Abstract
The study of Argentine social and political documentaries from 1956 to 1974 allows one to trace the crisis and discrediting of democracy that began in 1930 and intensified after 1955 with the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón. The documentaries show the decline of legitimacy of the opposing political forces, the radicalization of the political actors involved, and the configuration and affirmation of antagonistic social subjects. Toward the end of the 1960s, this process led to an imaginary of revolution and violence that energized documentary practices and forms.
Un análisis del documental social y político de la Argentina desde 1956 a 1974 permite reconocer la crisis y desacreditación de la democracia que comienza en 1930 y se intensifica luego de 1955 con el derrocamiento de Juan Domingo Perón. Los documentales demuestran el decline de la legitimidad de fuerzas políticas opositoras, la radicalización de los actores políticos involucrados, y la configuración y afirmación de sujetos sociales antagónicos. A fines de 1960, este proceso condujo a la construcción de un imaginario de revolución y violencia que transformó las formas y las prácticas del cine documental.
The systematic and independent production of documentary films in Argentina was linked to the transition from classical to modern film in the 1950s. The film institute established by Fernando Birri at the Littoral National University in 1956, later known as the Santa Fe School of Documentary Film, was one of the milestones in the genre’s increasing autonomy from state power and the influence of the major studios (see España, 2005; Lusnich and Piedras, 2009; and Wolf, 1993). Several academic studies have recently addressed the historical circumstances under which the School was created (see, e.g., Aimaretti, Bordigoni, and Campo, 2009), presenting Birri as a promoter of this less popular form of film during the classical period of national cinematography (1933–1955). Between 1956 and 1976, the documentary genre was gradually consolidated as the main means of expression for a new generation of filmmakers seeking to describe the most urgent political and social conflicts and actively influence reality.
This article takes a look at the political documentary films made during this period and analyzes the relationship between Argentine political history and the development of particular modes of documentary representation, their recurring topics, and the metamorphosis of the target audience inscribed in the discourse of the films. I argue that an analysis of political and social documentaries of the 1956–1974 period shows signs of the crisis and discrediting of democracy (understood as a system in which members of a society represent and settle their conflicts and interests on the level of government) that began with the coup against the democratic government of Hipólito Yrigoyen in 1930 and intensified after 1955 with the uprising against Juan Domingo Perón (Romero, 1996: 49). 1 During the 1960s, this process led to the creation of an alternative pathway for resolving social conflict, one based on an imaginary of revolution and violence. The loss of legitimacy of the opposing forces (Halperín Donghi, 1994: 26), which intensified with the overthrow of and subsequent ban on Peronism, 2 is reflected, in the documentary image, in the radicalization of certain political actors and the gradual configuration of conflicting social groups.
After a brief look at the history of the Argentine documentary, the paper focuses on a particular set of documentaries. Divided into three stages, they constitute highlights in the history of the political documentary and illustrate the changes in modes of representation over time. I argue that the development of the Argentine political documentary in this period does not necessarily move toward the more open and democratic representation modes that Burton (1984) has argued are observable in the Latin American documentary of the time. Burton, studying 15 documentaries from the region, notes a growing democratic trend in ways of representing reality, including the privileging of observational and indirect representation modes and strategies for eliminating, subverting, or supplanting the hierarchical and authoritarian voice-over (the “Voice of God”) in representations of the real. As she puts it, “Latin American filmmakers constantly force the expansion of the concept of documentary by favoring investigation over exposition, hypothesis over prescription, ‘process’ over ‘analysis,’ poeticized over ‘purely’ factual discourse” (1984: 345). This article explores an opposite trend in Argentine documentary film in response to an increasingly radical political and social situation in the country. The limits of direct and observational modes in controlling the political-ideological discourse of the films and the intellectual skills required by the reflective mode clashed with the aims of a kind of documentary that took part in the social war and addressed an increasingly politically interested viewer.
A Chronology of the Argentine Documentary
A brief account of the development of documentary cinema in Argentina may provide some historical perspective on the period in question. The first Argentine documentary films coincided with the earliest films produced in the country, those of Eugenio Py, Federico Valle, Eugenio Cardini, and Alcides Greca. They began as a series of panoramas, newsreels, scientific documentaries, travelogues, and historical documentaries between 1897 and 1925. 3 Although documentary film became established around the world and acquired a self-conscious character in the 1930s, it was only in the 1950s that it began to develop with increasing autonomy and independence in Argentina.
