Emilio Bernini

POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY

FILM IN ARGENTINA DURING THE 1960s

This essay offers a cultural-historical reading of the documentary films of what has
been called the Argentine ‘political avant-garde’, including groups like Cine Libera-
ción (Liberation Cinema) and Cine de la Base (Cinema of the Base), and filmmakers
such as Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Gerardo Vallejo and Raymundo Gleyzer,
among others. I shall begin by looking at Fernando Birri’s documentary Tire dié
(‘Throw a dime’), made at the Documentary School of Santa Fe, which belongs to
a period prior to the emergence of the ‘New Argentine Cinema’ and the ‘sixties
generation’. The essay attempts to connect the ‘New Argentine Cinema’ with the
political avant-garde, to the extent that all of the filmmakers share a similar moral
responsibility in relation to cinema and the image. The difference is that in the
mid-1960s the political avant-garde precisely comes to politicize what until then had
been a moral responsibility for filmmakers, just at the time when political practice
functions as the axis of cultural activity. On the other hand the essay analyses the
documentary practice of these militant filmmakers in terms of their creation of a new
type of staging: the rejection of any form of staging in the films of the Cine
Liberación Group (Solanas and Getino); the reflexive incorporation of cinematic
staging in the films of G. Vallejo; and lastly, documentary as the staging of politics
in the films of Cine de la Base and Raymundo Gleyzer.

Images of reality: the sixties generation (Birri and Tire

dié)

What seems to be an inaugural cut by the Argentine political avant-garde in fact

forms part of a complex process of transition that begins a decade before the
‘eruption’ of militant cinema. From the middle of the 1950s, filmmakers ceased to
make films in the manner of industrial production, but rather took up a different
relation to their productions and to society more widely. They broke away from the
studios and abandoned a tradition that they deemed irredeemable, redefining a moral
responsibility towards the image and towards those they were addressing. The
filmmakers of the 1960s were highly conscious of how cinema could be used and of
its effects on what lay beyond it: they were also conscious of how those effects could
be deliberately produced. Fernando Birri was one of the first to respond to an
implicit demand (to which in their turn modern filmmakers would also respond) that

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies Vol. 13, No. 2 August 2004, pp. 155–170
ISSN 0958-9236 print/ISSN 1465-3869 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1356932042000247002
1 56 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

cinema should give the audience knowledge of Argentine society: his first short was
the visual correlate of a social inquiry. This modest, almost artisanal, work was Tire
dié, which in fact offered in concentrated form a complete conception of cinema and
a sense of the history from which it emerged. The account of its production in a
booklet on the origins of the Santa Fe Documentary School (Birri, 1964) includes an
assessment of Argentine cinema, in whose tripartite schema it is possible to see a
gesture analogous to that of the political avant-garde 10 years on. Both assume their
place to be a foundational incipit and both distinguish three types of cinema in the
tradition, the third being conceived of as a synthesis and supersession. Tire dié and,
subsequently, Los inundados (The Flood Victims) were thus offered as syntheses of two
historically irreconcilable tendencies: a falsely popular or ‘populist’ cinema’ which
had been predominant, and the cinema that had emerged in reaction to it, New
Cinema, which failed to see that in its rejection of popular cinema it had lost its
audience, leaving behind only an ‘elite’ of cognoscenti. Birri thus maintained the
popular element that New Cinema had rejected, and with it proposed a ‘third’
cinema, although not with this name or with its political meaning. It would be a
popular and intellectual cinema, ‘realist and critical’.
For their part, the filmmakers of the sixties generation, even if not producing
critical assessments of history, were also in the business of proposing a break from
the past, because with their new version of the image they were negating a history
of filmmaking that had ultimately led to the industry’s crisis. However, the novelty
of the cinema they were producing was not merely modernizing and elitist, since that
‘image of social reality’ that Birri was concerned with in his documentary and first
fiction feature was also among the objectives of at least some of them. The proposed
‘expression of the situation’ through cinema, as Simón Feldman has put it, brought
the two together, and this imperative can be seen in the images they offer of
Argentine society. Disputing traditional themes, José Martı́nez Suárez in his first two
films (El crack, Dar la cara), Lautaro Murúa in Alias Gardelito and even Rodolfo Kuhn
in Pajarito Gómez dealt with new subject matter that expressed this shared social
objective. Dar la cara contains a short documentary essay, whose montage, with its
alternation of the faces of the poor and political posters, shares Birri’s approach as
well as that of the political avant-garde, even if neither had been well defined.
Murúa, meanwhile, in his film sketches out a map of social classes and their relation
to power, through the life of a lumpen who crosses paths with them all. Kuhn, in
Pajarito Gómez, throws the filmic image, the journalistic image and the advertising
image into crisis by taking an ironic stance towards their fate in the market. Even the
images of the villas miseria, the shanty-towns, the poor parts of the city appear again
and again in the cinema of filmmakers less concerned with a global image of society,
as in the early films of David José Kohon.
For these reasons, a similar sense of responsibility towards film production, a
similar address to an audience no longer considered as mere consumers, and even a
recognizable if never explicit tendency towards ‘consciousness raising’ through
cinema, brings together both experiences emerging in the same period, even if the
difference between the films is undeniable. At the moment when the filmmakers’
sense of responsibility was radicalized, and when politics was conceived as the central
axis of cultural practices, these features would be present but now politicized. Some
of these ‘ethical filmmakers’ of the 1960s would change the direction of their
 POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM IN ARGENTINA 1 57

