Solanas, Fernando

b. 16 February 1936, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Fernando “Pino” Solanas is, on the strength of the film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Ovens, 1968) and the accompanying manifesto “Hacia un tercer cine” (“Towards a Third Cinema”), the Latin American filmmaker most recognised by the world cinema community. Made in collaboration with Octavio Getino, these works provided a model and theoretical foundation for a formally avant-garde anti-colonial cinema, but through five decades of exiles and returns Solanas has produced a varied body of work, the quality and importance of which is recognised both in his home country of Argentina and internationally, with films such as Sur (The South, 1988), for which he was awarded the best director prize at Cannes, and Memoria del saqueo (Social Genocide, 2004), his return to militant documentary filmmaking that provided a gripping account of the political situation in his home country.

Solanas, born in 1936, is from the upper-middle-class Buenos Aires suburb of Olivos. The cultural circles of his youth included many fellow renegade middle-class intellectuals engaged in anti-establishment culture. While later working in advertising, he wrote comic-book and photo-novel scripts, before making two short films in the early-1960s, after which he began the work for which he would become famous.

Solanas and Argentine Nationalist Populism

While Solanas’ filmmaking modes have varied, his politics have remained both consistent and central, so any discussion of the former must start with the latter. Solanas’ work belongs to the national-populist revision of Argentine history that in the first half of the 20^th century began to redefine the nation as its pueblo—or people, referring specifically to the masses of ever-exploited workers and peasants—and identified authenticity with the popular, as opposed to the traditional deference to European culture that had guided the nation since its independence. Redefined in this way, Argentina is revealed as a nation long subjugated by imperialists enabled by the local oligarchy. In the struggle for national sovereignty the protagonist is by necessity the pueblo, which leads to privileging of the political possibilities that lie outside of politics proper, in collective action. The legitimising moment is October 17, 1945, the legendary popular mobilisation that returned the then-Labor Secretary Juan Domingo Perón to centrality after his forced resignation and arrest by the military, which was uneasy about his charisma and popularity among the proletariat. The events were organised by the meatpacking unions, but legend places Perón’s wife Eva in the starring role, exhorting the multitudes of descamisados (shirtless) who flooded to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the presidential palace, to demand the return of the conductor del pueblo (leader of the people).

The populist reinterpretation of Latin American and Argentine history inverts the classical formulation of Argentine history, which takes as its origin the 1845 book Facundo, Civilization and Barbarism, by the liberal theorist and future president Domingo F. Sarmiento. Facundo privileges all things European (as “civilization”) over the autochtonous (as “barbarism”), a discourse that favoured the oligarchy—the “fifty families” that owned much of the land and had access to Europe and its culture—and, according to revisionists, resulted in an inferiority complex that allowed for the perpetuation of neocolonialism: The post-Independence economic exploitation of the pueblo by foreign economic powers and the “satellite classes” that serve them. National populism takes October 17 as its own defining moment, and sees popular action as destined to eventually destroy the neocolonial order.

But since an impoverished and illiterate pueblo is incapable of understanding the complex causes of its own condition, a necessary catalyst for change is the middle-class intellectual, or intelligentsia. Although the populist revisionism of the days of Perón tended to have a strong anti-intellectual bent—since traditionally those considered to be intellectuals were organic to the oligarchy—its subsequent generations eventually recognised the need to cultivate intelligentsia support, and made the middle-class intellectual an important sector of its audience. Such a reading of Argentine history appears as a constant throughout Solanas’ long career. He is a member of the revolutionary left of the 1960s, which reinterpreted the Peronist phenomenon, pointing out the traditional left’s failure to recognise it as a source of truly revolutionary energy. In doing so his generation brought together the previously incompatible causes of Marxism and Nationalism. (1)

During his long career Solanas has worked in two filmmaking modes. The first is that of the militant documentary à la Pino: hand-held camera, passionate and at times indignant authorial voiceover, respectful of those on the side of the pueblo, disdainful of its exploiters. The second mode is that of fiction films that deal with the Argentine experience through formal experimentation and the use of national symbols such as tango music and dance.

Solanas’ work can be understood as belonging to three periods. First, made mostly in cooperation with Getino, the militant work of the Grupo Cine Liberación, the landmarks of which are La hora de los hornos and the manifesto “Por un tercer cine”. The period ends with Solanas’ exile in 1976. The next period consists of four fiction features that deal mostly with Argentine identity and the experience of exile, the most well known of which is Sur. In his most recent period Solanas has returned to the political documentary, now shooting on video, to deal with the aftermath of the “Menemato”, the decade-long presidency of Carlos Menem, during which massive corrupt privatisations crippled the nation’s economy.

