Todo Espectador Es Un Cobarde O Un Traidor
Every Spectator is a Coward or a Traitor

The revolutionary film La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) is released.
In 1965 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino began working together on a documentary-based film to bear testimony to Argentina's reality. They embarked on a process of collecting archive material—newsreels—and recording testimonies of militants of the so-called Peronist Resistance (a period of popular struggles beginning with Peron's fall in 1955), of intellectuals and university leaders. This search made the filmmakers travel all over the country and was reflected in the film's subtitle, 'Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation'.
Throughout this process (from late 1965 to mid-1968), the directors gradually modified their original proposal and part of their ideas. They incorporated the revisionist view of history and a look on the Peronist working class as the main subject of Argentina's revolutionary transformation. They experienced, as well as many other intellectuals in those years, a journey from the traditional left into a national left. With a new military regime coming to power in 1966, because of the film's adhesion to proscribed Peronism and in particular to its most radicalised wing, its revolutionary proposals and the will to inscribe it into the struggles for social change, they had to resort to an alternative exhibition circuit.
The formal organisation of La Hora de los Hornos is inextricably linked to these objectives. Its total running time of four hours 15 minutes is structured into three parts, each with a different formal treatment, theme and even objective. The first section, 'Neocolonialism and Violence', was conceived as an essay film, which discusses the neocolonial nature of Argentine and Latin American dependency through 13 chapters. The second part, 'Act for Liberation', is divided in two, reflecting specific time periods: Chronicle of Peronism and Chronicle of Resistance. Conceived as a film act and dedicated to the 'Peronist proletarians', these two chronicles respectively deal with an analysis of the ten years of Peronism in power (1946-55) and a critical reconstruction of the ensuing struggles (1956-66). The third part, 'Violence and Liberation', dedicated to 'the new man who is being born out of this liberation war', presents itself as a study on the meaning of violence. (The entire film can be found online)

"Guerrilla film-making proletarianises the film worker and breaks down the intellectual aristocracy that the bourgeoisie grants to its followers. In a word, it democratises. The film-maker's tie with reality makes him more a part of his people. Vanguard layers and even masses participate collectively in the work when they realise that it is the continuity of their daily struggle. La hora de los hornos shows how a film can be made in hostile circumstances when it has the support and collaboration of militants and cadres from the people.
"The revolutionary film-maker acts with a radically new vision of the role of the producer, team-work, tools, details, etc. Above all, he supplies himself at all levels in order to produce his films, he equips himself at all levels, he learns how to handle the manifold techniques of his craft. His most valuable possessions are the tools of his trade, which form part and parcel of his need to communicate. The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second." —Directors Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino "Towards a Third Cinema"