Revolution Palimpsest: The Hour of the Furnaces (Getino & Solanas, 1968)

CAMPO, JAVIER

Goa

Conferencia; International Conference Region Nation Trans-Nation: Literature-Cinema Interface; 2019

Departament of Humanities and Social Sciences. BITS Pilani, Goa, India

Making a four hour long film in three parts is risky, its clandestine mode of making has been dangerous and its palimpsest-like structure that articulates various languages, perhaps, signifies madness. And yet the experiment was successful. The ‘68 in Latin America is marked by the premiere of a "film-lighthouse", La hora de los hornos (Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1968). Made with heterogeneous elements, La hora needs to be understood as a work that begins with the Marxist left with foquist sympathies and Frantz Fanon and Ernesto Guevara as torch-bearers and ends with the wider context of the Peronist Movement in which its makers shared space with other militants coming from different backgrounds. The monumentality of La hora was revalidated by its contemporary and more recent Argentine films as the aesthetic and thematic influences were revealed through their following of some of its formal characteristics, repeating of some of its slogans and use of clips from the film as archival material. This presentation will introduce and discuss the Third Cinema Movement through this legendary film and it is based on the book that I edited recently, A trail of fire for Political Cinema: The Hour of the Furnaces fifty years later (Intellect, 2018, UK).