concerns or leave filmmaking, but others would move towards politics – as did Kuhn,
when he became involved in a group linked to Cine Liberación, or Murúa whose
project for filming ‘La Vı́ctima’, the very story by Vı́ctor Proncet on which Gleyzer’s
1973 film Los traidores (The Traitors) would be based, would link him with Cine de
la Base.1
However, these reasons that allow us today to consider the work of Birri and his
Buenos Aires contemporaries jointly were not the ones that guided the engagement
with their work in the years following its production. A new, taxonomic assessment
would now situate them as a whole in the category of ‘second cinema’, even though,
when the Cine Liberación group wrote its manifesto on the three types of cinema,
it recognized in them ‘an opening towards or attempt at cultural decolonization’.2
However, to talk of ‘Second Cina’ as an ‘opening’ implied not so much its
recognition in terms of filmmakers’ social responsibility, as a critique of the limits of
that attempt at cultural liberation. The political avant-garde declined to accept that
those who were engaged in the ‘decolonization’ of film practices would nonetheless,
like Birri, fall into the ‘reformist’ illusion of an industrial development of Argentine
cinema. But they also deplored the fact that the ‘New Argentine Cinema’ alternative
continued to respond to the demands of a progressive middle class (‘small groups
who preen themselves among the shrunken audience of the dilettante elites’) and still
sought commercial distribution, wanting ‘to enter into the great fortress’. Hence the
recognition of this first attempt at cultural decolonization remained limited to the
images of poverty on the margins of Santa Fe society that Tire dié (1958) documents,
because the political avant-garde’s critique, rejecting a naı̈ve belief in cinema, is
aimed at a certain ‘objective’ conception of the documentary that breaks from the
ideological domination to which its forms are subjugated. This critique is only
implicit in the manifesto but becomes evident in the films, if one considers that La
hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1966–68), the group’s first feature-
length film, overturns the supposed objectivity of the ‘classic’ documentary, or the
documentary ‘of observation’ (Nichols) to which Birri seems to subscribe.
Objectivity effectively presupposes a belief in cinema’s power to register reality:
whilst, on the one hand, there is no doubting what the image has registered there is
also, on the other, no room to question the way in which that registration (registro)
takes place. In Birri, the image’s power to register authorizes the presentation of the
documentary as counter-hegemonic information, no less objective than official
information: the voice-over at the beginning of Tire dié confirms this. This voice
becomes the embodiment of information as it recites the statistics that encapsulate
official knowledge about Santa Fe society, but it also appears to take a certain distance
when the statistics momentarily take on another tone, one which is slightly ironic,
and the figures themselves become heterogeneous and slightly laughable – which is
precisely at the moment in which, after a description of the area of the province, its
geographical location, population and economic activity, the voice-over intones that
so much ‘ink, paper and blotting paper’ is consumed, as well as so much bread,
glasses of beer, chalk in schools, metres of gauze and wire … that there are so many
ladies’ hairdressers. This ironic tone disappears, however, along with the voice-over
after the credits at the beginning, to give way to the ‘objective’ information of the
image and the ‘filmed’ social investigation. Objectivity lies not in the voice or in the
official figures but in the image. The inquiry so registered is the terrain of the
1 58 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

responsible filmmaker: no irony is subsequently possible. Thus the short is in no way

incompatible with official information, although it is superior to it in its informative
power, because it presents itself as something that will fill the gap in knowledge just
where ‘statistics becomes uncertain’, in the ‘shanty-towns’ of Santa Fe. Tire dié does
not hide its claim to offer information about a social reality which the government
and authorities are ignorant of, nor does it hide its intention that the audience should
‘become conscious’ of it.
If irony is abandoned with the voice-over, just as the inquiry begins, this will be
because from now on every mark of enunciation will have to be imperceptible. The
quest for objectivity lies in the disposition of the camera, in its imitation of
movements, and in the abandonment of the initial birds-eye view and the descent to
the human level. The film’s fixed axis and the short, lateral turns that this induces,
when accompanied by the displacement of the children and grown-ups, guarantees
the credibility of the scene and lends veracity to its registration of reality. For the
same reasons, montage is subordinated, subject to the passage from one interviewee
to another, or used to show the children’s activities around the railway bridge where
they ask passengers to ‘throw a dime’. Every cut thus responds to the demand for
information that is required: social knowledge emerges only from what the inhabi-
tants of the shanty towns say to camera, in the same way that some of the filmmakers
of the political groups will do, placing knowledge of society, history or politics
within the body of the interviewees, whether in documentary or fiction film. In Tire
dié there is no unifying montage, as there would be in the political avant-garde, since
montage is reduced to the succession of interviewees, none of whom corroborates a
political thesis. Neither do they engage in conversation with the filmmakers’ own
discourse since the image of reality is privileged over all of the voices. Whatever
thesis there might be is thus left to the viewer to decide on, as the booklet on the
origin of the Santa Fe School makes clear. For the documentary filmmakers, to
produce a cinema critical of ‘underdeveloped societies’ – a cinema that is not merely
a simple response to the conditions of underdevelopment – did not presuppose an
articulation of images that converged in accordance with some a priori idea, like the
idea of cinema contra underdevelopment. Thus the first film of the Cine Liberación
group, La hora de los hornos (1966–68), which is dominated by montage, is located
at the antipodes of such a conception: the School did not believe that documentary
film had the function of ‘producing solutions’ for the viewer out of what he/she saw,
as was the case with the group headed by Solanas and Getino, but of making him/her
see. However, the same documentary ‘of observation’ continued to rely on a certain
staging, even though this was in contradiction to the observational attitude of the
filmmakers. Staging manipulates the event that is being shown, making it depend on
an abstraction, that is, the idea previously held of it. Indeed, the final shots of the
‘tire dié’ sequence seem to abandon the neutrality that underlies the restriction of
movements and the subordination of montage to registration. It appears to ‘forget’
that montage now allows the single, objective point of view of the camera to
multiply, becoming that of the children as they run along the sides of the bridge, the
train passengers whose opinions are recounted, and even that of the camera itself.
The camera climbs the bridge, shoots from the sides of the train and from its interior,
and dominates as if returning to the panoramic bird’s-eye view of the opening. The
spatial unity of the event is thus fragmented and in its place we have an episode of
 POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM IN ARGENTINA 1 59