Fernando Birri, the founder of the Santa Fe School of Documentary Film, was explicitly influenced by Italian neorealism and the British documentary school and was the first to propose a national, realistic, and critical type of documentary for Argentina (see Birri, 1964). This first stage of documentary film focused on stories involving social, political, and economic reality. The appearance of La hora de los hornos (Grupo Cine Liberación [the film collective founded by Fernando Ezequiel Solanas and Octavio Getino and including Pablo Szir and Gerardo Vallejo, among others], 1966–1968) marked the beginning of a cinema of political intervention also called “militant cinema.” Its intent was to communicate political topics that went against commercial interests; it adopted independent and alternative modes of production, distribution, and work ownership, was produced and received by political and social organizations, and sought to engage its viewers in a direct and participatory way and to build an open cinematic discourse based on forms of the documentary cinematic essay (Getino and Velleggia, 2002: 27–29). This cinema was part of a broader regional movement known as the New Latin American Cinema (see Pick, 1993). During this stage, the documentary held a central place in Latin American filmmaking even though it still occupied a secondary place in filmmaking as a whole; it became an instrument of ideological awareness and struggles for national liberation across the subcontinent, in the case of Argentina in line with the aims of the militant Marxist left and revolutionary Peronism. The Argentine documentary developed in sync with the rest of the New Latin American Cinema and enjoyed the pride of place that documentary film had in that movement. Exchange between Latin American filmmakers was crucial to the dissemination and discussion of the documentary. The most relevant events include the international festival of documentary and experimental film sponsored by the Servicio Oficial de Difusión Radio Eléctrica in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1958, the invitations to the French filmmakers Joris Ivens and Chris Marker to visit Chile and Cuba, and the creation of the Mérida Documentary Film Festival in Venezuela in 1968.
The political-cinematic project that included the Argentine documentary within the framework of the New Latin American Cinema was brutally interrupted by the military coup of March 24, 1976, though it bears some relation to the documentary film that emerged after the return to democracy in 1983. A documentary film characterized by testimonials and denunciation developed between 1983 and 1994. Whether they were institutional, cooperative, or individual productions, all these films dealt with issues such as memory and oblivion after state terrorism, the identity of the indigenous peoples of Latin America, and marginalization in large urban centers. The most prominent works are Miguel Pérez’s La República perdida (1983) and La República perdida II (1986) the films of Grupo Cine Ojo, headed by Marcelo Céspedes and Carmen Guarini, and Carlos Echeverría’s Juan como si nada hubiera sucedido (1987). Toward the end of the 1990s, the documentary became more relevant and gained visibility in the cultural field. These new documentaries, which are part of what has been called the “new Argentine cinema of the 1990s” and exist amidst a profusion of films on the piquetero movement, address topics as diverse as the social and economic crisis, the military dictatorship, the Falklands War, 1970s militancy, and the biographies of well-known icons of national culture.
From Realistic Record to Militant Documentary
The young members of the Santa Fe School of Documentary Film and the subsequent groups drawn from the political-military organizations that produced the political intervention films of the 1970s were heterogeneous in their ideological sympathies, which ranged from Frondizism to Trotskyism and Peronism. Ideological stances were modified over time and gave rise to several types of cinematographic expression. However, it is initially possible to argue that the filmmakers of the period had a growing common interest in presenting a reality ignored by institutionalized fiction films, both past and present. This commitment to representing social conflict, including the adverse consequences of underdevelopment, dependency, and the absence of a state that would protect the neediest, can be understood as having three stages. The first stage (1956–1966) favored tales that attempted to document rather than judge or present a thesis. During the second stage (1966–1969), having completed the process of recognition and social diagnosis, the documentary began to become a tool for political struggle in the symbolic field. The visibility given to social conflict was accompanied by a series of theses and proposals related to the social and political interests of the filmmakers and the groups to which they belonged. In the third stage (1969–1974), the content was radicalized and film became a tool for counterinformation. Thus Argentine political documentaries started as ethnographic, anthropological, and sociological observation (which made them an instrument of knowledge and research) and then became tools for protest and for militant communication and indoctrination. 4 The following sections provide a glimpse of each stage by addressing the most significant works of the period.