Three films will not be discussed here due to problems of availability: the 1962 fiction short Seguir andando, the 1963 short documentary Reflexión ciudadana, and a documentary on disability, Le regard des autres, made in 1979 during Solanas’ exile in Paris, produced by the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

Militant Filmmaking: The Grupo Cine Liberación

Solanas’ first, and still most important feature, La hora de los hornos, had repercussions across Latin America and the world as a model of a politically militant cinema, by providing counter-information to contradict the long-established discourses that naturalised social inequalities and provided cover for elites who, in cooperation with foreign capital, exploited the lands and peoples of the continent. The film, in what Solanas dubbed a “cine-acto,” provokes the spectator to act through the use of cinema vérité and newsreel footage, interviews, shock montage and by interrupting itself to call for debate.

It was made during the authoritarian military government of Juan Carlos Onganía (not the more recent and notorious dictatorship), which waged repressive campaigns against universities and avant-garde culture (closing the Instituto Di Tella, center of experimentation in the visual arts, and prohibiting the opera Bomarzo, by Alberto Ginastera, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema), but during which the opposition sectors previously in conflict which each other were unifying under the banner of Peronism. Made clandestinely, La hora de los hornos documents both the “quotidian violence” of social injustice and the repressive violence that enforces it. But its radicality lies in its move beyond documentation into the sphere of militant agitation, the challenge it issues to the passive spectator through its conception of the “cine-acto,” inspired by, among others, Frantz Fanon’s pronouncement that “every spectator is a coward or a traitor.” Screenings were also carried out in clandestinely, with space opened for debate, and provocations built into the screening. These tactics were designed to directly mobilise the masses, but also addressed the middle-class intellectual, or as Solanas said in 1969, “the imperious necessity for the militant intelligentsia to root itself in Argentine reality and to contribute to the process of internal liberation of the movement of the masses.” (2)

The film has three parts. In the first, “Neocolonialism and Violence,” 16-millimeter footage filmed in factories, mines and cane fields is seen as a voiceover provides statistics. This material, shot by Solanas and Getino, is often recreated, acted out for the camera, as are the voices of the oligarchy, by which the cattle-breeding landowners are portrayed as culturally alienated, considering themselves more European than Argentine. These images are accompanied at times by a driving percussive soundtrack composed by Solanas, and at others by pop music that creates an ironic counterpoint to the image, a “détournement” of cosmopolitan pop culture, of which the most well-known sequence inter-cuts graphic slaughterhouse footage with print advertisements showing a superficial and oblivious bourgeoisie.

The second part lays out the populist historical revision, employing archival footage to present October 17 and Perón as “expressions of the people,” and, in the grand ideological shift of the time, precursors of the Marxist-inspired liberation struggles of the 1960s. This reconciliation of two previously incompatible revolutions—that of Perón (who persecuted the Argentine communists during his presidency) with that of Che Guevara—is a central imperative of the film, the third part of which consists of various calls for revolutionary violence.

Around the time of the making of La hora de los hornos, Solanas formed with Getino the Cine Liberación group, dedicated to, as their manifesto “Por un tercer cine” says, calling into question the prevalent models of “first cinema”—that of the industry, of which Argentina had a rich history—and “second cinema”—that of the auteur, which had momentarily flourished in Argentina in the early-1960s without establishing itself as a viable mode of filmmaking—and proposing a “third cinema” that is collective, formally experimental and above all politically militant. The manifesto addresses the problem of the passive cinemagoer by theorising the “film-act” as a “meeting” at which debate is given as much importance as the film itself.

With their next two films, Perón: la revolución justicialista (Perón: The Justicialist Revolution, 1971), and Perón: actualización doctrinaria para la toma del poder (Perón: Doctrinary Update for the Taking of Power, 1971), Solanas and Getino further explored Peronism’s potential contribution to the anticolonial struggle. The figure of Perón had retained its mythic power to inspire popular movements in Argentina, so Solanas and Getino set out to bring home images and the voice of the general for the first time since his overthrow. They interviewed Perón in Spain, where he was in exile, and put together two films in which they question the general on preselected themes, upon which he discourses with an impressive charisma and a surprising sense of humor. (3)