analysis. Here the School diverged from the Neorealist legacy, precisely as it altered
Bazin’s plus du réel, that ‘surplus of reality’ that the event offers in its integrity.
On this point the political avant-garde and the Santa Fe School could find
common ground, as Cine Liberación acknowledged in its exclusive quotation of this
fragment in its own documentary. The quotation chosen from the short is exactly the
sequence that was staged but only acknowledged its montage, because an analogous
staging of reality was inadmissible in Solanas and Getino’s film. The sequence is there
as part of Cine Liberación’s recognition of its own cinematic antecedents but also to
demonstrate its supersession of them, thus adding to it a meaning that it did not
originally possess, just as the film does with all the fragments it quotes and even with
its own fragmentary materials (whether shot by the team or extracted from
documentaries, advertising or from the archives). In the dialectic of image and text
appropriation which structures the entire first part of La hora de los hornos, quotation
fragments these images from the final sequence of Tire dié, introducing into them a
gaze that could only be the product of montage. The features of the children, whose
expression connotes impotence in the face of the world, here produce a sort of
brilliant application of the Kuleshov effect, achieving it at least twice: shots of a
crying child’s face are inter-cut with shots of advancing tanks, as if the child were
crying out of fear of this violence, as he might cry from hunger, from anxiety in the
face of death or from tiredness – depending on what complementary shots were
added. In the same way, the original look of the child from Tire dié who is running
parallel to the moving train becomes, through the insertion of shots of Buenos Aires,
a look from below at the buildings of the city, taken from the same imaginary vantage
point and with the same advancing movement. All the images of the city are thus
impregnated with the same look of the poverty-stricken child, who seems to observe
spatial omnipotence from his frail body as he fails to catch up.
Nevertheless, the staging of the ‘throwing the dice’ in Tire dié continues to be
conceived through the same notion of registration that permeates the whole film,
although its analytic content and the cutting that organizes it distances it from
Neorealism. In fact, with this paradigmatic sequence of poverty – children begging
for coins – the documentary makers wanted nothing more than to endow the image
with greater ‘realism’, presenting a scene that happened every day when the train
passed through. It was staged, however, because all the official images ignored it
completely. Thus staging the activity that children engaged in every day pursued the
same objective as the interviews, that is, making social reality known. In this sense,
the preparation of the staged scene formed part of the same intention that lay behind
the repetitive filming of the interviews, reworked over and over again in order to
achieve a certain naturalness in the responses. With these modifications, the
filmmakers wanted to make them more lifelike, and thus avoid a situation where the
interviewees would betray their awareness of the camera in front of them, for
instance displaying surprise or shyness. The film diary of the shooting of Tire dié
exhaustively reproduces the corrections that the filmmakers made to increase the
impression of registration, and to eliminate any indication that the words spoken by
the shanty-town inhabitants or their attitudes were, ultimately, acted. But this labour
of correction, which would make the image closer to the captured reality, came up
against a technical limit. Recording the sound track was a problem since the crew
lacked adequate equipment. The importance of the voices of the people from the
1 60 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

shantytowns meant that they could not be reduced to a barely intelligible murmur,
since the power of registration, its truth, also lay in what they said. Hence it was
necessary to remedy the imperfections of the soundtrack, even if this meant resorting
to the voices of professional actors (Francisco Petrone, Marı́a Rosa Gallo). This
response was in line with the same aim of social information, and its intelligence lay
in the fact that the feeble sound quality of the original soundtrack was not erased,
so that we can hear the two levels of sound superimposed: the background noise and
the barely distinguishable voices of the original speakers are mixed with the studio
recordings of the actors, as if they were talking at the same time. But such a
superimposition alters the deliberate neutrality of registration: just where the
filmmakers attempt to avoid any sign of enunciation, the latter returns with the
voices of the actors, as these frame and indirectly quote the words of the speakers,
thus producing an extraordinary collision of voices. Even this clever combination had
an unforeseen aspect: the filmmakers were not aware that the well-spoken voices of
the professionals would tend to correct the speakers’ pronunciation, in an almost
imperceptible way, eliminating certain ‘defects’ of speech, certain discursive ‘mis-
takes’ which the speakers made, even though the very title of the film was a
vindication of popular orality: tire dié. The correction in accordance with linguistic
norms, which no doubt passed without notice, not only made the voice of the
interviewees indirect, but also allowed the introduction of a normative gaze on the
other, even as the image with its neutrality sought to avoid it. This danger was also
evident in the work of the political avant-garde.