The First Stage: Documentation, Testimonials, and Diagnosis
The first period was strongly influenced by the Santa Fe School and Fernando Birri. Generally speaking, the films introduced new forms of representation, and social actors who had been forgotten or set aside in classical productions appeared on screen for the first time. The films presented the victims of marginalization, poverty, and underdevelopment body and soul. Likewise, provincial environments were represented more realistically, discarding the picturesque approach found in classical film. This was a stage of documentation, diagnosis, identification, and quantification of social problems and conflicts. The filmmaker became a researcher, a sociologist or anthropologist confronting the subject and observing inequality, injustice, or marginalization. Statistical data, quantification, and social survey are all common to the works of the period, as in the parody of an institutional voice-over employed in Tire dié (Fernando Birri, 1958–1960), the interviews with the inhabitants of a tenement in Los 40 cuartos (Juan Oliva, 1962), and the description of past prosperity in Puerto Piojo (Rodolfo Freire and Luis Cazes, 1965). In addition, these films are halfway between what Bill Nichols (1997: 68–78) calls “exposition” (authoritative enunciation addressed to the viewer) and “observation” (filming reality without attempting to control it). This means that observation and display of social situations of inequality, marginalization, and excluded social subjects, far from leaving interpretation solely in the hands of the viewers, are controlled by expository enunciation in the form of voice-over and/or explanatory intertitles.
The paradigmatic film of this period is Tire dié, the first work of the Santa Fe School students coordinated by Fernando Birri. This self-styled “filmed social survey” shows the misery of the inhabitants of an area of lower Santa Fe close to the railroad line that crosses the Salado River. It begins with a voice-over providing statistical data that portray Argentina as a power in food and services production, presenting a strong contrast with the situation endured by the inhabitants of the place. Although it is mainly a denunciation, the film’s importance lies in the presence of social actors whose image had been missing from previous Argentine films. It introduces a social class that will be at the center of political cinema for years to come. Los 40 cuartos, Puerto Piojo, La tierra quema (Raymundo Gleyzer, 1964), and El hambre oculta (Dolly Pussi, 1965) follow the same pattern. These documentaries are what the filmmaker Juan Oliva (quoted in Wolf, 2001) has called “essays of an unspecified anthropology” in that they trace the state of Latin American underdevelopment by focusing on particular aspects of it such as precarious housing (Los 40 cuartos), child malnutrition (El hambre oculta), unemployment (Puerto Piojo), and misery and the disappearance of the state’s social commitment (La tierra quema). It could be argued that this first stage of the documentary film is characterized by a critical view of development theories regarding Argentine social and economic issues, a perspective widely shared by intellectuals from 1955 on (Altamirano, 2007: 55).
These documentaries reflect two concepts of Latin American developmentalism. First, the center/periphery scheme seems to dominate the construction of space and the dramatic elements exposed in the films, but this scheme diverges from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s geopolitical division of the global economy. In these films, the center/periphery scheme applies to the nation, demarcating and configuring easily identifiable semantic fields: capital/province, urban/suburban, integrated/marginal. The periphery—the place assigned to Argentina on the global geopolitical map—is the marginalized space and the focus of documentary narratives. This center/periphery configuration is identifiable in Los 40 cuartos, with Santa Fe as the center and its largest tenement as the periphery, a place of social injustice, overcrowding, and poverty. Something similar happens in Tire dié and El hambre oculta, but here the scheme moves into a broader framework. In these documentaries the city is the center and the slums (in which child malnutrition is rife and children beg from train passengers) are spaces in which underdevelopment condemns and marginalizes a sector of society. La tierra quema reproduces this scheme on Brazilian soil, where the periphery is composed of extremely poor settlements in northeastern Brazil.
