Chair: Javier Campo
Respondent: Fernao Ramos
Javier Campo
CONICET, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
Realizar un film en tres partes que dure más de cuatro horas, es arriesgado. Hecho de manera clandestina, resulta peligroso. Proyectado como un palimsesto que articule lenguajes diversos, es una locura. Pero el experimento resultó exitoso. El 68’ latinoamericano está signado por el estreno de un “film-faro”, La hora de los hornos (Octavio Getino y Fernando Solanas, 1968). Podemos entender a La hora de los hornos como ubicada en un primer tramo del sendero que partió de la izquierda marxista (con simpatías foquistas), para la que Frantz Fanon y Ernesto Guevara fueron estandartes, y llegó hasta el amplio Movimiento Peronista en el que los realizadores convivieron con otros militantes que no habían partido de las mismas bases. La monumentalidad de esta obra será revalidada en otros films argentinos del período y posteriores que se demostrarán inspirados estética y temáticamente, siguiendo algunos de sus procedimientos formales, repitiendo algunas de sus consignas o tomando planos de la misma como material de archivo. En esta ponencia se presentarán algunas notas, de un trabajo más extenso, relativas a un análisis formal del film de Octavio Getino y Fernando Solanas. El objetivo ha sido tratar de encarar lo que pocas veces se ha intentado saber: ¿Cómo está elaborado este film documental político imprescindible? ¿De qué maneras presenta sus discursos políticos y qué dicen los mismos? Algo tan simple, y al mismo tiempo tan complejo, como proceder a un análisis estético-político de La hora de los hornos.
Kristi M Wilson and Laura Ruberto
Soka University of America
Berkeley City College
The Hour of the Furnaces’, May 1968, and the Pesaro International Film Festival
The 17 May 1968 issue of the Italian daily newspaper, L’Unita’ ran a brief story on the Pesaro Film Festival, with the simple headline: ‘Questi i primi film selezionati per Pesaro’ (These, the first films selected for Pesaro) (1968: 9). The piece goes on to list, without much fanfare, some of the chosen films, noting that over 100 had been submitted for potential inclusion in the festival and that there would be a special ‘tavola rotonda sul cinema latino-americano’ (roundtable on Latin American film) and listing among the films from Latin America, ‘La hora de los hornos (L’ora dei forni) di Fernando Solanas (Argentina)’ (1968: 9). Written between the lines is the story that the paper did not run, the story that it could not have thought to run but which, today, some fifty years later, we can report with hindsight. That is the story of this paper. Why the Pesaro Film Festival and why this particular film? What was the greater cinematic community in which the film screened?
Bibliographical References
Buchsbaum, J., ‘A Closer Look at Third Cinema’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 21:2 (2001), pp. 153-166.
Campo, J., ‘Filmando teorías políticas: dependencia y liberación en La hora de los hornos’, Política y cultura, 41 (2014), pp. 65-88.
Getino, Octavio, ‘Tra il Vecchio e il Nuovo Cinema Politico in Argentino’, in Pedro Armocida, Daniele Dottorini e Giovanni Spagnoletti (eds), Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema: Il Cinema Argentino Contemporaneo e L’opera di Leonardo Favio, (Milano: Marsilio Editore, 2006), pp. 106-119.
Francese, J., ‘The Influence of Cesare Zavattini on Latin American Cinema: Thoughts on El joven Rebelde and Juan Quin Quin’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24: 5 (2007), pp. 431-444.
Ruberto, L.E. and Wilson, K.M. (eds), Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2007.
Laura E. Ruberto is a Humanities professor at Berkeley City College, where she teaches courses in film studies and cultural studies. She has been a Fulbright Faculty Scholar to Italy and her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is co-editor of the Fordham University Press series Critical Studies in Italian America and is the Film and Digital Media Review editor for the Italian American Review. Her published work includes Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007/2010), the co-edited volumes Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2007) and Bakhtin and the Nation (Bucknell University Press, 1999), and the translations, Such Is Life, Ma la vita e’ fatta cosi: A Memoir (Bordighera, 2010) and Threshold (with Irena Stanic-Rasin, Italica Press, 2016).
Kristi M. Wilson is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Humanities at Soka University of America. Her research and teaching interests include classics, film studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and rhetoric. Dr. Wilson is the co-editor of Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (2007), Film and Genocide (2011), and Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (2014), and author of numerous publications in such journals as Screen, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Signs, and Literature/Film Quarterly. She also serves on the editorial board and is a film review editor at Latin American Perspectives (SAGE Publications).
Tomás Crowder-TaraborrelliSoka University of America Popular Music and Political Militancy in The Hour of the Furnaces
In this presentation, I will analyze the presence of popular music in the film’s soundtrack and its counterpunctual relationship the image. The filming of The Hour of the Furnaces began some months before General Juan Carlos Onganía’s coup d’état in 1966. In Argentina, middle and lower class youths, like a large portion of North American and European youths, were enjoying rock music and adding momentum to the hippie movement. ). I will build upon their research in order to reflect on the dialectic movement of the film’s revolutionary message, which is actualized in large part by the counterpoint relationship between music and image. The revolutionary message in Solanas and Getino’s documentary, as Mariano Mestman explains in detail, had an “agitational” function (2007, p.7) and aspired to transcend the screen, to move the spectator and give a voice to the people (2013, p.307). Similarly, rock musicians wanted to surpass the limits of the stage in order to mobilize the audience and transform them into consumers of their albums and sympathizers of their vital rebelliousness. This essay attempts to determine Grupo Cine Liberación’s perspective on rock music’s potential as a movement of political and social transformation.
Bibliographical References
Burton, J., 1978. The Camera as “Gun”: Two Decades of Culture and Resistance in Latin America. Latin American Perspectives, 1(16). pp.49-76.
Campo, J., 2014. Filmando Teorías Políticas: Dependencia y Liberación en La Hora de los Hornos. Política y Cultura, Spring Issue. pp.65-88.
Favoretto, M. & Wilson T. 2010. ‘Entertaining’ the Notion of Change: The Transformative Power of Performance in Argentine Pop. Popular Entertainment Studies, Vol.1, Issue 2, pp. 44-60.
Getino, O., 2011. The Cinema as Political Fact. Third Text, 25(1), pp.41-53.
Manzano, V., 2014. “Rock Nacional” and Revolutionary Politics: The Making of a Youth Culture of Contestation in argentina, 1966-1976. The Americas, 70(3), pp.393-427.
Podalsky, L., 2011b. Of Passion, Aesthetics, and Politics: rethinking the New Latin American Cinema. In: L. Podalsky, ed. 2011. The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin America Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. pp.25-57.
Tomás Crowder -Taraborrelli received his doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese at the
University of Irvine, California. He is an associate producer for ITVS and POV, from
the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. He is on the editorial board of
the journal Latin American Perspectives, of which he is co-editor of the film section. He is co-editor of Film and Genocide ( University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) and El documental político en Argentina, Chile y Uruguay (LOM Ediciones, 2015). Currently, he is a visiting professor of Latin American Studies at Soka University of America, California.
Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli 