Each film has a very specific ideological design. In La revolución justicialista, directed at all Argentines, a casually dressed and relaxed Perón recounts a personal history of his first presidency. The film links Peronism and its popular appeal—facilitated by Perón’s revisionist account, based on easily graspable binaries such as that of the pueblo versus the oligarchy—to the leftist revolutionary struggles of the time. Actualización doctrinaria para la toma del poder specifically instructs members of the Peronist Movement how to rebuild its political machinery. The general, now more formally dressed, theorises on political systems, presents his own third position, and discusses his nationalist precursors, as his young wife Isabel sits mutely to his right. He was at that time becoming increasingly active, pulling the strings back in Argentina that would lead to his return to the presidency in 1973, which he held for less than a year before dying, leaving the scarcely-qualified Isabel in power. During his presidency he split violently with his more revolutionary supporters, leaving a polarised Argentina that would soon sink into the notorious military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983.

Between 1973 and 1975 Solanas, now without Getino, made what he called an “epic of the Argentine people,” the Glauber Rocha-inspired fiction feature Los hijos de Fierro (first screened in 1978). It appropriates “El gaucho Martín Fierro”, the 1872 narrative poem by José Hernández that recounts the exploits of the outlaw gaucho who was later proclaimed a model of Argentine authenticity by revisionists both elitist and populist. By equating Fierro with Perón (and aided by a voiceover in the same octosyllabic payador verse as the source poem), Solanas mythologises the Peronist resistance while presenting in a more realist key his own historical moment, from the 1955 right-wing coup that ousted Perón until just before his return to power.

The structure of the film is borrowed loosely from the poem, and consists of three episodes. In the first, “la ida” (the departure), Fierro’s “sons” are workers who lead a factory takeover in solidarity with twelve fired compañeros. When the police violently retake the factory the resistance passes into clandestinity. The workers/guerrillas are seen reading communiqués from Perón, making bombs, and finally captured and tortured. The title of the second episode, “el desierto” (the desert), metaphorically represents Perón’s long absence. During the wait for his return, day-to-day family conflicts, union intrigues and other dangers divide the pueblo. The voice of Vizcacha—a malevolent character from “El gaucho Martín Fierro”—advises individualism and corruption, as the union is reduced to gangsterism. The third section is “la vuelta” (the return), in which the Peronist popular struggle intensifies. Documentary footage of 1968 street battles (the Cordobazo student and worker uprisings) is seen. The pueblo unites in revolt, but state repression touches off an urban guerrilla “integral war,” to which the military responds with more repression, torture and executions.

While the film was being made, Argentina was undergoing a period of intense political violence, and when the military took power in 1976 Solanas was targeted by right-wing paramilitaries and went into exile. In France, he remained active with human rights groups, made the documentary Le regard des autres (1979), and began work on what would be the first film of the next phase of his career, Tangos, el exilio de Gardel.

The Return to Argentina and Fiction Filmmaking

In 1983, shortly after the fall of the military dictatorship, Solanas returned to Buenos Aires. His next films would address, often through metaphor, the experience of exile, both exterior and interior, and the resulting questions of identity. In 1985 he released Tangos, el exilio de Gardel (Tangos, the Exile of Gardel). The film, made in France, is worlds away from the earlier militancy, instead dealing somewhat whimsically with the experiences of forced expatriation through the popular culture of the country left behind, specifically tango music and dance.

An Argentine-French coproduction, long in the making, Tangos appeared at a time when Argentine cinema was deeply engaged in dealing with the recent past that had been untouchable material until the dictatorship fell. It is set in Paris, and addresses the period through metaphor and aesthetic experimentation, combining musical and experimental dance performance with the melancholy of exile. But this way of engaging the immediate past proved problematic in Argentina, where a more sober realism was expected, and the film was not generously received by the wider public. Tangos succeeds, however, where it explores the ways in which exile produces changes in identity, in its recognition that “Argentinity” is not some immutable essence to be conserved at all costs, but like the tango dance itself, is rather a product of circumstance and expression, given form by invention and improvisation.

Solanas’ next film is the most successful of this period, and earned him the best-director award at Cannes. Set in Buenos Aires and immersed in local color, Sur (1988) deals with the interior exile of those who were imprisoned or stayed in Argentina with radically altered lives. It focuses on Floreal, a reluctant union militant arrested and held in prison until the end of the dictatorship. His memories and phantasms (and those of his wife, Rosi), are interwoven with the present “reality” of his release, dramatising the trauma of coming home to a place and persons whose lives had continued to evolve while ones’ own remained stuck in the non-time of prison existence.

