The Hour of the Furnaces

The Hour of the Furnaces is a 1968 Argentine film directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas. 'The paradigm of revolutionary activist cinema', it addresses the politics of the 'Third worldist' films and Latin-American manifesto of the late 1960s. It is a key part of the 'Third Cinema', a movement that emerged in Latin America around the same time as the film's release. The work is a four-hour trilogy, divided into chapters and united by the theme of dependency and liberation. The first part - "Neo-Colonialism and Violence" - is conceived for diffusion in all types of circuits, and is the one presented at Cannes Classics. In a survey of the 100 greatest films of Argentine cinema carried out by the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in 2000, the film reached the 22nd position. In a new version of the survey organized in 2022 by the specialized magazines La vida útil, Taipei and La tierra quema, presented at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the film reached the 6th position. Plot In 1965, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino began collaborating on a documentary film that would serve as a witness to Argentina's reality. They began gathering archival material – newsreels – and testimony from Peronist Resistance fighters, intellectuals, and university leaders. The filmmakers' quest took them all throughout the nation, as evidenced by the subtitle of the film: 'Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence, and Liberation. The filmmakers gradually amended their original concept and part of their thoughts during this procedure (which lasted from late 1965 to mid-1968). They included a revisionist perspective of history as well as a focus on the Peronist working class as the central figure in Argentina's revolutionary change. They, like many other intellectuals in those years, underwent a transformation from the old left to a national left. Because of the film's adherence to forbidden Peronism, particularly its most extreme wing, its revolutionary demands, and the desire to inscribe it into the fights for social change, they had to resort to an alternate screening circuit when a new military dictatorship came to power in 1966.