Incessant interpellation: Cine Liberación and La hora de

los hornos

The Cine Liberación group completely dismissed the notion of an image of reality,
since reality for them was not material to be registered and recorded but to be
transformed by means of cinema. The passage from a sense of documentary as a
registration of reality to one of the production of meaning in relation to it, was in
part a consequence of the historical changes that brought politics into the cultural
sphere, although the cultural sphere in Argentina has always been relatively imbri-
cated with political practice, and particularly so since the sixties (Sigal, 1988). The
moment of La hora de los hornos marked a shift away from Birri’s cinematographic
experience, framed by the developmentalism of Frondizi¡s government. With Onga-
nı́a’s militaty coup in 1966 there began an unprecedented history of clandestine work
in cinema, which affected all aspects of the shooting and distribution of feature film
– constraints unknown to the Santa Fe documentary filmmakers who had still enjoyed
the protection of a university structure. Hence the power of the film’s images was
not simply due to the energy of its visual and sound montages, but moreover to its
clandestine political condition, whose reconstruction would allow the sharing of an
experience that was nevertheless lost for ever. These historical conditions are
outlined in part in the group’s manifesto, where they refer to the importance of the
creation of specific locations for clandestine meetings between filmmakers and the
people. This reveals the condition that defines militant Argentine cinema, beyond the
political dogmas asserted by their films: the conquest of a new political ‘public’ and
 POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM IN ARGENTINA 1 61

space. What was at issue was no longer the audiences of ‘cowards’ or ‘traitors’ in
the moviehouses, nor a form of ‘holdout’ cinephilia in cinema clubs, just as the issue
was no longer about auteur directors, but about filmmakers whose functions could be
taken over by other militants. The audience was offered ideas that belonged to them,
or that they could make their own – depending on which parts of the film they saw
as well as their social location (workers, students, intellectuals) – because the first
film made by the Cine Liberación group was designed for different uses and put
together with different fragments at each showing. Although the way in which we
view the documentary now is unavoidably different, its very organization still testifies
to this extra-cinematic frame which gave birth to it.
However, its basic procedure, the ceaseless fragmentation of the images that
make up the first part of La hora de los hornos, ’Neo-colonialism and Violence’,
depends on a knowledge of the language of advertising, although put to other ends.
Solanas’s experience of publicity reveals an intellectual appreciation of its form and
an acute awareness of its use. This gives the film its basic structure but also
constitutes its limitation. The filmmakers undermined the advertising model by
intensifying the rhythms of montage and by deliberately inverting its meaning with
conscious political ends, but the technique of image manipulation is still intact,
although its aims are radically other, thus legitimizing its use. This becomes clear
when Solanas abandons montage and intense close-ups in his later films and
subordinates them to sequential shots and group shots. However, this does not mean
that in the documentary montage is only a means to a particular impact, because the
combination of images tends to work with a dominant mode in each of the chapters,
as if each section had its own rhythm. It has been said that the rhythm of the
montage, the combination organized by an inherent axis of composition in each part,
derives from avant-garde Soviet cinema. But there is no calculation of the compo-
nents of the shot à la Eisenstein, one of whose objectives based on reflex psychology
was the achievement of a precise combination of stimulus elements that would
produce the desired response effect. What we have here is rather a deliberate
organization of parts through which the film transcends the mere assertion of political
content, though being at the same time at the service of ideological commitment.
The influence of the Eisenstein model is limited to the dominance of montage, the
use of images as fragments, and above all to the refusal of staging: the group was
conscious that staging reality is also a form of domination. To reject staging is to deny
its presence altogether, to exclude it from the very universe of the film, without
offering any alternative staging of reality. Furthermore, the group saw themselves as
filmmakers who were contributing to a revolutionary change that had not yet been
produced, whereas Eisenstein’s films belonged to a cinema of a revolution that had
already taken place.
Such formal work separates La hora de los hornos from so-called ‘social documen-
tary’, which would simply privilege the political information that a film conveyed
with no attention to the vehicle through which those ideas were expressed. On the
other hand, a close reading of the film reveals that it is engaged in bringing together
what has traditionally been seen as irreconcilable, that is, the political vanguard and
the aesthetic avant-garde (Stam, 1990). Solanas and Getino’s documentary is an
attempt to produce a film where a cinema which is an instrument of politics and a
non-instrumental political cinema come together in a compatible way: an aesthetically
1 62 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

advanced cinema asserts its autonomy in relation to politics, although its avant-garde
filmmakers do not give up their political ideas. Even though the film does not achieve
this synthesis, we can see it working on two fronts simultaneously: it puts forward
a political content and alters the form of the ‘classic’ social documentary, as it had
been practised by the Santa Fe school. The constant work on the fragment, their
selection for effect, the shift between the parts of a prevalent axis of organization,
all presuppose a conception of form in its materiality, as can be seen in the films of
the aesthetic avant-garde, even though political ‘messages’ do not predominate in
these. In other types of cinema of the political avant-garde, such as that of Cine de
la Base, political radicalism is always presented in the form of superimposed
discourses, discourse-overs, so to speak, ‘explanations’ of social processes, with no
trace of a will to formal transformation, although this does not imply a naı̈vety with
regard to form but merely a different conception of documentary. La hora de los
hornos is one of the few Latin American films to attempt such a synthesis, but part
of the difficulty in realizing it lay in the fact that its obvious textual work always
yielded to the dominance of the word (voice-overs and written texts), because the
word, as is well-known, is a more powerful and more effective vehicle for ideological
transmission than the image.
The documentary begins with a darkened screen, a black background ac-
companied by increasingly loud percussion. The first thing that can be discerned is
the brilliant flash of a match, or the flame of a torch which immediately goes out.
Like a spark that will ignite the ‘revolutionary fire’ the first image of film thus
announces through its effect the virtually uninterrupted series of ‘explosive combina-
tions’ that will follow, since the entire film is a deliberate attempt to cause this sort
of impact, as if each one were a brief flash of white, blinding light. There then follow
a series of images of much shorter duration concerning police repression, which are
broken off just as weapons are fired. The brilliant light of the lit match thus finds a
continuity with the flash of arms during the repression of popular violence, although
the latter is less visible than the former. In these moments comprehension is slow,
impeded by the slow, percussive rhythm of the images. The aim here is to induce
a questioning, to suspend reason and to capture the audience emotionally, precisely
to the extent that they cannot come to a decision about the meaning of the images.
These are moments of total vision, to the extent that vision has no guide as to how
to read the images, and they are not confined to the prologue but punctuate it again
and again until the voice or texts intervene to prevent their proliferation. In this way,
the moments of uncertainty give way to the evidence imposed by the voices and
signs, the innumerable quotations from a myriad different sources (Aimé Cesaire,
Perón, Scalabrini Ortiz, Che Guevara, Fanon, Evita, Sartre, et cetera) concerning
violence, liberation, the system and the ‘falsity’ of liberal history. The film offers
itself as a refutation of such a history, constituting the telling of another version of
Argentine history, but in this case heir to historical revisionism. But this version of
history does not consist merely of the images themselves, although they are used to
enhance the argument, nor does the call to popular violence depend strictly on the
effects of montage, because both are in the last instance affairs of the word.
The punctuation of the moments of greatest impact thus produces a recurrent
alteration of perception in the audience, who have to constantly readjust their vision
to the change or to the unexpected cut. It is a movement of incessant interpellation
 POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM IN ARGENTINA 1 63