Solanas’ authorial presence is felt in the often-extravagant aesthetic choices, such as the abundant use of fans, lights, mirrors and fog machines, which are largely decorative resources of what is in essence a more classical than experimental mise-en-scène. Constant temporal and tonal shifts make for an uneven but very compelling film, which does not lack humor at the expense of the military, but certain Felliniesque touches and generous portions of overly-picturesque local colour are less successful. The film is at its strongest when it delves into the intolerances and hypocrisies of its heroes, notably the central theme of Floreal’s refusal to forgive the affair had by Rosi while he was in prison.

Solanas’ next film, El viaje (1992), exaggerates the extravagances of the previous films, showing an almost zoological urge to include diverse film styles—mixing road movie with magical realism, grotesque with melodrama—as it catalogues the varied places and peoples of the continent to advocate a pan-Latin American solidarity. Martín Nunca, the young Argentine protagonist, encounters a Chilean Virgil who guides him on a Dantesque/magical realist adventure through a flooded Argentina, metaphorising its economic and cultural “sinking.” After Argentina, Martín tours Latin America by bicycle—an ecologically-correct restaging of Che’s voyage—witnessing examples of both capitalist exploitation and popular solidarity. By its end the film becomes burdened by heavy-handed metaphors and the overindulgence in the pleasures of exoticism reflected in the postcard-like images and diverse types encountered.

During these years Solanas was entering national politics. One of the first to denounce the abuses of the Menem government, he was the victim of a retaliatory attack in 1991, shot six times in the legs. The next year he ran for the national senate and lost, but in 1993 was elected National Deputy for Buenos Aires province. In 1997, his term over, he left formal politics and returned to filmmaking.

The theme of his last fiction film to date, La nube (1998) is the effect on “authentic” (as in “non-commercial”) culture of neoliberal economics, which replaces cultural values with the monetary value bestowed by a middle-class public seeking diversion. It is set during the Menem decade, that reign of an inauthenticity Solanas chose to metaphorise by making all but the central characters walk backward through the diegesis.

The protagonists are bohemian performers whose publicly owned theater the government is planning to sell off to be replaced with a shopping center. As sub-themes are piled on—the lack of appreciation for the politically engaged cultural pantheon of mid-century, corruption, abuse of power, etc.—the pathos reaches spectacular levels. When the protagonists take over the theater to defend it, popular resistance all too predictably materialises. But unlike the 1940s or the ‘60s, now it is pure deus ex machina: a spontaneous uprising of the previously absent pueblo chases away the wrecking crew. When the shows continue and a much-needed audience miraculously appears, it is not a proletarian public—which would likely not be attracted to the Pirandellian modernism of the shows—but the middle-class intelligentsia that the last two decades of dictatorship and neoliberalism had decimated. This wishful thinking—a faith in the masses and the intelligentsia in a society that had democratically re-elected Menem three years earlier—seems to signal the exhaustion of Solanas’ political and aesthetic program, and his next move was a return to militancy, first in politics, then in film.

The Return to Militant Documentary

Solanas’ most recent filmmaking turn was presaged in 2002 with his formation of a movement advocating the re-nationalisation of the public resources sold off or leased during the last several decades. He had been in a privileged position to view the depredations when, as senator from 1993 to 1997, he was a member of commissions on Culture, Energy, Communications and Environment. He soon began a series of documentaries, five to date, that return to his earlier denunciations of neocolonialism and calls for popular mobilisation, although now in a less formally radical mode and without the workings of the “cine-acto.”

The urgency of the project was determined by the massive failure of the neoliberal project, especially after its intensification in the 1990s under Menem. Taken as a whole, the films provide a programmatic exhortation for the people to take up, if not arms, at least a political protagonism in the struggle against the corrupt selling-off of the Argentine patrimony—which Perón had nationalised some six decades earlier, as he enthusiastically described in La revolución justicialista—and of democracy itself. But now the tone is less optimistic, with the meta-narratives that guided his first works long-shattered and collective struggle transformed into individual struggle by the dictatorship’s violence and the neoliberalism of the ‘90s.

Solanas’ authorial presence is central. Once again a nationally recognised figure, his weighty credibility makes these documentaries possible. The interviewees often address him familiarly as “Pino,” treating him as a trustworthy compañero and offering him access where others might be denied. He films with a small video camera, interprets the events in his own voice and in terms similar to those of his Cine Liberación days, with a stubborn faith in the heroic protagonism of the pueblo.

