This is a copy of the blog entry I posted the first time I taught the class. We will discuss that matter in class tomorrow. It very much describes the class content we covered today, and gives you an idea of the expectations regarding the blogs.
Please complete the assignment at the end of the entry and e-mail me if you encounter any problems.
You can see the film we screened in class here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=jQOXKoMHOE0
Hour of the Furnaces (from a post from June, 2012)
Today we started the class by presenting some ideas about the content and objectives of the course. One of the premises of the course is that film as an art form in Argentina reflects the way in which political and economic circumstances frame everyday life and art making, and how filmmakers produce works that reflect their vision of themselves as political agents, intellectuals, and artists.
We mentioned how in Argentina, traditionally, artists have played an important role as shapers of national identity and, especially since the 1950s, have tried to produce films that want to escape, visually and ideologically, from the tendencies that dominated its market: on the one hand, the Hollywood tradition of film as entertainment –exemplified by the 1935 film El día que me quieras, starring tango heartthrob Carlos Gardel, a film produced and distributed by US studios that perpetuated stereotypes about the country and its inhabitants. On the other, another form of filmmaking that followed European principles and viewed film as “high” art (art that reflects the sophisticated aesthetics of countries such as France, Italy and Germany, that does not speak of the realities of the Argentine working class).
Falicov’s book The Cinematic Tango, which we will use as our primary reference in the class, places great emphasis on how the relationship of the film industry and the government in Argentina shape the way film is approached and supported both by the state and by the public. Like our class, Falicov sets as a starting point the mid-1980s, which marks the end of a long period of especially violent dictatorships in Argentina, and when, in confronting democracy, society is faced with the choice of offering support for a national form of filmmaking that would contribute to the exploration of national issues in a manner different from the one traditionally established by the economic domination of film distribution circuits by U.S. businesses, or fuel a form of “entertainment” filmmaking aimed at producing films for mass consumption in the following tradition, (or something in between).
We watched Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's The Hour of the Furnaces, (1968), a political documentary that embodies many of the principles the filmmakers of the 1960s used to separate themselves from the Hollywood tradition. Solanas and Getino are the authors of the text “Towards a Third Cinema” (in Blackboard), which defines the circumstances that lead the two to propose the creation of a “national cinema of liberation” and the objectives of such films. Using a pedagogical tone that combines the statistical, the historical, and the symbolic in the narrative, and documentary images that contrast life in the city and in the country, in the posh neighborhood and meeting points of the economic and intellectual elites in the capital and the squalor of the life of the working poor in the urban shantytowns and the underdeveloped provinces, the film is an open call to revolution, “educating” its audience in the fallacies and contradictions that perpetuate the NEOCOLONIAL condition of the country, how its economic dependency generates also an intellectual and political dependency, perpetuating a system that reflects a “second hand ideology” that is depersonalized, “disguised” with the cultural principles of the colonizing nations, creating an “idealized” culture that does not reflect the realities (historical, social, racial, economic) of the people. “If you really want to be a true MAN, you have to be like me” says the colonizer. The paternalism of European culture, Solanas says, masks its racism, and seeks to push the colonized subject towards the adoption of its European principles, instead of allowing him/her to search for its own roots, traditions, and values. Getino and Solanas look at the influence of the cultural models imposed by the West (music, art, advertising, literature, even religion) as tools that manipulate and drown any attempts on the part of the national cultures to explore, develop, and express their own identity, to organize their society in their own terms. The part of the film that we watched (13 chapters that represent only 1/3 of the total movie) presents the argument for the development of a form of revolutionary resistance, the only one, according to the filmmakers, that is left to a people whose everyday life, identity, ideology, economy, etc. are controlled by traditional elites and their foreign handlers who have political and economic control of the country and defend both using physical and psychological violence. “The war in Latin America is waged mostly in the mind of the people” they say, “the mass media are more powerful than napalm”.
The film is a great starting point to the class not simply because it advocates for this radical political and cultural change, but also because it offers a set of aesthetic and ideological alternatives to the dominant paradigm of Western colonialism. Solanas’ documentary is an excellent example of the way in which Latin American filmmakers propose to use cinema to exact change in the region. Interestingly, later in the semester we will watch another documentary by Solanas that will explore the same ideas in the context of Argentina in the 21st century.
