To Invent Our Revolution: An Aesthetic-Political Analysis of The Hour of the Furnaces

CAMPO, JAVIER

A Trail of Fire for a Political Cinema. The Hour of the Furnaces fifty years later.

Intellect

Lugar: Bristol; Año: 2018; p. 23 - 46

Thatis, it is not possible to understand The Hour of the Furnaces as located in the first part of the path that commences in the Marxist left (with sympathies for foquism) for whom Frantz Fanon and Ernesto Guevara were standard bearers, and ends in the ample Peronist movement in which the filmmakers lived together with other militants coming from different paths. The monumental character of the film will be confirmed by other Argentine films at the time, and later on, that will reveal themselves inspired, aesthetically and thematically, following some of its formal characteristics, repeating some of its messages or taking actual shots from the film as archive footage.This chapter will produce a formal analysis of Getino and Solanas' film.Without leaving out the political-thematic variables, it will weave together the core ideas that link the aesthetic mechanisms and the formal structures that construct the film with the presentation and defence of ideas and calls for political action. The sequences will be grouped according to their recurrent functions and, therefore, without attending to their chronological position in the film.  The aim of this analysis is to try to face what rarely has been tried to find: How is this indispensable political documentary elaborated? In what ways does it present its political discourses and what is their content? Something as simple as well as complex, how to carryout an aesthetic-political analysis of The Hour of the Furnaces?