In the last fifty years an extensive bibliography has discussed The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) and the inseparable proposal of Third Cinema (1969). In this chapter I will focus on a less explored aspect: the film’s journey in...
moreIn the last fifty years an extensive bibliography has discussed The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) and the inseparable proposal of Third Cinema (1969). In this chapter I will focus on a less explored aspect: the film’s journey in non-commercial, alternative or militant circuits linked to the student and workers movement in the first world throughout 1968 and the immediate following years.
The Hour of the Furnaces and the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema can be inscribed, as it is well known, within a wider period, the so-called long 60s. After the pioneer essay by Fredric Jameson (1984) on this period – that according to him could be tracked back to sometime in the second half of the 1950s and could be extended until 1972-1974 – many other authors used the same concept and proposed different periodizations. As far as I am aware, the ‘widest’ locates the origins of the long 60s at the beginning of the Algeria War (1954) or the Bandung Conference (1955) and its ending in the Sandinist Revolution (1979). Of course, it is a periodization that takes into account also the idea of the global 1960s inasmuch as the 1960s account for the expansion of a common sensibility at an international level that tries to cover a wide range of processes of rebellion, revolt, insurrection and revolution in a number of countries around the world. That temporal extension (long 60s.) and geographical (global 60s.) is quite apt to think about The Hour of the Furnaces in its national and international context. Although its world premiere took place amidst the revolts of 1968, at the same time, it is possible to find the conditions that made the film possible as far back as the middle of the 1950s. And this not only because its third worldism dialogues with Algeria and Bandung, but also because 1955 is the year of the civic-military coup against the government of General Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina and the beginning of the so-called “Peronist resistance” against successive governments. The whole of the second part of the film, sometimes disregarded by academic accounts, concerns itself precisely with Peronism and “the Resistance”. At the same time, we can extend its ‘sixties’ influence until the end of the 1970s. In this respect, we can take also as a significant fact the almost forgotten dossier organised in 1979 by Guy Hennebelle and the group CinémAction for the magazine Tiers Monde (1979) about the influence of the film and the manifesto in several countries around the world.
As it is well known, in the 1980s, and even in later periods, the film and the document were revisited in new manifestos, events and proposals in different places. Although, from my perspective, the historical period of The Hour of the Furnaces (and of Third Cinema) had already concluded even in those years, its ideas (cinematic, political) could still dialogue without a doubt with oppositional and confrontational to power initiatives in many countries. In an important essay on the “changing geography” of Third Cinema, Michael Chanan (1997) reconstructed, among other questions, the history of the film and of Solanas and Getino’s manifesto; some misinterpretations and modifications of the original definitions of the three types of cinema; the connections of the film with parallel movements in different countries; and the “transnational function” of Third Cinema. The author also addressed the subsequent recuperation of the thesis put forward by the film and the manifesto and their dialogue with other perspectives more or less similar in the 1980s. In particular, he wrote of the pioneer recuperation by the scholar Teshome Gabriel in his works at the beginning of the decade. He also focused on the well-known Third Cinema Conference held in Edinburgh in 1986, organised by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen that focused on the relevance of the concept of Third Cinema for the oppositional practices in film and video in the 1980s in the metropolitan centres of First World countries.
In what follows, I will return over some of the testimonies and ideas included in those two moments of the debate around Third Cinema. (the CinémAction dossier of 1979 and the meeting in Edinburgh of 1986 ) and I will survey other less well known sources and documents such as catalogues from parallel distributors, letters, testimonies or press notes from those days. From there, I aim to look at the place that The Hour of the Furnaces occupied in the circuit of political and militant cinema in the first world, the debates it sparked, the polemics in which it took part . Of course, it will probably be an incomplete journey but I do not think it is a question of summarising that history but of continuing to explore it.
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Published in the book A trail of fire for political cinema (Javier Campo and Humberto Pérez-Blanco, eds.), Intellect, 2018; pp.135-158.
