From Buenos Aires to Beirut: Circuits of Cinematic Solidarities and Palestina, Otro Vietnam

In January, I went to see Carmen Amengual’s A Non-Coincidental Mirror at Smack Mellon Gallery in DUMBO. The exhibition centred on Argentine Amengual’s porteña mother, Malena Fernández, and her somewhat mysterious year in Algiers in 1973. The exhibition was part film installation and part circuitous informal library. In her film, Amengual draws on her mother’s archive: her letters and an unfinished film from that period. Amengual lingers on architecture and space in Buenos Aires and Algiers, searching for traces of a lost history. The exhibition materials, placed on tables that wind through the gallery space, serve perhaps as the installation’s physical bibliography. Amengual includes texts and textual paraphernalia such as Solanas and Getino’s infamous Third Cinema manifesto; newspaper clippings from the 1970s; journals such as Révolution Africaine and African Cinema; notes and resolutions from the Third World Filmmakers meeting in Algiers in December 1973; academic articles on tricontinentalism and Third Cinema; and posters, pamphlets, and other ephemera, including her mother’s accreditation card to the Third World Filmmakers meeting. Taking the Third Cinema movement and tricontinentalism as its historical backdrop, the film and exhibition explore Third Worldist solidarities and transnational connections of the 1970s with the aims of resurrecting histories lost to repression, violence, and defeat.

In the exhibition materials, Amengual makes mention of Jorge Giannoni, a close friend of her mother’s, who, as of 1973, worked as the cinematheque director of the Third World Institute at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) while Fernández worked as the audio archivist for the Institute. The Institute was, of course, short-lived – shuttered by the coup in 1976 – and Denti, like many others, went into exile. But what came to my mind while flipping through the documents on display in Amengual’s installation, was a film Giannoni made with Jorge Denti, Palestina, Otro Vietnam (Palestine, Another Vietnam, 1972). Following Amengual, who follows traces of her mother’s life to stitch together a tentative history, this paper takes a film made by two Argentines in the early 1970s as the thread it seeks to unravel.

Photo of Malena Fernández’s accreditation card for the First Third Cinema Committee Meeting in Algiers in 1973. Displayed at Smack Mellon, January 2025. Photo taken by the author.

Third Worldism in Buenos Aires

The 1970s in Argentina are best known for the military dictatorship and the disappearances of 30,000 Argentinians between 1976 and 1983.¹ However, prior to the 1976 coup d’état, the left was in a period of intense growth and internal conflict. The restoration of democracy and Perón’s return in 1973 promised to breathe new life into the Argentine left. Between the 1955 military dictatorship that ousted Perón and sent him into exile in Spain and the return to democracy eighteen years later, the Peronist, syndicalist, and Marxist left were heavily suppressed. Nevertheless, they remained active underground, with Peronist and Trotskyist cadres conducting acts of political violence. Upon Perón’s return, he favoured rightist Peronists over the leftist factions, fuelling internal conflicts and divisions within the Peronist movement. Leftist cadres increased their militancy against what they deemed as Peronist reactionaries, especially in the wake of Perón’s death in 1974 and the power vacuum of Isabel Perón’s brief presidency (1974-1976).

Mariano Mestman argues that student and worker protests in Corrientes, Rosario, and Córdoba in May 1969 spelled “the beginning of the end” for Juan Carlos Onganía’s dictatorship.² The Cordobazo and the Rosariazo uprisings became a symbol of the spontaneous power of both the Peronist and Marxist left. It is in this period that the Third Cinema movement emerged in Argentina, with Solanas and Getino’s seminal 1968 tract, “Towards a Third Cinema,” and their landmark film, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968). Third Cinema, a Third Worldist film movement that aims to undo both First and Second World filmmaking practices, emerges from these two works. In La hora de los hornos, Solanas and Getino forward a Marxist, dialectical, and agitational understanding of the country’s national history. Third Cinema sought to create a new cinematic language – one that challenged colonialism on the levels of form, content, and production. Striving to undo the cultural hegemony of Hollywood, European auteur film, and Soviet funding models, Solanas and Getino articulated a participatory model of filmmaking, offering cinema as a decolonial and revolutionary tactic.

