History Is A Weapon

"In this long war, with the camera as our rifle, we do in fact move into a guerrilla activity."

In 1969, Fernando Ezequiel Solanas (b. Buenos Aires, 1936), in collaboration with other Argentine filmmakers, filmed a chapter of Argentina, mayo de 1969: los caminos de la liberación. The film has never been restored in its entirety, and few have seen it. Nevertheless, it remains a legendary testimony to collective political unrest, particularly influential for its promotion of cinema as a new vehicle of protest against a ruling regime. Solanas’ filmic inspirations were not exclusively cinematic: his earlier studies in literature, music, dance and law led him to pursue theater arts at the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts (Conservatorio de Arte Dramático), where cinema would eventually seduce him. His career in cinema began at age 26, with the filming of Seguir andando (1962). Another short film, Reflexión ciudadana (1963), followed a year later. Like his friend Octavio Getino, Solanas was a Peronist, and in 1968 the two men directed the most influential political documentary of the era: La hora de los hornos: Notas y testimonios sobre el neocolonialismo, la violencia y la liberación. Divided into three parts, the 255-minute documentary managed to be many things at once: instrument of leftist political and social protest; manifesto; educational cinematic debate; essay of cultural interpretation of Latin America in general and of Argentina in particular; a filmic collage, collecting and juxtaposing fragments from other films of the period; active artifact in the democratization of images; unofficial history. It was also the most controversial film of the 1960s.
Solanas and Getino also founded the Grupo Cine Liberación and developed the theory of “Third Cinema”: a cinema that is neither commercial nor authorial, emerging instead from the public at large. Meanwhile, the two kept in close contact with Juan Domingo Perón during his exile in Madrid (1955-1974), following his removal from power in the so-called Liberating Revolution (Revolución Libertadora). The relationship resulted in their 1971 film, Perón: Actualización política y doctrinaria para la toma del poder.
Solanas’ second full-length film, Los hijos de Fierro (1972), appropriated a well-known literary character in order to experiment with combining scenes of fiction and documentary. This innovation achieves an extremely personal reading of Martín Fierro, the classic “gauchesco” poem of 1872. Adding to the film’s unique ambition, much of the dialogue is written in the same octosyllabic meter as José Hernández’s poem. Given the poem’s fundamental role in Argentine culture, it becomes a poignant frame of reference and brilliant backdrop for a complex film that oscillates between epic and lyric, realist and mythic, allowing the poem’s “characters” and scenarios to articulate a political allegory of the 1970s in Argentina. In 1975, the military executed another coup d’etat in Argentina. The following year, Solanas went into exile.