But while the enemy—neocolonialism and its national enablers—has remained constant, its reach has gone further than was imaginable forty years before. As Solanas’ own voice tells us in Memoria del saqueo, “the levels of poverty denounced in La hora de los hornos in the 1960s were barely a presage of the neoliberal genocide of the nineties.” In the face of these tragic developments, a necessary tactical refashioning was undertaken by the filmmaker. The earlier Peronism is gone in name—its Justicialista political party tarnished by the politics of Menem—but not in spirit: The pueblo is still the hero, and neoliberal economics the villain. But unlike those earlier times, these films are decidedly not epics. The hoped for result of popular mobilisation is no longer the “total liberation” of the 1960s, but rather the seemingly more modest concept of “human dignity,” and so the pueblo is called to a more diffused and incremental struggle.

One of the opening shots of the first film of this period, Memoria del saqueo (2004), announces the project’s poetics: dramatic commentative music is heard over a tracking shot from an automobile in which we see two young cartoneros—inhabitants of the slums who come into the city after dark to sort through trash—glaring back at the camera, which pans upward to show us they are on the monumental steps of a bank building. The contrast-montage of Solanas’ early work appears here seen within the shot, a formal option made possible by the proximity of obscene wealth to abject poverty that is a legacy of the decade-long presidency of Menem and the apathy it generated in the populace.

The film opens with graphic, in-the-street footage of the turmoil that cut short the presidency of Menem’s successor, Fernando de la Rúa: the national economic crash, cacerolazos and police repression that climaxed the story of the looting of the national patrimony: After the return to democracy in 1983 and a shaky first decade, the country returned the Peronist party to power, only to be betrayed by Menem’s forsaking of Perón’s non-alignment stance and privatisation of the nation’s resources and infrastructure. An inserted text states the prevailing ideology: “everything public: corruption and bureaucracy…private: modernity and efficiency.” Railroads, utilities, oil and gas were sold off for pennies on the dollar to the foreign corporations in exchange for kickbacks to government ministers.

After criticisms of Solanas’ continued faith in the pueblo in Memoria del saqueo—the same pueblo that provided the bulk of Menem’s support in his 1995 reelection—Solanas’ next film, La dignidad de los nadies (2005), responded by telling a string of personal stories of those who suffered the effects of the neoliberal ‘90s and the economic meltdown of 2001, stressing their ensuing politicisation and thus introducing a bit of much needed hope in the form of a return to a nascent resistance to the neoliberal juggernaut.

The first story is of a young man politicised by the repression that brought down de la Rúa’s presidency. Shot in the head by a policeman, he was rescued by the protagonist of the next story, “El Toba,” a 1970s-era militant carrying on the struggle today as a schoolteacher and organiser of soup kitchens. Here, as always, Solanas questions the old national narratives of modernity and civilization by pointing his camera at what society has left behind, focusing on the devastation wrought by injustice.

But Solanas does not leave out the backstory, the machinations of power. After the crisis, the banks managed to pass their debt on to the state at the same time their predatory lending practices were impoverishing small farmers. Here the film’s themes dovetail with those of Michael Moore, suggesting that the current economic model and the corruption it institutionalises have become universally hegemonic. To brighten this bleak horizon Solanas closes with an example of hope, showing how workers occupied an abandoned ceramics factory and ran it successfully despite attempts by the police to evict them, which they are shown resisting with slingshots and small ceramic projectiles they fashioned themselves.

With his next film, Argentina latente (2007), Solanas again privileges hope, providing a pep-talk to an Argentina “as powerful in natural resources and raw materials as it is incapable of defending them.” He proposes rebuilding the industries dismantled as the country was converted to a provider of raw materials during the second half of the last century. Among other issues, he addresses the resulting national brain-drain, showing examples of industry—nuclear power and shipbuilding—to demonstrate that the state has and can again lead technologically ambitious and profitable enterprises. But he returns as always to the pueblo, presenting the case of the IMPA, a cooperative aluminum plant that, with the elimination of executive salaries and corporate profits instead of the reduction of salaries and workforce, has flourished.

Solanas’ next film, La próxima estación (2008), denounces the systematic dismantling of the nation’s railways through privatisation, theft of infrastructure and, importantly, the disinformation campaign that convinced the populace that privatisation would bring a long desired “modernity” and led to popular immobilisation. Solanas begins the task of re-informing his viewers by demonstrating that it was not British capital, as commonly held, but rather the Argentine state that funded the railways that led to the nation’s early-20^th-century prosperity. He goes on to articulate a philosophy of the public good over private profits, then finishes by advocating, in place of the planned bullet train that will serve only wealthy passengers and cost billions, the re-nationalisation and rebuilding of existing lines.