Unlike Getino and Solanas, Jorge Giannoni and Jorge Denti remained abroad until 1973, but, like Getino and Solanas, sought refuge from the military dictatorship of the 1960s by traveling – in Giannoni and Denti’s case, at least, initially as itinerant hippies.³ Giannoni moved to Rome in 1966 after spending some time in the Northeast of Brazil working on an unfinished film with Raymundo Gleyzer.⁴ Dispatched to Paris in May 1968 as a correspondent for an Italian news agency, Giannoni was reunited with Denti, who he’d met years prior in Argentina.⁵ Denti, for his part, moved to London in the 1960s and found himself in Paris in time for May ’68, where he participated in the occupation of the Francoist Casa d’España.⁶ In Rome, the two began to work with Renzo Rossellini’s film production company, San Diego Cinematografica, and travelled to Beirut. Having made contact with Fatah cadres through the German filmmaker Monica Maurer, Denti and Giannoni were hosted by Palestine Film Unit (PFU) members Mustafa Abu Ali and Khadijah Habashneh.⁷ When they returned to Rome, Denti and Giannoni used San Diego’s editing bench to edit Palestina, Otro Vietnam in exchange for working on material Rossellini had received from Bolivia.⁸

Following the return of democracy in Argentina in 1973, Denti and Giannoni went to Buenos Aires to participate politically back home. Giannoni became the director of the cinematheque at UBA’s Third World Institute.⁹ In September 1973, Giannoni and Argentine architect Susana Sichel attended the Nonaligned Conference in Algiers and proposed a Third World Cinema Committee and the first committee meeting in Algiers that December. Giannoni, Sichel, Malena Fernández, and others began planning immediately, inviting filmmakers from countries that had nationalized their film industry and from various Third World liberation movements – including, of course, Mustafa Abu Ali and the Palestine Film Unit.¹⁰

Palestina, Otro Vietnam: A Ciné-Geography

Palestina, Otro Vietnam was first screened in 1973 at the First Palestine International Festival in Baghdad, where it won best documentary. It was also screened at the Second Third World Cinema Committee meeting in Buenos Aires, at UNAM in Mexico City, and made its way to Havana, where it was re-edited into a newsreel explaining the Lebanese civil war in 1979. The film and its filmmakers’ itinerant lives suggest that the choice to include an English voiceover is most likely not just to appeal to British or American audiences. Instead, English is likely used as a presumed lingua franca – as a way to open the film up to diverse audiences across the former British colonies and beyond. The transnational circulation of the film and its filmmakers’ engagement with the Third Cinema movement also suggests a reciprocal engagement with tricontinentalism and Third Cinema’s aesthetic practices.

I first read about Palestina, Otro Vietnam in Khadijah Habashneh’s memoir, Fursan al-sinima: sirat wihdat aflam filastin (The Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit). Habashneh, a filmmaker, archivist, and central member of the PFU, details the history of the film unit, which was active during the Palestinian Revolution (1968-1982) as Fatah’s film unit. The PFU sought to participate in the Revolution through film – its motto being “a camera in one hand; a gun in the other.” Cognizant of the gaps in the Algerian national film archive, the PFU saw its role as not only to galvanize Palestinian refugees living in Amman and Jordan following the Nakba of 1948 and the Naksa of 1967, but also to record the Palestinian national liberation struggle for a future Palestinian state.¹¹

In her memoir, Habashneh recalls hosting two Argentines – “Jorge One and Jorge Two,” as she calls them¹² – in Beirut in 1971, not long after her and her husband, co-founder of the PFU, Mustafa Abu Ali, moved to the city from Amman. She recounts conversations with the two Jorges and the Swiss artist Manuela Generali – the third member of the Collectivo Cinema del Terzo Mondo (CM3), who travelled to Beirut with Denti and Giannoni – about the Palestinian Revolution and the role of women in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Somewhat endearingly, Habashneh recalls that the two Jorges ate a lot of yogurt, perhaps, as she writes, “so that they wouldn’t burden me.”¹³

Though there are only a few brief lines in The Knights of Cinema about this seemingly unusual encounter, the images of the two yogurt-eating Argentines in Beirut filming the Palestinian Revolution stuck with me as I tried to track down the film. Initially, I could not find a copy online – unsurprising, given how many films from the 1970s have been lost. However, last fall, a friend sent me a Vimeo link, and not long after, the film was uploaded online, and I was finally able to watch it.¹⁴

