cinemas of the south

Fernando Solanas: a Profile
By Luciano Monteagudo

Fernando Solanas has always been, and still is, a new, different, mobilising experience. Few Argentinean films, if any, have caused such furious national and international controversy as his first film, The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos, 1966-1968). It was both a political and an aesthetic controversy, that instead of fading out with time, became increasingly intense and notorious as the film cut through the country's different historic circumstances like a knife, from Juan Carlos Onganía's military dictatorship in the mid-sixties to the return of Juan Domingo Perón to democratic power during the following decade.

Social Genocide (Memoria del saqueo, 2004)

This ability to create a different and polemic cinema, far from the established conventions of more important western cinemas (Hollywood, Europe), had an unyielding continuity in the handful of films that Solanas could make in over thirty years of work: The Children of Iron (Los hijos de Fierro, 1972-1978), Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (Tangos, el exilio de Gardel, 1985), The South (Sur, 1988), The Journey (El viaje, 1992), Clouds (La nube, 1998) and more recently the documentaries Social Genocide (Memoria del saqueo, 2004), for which he received an Honorary Golden Bear in Berlin, and The Dignity of the Nobodies (La dignidad de los nadies, 2005), awarded at the Venice Mostra. In their own way, each one of these films provides an original look at Argentina and its people, a vision that is not shaped by any model other that its own.

In this sense, one could say that Solanas is one of the few authentic authors in Argentinean cinema, in the sense that his cinema has always responded to his expressive needs, to his ideology and to his personal conception of the creative fact. Solanas is much more than the director of his films; he is also the screenwriter, the producer, the set designer, the music composer, and sometimes, such as in Social Genocide and The Dignity of the Nobodies, even the camera operator. No aspect of filmmaking is unknown to Solanas.

Fernando Solanas

This omnipotence is consubstantial to the topics he chooses and his way of treating them. In Solanas' cinema, everything is big, everything attains a mythic dimension. His films deal with Martín Fierro and Perón, Gardel and San Martín, love and democracy, Argentina and Latin America. Solanas is a filmmaker of great gestures that always decides to embrace the most complex and abstract subjects - national identity, history as a meeting place - and takes the risk of stating them in a permanently new, free and unprejudiced manner.

Solanas is also one of the few Argentinean filmmakers that, parallel to his practice, has constantly developed a theoretical reflection, which can be found not only in his three books (Cine, cultura y descolonización, together with Octavio Getino; La mirada, with sociologist Horacio González, and Una passione latinoamericana, published in Italy) but also in the huge amount of interviews and articles in which he proves that his work is always based on an elaborate process of critical analysis. One could even say that Solanas himself is part of Solanas' work. The character with the white hair blowing in the wind, with his strong presence in politics and the media, capable of defending each one of his films with the same fervour and verbosity with which he can publicly denounce the corruption of the ruling class. These denunciations were paid back, early in 1991, with shots against his legs. He suffered this clearly menacing attack when he was a member of the congress and blew the whistle on the misappropriation of public patrimony under Carlos Menem's government.

The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos, 1966-1968)

However, a filmmaker is above all what his work says. Moreover, Solanas' work talks about the country, about Peronism, about exile, about democracy, about popular resistance. For instance, it is impossible to speak of The Hour of the Furnaces out of the social and political context of its time. The film was born precisely as an instrument for revolutionary action at a moment when the world in general, and Latin America in particular, was seeing the rise of the concept of 'liberation', in the widest and most polysemic sense of the word. The film was made clandestinely and it opened in Europe amidst the worker and student upheaval in May 1968. The Hour of the Furnaces responded more to ideological than to aesthetic motivations, although these were inevitably present in the film's decisive form.

