Fernando E. Solanas

A sentimental longing mixed with political commitment, concern with the formal aspects of film, and the dream of an ideal imagined Argentine community permeate all of Solanas’s works. Arguably one of the most internationally acclaimed Latin American filmmaker-activists, Solanas broke into the world cinema stage at a time of significant global changes with a film that epitomizes all those qualities. The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos, 1968), co-written with Octavio Getino, was made when the New Latin American Cinema was in the process of consolidation, when the Cuban Revolution and the French May of 1968 were globally spreading a climate of political agitation and when Argentina was under the influence of a military regime that proscribed Peronism and was experiencing the passage of many intellectuals – like Solanas himself – from a traditional left into a national left (Mestman 2003: 119). The avant-garde documentary style of The Hour of the Furnaces succeeds in revealing one of Solanas’s principal preoccupations: the capacity of cinema to advocate national and continental liberation from imperialism and multinational capital. [Opening Paragraph]