The hour of the furnaces

CAMPO, JAVIER

World Film Locations: Buenos Aires

Intellect Books

Lugar: Bristol; Año: 2014; p. 33 - 34

The Hour of the Furnaces begins with a long sequence in which the state of affairs of Latin America in the 1960s is summarized using text, photographs and found footage. This is followed by images (of villas [slums], rural workers, the elderly) that illustrate the narrative account, providing hard data about the region´s low standards of living, distribution of land ownership, deaths by curable diseases, and Buenos Aires´s role as ´epicentre of neo-colonialism´. The ´objectivity´ vanishes as the reporter defines the city as ´cradle of the great middle class, the small-timers and eternal whiners of a perturbed world for whom the revolution is necessary but impossible [...] head office of the church, the army, the legislative and executive powers, and 80 per cent of criminal organizations´. While the images show buildings that are representative of these powerful institutions (Palacio de Tribunales, Congreso de la Nación, Teatro Colón, Edificio Kavanagh and the building once known as the Banco de Boston, which was also the symbolic target and epicentre of the 2001 protests), the spoken narration expounds a rhetoric that contrasts sharply with the objective tone that had defined the first part of the film. For Robert Stam (p. 259), the selected sequence, which describes the city in a bitter tone, is ´dipped in acid. Rather than exalt the cosmopolitan charm of the bustling energy of Buenos Aires, the commentary disengages its class structure´, in a procedure similar to Luis Buñuel´s irreverent satire of Rome in L´Age d´or (1930).