"A militant cinema involved ideologically and politically in and for the revolution," running 4 hours and 20 minutes on the concrete political and economic situation in Argentina, is entering its second week at the Orson Welles Cinema in an extended run. Directed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, La Hora de los Hornos is the first film of its kind, made with and for underground militant groups-students, workers, guerrillas-in a country where the liberation of revolutionary masses from a repressive military regime is in the making. Part I, Neo-colonialism and Violence (95 minutes) runs Wednesdays through Saturdays; Parts II and III, Act for Liberation (2 hours) and Violence and Liberation (15 minutes), Sundays through Tuesdays.

Now is the hour of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.

Images: Solanas develops social contradictions by means fundamentally different from those of the other major theorists of the militant cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, who phrases this problem as the necessity to build simple, anti-realist images in order to build a purely dialectical and coherent political analysis. La Hora de los Hornos builds its dialectic in the editing of "found" images, pre-existing appearances (documentary footage, his own and that of others, also stills, paintings, commercials, etc.) that expose contradiction by their relation to each other.

Solanas collects the surfaces of reality in order to reorganize them as objects into a total social context, creating an essay form in the tradition of the far-Left Soviet cineaste Dziga Vertov (who said: "To make a montage ... means to write something cinegraphic with recorded shots."). Appearances serve as linguistic elements, his "writing" vocabulary, which means less concern with the purity of the images (i. e. dialectical compositions) than with their dialectical relation. Individual images of the bourgeoisie, for example, are never caricatured (ef. Eisenstein) in sequences of their normal activities that are perfectly harmless in hemelves: relaxing at the beach, golfing, socializing at a cattle auction. But Solanas makes these smiling (and sometimes even attractive) human beings hideous and hateful ("monstrosity masquerading as beauty") by placing them in the same construction with images of other human beings starving and diseased.

He connects images to illuminate social contradictions not apparent when they are perceived in isolation. One particularly moving sequence links the upturned face of a hungry child in the back country with the exploitative neo-colonial system by intercepting it with a dazzling skyscraper in Bucnos Aires, the port city where foreigners siphon off the country's natural wealth. Instead of pretending a special or temporal literalness (like Hollywood montage), this connection is based on a mediation of concrete images with the assessment of Argentine social structure as a class structure. The ambiguous apparent nature of the images by a construct of contradiction is transformed into their essential nature based in material conditions.

A situation in which the "facts" speak out unmistakably for or against a definite course of action has never existed, and neither can nor will exist. The more conscientiously the facts are explored-in their isolation, i. e. in their unmediated relations-the less compellingly will they point in any one direction.... Thus dialectical materialism is seen to offer the only approach to reality which can give action a direction. The facts no longer appear strange when they are comprehended in their coherent reality, in the relation of all partial aspects to their inherent, but hitherto unelucidated roots in the whole.

Sounds: As both branches of the militant cinema agree, images do not speak for themselves. Sounds-which Godard has called "the oppressed track" in the cinema of Nixon Paramount-serve as a force of equal importance as images in dialectical analysis, through linking facts and context. Except in a few direct interviews Solanas maintains a tension between images and sounds such that comprehension develops along parallel and contradictory lines of struggling ideas. The gestaltist impulse to force correspondences produces irony and consequently a sense of the film's materialist superstructure.

Solanas uses the aristocracy's own comment on images of itself to reinforce the overview of their antirational orientation he has already set up; their own baroque music to raise their monuments and cemetery to absurd heights of grandeur, to emphasize the stagnant, death-like concentration of wealth in this elite and isolated class. The clearly-drawn irony of the Argentine national anthem (sung by an opera singer in the European classical tradition), being dubbed over sordid scenes of a knife fight between hungry men and young boys and an old cripple waiting for a prostitute, exposes the fundamental contradiction between an idealized political order and the real needs of a majority of Argenines. A spoken historical analysis of Peronism in Part II remains detached literally from the newsreel footage that accompanies it, so as to reinforce the idea of an analysis above and beyond a mere recapitulation of events. And in addition to these contextual uses in organizing images and posing contradictions, sounds prove the most efficient and economical way of presenting statistical information.

The bourgeois theatre's performances always aim at smoothing over contradictions, at creating false harmony, at idealization. Conditions are reported as if they could not be otherwise.... If there is any development it is always steady, never by jerks; the developments always take place within a definite framework which cannot be broken through.

None of this is like reality, so a realistic theatre must give it up.

A Radical Separation of Elements: Solanas' total dialectical form consists of universal internal contradiction, with no element allowed to stand unchallenged, similar to the theatrical form Brecht often referred to as "the great struggle for supremacy between words, music, and production." La Hora de los Hornos builds its total analysis of class conflict from a heterogeneous mass of small "cells" or "acts," each of which invents its own peculiar camera-style in contrast to that of its brothers. And within each cell images and sounds struggle within themselves and with each other: dialectics within dialectics. Tracks of the countryside are intercut with zoom-ins on groups and individuals, and set shots of people suddenly zoom-out to include their surroundings: texts and contexts. And documented reality confronts the film apparatus itself: people talk directly into the camera, or they attack it, despise it sullenly, or avoid it in the voyeuristic hand-held sequences that record images of people in the most abject situations of poverty. Interviews are broken down into components of monologue and detached images, as in the long shot of guerrilla leader Julio Troxler wandering solemnly around the garbage dump where many of his compatriots had been massacred, while his pre-recorded recounts his experiences.

Why does Solanas refuse to integrate these clements for our convenience? It comes from a conscious political choice to leave the film's form totally open: the director's intention is to decompose history and material conditions for analysis, leaving the re-composition incomplete. Further criticism, conclusions, and choices for action must be taken up by the audience; discussion becomes praxis determined by the people. There is no recourse to cinema-verite pretensions of proof, to demonstrating factual unity of sound and image, since La Hora de los Hornos does not purport to be a chunk of reality, a perfection, an end in itself, but rather a beginning.

Before it explodes a bomb is a single entity in which opposites coexist in given conditions. The explosion takes place only when a new condition, ignition, is present. An analogous situation arises in all those natural phenomena which finally assume the form of open conflict to resolve old contradictions and produce new things.

We are at a moment in History where one can no longer spend years and years sculpting a statue or building a column or painting a delicate portrait. We are constantly assailed by all the information media that are controlled by the system. We are literally victims of aggression.... We have to accept the limitations imposed on us by the historical process of the liberation of man. We should think in terms of the limitations imposed on a Vietnamese man-menaced by napalm, with little time and little space in which to live.

Conditions of Production: La Hora de los Hornos was made clandestinely in bits and pieces over a period of two years (1966-67) and owes much to the collaboration of subversive groups in various parts of the country. Solanas and Getino not only had to contend with the threat of political censorship and retribution-the film has not yet been allowed public exhibition in Argentina and private attempts are dangerous-they also had to deal with the high production costs of using film as the medium of their essay in the situation of a capitalist economy. They worked as cheaply as possible,using the most crude 16mm Bolex available, without sinc-sound or motorized drive (making their longest possible takes about 30 seconds). And to raise the money they worked in the daytime making commercials (many of which are exploited contemptuously in the film), an appropriate-and inescapable-contradiction.