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Violence and Liberation in The Hour of the Furnaces

By Paul A. Schroeder

The Hour of the Furnaces (1968 Argentina 260 mins)

Prod Co: Grupo Cine Liberacion/Solanas Productions Prod: Edgardo Pallero, FernandoE. Solanas Dir, Scr: Fernando E. Solanas, Octavio Getino Phot: Juan Carlos Desanzo,

Fernando E. Solanas Ed: Juan Carlos Macas, Antonio Ripoll

Cast: Mara de la Paz, Fernando E. Solanas, Edgardo Surez

The title of this three-part agitprop documentary comes from a quote Che Guevara used

to open what was to become his last public statement, the Message to the

Tricontinental, in 1967: Its the hour of the furnaces and only the light shall be seen.

The author of the quote is Jos Mart, Cubas nineteenth century national hero. Thisdouble reference, to a revolutionary who died fighting Spanish colonialism, and to a

revolutionary who had just died fighting neo-colonialism, cues the viewer to think of the

parallelisms between contemporary liberation struggles and Latin American wars of

independence in the nineteenth century; namely, a voluntarism and a nationalist anti-imperialism that effectively trumped other epistemological categories. In this regard, the

films strong bias against validating questions of power that fall outside the realm of

political economy is a reflection of its times. At the same time, however, this limitationshould not blind us to the films greatest strength: the clear articulation of a revolutionary

discourse through an equally revolutionary means of representation.

Shot clandestinely between 1966 and 1968, during the initial stages of what would come

to be known as Argentinas infamous dirty war, the film was screened clandestinely as

well, to sympathetic audiences of workers, anarchists and revolutionaries who would

regularly interrupt the projection to discuss concepts and issues raised in the film. Given

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the limits of space, I will focus on only one of these themes, the relationship between

violence and liberation, by calling attention to the central role that violence plays in thedialectical unfolding of the films three part narrative, a narrative where Part 1

corresponds to the thesis of the current status quo; Part 2 to a prolonged antithesis of

Peronist struggle; and Part 3 to a soon-to-be-achieved synthesis. Through this dialectical

structure, the film rearticulates violence not only as a Marxist would that is, as asymptom of the changes in modes of production but also as a Leninist and especially a

Maoist would: as a tool to be actively wielded against an oppressive status quo in order to

overthrow it.

Part 1: Neocolonialism and Violence

Part 1 describes neo-colonial violence as having several manifestations, and after

enumerating them, we are told in an intertitle that under neo-colonialism,

VIOLENCE

CRIMEDESTRUCTION

BECOME

PEACE

ORDER

NORMALITY

At this point a rapid-fire visual montage of neo-colonial violence not only in Argentina

but also in Africa, Vietnam and even the United States is scored by the frivolous laughter

of a woman. The juxtaposition of a visual track that bombards the viewers with images of

suffering and exploited subjects, with a soundtrack of what in this context represents the

shallowness of consumerist culture, effectively violates the sensibilities of viewerstrained to see only commercial or auteur cinemas (or what the directors, in their

manifesto Towards a Third Cinema, called first and second Cinemas, respectively) (1).

The film then drives home the connection between exploitation and consumerism througha sequence that cuts between images culled from the world of advertising and images of

cows being slaughtered in an abattoir, a direct tribute to one of the films ideological and

artistic intertexts: Sergei Eisensteins Strike (1925). With spectators thus disarmed, the

film issues a call for inventing a new vocabulary, a new theory, a new aesthetic, and anew spectator who by virtue of liberation is no longer a spectator but an actor in the

social sphere. In effect, the film becomes what their manifesto calls a work outside and

against the System, [] a cinema of liberation: the third cinema.

The closing sequence, with a sacrificed Che lying in state, is set up as the example of that

invention, the New Man theorised by Che himself. The narrative function of thisextended closing shot is to establish a visceral and tacit approval of violence against the

system as the only viable act of liberation. It will be up to Part 2 to develop the necessary

historical and theoretical justification for this conclusion, and to Part 3 to give more

examples (besides Ches) on how to proceed.

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