Before you react to the film in this blog, read Getino and Solanas’ article and the first Chapter of Falicov’s book, and use those texts as a basis for your reflection
We mentioned how in Argentina, traditionally, artists have played an important role as shapers of national identity and, especially since the 1950s, have tried to produce films that want to escape, visually and ideologically, from the tendencies that dominated its market: on the one hand, the Hollywood tradition of film as entertainment –exemplified by the 1935 film El día que me quieras, starring tango heartthrob Carlos Gardel, a film produced and distributed by US studios that perpetuated stereotypes about the country and its inhabitants. On the other, another form of filmmaking that followed European principles and viewed film as “high” art (art that reflects the sophisticated aesthetics of countries such as France, Italy and Germany, that does not speak of the realities of the Argentine working class).Falicov’s book The Cinematic Tango, which we will use as our primary reference in the class, places great emphasis on how the relationship of the film industry and the government in Argentina shape the way film is approached and supported both by the state and by the public. Like our class, Falicov sets as a starting point the mid-1980s, which marks the end of a long period of especially violent dictatorships in Argentina, and when, in confronting democracy, society is faced with the choice of offering support for a national form of filmmaking that would contribute to the exploration of national issues in a manner different from the one traditionally established by the economic domination of film distribution circuits by U.S. businesses, or fuel a form of “entertainment” filmmaking aimed at producing films for mass consumption in the following tradition, (or something in between).
We watched Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's The Hour of the Furnaces, (1968), a political documentary that embodies many of the principles the filmmakers of the 1960s used to separate themselves from the Hollywood tradition. Solanas and Getino are the authors of the text “Towards a Third Cinema” (in Blackboard), which defines the circumstances that lead the two to propose the creation of a “national cinema of liberation” and the objectives of such films. Using a pedagogical tone that combines the statistical, the historical, and the symbolic in the narrative, and documentary images that contrast life in the city and in the country, in the posh neighborhood and meeting points of the economic and intellectual elites in the capital and the squalor of the life of the working poor in the urban shantytowns and the underdeveloped provinces, the film is an open call to revolution, “educating” its audience in the fallacies and contradictions that perpetuate the NEOCOLONIAL condition of the country, how its economic dependency generates also an intellectual and political dependency, perpetuating a system that reflects a “second hand ideology” that is depersonalized, “disguised” with the cultural principles of the colonizing nations, creating an “idealized” culture that does not reflect the realities (historical, social, racial, economic) of the people. “If you really want to be a true MAN, you have to be like me” says the colonizer. The paternalism of European culture, Solanas says, masks its racism, and seeks to push the colonized subject towards the adoption of its European principles, instead of allowing him/her to search for its own roots, traditions, and values. Getino and Solanas look at the influence of the cultural models imposed by the West (music, art, advertising, literature, even religion) as tools that manipulate and drown any attempts on the part of the national cultures to explore, develop, and express their own identity, to organize their society in their own terms. The part of the film that we watched (13 chapters that represent only 1/3 of the total movie) presents the argument for the development of a form of revolutionary resistance, the only one, according to the filmmakers, that is left to a people whose everyday life, identity, ideology, economy, etc. are controlled by traditional elites and their foreign handlers who have political and economic control of the country and defend both using physical and psychological violence. “The war in Latin America is waged mostly in the mind of the people” they say, “the mass media are more powerful than napalm”.
The film is a great starting point to the class not simply because it advocates for this radical political and cultural change, but also because it offers a set of aesthetic and ideological alternatives to the dominant paradigm of Western colonialism. Solanas’ documentary is an excellent example of the way in which Latin American filmmakers propose to use cinema to exact change in the region. Interestingly, later in the semester we will watch another documentary by Solanas that will explore the same ideas in the context of Argentina in the 21st century.
Before you react to the film in this blog, read Getino and Solanas’ article and the first Chapter of Falicov’s book, and use those texts as a basis for your reflection