Secondly, the documentaries repeatedly denounce the lack of an active and interventionist role on the part of the state, a necessity according to all the variants of development theory of the time. They present scenes of abject poverty, underdevelopment, and a lack of state protection. Unemployment, malnutrition, and the precarious housing situation are all framed by a discourse of denunciation and suggest that, less than a decade before the overthrow of Perón, the actions of a presumably welfare-based and protective government had not been effective. This is, then, a documentary cinema that through display, quantification, and diagnosis calls on the state to fulfill its obligations in agreement with existing development theories. If there is an antagonist, a visible enemy, in these documentaries it is underdevelopment and, therefore, those who work to maintain the prevailing political and economic structures. 5
In a similar vein but with a poetic slant, 6 we have the shorts Buenos Aires (David José Kohon, 1958), Faena (Humberto Ríos, 1960), and Los que trabajan (Nemesio Juárez, 1964). These documentaries, indebted to the Soviet intellectual tradition of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, metaphorically present worlds riven by violence: the slums and the slaughterhouses. The films by Kohon and Ríos build antagonistic semantic fields: those who are wealthy and those who live in poverty, those who enjoy the benefits of modernity and those who suffer from underdevelopment, those who enjoy a carefree life and those who endure suffering, those who punish and those who are punished. They present two antagonistic and irreconcilable worlds separated by the violence and inequality. 7 Following Ortega and Martín Morán (2003: 43), we could say that, while these films are constructed around topics related to the development discourse, they denounce the “unfulfilled promises of the development program: progress and development are presented as a process that benefits only certain social classes while the rest of the population gets the leftovers.”
The Second Stage: Method, Transformation, and Commitment
In the second stage, the political stances of Argentine documentaries became increasingly explicit while maintaining the expositional and didactic profile of the first. The radicalization of discourse began during the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía, when the left wing, including the Peronists, fully understood that the shutdown of political life was irreversible and systematically rejected the liberal and democratic tradition (Romero, 2001: 166–170). 8 Documentaries of this era portray the exclusion of a broad sector of society from political, social, and economic life. The need for a more complex and elaborate discourse is related to the adoption of the feature film as a form of expression. The new documentary films structured their narratives around two main aspects: first, the display of a situation of inequality and social injustice and, second, suggestions of ways to restore justice or change the course of events. Thus documentaries began to function as a tool in the service of particular social actors. The subject that this type of documentary addresses is more restricted and identifiable: an equal, a companion in the struggle and no longer an abstract and possibly politically disengaged viewer (in La hora de los hornos, for example, “Every mere spectator is a coward or a traitor”).
This stage is characterized by an approach that favors the reflexive aspect of the documentary. It focuses on processes of negotiation between filmmaker and viewer, addressing the “delicate issues of representation, objectivity, realism, its condition as a construct and not as a direct portrayal of reality” (Weinrichter, 2004: 44). The most representative pieces from this stage are the above-mentioned La hora de los hornos (especially its first part, “Neocolonialismo y violencia”), México, la revolución congelada (Raymundo Gleyzer, 1969), and El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales (Gerardo Vallejo, 1968–1971). 9 Although a detailed analysis of these complex and dissimilar documentaries is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to consider some of their distinctive features.
First, the three films have a historicist character that sustains their discourse and thesis. La hora de los hornos is a revisionist reading of Argentine history in the tradition of Juan José Hernández Arregui, José María Rosa, or Jorge Abelardo Ramos. Dependency theory, on the rise at the time, is one of its theoretical and ideological foundations. Although the political stance is defined during the first few minutes, the first half of the documentary displays a wealth of information, documents, and audiovisual records regarding the national situation: underdevelopment, neocolonialism, and social injustice. There is a pedagogical concern to explore Argentine history by extracting the information and symbols needed to sustain a certain ideological discourse and the revolutionary options proposed by the authors in the second part (see Trombetta and Wolkowicz, 2009). México, la revolución congelada also uses archival footage to present a vision of the Mexican Revolution influenced by the ideological perspective of Raymundo Gleyzer, an activist for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, and provide a series of social and historical arguments that lead to a bleak present. However, the most important innovation in this film is its use of testimonies. Drawing upon his journalistic training, Gleyzer uses interviews to uncover the ideological contradictions present among the lower classes. He displays a constant concern, a legacy of the first stage, for recording, displaying, and diagnosing events along with a need to disseminate a political thesis: that the institutionalization and stagnation of the revolutionary process have thwarted its very goals. El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales can also be seen in these terms, although it is somewhat different stylistically. It makes extensive use of fiction in presenting the characters and replaces the historical approach with an anthropological and sociological analysis of those characters and their relationship to their environment. While the political stance and bias are less obvious than in the previous films, the documentary makes its views explicit by presenting Reales’s sons as archetypes. Héctor Kohen (2005: 501) describes them as follows: “Angel, a mason, bears his fate; Mariano, the policeman, is an enemy of the people; but the third son, ‘el Pibe,’ is depicted as a hero, a union delegate.”
Secondly, the three films are characterized by rhetorical procedures that establish two significant categories: an “us” and a “them.” Antagonism and growing social and political polarization are related to the two conflicting national images posited by sociologist Gino Germani (1963). The first image, which these documentaries present as “them,” belongs to the first half of the twentieth century: “According to this vision, Argentina was a progressive ‘European,’ modern country meant to take its place in the international division of labor thanks to its inexhaustible agricultural riches” (Altamirano, 2007: 86). The second image, which in these films constitutes the “us,” Germani considers pessimistic:
The country was an underdeveloped nation of almost colonial status and possessed of a “feudal” agrarian structure. . . . It attributed the perpetuation of economic and social backwardness to imperialism and the “anti-national” oligarchy while appealing to the “non-respectable left wing” in its different guises (Marxist, national, etc.) as well as the totalitarian and extreme right wing, albeit in a different manner.
Germani’s interpretation has been criticized by a number of historians since the 1970s, including Mora y Araujo (1977), Smith (1974), and Murmis and Portantiero (2004 [1971]). However, it is related to the documentary depictions of the time; while perhaps erroneous, it was surely part of the imaginary during those years. In addition, this antagonism is accompanied by a clear stance on the part of the “us.” The presentation of this dichotomy is based on different resources available to film language, such as the caricaturing of the enemy by establishing rhetorical games involving the dialogue and the sound track, the use of voice-off and voice-over, and dialectical montage.
The Third Stage: Intervention, Militancy, and Exile
The third stage in the development of the Argentine political documentary is defined by the radicalization of a militant stance and its prioritization over the mere registration, description, and documentation of conflictive situations. Here, film is understood as a weapon that targets viewers of a certain group or class. The filmmaker is no longer in front of the subjects but with them, participating in the conflict and seeking to change reality. Returning to Nichols’s categories, this stage is marked by the preeminence of the interactive mode; the characters speak to the camera rather than just among themselves, incorporating the filmmaker to establish an actual relationship with their referent (Nichols, 1997: 78–84).
The 1969 social revolt known as the Cordobazo had a decisive impact on the political and social history of Argentina. A series of strikes and trade union assemblies in opposition to the Onganía administration’s de-industrialization and antiworker measures, political persecution and censorship, and takeovers of unions and universities culminated in Córdoba on May 29 and 30 in a brutal confrontation between workers, supported by left-wing students and civil-society sectors, and the police and the army. Though the army managed to dissolve the protest, similar events subsequently occurred throughout the country. Cultural and artistic circles were profoundly shaken by this, and reactions rippled across the various fields, including that of the documentary. The antagonisms present in the narratives of the second stage became radical, and leftist filmmakers began to split along political lines. Cinema represented a society that, as James Brennan and Monica Gordillo (1994: 53) point out, “was increasingly divided, in its perspectives and political practices, between the concepts of pro- and anti-people and Peronist/anti-Peronist, a polarization that prevented dialogue and political commitment from taking place through constitutional channels.”
Two films address the Cordobazo directly: Argentina, mayo de 1969: Los caminos de la liberación (Grupo Realizadores de Mayo [Nemesio Juárez, Octavio Getino, Pino Solanas, Jorge Martín, Eliseo Subiela, Pablo Szir, Rodolfo Kuhn, Jorge Cedrón, Mauricio Berú, and Rubén Salgado], 1969) and Ya es tiempo de violencia (Enrique Juárez, 1969). Urgency and clandestine working conditions are key to this period, decisively influencing the narrative and stylistic development of the films. First, they partially abandon the historical, anthropological, or sociological research that characterized previous productions. 10 Interpretations of the Cordobazo do not merely attempt to raise militant awareness, as was the case during the second stage; they seek to inspire immediate mobilization and support in the struggle. Argentina, mayo de 1969: Los caminos de la liberación is perhaps one of the most enigmatic documentaries of the period. Lost for more than 30 years and only recently recovered, it consists of 10 short films made by militant filmmakers of diverse political affiliations 11 and other filmmakers with no background in political activism. From denunciation and testimony to avant-garde experimentation, directors place the Cordobazo in the history of Argentine insurrections and thus present it as an essential platform for future revolutionary change. The shorts address the same theme from different angles but with the same purpose: Nemesio Juárez presents the role of the army in the repression; Rodolfo Kuhn interprets events as a sinister fairy tale; Eliseo Subiela instructs the viewer on homemade Molotov cocktails using the format of a cooking show for housewives. In Ya es tiempo de violencia, Enrique Juárez bases his narrative on heterogeneous source materials: the voice and the story of a worker from Ika-Renault who participated in the revolt, the reading of a letter from Agustín Tosco, a montage of images of the Cordobazo and other popular protests in oppressed nations. In presenting the story of the automobile factory worker (a strategy also employed by Pablo Szir in the collective film), he employs what Luis Alberto Romero has called a “logic of aggregation,” a logic that characterized the development over time of a common front based on an antagonistic process. Thus it gives an account of the different social sectors (workers, university students, state employees, and others) that made common cause during the Cordobazo.
Another aspect of the third-stage documentary can be found in the short films made by Raymundo Gleyzer and the Grupo Cine de la Base. Most of them are focused on the political premises of the organization to which the group belonged. Though when taken out of context these films may be perceived as precarious, clandestine conditions and haste did not preclude creativity and didacticism. Among the most significant are Comunicado Cinematográfico del ERP no. 5 y no. 7: Swift (1972), the purpose of which was to spread news of the kidnapping of the honorary British consul Stanley Sylvester, the head of Swift; Ni olvido ni perdón (1972), which was about the Trelew massacre; and Me matan si no trabajo y si trabajo me matan (1974), which dealt with the struggle of the Insud factory workers. The first two shorts are urgent cinema; Me matan si no trabajo y si trabajo me matan had a longer preproduction process, and its narrative structure is as complex as that of Gleyzer’s two feature films, Los traidores (1973) and México, la revolución congelada.
The Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo’s Comunicados Cinematográficos no. 5 y no. 7 is eminently practical: its aim is to communicate a victorious guerrilla action and turn it into an example for mass struggle while moving toward higher goals. The shorts alternate between montages of still photographs and reports to employees, employers, and national authorities, accompanied by a voice-over that explains the goals and progress of the operation. This is perhaps the least aesthetically elaborate film of those mentioned, but it is strictly functional to spreading the word about the operation. The most interesting thing about it is the counterpoint generated between the different reports: the voices of the interviewees are in conflict, and the viewer has to accept or reject the discourses presented.
Ni olvido ni perdón tells, shortly after the events, of the massacre perpetrated in the Trelew detention center in 1972. In a joint action involving three guerrilla groups, the Montoneros, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (Revolutionary Armed Forces—FAR), and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (Revolutionary People’s Army—ERP), 22 militants mutinied and, with help from outside, escaped. They were ambushed in the Trelew airport, and only 6 managed to escape to Chile. The documentary is based on the only journalistic record of the events, a report from the local news channel to three leaders of the various organizations. After a brief introduction, during which a voice-over narration, accompanied by a montage of still photos, recalls the events that led to the taking of the airport, we are taken to the audiovisual source, the newscast of a local television channel. This is neither cut nor edited; it is the “raw story,” so to speak. The decision is both aesthetic and political, prioritizing the images without any kind of manipulation in order to reawaken memory of the crime. This embodies a kind of counterdiscourse: whereas the newscasts and the mass media manipulated the material by removing the images from their context, presenting the live footage vindicates the revolt and throws light on the events at the airport. For Grupo Cine de la Base, denouncing, criticizing, and raising awareness meant being brutally explicit—calling things by their names and avoiding rhetorical games. The final part of the short again uses stills to memorialize the dead militants. Naming each of the 16 and displaying their pictures serves a dual function, denouncing the massacre and denying the military dictatorship the symbolic death of the victims by refusing to let their images disappear.
Me matan si no trabajo y si trabajo me matan addresses lead poisoning among Insud factory workers. While this film, like the others, decries a situation, it lacks the urgency of the previous ones. It aesthetically and narratively incorporates elements from various disciplines (music, fine arts, drawing), producing a polyphony of narrative materials. The testimonies of workers are accompanied by songs composed for the occasion that denounce the suffering of workers but also tell management about their workers’ tenacity. Cartoons in the style of children’s comic books are used to explain the way the capitalist mode of production exploits workers. (A series of graffiti, understood as a means of popular expression, underpins the beginning of each of the songs.) The final sequence moves away from the narrative line deployed in the rest of the documentary and pays homage to representative and militant Rodolfo Ortega Peña, who had recently been murdered by the Triple A (the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, an extreme right-wing paramilitary group that killed many leftist militants in the early 1970s). This tribute further demonstrates the flexibility and permeability of militant documentaries and their ability to adapt their discourse to a convoluted sociopolitical situation.
It is possible to conclude from this analysis that third-stage documentaries favor politics over film. For this reason, they adopt precise discursive and communication strategies, targeting an audience aware of the contents of the work. The films were clandestinely screened in villages, poor neighborhoods, unions, and private residences, and this involved a different audience from the one addressed during the previous stages. Also, those responsible for the works of this period saw filmmaking as part of an act of committed militancy that had to be carried to its ultimate conclusion (Jorge Cedrón was found stabbed during his exile in Paris; Raymundo Gleyzer, Pablo Szir and Enrique Juárez were abducted and disappeared by the military dictatorship in Argentina).
Conclusion
This analysis of Argentine political and social documentary film leads to two possible conclusions. First, the documentary discourses of the period are strongly linked to a period of Argentine history that witnessed the progressive radicalization of a population seeking substantial sociopolitical change. The films that follow La hora de los hornos no longer portray democracy as a system in which it is possible to resolve conflicts and resort to revolution and violence. They judge and criticize institutions, postulating a link between them and past and present inequality. Secondly, the political and ideological radicalization of a certain social group 12 impacted modes of documentary representation, with a documentary of observation and testimonies giving way to one of unrest and political intervention.
At the same time, the development of the Argentine political documentary is marked by a gradual reduction in the breadth of the groups to which it is addressed, both quantitatively and in terms of target audience. The documentaries of the Santa Fe School of Documentary Film and the works of Humberto Ríos and David José Kohon barely focus, in narrative and intent, on the social actor with whom the viewer should identify. The social actors portrayed are there to be acknowledged and incorporated into the symbolic field of cinematic representation. This changes with La hora de los hornos because of its clandestine exhibition, Peronist identity, and constant questioning of the viewer. However, films of the second stage such as this and El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales still aim to reach a larger audience. In contrast, the third-stage documentaries are meant primarily as a tool for counterinformation addressed to an interested and committed militancy. Here, critical judgment is implicit in the film and no longer open to the viewer as it had been in previous phases. In this sense, the documentaries of the second and third stages build a system of representation in which the people and their opponents are presented as irreconcilable forces. The enemy that the people/viewers must face is everyone from the national oligarchy and imperialism to the complicit middle class and the military state.
Between 1956 and 1974, the Argentine political documentary was transformed in tandem with the social environment, which underwent a kind of political and ideological radicalization that is reflected in the films. This transformation had its formal counterpart in the adoption of more controlled modes of representation and increasing selectiveness with regard to the target audience, and this speaks of a dialectical link between the documentary and the public sphere in times of national turmoil. Thus the difference between the reflexivity and observation of the Latin American documentaries of the time—especially in Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Colombia and Brazil (Burton, 1984)—and what happened in Argentina can be seen as a result of a marked difference in sociopolitical contexts.
Footnotes
Notes
Pablo Piedras is a postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad de Buenos Aires working on contemporary Argentine documentary film. He co-manages the Centro de Investigación y Nuevos Estudios and is a coauthor of Civilización y barbarie en el cine argentino y latinoamericano (2005) and coeditor (with Ana Laura Lusnich) of Una historia del cine político y social en Argentina (1896–2009). Since 2006 he has taught the history of Latin American and Argentine cinema in the arts program of the School of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. Mariana Ortega Breña is a freelance translator based in Canberra, Australia.