The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
The Hour of the Furnaces / La hora de los hornos (1970)
A Film by Fernando E. Solanas
DVD9 + DVD5 (VIDEO_TS) | NTSC 4:3 (720x480) | 250 mins | 8,14 Gb + 4,49 Gb
Audio: Spanish AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: part 1 - English, French, Spanish; parts 2 & 3 - Spanish only
Genre: Documentary, History, War | 2 wins | Argentina
A Film by Fernando E. Solanas
DVD9 + DVD5 (VIDEO_TS) | NTSC 4:3 (720x480) | 250 mins | 8,14 Gb + 4,49 Gb
Audio: Spanish AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: part 1 - English, French, Spanish; parts 2 & 3 - Spanish only
Genre: Documentary, History, War | 2 wins | Argentina
This brilliant documentary launched the Third Cinema movement and put Latin American cinema on the international map. It combines new and old film footage to explain the history of Argentina and the wave of revolutionary fervor that swept many countries in Latin America. From the Spanish invaders to modern military concerns financed by foreign powers, this feature examines racism, social upheaval, native massacres and the precarious political situations that could change in the wake of revolutionary rebellion. In a noted sequence, director Solanas juxtaposed images of American commericalism and scenes from a slaughterhouse with snatches of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band playing over top. The scene climaxes with a rapid staccato montage of starving children, bleeding cows and Coca-Cola signs matched with the sound of machine gun fire. The sequence is as thrilling as it is haunting–a masterpiece of pure cinema. This feature took the Critics Award at the Pesaro New Cinema Festival.
IMDB
"La Hora de Los Hornos" (The Hour of the Furnaces) is a three-part, four-hour and 20-minute, political documentary film, directed (as well as photographed and written in part) by Fernando Ezequiel Solanas, a young Argentine filmmaker who has committed himself to the cause of violent revolution as the only means to true liberation and the establishment of a national Argentine consciousness. On the basis of the 90-minute Part One, subtitled "Neocolonialism and Violence," the work might well turn out to be a polemical epic, an essay film of a political, cinematic and psychological complexity unlike anything I've ever seen.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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For reasons I do not know, Solanas has allowed only Part One to be released for commercial distribution here, although the entire film has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and is available for 16 mm. showings by film societies, universities and such. It has also been widely screened in Europe but, understandably, only privately in Argentina.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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Part One opened here yesterday at the New Yorker Theater on a program with Joseph Strick's 22-minute "Interviews with Mylai Veterans," which has been nominated for an Academy Award. As its title implies, the film is a series of interviews with five enlisted men who participated in the Mylai action and all of whom are now out of the Army. The effect of the testimony—rueful, matter-of-fact, unsentimental, a lot of it smiling (at the interviewer and at the fact of being interviewed, rather than at the subject)—is terrifying, and almost indescribably sad.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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Because no movie genre makes quite as personal demands on the viewer as the political documentary, or plays on his prejudices with such accuracy, perhaps I should explain something of my own experiences, which, of course, I took with me when I entered the theater to see "The Hour of the Furnaces." I'm no student of either Argentina or Latin America, and just about everything I know of them is the more or less chance result of several short visits to Argentina in the early 1960's.
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First of all there was, for me, each time I arrived in Buenos Aires international airport, the feeling that I'd arrived at the end of the line, if not the world. Although the airport services the largest city in South America, and is modern and efficient and handsome, it seems—as Solanas says of Buenos Aires itself—to have "turned its back on the country." It faces north and east and west, but not south, and if one had wanted to go to Tierra del Fuego, or even Córdoba, one had to go to another airport.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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Seen from the perspective of either British Empire or United States hegemony, Argentina is, quite literally, as far away as you can get, the last stop before the South Pole, a fact that has shaped a kind of national inferiority complex—political, cultural and economic. It has set out to demonstrate that being Argentine, as well as Latin American, can be beautiful.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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"La Hora de Los Homos," Part One, is a cool but furious examination of first the British and then the American neocolonialism that, according to Solanas, had as its aim the "Balkanization" of Latin America for economic exploitation. Here is no unbiased report, but a vivid, angry, indoctrination lesson, sometimes crude but always cinematic, that has the look of the kind of documentary film Godard might make if he opted to play on the bourgeois emotions he now scorns.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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The film employs old prints, newsreels and interviews, as well as clips from the work of Joris Ivens and Fernando Birri (the only other young Argentine filmmaker I know who shares, with Solanas, an authentic Argentine vision), On the soundtrack there are lengthy quotations from Sartre and Fanon, slogans, and masses of facts, none of which I can easily authenticate.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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Some of Solanas's juxtapositions are so obvious they are unworthy of the quality of the passion of the film that contains them. Mostly, however, the images, the editing and the sound track are fine, even witty, as in the section on the Argentine aristocracy, defined by its grandiose cemetery that looks like Washington's Resurrection City, sculptured in marble. The aristocrats, he notes, "take the past as [if it were] a future."
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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I find difficult (and depressing) Solanas's conclusions in favor of Perónism, which he describes as the first popular expression of Argentina's national consciousness, and suspect that, in the style of other contemporary revolutionaries, he may well feel that the past can be rewritten, through re-evaluation, according to the needs of the present. Solanas's conclusions thus escape me; his arguments do not.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
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"La Hora de Los Hornos," Part One, is, most importantly, a unique film exploration of a nation's soul. It's full of tremendous vigor, unlike the tired Buenos Aires dinner party at which the hostess, before introducing me, gave me quick sketches of everyone in the room. "Over there," she said, pointing to a handsome, morose man, who seemed to be getting quite drunk, "is José… Poor José. He always wanted to be the Minister of War. In the last regime, he was—for three weeks. Now he has nothing to look forward to."
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
Extras (DVD Two):
- Sinopsis-Pressbook-Pesaro 1968
- Ficha Tecnica
- Making Of
- CV De Pino Solanas
- Final Alternativo
- Entrevista A Hernandez Arregui
- Secuencias De Capitulos
The Hour of the Furnaces (1970)
Note! Unfortunately the original dvd doesn´t have the subtitles english or french in the second and third part!
Many Thanks to gustavodvds.
No More Mirrors.