Solanas’ most recent film to date, 2009’s Tierra sublevada: oro impuro, is dedicated “to those who defend our natural resources and environment,” and expands his concern to the environmental destruction that adversely affects the lives of the powerless. He investigates a minerals mine to expose a corrupt leasing process that allows corporations to export the near-totality of minerals extracted in exchange for kickbacks, leaving behind poisoned watersheds, acid rain and poverty. A glimpse at a new form of protagonism of the pueblo is seen in the presence at the popular mobilisations of the wiphala, the “rainbow squares” flag associated with Andean indigenous movements, which links the Argentine pueblo to those who have been powerful agents of change in Bolivia and Venezuela.

Along with his ongoing documentary projects, Solanas has recently been busy in national politics, running for president in 2007, then being elected as national representative for Buenos Aires in 2009. He founded the party “Proyecto Sur,” whose mission statement describes it as a “political, social and cultural movement that locates respect for the human condition above any other consideration” and works for “the defense of the environment and the public ownership of our natural resources, as a condition to reach an authentic social justice and guarantee national sovereignty.” (4)

The term “sur” (south) has been conspicuously present throughout Solanas’ career, beginning with La hora de los hornos, in which is heard the tango ‘Sur’, which nostalgises the popular suburbs of Buenos Aires. This multivalent term, which reappears in many of his films, has very specific connotations as one pole of various binary oppositions. Buenos Aires divides roughly into southern (proletariat) and northern (wealthy and middle class) neighborhoods, and it was the pueblo of the south who demanded Perón’s return in 1945, provided revolutionary hope in the ‘60s, was victimised by the dictatorship in the ‘70s and manipulated by Menem in the ‘90s. It is where Solanas again looks for hope, now expanded into a global South in opposition to the North’s economic imperialism. This faith in the power of popular mobilisation to bring about social justice has for five decades motivated Solanas to challenge the hegemony of the ever-more-unholy alliance of corporate power and political corruption with an always critical body of work.

This article has been peer reviewed

Filmography

Seguir andando (1962)

Reflexión ciudadana (1963)

La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968, co-directed with Octavio Getino)

Perón: la revolución justicialista (1971, co-directed with Octavio Getino)

Perón: actualización política y doctrinaria para la toma del poder (1971, co-directed with Octavio Getino)

Los hijos de Fierro (The Sons of Fierro, 1972-1975, screened in 1978)

Le regard des autres (1979)

Tangos, el exilio de Gardel (Tangos, the Exile of Gardel, 1985)

Sur (The South, 1988)

El viaje (The Voyage, 1992)

La nube (The Cloud, 1998)

Memoria del saqueo (Social Genocide, 2004)

La dignidad de los nadies (The Dignity of the Nobodies, 2005)

Argentina latente (Latent Argentina, 2007)

La próxima estación (The Next Station, 2008)

Tierra sublevada: oro impuro (2009)

La guerra del fracking (2013)

El legado (2016)

Bibliography

Mariano Mestman, “Estrategia audiovisual y trasvasamiento generacional: Cine Liberación y el Movimiento Peronista.” In Sartora, Josefina and Silvina Raval, eds. Imágenes de lo real. Buenos Aires: Libraria, 2007.

Zuzana Pick, The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Luis Alberto Romero, A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century. Trans. James P. Brennan. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2002.

Fernando “Pino” Solanas, Causa sur. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2009.

Fernando Solanas, “Cinema as a Gun: An Interview with Fernando Solanas.” Cineaste 3, no. 2 (Fall 1969).

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. “Towards a Third Cinema.” In Chanan, Michael, (ed.), Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1983.

Robert Stam, “The Hour of the Furnaces and the Two Avant-Gardes.” In Julianne Burton, (ed.), The Social Documentary in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.

Web Resources

Interview in English with Solanas, by Michael Guillén: http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2006/04/2006-sfiffthe-evening-class-interview_29.html

Proyecto Sur, Solanas’ most recent political project. Introduction and Proposals (in Spanish): http://www.pinosolanas.com/act_proyecto_sur.htm

“Pino se planta,” Solanas’ blog (in Spanish): http://www.pinoseplanta.com/

Towards a Third Cinema: http://www.documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html