Contradictions and Friends: Solanas designed the length and structure of his film with an eye to resisting its being co-opted into the alienated conditions of the "entertainment" industry when distributed in capitalist countries. He intended the breaks in the film to provide the necessary opportunity for debate and analysis by the audience, not to create bite-sized chunks for exhibitors to exploit most effectively for high grosses. Unfortunately the Orson Welles-in collaboration with the distributor, Cinema of the Third World-has chosen to observe only an "intermission" between Parts II and III and to charge audiences twice for seeing the whole film. Splitting the experience over at least two days and including the slack and unimaginative "Interviews with My Lai Veterans" on the same bill cannot help but dilute the force of La Hora de los Hornos. Hopefully, many will voice their criticisms at the theatre and actively make sure that the level of discussion takes place that Solanas intended. Of course the Welles is trapped in the exigencies of the same system under which the film was produced, but these compromises should be carefully considered politically in the hope of someday having a real community film theatre.
IN ORDER TO DOMINATE MAN NAPALM AND POISON GAS ARE NOT YET NECESSARY. THERE IS AN INFINITY OF ECONOMIC, POLITCAL, AND CULTURAL MEANS JUST AS EFFECTIVE.
Demystifying Neo-colonial Violence: "The Vietnamese has only to raise his head to find the enemy," Solanas comments over images of antiaircraft gunners from Joris Ivens' The Earth and the Sky; "for us it is infinitely more difficult," The Argentine system's violence is legalized, actual and potential: hunger and exploited labor, as well as police repression. It is an institution and is hence mystified by "normality." One particularly grotesque sequence connects the brutal daily immediacy of slaughtering cattle to the neo-colonial mechanism by intercutting commercials for Americanmade consumer products. The fact that beef is one of Argintina's greatest resources, plundered by the "developed" nations, raises the blood-letting to a figurative significance. A starving people exchanges its subsistence for the opportunity to buy American luxury items. Solanas presents images of imperialist ideological penetration as well, designed to de-nationalize and de-politicize the people with imported entertainment commodities, while the sound-track provides a subliminal Ray Charles ( I Don't Need No Doctor ): "The people are taught to think in English." The film seeks to expose the material basis of this daily violence against the Latin American's dignity, national pride; and ability to survive by attacking the appearances the system tries to maintain. It attacks the dehumanizing term invented by the imperialists to mask and justify their activities: "Underdevelopment" (subdesarroyo), which, translated into reality, means "a forced Dependence."
Cultural Dependence and Intellectual Lackeyism: The imperialist violence analyzed in La Hora de los Hornos is also visited on the people's attempts to create a national culture, with the help of a cadre of Argentina's intellectuals who hide their privileged class status behind various myths:
Academic Freedom. The University of Buenos Aires, the main organ for propagating European classical-humanist traditions, oppresses national forces of creative self-determination by institutionalizing the imitation of models from the oppressor cultures and by mouthing their ideology ("free trade," "liberalism," and the one crop economy). Professors of course portray the university as "an island of democracy" in a sea of whatever (familiar words on American campuses), obscuring its reactionary political alignment.
Universality. Just as the bourgeoisie likes to conceive of itself as "citizens of the world" bourgeois writers prefer to portray "the human condition," the idealization of Man apart from the economic and political situation of Argentine man in the particular, oppressed man. And of course, as everyone knows, universal culture is centered in the Developed nations (where the money is) and in the Developed classes. Solanas shows a literary party (at the PepsiCo building) for leading novelist Mujica Lainez (winner of the Kennedy Prize, the Gold Medal of the Italian government, and other imperialist trophies) who is presenting his latest work ( Royal Chronicles ) and explains himself quite candidly: "I am a man of European formation... I'd like to live in Venice forever, to the very last moment.... Here things are so complicated. We're so far away, so out of place."
Political silence. Intellectuals have a way of selling out the people politically as well as artistically. When Peron was overthrown by the "Gorilla" junta of the oligarchy, with 300 killed in the streets by aerial bombardment, "those who could write had nothing to say," Today in Argentina those nationalist intellectuals who have not lost touch with the masses (like Solanas and many of the guerrillas he interviews) are either exiled or underground.
CULTURE WILL BECOME A UNIVERSAL FACT AT THE SERVICE OF ALL MEN WHEN WE HAVE DESTROYED AT A UNIVERSAL LEVEL IMPERIALISM AND CLASS SOCIETY, WHEN WE HAVE UNIVERSALIZED THE COMPLETE LIBERATION OF MAN.
If everybody is to be engaged in the struggle for our common salvation, there are no clean hands, there are no innocents, there are no spectators.... Every spectator is a coward or a traitor.