not limited by the end of the film: once the screening is over, discussion begins, or
discussion interrupts the film whose basic modality is none other than the cut, the
interruption of the flow of images. The very possibility of cutting at any moment in
order to begin a discussion is thus given by the very articulation of the film, which
works with the fragment as a unity, quoting fragments from other films (Birri, Rı́os,
Ivens, Hirzsman) and inspiring the quotation of its own images as fragments in other
films – as in Marin Karmitz’s Camarades (Mestman, 2001). Thus interpellation
precedes the film but also constitutes it, modifies it and continues it. For Solanas and
Getino, there is no reality to register but only a call to a consciousness of it in order
to transform it. However, once the change in the public scene is effected (the return
of Peronism to power) the conjuncture then modifies the film (the well-known
cropping of the shot of the dead Che and the addition of other images), and thus
signals the limit of interpellation a posteriori, the change implying the abandonment
of documentary for features of a singular type of fiction, which –while not excluding
documentary features– now combines them with strong allegorical elements.

The filmmaker and the filmed: Vallejo and Cine Liberación

If La hora de los hornos did not hide its intention to present a total narrative of
Argentine history within a Latin American framework and as part of the Third
World, this aim did not define Gerardo Vallejo’s first full-length feature, although the
filmmaker did form part of the group. El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales (The
Road to Old Reales’s Death, 1971–72) still shared an idea of documentation but this
was limited to recording the life of the sugar harvest workers of Tucumán. Here a
previously constituted thesis does not predominate over reality, nor is there a
deliberate attempt at objectivity, even though neither thesis nor registration is
rejected altogether. The filming of the stories of the Reales family, the old man and
his three sons, does not try to avoid the presence of the documentarist, as in the films
of Birri and the School. Rather, this presence is obvious and made visible in every
painstaking movement of the camera and in its notorious greed to register the
smallest details of bodies and rural environment. Each gesture, each feature is
captured as if the point were to exhaust them, as if these details gathered together
within them the entire history of the exploitation of the workers, or as if the features
themselves and their marks and the shape of the workers’ hands concentrated more
of what the filmmakers claimed to say and show through the voices and images.
Something of the real, irreducible to discourse, remains in the image, similar to what
occurs in the Cine Liberación group’s first documentary where the image is
nevertheless charged with falsity. The greediness of the camera to register each
minutia emerges in this repeated use of detailed shots which run the risk of becoming
abstracted from the figures, as in the sequence of the healer in which his mouth,
breathing out the healing smoke, occupies the whole of the image, or in the close-ups
of the fingers of a child sorting corn. However, the details, the extreme closeness of
the camera to the object, do not seem to be enough: Vallejo’s documentary also
requires a singular staging of certain episodes, not denied as such or fully attested to,
which have to be reconstructed because they took place off-camera. The episode of
the rape in the canefields (when Mariano rapes one of his captives) or the domestic
1 64 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