The Hour of the Furnaces puts forward the thesis of liberation as the sole alternative to political, cultural and economic dependence, and therefore had to reject the film models established by the prevailing system. In its praxis, the film is already developing the theory of the Third Cinema: to break free from Argentinean films' structural and linguistic dependence on US and European cinema. The work should rise from its own Latin American need. The shock the film produced - and still produces - is mainly due to the form in which it is structured, starting from notes, chapters or "cells" that develop a thesis, an antithesis and finally a synthesis, in the manner of Marxist dialectics.

Fernando Solanas filming Social Genocide

This film-essay model started to give way, within Solanas' work, to an equally original kind of fiction, which began with the singular political interpretation of the national poem Martín Fierro in the film The Children of Iron. If Solanas was hitherto determined to politicise art, in Tangos, the exile of Gardel, what he did was to bring aesthetics into politics. Whereas Perón was the sole - and therefore exclusive - divinity in The Hour of the Furnaces and The Children of Iron, in Tangos this gives way to the polytheism of intellectuals and artists. José de San Martín's ghostly appearance in the film, old and tired after 25 years of exile, also seems to reaffirm the will for agreement: "I have been waiting for a century and a half to be able to see the homeland we dream of: big, united,..." he sighs as Carlos Gardel, sitting next to his drinking mate, puts his version of the tango Volver (to return) on the phonograph.

In The South, which tells of an ex-political prisoner's encounter with an incipient democracy after the military dictatorship, this dream still seems possible. The film is a double love story: that of a couple that comes together again, and that of the people reconciling with its country after the long night of tyranny. However, Solanas' following films, The Journey and Clouds , become increasingly grey and dark, even anguished, as this hope turns into frustration. Each one has its specificities, but they all share a particular aesthetic made of very wide shots: "It is not a matter of optics but of ideology," Solanas has said, "I need to grasp the largest possible reality, the individual, the character and the entire context."

The South (Sur, 1988)

This same ambition led him to Social Genocide, his return to documentary and to the path opened almost forty years ago by The Hour of the Furnaces. His diagnosis of the country is not very different from the one he did back then, just that now the state of affairs is much more critical. The crisis Argentina went through in 2001 and 2002 was the deepest in its history and Solanas points out the ones that are responsible: corrupt political leaders, but also large international holdings and financial institutions that acted rapaciously and treacherously.

Once again, just as he has always done throughout his filmography, Solanas chose the mural, the wide-angle lens that allows him to grasp reality as largely as possible: the individual and his entire context. The documentary begins contrasting the city's huge skyscrapers (polarisation, contrast, antithesis are a trademark of Social Genocide) with the families looking for food right outside these monuments to usury. The camera is in permanent movement, but the rhythm is calm, like that of a passer-by that observes - using forward travelling shots - but also reflects on what he sees before him. The off-voice is Solanas', who lets his thoughts stream out: "What had happened in Argentina ? How was it possible for there to be so much hunger in such a rich country?" he asks himself. The film's main thesis appears: the country was ravaged by a new kind of aggression, carried out under peace and democracy; a daily and silent violence, ".that leaves more social victims, more emigrants and more deaths than state terrorism or the Malvinas (Falklands) war."

The Dignity of the Nobodies (La dignidad de los nadies, 2005)

Nevertheless, Solanas sees a light at the end of the tunnel. Proof of it is The Dignity of the Nobodies, his most recent documentary and a continuation of Social Genocide, organised around a series of stories about popular resistance in the Argentina of today. Solanas' new immersion in national reality proposes a structure through multiple voices drawing a map of the country after the devastation under Menem. "It is a sort of book of chronicles and stories, in which testimony joins narrative; essay joins History; life joins fiction," as Solanas defines it.

The Dignity of the Nobodies places a magnifying glass on anonymous characters, on nameless Argentineans, everyday heroes with their small daily feats for survival, those that history does not recognize or record. Solanas, an increasingly solitary character, as far from contemporary Argentinean cinema's minimalism as from political power, is already preparing his film-essay Argentina Latente , which will complete the trilogy about a country that is still in pain.

Luciano Monteagudo
© FIPRESCI 2006

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