In opposition to an aesthetics, one has got to set up an anti-aesthetics: I don't necessarily mean of ugliness, but rather of that which, according to bourgeois notions of aesthetics, could not be considered beautiful. To be an artist means, in this case, to proceed from the anti-aesthetics of the forms one utilizes and to find a corresponding new language, new expression.... We, from Argentina, trying to create a new cinema, a cinema of poetry and polemical essay, call for works in progress, for unfinished works of art, for imperfect works of art.
Demystifying the Cinegraphic Image: La Hora de los Hornos explicitly disavows the role of presenting the whole Truth about the revolutionary situation of Argintina. The voice of Solanas comes on in Part II over sections of black leader to explain the intentions of the filmmakers, to remind us that this experience is their communication via celluloid, a projector, and a screen rather than some larger-than-life revelation, and finally that it is a form left open and fragmented-to be finished by the audience with their own debate and acts. He calls the film a collection of "Notes and Testimony on Violence and Liberation"; in other words, revolutionary opinions and models posed with and against each other in interviews, quotations, collages, and commentaries. Solanas frequently presents his arguments in stark black and white titles that stand as polemical assertions to be evaluated and cannot be confused with "reflections of reality." But what about the effects of his documentary images themselves? Does our relation to his analysis depend on our belief in the illusion that they reproduce reality? And do Solanas' structural alienating devices in practice succeed in their attempt to present argument rather than truth, analysis rather than reality, and not "a just image," but "just an image"
Against the Ideology of Real Life: Godard attacks the problem of our potential acceptance of reactionary propaganda by questioning the ontology of each individual image in order to reveal the hidden ideology of every element-lurking bourgeois assumptions that give aid and comfort to the maintainers of the ruling order. In other words he exercises dialectically all unexamined values from his cinematic vocabulary. "Realistic" cinema becomes his most formidable enemy: metaphysical defender of "the ideology of real life." universalist, humanist justifier of the present politico-economic system, mystifier of the historical alternatives open to the oppressed. So when he presents an image of oppression in Wind From the East. with soldier and Indian simultaneously reading from books of conflicting ideology. Godard makes sure we don't take this as a literal statement or fiction about the way things really look. This is visual symbolism on a purely political, analytical level. By contrast, the multi-level (i. e. vague) implications of "captured" reality, the self-evident (and self-right-cous) truths of "cinema-verite," prove politically demobilizing.
Against Immediacy: When we see a literal representation of a starvingchild or an act of brutality in somebody's documentary, images we believe to be real, we are so struck by the immediacy of the horror that we have to act fast to assimilate it into our sensibilities. Moral indignation: someone should help those people, or that policeman should be held responsible. Altruistic resolve: next year we can't forget to give to the United Fund.
The difference between such immediacies in Real Life and in a movie theatre is of course quite vast. Where-as the direct witness to an atrocity defines his relation to it in terms of action, the spectator of an alienated "reality"-deached from its physical context-can only define his attitude, a situation that gives rise to the impotence of liberal guilt and its sublimation on the level of a vague idealism. Effective and detached political analysis is swept aside as pure intellectualism, heartlessness. And the underlying material determinants remain obscured.
As Godard maintains, the immediate image is merely "the reality of the reflection," an ambiguous appearance that could have been caused by anything (including the camera), that leads to no clearer understanding of "reality" because it neglects answering the question "why?" So what about La Hora de los Hornos? How do its documentary images treat the question of causality and discredit surface verities?
Class Images: Solanas' principal means of demystification is the division of images along class lines. Structurally this entails assailing immediacy by placing all elements within a context of material contradictions, a dialectical syntax already discussed. On the level of individual images-the sign-system-class division means that appearances possess abstract class associations and at the same time serve as concrete receptacles for the ideology presented by the sound-track. These images are not called upon to reproduce reality, but to act as models used in discussing, describing, criticizing reality. Rather than collecting a predominance of "convincing" visual examples of the system's brutality-Newsreel-like riot footage, malnutrition scenes, etc.-Solanas concentrates on the brutality (or ease) of everyday class life, presenting images of the human recipients-victims of profiteers-by the logical extension of the system's statistical inequalities being considered. These class depictions (signs) are designed to mediate larger social contradictions to a concrete, human, class-as opposed to a "realistic" individual-level.
Believing in the redemption of physical reality, then, is not at issue in La Hora de los Hornos, since no such feat is attempted. The images generally stand in a disembodied, figurative relation to the sounds doing the analyzing. Rather than extending these specialized intellectual principles into a Godardian dialectic within every element, Solanas chooses a sign system appropriate to his own country's situation, images most intelligible and applicable to the practical revolutionary concerns of the oppressed.