violence (when the lad and his mother are separated) come out of the same testimony
that shapes the film, but their histories have something that the filmmakers need to
recover for the image. For Vallejo, staging is restitution, a response to something
seen as an insufficiency of registration and at the same time the consciousness of the
documentary.
There is thus no contradiction: the belief in registration, in the indexical
character of the image, is maintained alongside the consciousness of registration itself,
of its technique and technology, since all registration is also an arrangement of
equipment, lighting, selection, framing and bodies. In El camino hacia la muerte del
viejo Reales one knows that the presence of the camera is not innocent and that the
way in which the subjects are framed within the story is the imposition of a radically
different gaze, which despite being conscious of social differences is nevertheless
socially different. One also knows that the camera arrived too late and that the old
man’s death could not be registered but only represented a posteriori for an image
with the appearance of a document. Vallejo seems to resolve the dilemma of the
documentary maker who knows that documentation is a forgery, but not by resorting
to the worked neutrality of the early Birri or by engaging in the total manipulation
of fragments to emotional effect as with Solanas and Getino, where the work done
on the fragmented images is also undoubtedly a consciousness of the apparatus as
such. Vallejo considered his film to be a composite of ‘notes’, as if it were a question
of ‘drafts’ which are taken to be such by the voice-over as it recites how and where
the film was shot, the number of days worked, how it was to live with the peasants,
and the death off-camera of the old man and its imaginary reconstruction, ‘in the way
he would have wanted to die’, drunk in the canefield. Hence the relentless
movement of the camera, which at time leaves behind what it has focused on and
moves on its own through space, could be nothing other than the assumption of this
difference, this unassimilable out-of-phased-ness of the documentary maker in
relation to the objects of filmmaking. ‘These images are a bit of a mixture of our
presence and their reality [of the others]’, claimed Joris Ivens, the Belgian documen-
tary maker quoted by the group and a permanent presence amongst the Argentine
political avant-garde.
This assumption is clearly shown in the second ‘testimony’, that of the policeman
son of old Reales, Mariano. Vallejo’s film does not fail to show the ideological
contradiction of its interviewee, as when it shows the filmmakers’ surprise when they
realize that before his employment as a police officer Mariano had been a ‘workers’
delegate’ and ‘one of the most rebellious and combative’ at that. However, the
contradiction of the trade unionist worker, now working for the forces of order,
continues to be reworked when some ad-hoc verses are included in which the
filmmakers’ gaze is reinserted, but this time in words challenging the worker cop’s
involvement in the suppression of his class fellows. Until this point, the gaze is an
effort at empathy with the world constructed in images, and the film is even
presented as a political redemption of the oppressed, since it gives the right to a voice
and to an image to those lives that do not yet possess them. But now, on the
contrary, El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales judges, and with this reveals that it
belongs to Cine Liberación, at a similar point to the elucidation of the image in La
hora de los hornos. In Solanas and Getino’s film there could be no place for
contradiction amongst the oppressed, or amongst the enemy class, or in the audience,
 POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM IN ARGENTINA 1 65

cowardly until it responds to the film’s interpellation, since the documentary

emphasized struggle and the call to liberation, and this aim which dominated
everything, before and after the film, denied the existence of any contradiction. But
not every call to the armed struggle, as with the analogous but ideologically different
one of the Cine de la Base in their fiction film Los traidores (1973), renounced work
on contradiction: in this film, contradiction is constitutive of the status of the
traitor, the central character, whose consciousness of treason strikes him in memory
and disturbs his dreams.
Nevertheless, in La hora de los hornos social class requires a subtle sort of work
with regard to the film’s sound, which here constitutes a parallel dimension to the
visual, an almost autonomous one, but no less integrated in terms of its impact. The
National Anthem juxtaposed with poverty in Tucumán or a popular song as
accompaniment to the images of work in the slaughterhouse and advertising do not
constitute the only use of sound, because its function is not just to reinforce the
impact of the visual montage. In the prologue, the percussion crescendo has the
same aim as the images, thus doubling the rapid montage of images with blows of
sound. But towards the close of the sequence, as the images grow longer in
duration, the blows change or deform, so that the soundtrack consists of sharp cries
seemingly without reference, as if they were laments, or expressions of suffering
under oppression. In fact what is being worked with are African songs ‘played
backwards, which gives connotation an openness rather than an anchorage. In this
sound world, even the oral ‘testimonies’ of the workers (in part 3, ‘Everyday
Violence’), which are intercut with each other, seem to fuse with each other, so that
they become only traces of words, or a mere rumour of what they once were,
becoming mixed up, forming a sonic mass that is each and every voice at once,
without distinction, as if all that remained were the substance, the material support
of what was said. And with this, the content, the experience of the workers, is
revealed as a growing sonic substance, just as the shot turns into a black background,
with superimposed luminous circles, the lamps on the miners’ hats. The voices of
the people thus form a growing noise, become the voice of the people, although with
no reference in sound and with no individuality. This is unlike Vallejo’s aim, where
the unique, singular tone of real voices is what counts. By contrast, the sound of the
enemy class does not lose individuality, and it does not merge into noise: the
recordings of the voices of the oligarchy or of the bourgeoisie (in part 5 ‘The
Oligarchy’) give them a certain sharpness, because here it is the antipopular
character of what they are saying that must be understood, even if not all of what
is said can be reduced to the content of their speech. The reactionary nature of their
political opinions can be seen not only in their frivolous justifications for poverty and
repression but above all in the tone, in certain turns of phrase, or in words they use
that are never used by the people. In effect, it is not singularity as the unmistakable
grain of the voice of old Reales that needs to be indicated but the clarity of voice as
everything that it connotes. The intelligible voice in La hora de los hornos is the voice
of connotations, full of acquired meanings. The oligarch or the bourgeois acquires
his or her social character when their turns of phrase or terms of discourse are
associated with cultural stereotypes, accompanied by documentary images of the
presence of the military on the streets. Even the feminizing of certain voices, their
affectation, and also the leisure activities which the images display (bourgeois in
1 66 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

beachwear, on yachts, playing golf, their indolent attendance at rural shows) are all
themes associated with the ruling classes. Some of these were ridiculed by Julio
Ludueña a little later in his Alianza para el progreso (Alliance for Progress, 1971) a film
which worked on the commonplaces of the Left, although with a different idea of
cinema and its relation to politics.

