, 1974-75.

Perón was exiled by a military coup in 1955. Perónism was banned and followed by a military dictatorship and then civil governments. Perón returned from exile for a short-lived assumption of  power in 1974 temporarily lifting oppressive military rule; he died in office in 1975. Perónism, with twists and turns, continued to dominate Argentina’s political life, “deeply woven into the national fibre,” in a country experiencing endemic economic crises.  Solanas was an active supporter of Perónism (also known as Justicialism) reflected in “the chronicle of the Perónism“ section of The Hour of the Furnaces.

Historically Perón following a ‘non-aligned’ foreign policy (he was a personal friend of Che Guevara). Widely fluctuating terms of trade resulting in fluctuating exchange rates for the peso and debt defaults were followed by recurring IMF bail-out loans over the decades. Stemming from variably ineffective economic management resulting in periods of uncontrolled inflation, Perónism’s mix of economic populism and nationalism maintained its continuing support base in the trade unions and the informal economy through social movements based in the poorer suburbs of the cities. The postwar export boom tapered off and inflation and corruption grew. One of Perón’s salient legacies was the CGT labour federation which remained one of the nation’s most powerful institutions even after his exile.

Argentina is “the only country in modern economic history to have fallen from rich-world status back into the middle-income bracket” (The Economist). Juan Perón in his first term undertook widespread nationalisation of British and American economic interests while working with Argentina’s business oligarchy and benefitting, at least in the short term, from a compliant central bank. Universal social security, a populist version of Roosevelt’s New Deal, was introduced by Perón. Until her early death from cancer in 1952, his wife Eve ‘Evita’ Duarte, herself born into poverty, maintained close identification with the less powerful in society who continue to keep her memory alive in Argentina.

As a result of variously inadequate responses through decades by often weak and divided Perónist governments, economic crises saw a peak of three figure inflation; the Peronist party lost its majority in the Congress for the first time in 40 years. An eccentrically forthright, radical right wing libertarian, Javier Milei, was elected president in December 2023. Milei is a subscriber to the economics of Thatcherism rather than Trump: fiscal discipline, free trade, free markets, an open economy and policies that align with each other combined with an “infinite contempt” for big government and socialism.

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Edgardo Cozarzinsky  “Torre Nilsson Remembered”  Sight and Sound Winter 1978/9 p.29                                                                 

John Mraz  “Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino”  International Dictionary Vol 2 Directors Ed.C. Lyon                                                        

Julianne Burton  “The Traitors”  Film Quarterly Fall 1976                                                                                

Various,  Argentine Cinema  Tim Barnard ed. 1986                                                                                          

Jim Pines, “Third World on the Screen” Movies of the Sixties ed. Ann Lloyd 1983                                      

Paul Willemen and Jim Pines eds.  Questions of Third Cinema  BFI  1989                                            

Bhaskar Sarkar, “Third World Cinema” Encyclopedia of Film Theory  eds. Branagan & Buckland 2015  

Robert Stam  “Third World Film and Theory”  Film Theory An Introduction  2000                                            

Roy Armes  Third World Film Making and the West  1987 ;  short bio-portrait of Torre Nilsson as one of “five directors of the year’ in International Film Guide 1967.                                                            

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso

6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia

6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia

6 (41) - The Soviet Union

6 (42) - Asia - Japan - Part One

6 (43) - Japan - Part Two

6 (44) - Japan - Part Three - Shohei Imamura

6 (45) Asia - India Pt 1 - Satyajit Ray

6 (46) Asia - India Pt 2- Ghatak, Dutt, Sen, Parallel Cinema

Asia - 6 (47) China  (To be published shortly)

6 (48) - Brazil Pt 1- Cinema Novo, dos Santos, Rocha

6 (49) Brazil Pt 2 - de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra