March 4 , Thursday, 7:30PM
Film as a Subversive Art III:
Left and Revolutionary Cinema: Third World

Round three of films from the book "Film as a Subversive Art" written in 1974 by Amos Vogel, the founder of the Cinema 16 in New York, New York Film Festival and Lincoln Center Film Department. The program features

The Hour of the Blast Furnaces (LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS) (Part I: "Neo-Colonialism and Violence")
by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 95min, 1967, Argentina

"The masterpiece of the subversive art - a shattering indictment of American imperialism in South America -- is a brilliant tour de force of tumultuous images, sophisticated montage, and sledgehammer titles, fused into a passionate onslaught of radical provocation to olt the spectator to a new level of consciousness". - Amos Vogel

"The inaugural film of our series `Nations, Pollinations, and Dislocations,' The Hour of the Furnaces is by far the most influential film ever to come out of Latin America. First released in 1968, it came to represent one of the most articulate voices of the western world's first supra-national revolution: the radical student, worker and civil rights movements in Europe and the Americas which were then spilling over local and national borders with lighting speed. The Hour of the Furnaces defined itself as the first embodiment of a `Third Cinema' - a radical cinema in which group production and the politics of distribution and presentation [the film was designed to be stopped and discussed as it was being projected] took precedence over `mere' aesthetic concerns; it would have a strong impact on avant-garde filmmaking throughout Europe, the U.S, and Canada. If, thirty years later, it bears witness to a bygone era of utopian radicalism, it remains a central cinematic example of the marriage of aesthetics and politics at the core of avant garde art" (Elena Feder). Part I, "Neo-Colonialism and Violence," is a radical history of Argentina. Part II, "An Act for Liberation," traces the 1945-1955 reign of Juan Peron and the activities of Peronist movement after his fall from power. Part III, "Violence and Liberation," considers the role and meaning of violence in political struggle. "[A] masterpiece . . . a dazzling array of newsreel material, extracts from films by Fernando Birri, Léon Hirszman, Joris Ivens and Humberto Rios, interviews, songs poems and new material . . . . This devastating film, made clandestinely, ends with a two-minute close-up of the face of dead Che Guevara" (Bloomsbury) - http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/archives/Nati.html

The film is introduced by Juan Mandelbaum who is a an Argenitnian filmmaker currently living in the US and a friend of Fernando Solanas. Juan made a documentary on the role of the artist in Latin America that features Solanas among others. The evening will begin with the excerpt from this documentary.