Documentary staging: Gleyzer and Cine de la Base

With El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales the Argentine documentary maker
acknowledged his active participation in what he was documenting, and this brings
him close to the cinema of Raymundo Gleyzer, whose political ideas were fought out
with those of Cine Liberación. Gleyzer came out of ethnological documentary, where
he worked with Jorge Prelorán, but came to acknowledge Joris Ivens as his maestro.
In Gleyzer’s shift to document Latin American social reality (Brazil, Mexico,
Argentina and even projects for Chile and Bolivia) we can see the model of Ivens’s
itinerant cinema. But the initial union between ethnologist and politician already
expresses an indissoluble relationship between the filmmaker and his objects: and as
with Vallejo, this relationship takes on the difference between the filmmaker and
what he was filming. However, where Vallejo took on this out-of-phasedness,
underlining the film’s character of a ‘note’, Gleyzer was to work on the basis of a
certain non-intervention which he had learned as an ethnologist, attempting to
observe what was in front of the camera without modifying the transformations that
could thus take place in the course of shooting. It was in these unforeseen changes
that the filmmaker found his place, precisely when he did not modify what was
discrepant with respect to his aim: this unexpected emergence constituted a
guarantee of registration of reality. But in its turn, registration was reconfirmed when
the filmmaker did not hide his presence, when he left the tremor of his hand in the
finished film, ‘the exact tremor of the person communicating with a camera’, as his
cameraman Humberto Rı́os said (quoted in Peña & Vallina, 2000). Registration was
thus strengthened with regard to the unforeseeable, no less than in the effective
presence of the person filming, as in the chance movements of the camera that
displace the frame or stain the image for moments, even if they did not reach the
scale of Vallejo’s vigorous camera movements as a way of taking on the issue of
enunciation.
This does not imply that the capture of the unforeseen excluded the political
thesis. On the contrary, the discourse of his interviewees and their presence
constitute irrefutable evidence of one. In Vallejo’s documentary, the lives of the
Reales family, who sought to be a part of the entire history of the sugar harvest
workers, were akin to those of Gleyzer’s interviewees, because their particular lives
stood as pars pro toto of their class and their social and political history. Gleyzer would
work with their testimony throughout his production, because he understood that
evidence of the historical process was found there, as it left its physical mark. In
Ocurrido en Hualfı́n (Incident in Hualfı́n, 1965) the political idea – in spite of Prelorán
– seemed to be embodied in the three descendants of the Aymara Indians, because
their partial histories represented, according to Gleyzer, ‘the history of three
generations affected by Peronism’, in whose lives ‘everything remains the same’
 POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM IN ARGENTINA 1 67

(Peña & Vallina, 2000). Similarly, the old revolutionaries of México, la revolución
congelada (Mexico, the Frozen Revolution, 1970) are the living memory of a popular
struggle, as they tell of their experience and wonder about the course of the history
they helped to forge. The historical narratives voiced by the ex-soldiers, and even by
those for whom the revolution meant an irreversible change (the landowners of the
Dı́az period), thus establish a dialogue with the interviewers’ words off camera; and
the voice-over, which gives an account of the process of the Mexican Revolution and
its conservative dénouement, seems to share this global political insight with the
implicit knowledge of the individuals who confirm it. The ‘dialogical’, ‘interactive’
character (Nichols, 1997) of Gleyzer’s documentary thus contrasts with the single,
dominant voice of Cine Liberación’s first full-length film, whose thesis does not
require interviews in order to find supporting evidence,3 and where the presence of
voices always demands further work to support the connotation of these individual
sounds. The political thesis in Gleyzer and the Cine de la Base depends, then, on the
witnesses of what history once presented as possibility but which others have
distorted, or the testimony of those who find themselves ‘with no alternative’
between their representatives and the oppressors.
Me matan si no trabajo y si trabajo me matan (They kill me if I don’t work and they
kill me if I do, 1974) posed this political situation from the very title. Although the
title in fact refers to death by police repression or to death on the job (lead poisoning
among the workers at Insud), the closed alternative is the same, because between
‘the bosses and the bureaucracy’ there is no space for political choice. It is exactly
in the midst of the trade union representatives that you find the people who betray
their own principles. Whether it is Peronism, the Mexican PRI (Institutionalized
Revolutionary Party) or the trade union bureaucrats who turn their back on their
own experience of struggle, the nucleus of the thesis pays privileged attention to the
veiled forms of betrayal, or takes it upon itself to bring them to light. Gleyzer focuses
on the class-consciousness of those who betrayed the class in whose ranks they were
active, although not all of his films can be reduced to this aim. Los traidores (The
traitors, 1973) is a synthesis of Gleyzer’s militant cinema, since it takes up the
political idea of betrayal but in order to produce a fiction based now on a character
who earns the label, opposed to the memories of the older workers in whose
conversations the history of their struggles is preserved.
Vallejo had already employed the means of a forged history with the young
(‘pibe’) Reales, which was also an artifice used to turn a common man’s life into the
desired destiny of an entire social group. Vallejo claimed that the ‘Pibe’ had no
knowledge of trade union activity, that his ‘road’ led elsewhere (Vallejo, 1984). In
this he deliberately created an imaginary alternative, with the aim of giving ‘Pibe’
‘the possibility that might have been’, a consciousness of his class. Vallejo, in other
words, superimposed the features of an ideal character onto those of the real person.
But this operation does not need to be impugned, in that it responded to the same
interest in re-creating episodes that took place off-camera. To do justice to old Reales
by filming the death that he wanted is as imaginary as the change that is imposed on
the life of his son, as if Pibe himself were engaged in a sort of justice, when he
accepts that he will ‘act out’ his militancy, becoming the character of his own life.
Gleyzer proceeds in a similar but inverse way in Los traidores, when his character, the
trade unionist Barrera, becomes a composite of features taken from historical
1 68 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

unionists (Miguel, Vandor, Rucci). Recognizable elements taken from real individu-
als make up the character, so that it can represent them all. Expressions, gestures
and words reverberate with the audience’s knowledge of trade unionism, no matter
how minimal. These features seek to contribute to the raising of the audience’s
consciousness, because the film does not just address the militant but all those
unaware of who rules them. Diagesis explains the political process, whereas in the
documentary the thesis is given to the voice-over in dialogue with the voices of the
people.
For these reasons the militant documentary and the political fiction are not
opposed but can be seen as two modalities in collusion: they are congruent with
each other, because the staging of the fiction does not diverge from the conception
of the documentary. One point of coincidence is that the militant documentary does
not exclude staging, since the political meaning of documentary is based not only on
what it says about the social process but on the new staging it offers as another
image of the reality whose representations it disputes. Gleyzer’s cinema seems to
assume our knowledge of reality being staged, so that it becomes the aim of the
militant filmmaker to give another version of it, to reveal the material interests that
lie behind it. Swift 1972, one of the Communiqués of the ERP (People’s Revolution-
ary Army), begins with a short series of shots in which someone walks into a public
bathroom where he finds, hidden behind the washbasin mirror, an envelope that
contains information about the kidnapping of the English consul, the owner of the
Swift meatpacking plant. The rest of the documentary, which justifies the revol-
utionary action, does not need to resort to another instance of staging, because the
purpose of political identification has already been achieved. Through this little scene
the viewer is expected to share the film’s viewpoint, or to be induced to enter
into the world thus staged, since he will be aware of the political content of the
letter known through clandestine means, in a situation similar to the one the film
offers.
The resemblance thus depends on the act of simultaneous reading, because as
the ‘actor’ in the scene reads, the paper with the secret information becomes visible
for whoever is watching the image. Thus the text’s political information does not
break into the image from outside, but rather occupies the space of the shot in the
world staged on screen. Here Gleyzer avoids inserting placards to interrupt the
images and inscribe dogma, as happens with the violent irruption that is part of
Solanas’s and Getino’s documentary montage, but at the same time it does make
them present throughout the film. Gleyzer makes them part of the image, of the
world that is offered within it: the thesis can be ‘inscribed’ in the same reality that
is presented in the film. Me matan si no trabajo… shows the militant workers painting
their own posters: even the credits are a material part of the image, because the title
of the film itself comes from the placards carried by the Insud workers on their
demonstrations. In the same way, the name of the group that made the film,
Cine de la Base, can be read in the graffiti on the walls of the space that the film
documents. The information about lead poisoning, the struggle and its success
is written in contemporary newspapers, the same graphic material that is used in
the homage to Ortega Peña offered by the film. If, in the one case, the point
of coincidence lies in including a staged sequence in a documentary in order to
give another representation of a reality that is already staged, in the fiction feature
 POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM IN ARGENTINA 1 69

it lies in taking materials from the archive in order to construct some of the
diegetic stagings. Gleyzer’s cinema thus defines politics as a form of staging, and
in this he comes close to Vallejo, although the group to which he belonged would
deny it: for them, it is fiction that will do the staging, but this time backed up by
allegory.

Translated by Philip Derbyshire

Notes
1 See Martı́n Mestman’s essay ‘Postales del cine militante argentino en el mundo’
(Mestman, 1995) and the book by Fernando Martı́n Peña and Carlos Villena (2000)
on Raymondo Gleyzer.
2 See their manifesto ‘Hacia un tercer cine: Apuntes y experencias para el desarrollo
de un cine de liberación en el tercer mundo’ (Solanas and Getino, 1988).
3 Except in parts II and III of La hora de los hornos, where in fact the interviews serve
to corroborate what has been proposed at the level of the voiceover.

Works Cited
Birri, F. 1964. La escuela documental de Santa Fe. Santa Fe: Documento.
Daney, S. 1986. L’oeil du cinéaste en plus (cinéma militant), La rampe. Parı́s: Cahiers
du cinéma.
Mestman, M. 1995. Notas para una historia de un cine de contrainformación y lucha
polı́tica. Causas y azares, n° 2, otoño 1995.
Mestman, M. 2001. La exhibición del cine militante. Teorı́a y práctica en el Grupo Cine
Liberación. In AAVV, Actas oficiales del VIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación
Española de historiadores del cine. Madrid: AACC.
Mestman, M. 2002. Postales del cine militante argentino en el mundo. Kilómetro 111,
No. 2, September.
Monteagudo, L. 1993. Fernando Solanas. Buenos Aires: CEAL.
Nichols, B. 1997. Modalidades documentales de representación, La representación de la
realidad. Cuestiones y conceptos sobre el documental. Barcelona: Paidós.
Peña, F.M. and C. Vallina. 2000. El cine quema. Raymundo Gleyzer. Buenos Aires:
Ediciones de la Flor.
Sarlo, B. 1998. La noche de las cámaras despiertas, La máquina cultural. Buenos Aires:
Ariel.
Sigal, S. 1988. Intelectuales y poder en la década del sesenta. Buenos Aires: Puntosur.
Solanas, F. And O. Getino. 1988. Hacia un tercer cine. Apuntes y experiencias para el
desarrollo de un cine de liberación en el Tercer Mundo. In AAVV, Hojas de cine.
Testimonios y documentos del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. México: Fundación Mexicana
de Cineastas, UNAM.
Stam, R. 1990. The Hour of the Furnaces and the two avant-gardes. In The social
1 70 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

documentary in Latin America, edited by J. Burton. Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh.
Vallejo, G. 1984. Un camino hacia el cine. Buenos Aires: El Cid.

Emilio Bernini is
an editor of the Argentine film journal Kilómetro 111. He teaches at
the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad del Cine.