Palestina, Otro Vietnam unfolds in chapters: in the first, a male narrator describes, in English, “the Aggression,” or the Six Day War, as the camera jumps between black and white images of tanks, bombs exploding, and injured victims of these attacks. The film shifts to colour, and the camera is in the thick of a crowd of protestors. The voiceover changes to a woman’s voice, who describes how, after the defeat of the Arab forces in 1967, the Palestinian resistance emerged and grew dramatically after the victory of Fatah forces at the battle of Karameh. Young Palestinians in the refugee camps become fida’iyin – or freedom fighters – and asserted their dignity through the struggle for national liberation.¹⁵

Palestina, Otro Vietnam

Palestina, Otro Vietnam

Palestina, Otro Vietnam

The subsequent chapters of the film show fida’iyin training camps. First, men wearing keffiyehs are seen doing assault courses and pit crawls, jumping over fire, and climbing rock faces. Next, the film shifts to the role of women in the revolution; the woman narrator states that the Palestinian woman is “realizing more and more her necessity to be a revolutionary” and that “without her, there would be no victory.” Women fida’iyin are seen training as well – cleaning rifles, doing low crawls, rehearsing pulling women comrades to safety, and tending to their wounds. The film closes with young boys training: a boy no older than twelve delivers a lesson about the Kalashnikov to boys even younger than him; the children do training exercises, assault courses, jump over fires – repeating the earlier actions of the adults.

In juxtaposing bombardments with protests, images of injured victims with fida’iyin training camps, Palestina, Otro Vietnam invokes Third Cinema aesthetics and echoes explicitly Mustafa Abu Ali’s film Bilruh Bildam (With Soul, With Blood, 1971). Both films articulate a historical narrative that adheres to Fatah rhetoric: the defeat of Arab forces in the Six Day War and Fatah’s success at the Battle of Karameh led to the emergence of a Palestinian national liberation movement, with fida’iyin coming mainly from the refugee camps. Furthermore, both films understand Zionism to be a product of imperialism and see imperialism, Zionism, and Arab reactionary forces as their opponents. 

Most strikingly, perhaps, Palestina, Otro Vietnam borrows almost exactly from With Soul, With Blood in filming children’s training. In both, the camera films young boys doing drills from a variety of unexpected angles. In With Soul, With Blood, the camera looks up towards the sky as young boys jump from one obstacle to another. In Palestina, Otro Vietnam, the camera is directly underneath boys as they hoist themselves up and flip themselves around on metal bars. Both films experiment with camera angles in filming proto-military training, attempting to establish this new cinematic language. Just as Habashneh recalls conversations about the struggle for Palestinian national liberation and recounts conversations between Abu Ali and Godard on the role of cinema in revolutionary movements, one can imagine that Denti, Giannoni, and Abu Ali exchanged ideas with regard to filmmaking as well. 

Palestina, Otro Vietnam

With Soul, With Blood

Mustafa Abu Ali’s collaboration with Godard in the filming of what would become Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976) is one of the best-known examples of transnational cinematic connections of the Palestinian Revolution. However, as Nadia Yaqub notes, the Palestinian filmmakers of the revolutionary period were well-connected, especially within the world of Arab filmmakers.¹⁶ Palestinian films screened at film festivals in Damascus, Algiers, Baghdad, Leipzig, and Rome.¹⁷ The Palestinian struggle was, of course, central to the Arab left in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but the tricontinental networks forged at film festivals in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe helped participated in establishing Palestine as a central node in the internationalist, leftist, and anticolonial politics of the 1970s. 

As Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray argue, the tricontinental connections of Third Cinema operated on the level of the individual, the institutional, the aesthetic, and the political.¹⁸ This “ciné-geography”\refers not only to the political commitments of the filmmakers but also to the film’s production, exhibition, and distribution.¹⁹ Third Cinema insists on reflecting the film’s political content on every level. Because Third Cinema is, first and foremost, a political orientation towards filmmaking, its aesthetic is harder to define. But Palestina, Otro Vietnam, like PFU films of this period, participates in Third Cinema aesthetics by subverting newsreel aesthetics, combining image and sound in dissonant ways, and juxtaposing images of violence with images of armed struggle. By tracing the film’s ciné-geography – or its itinerant lives, connections, and aesthetics – we can ascertain its participation in the internationalization of the Palestinian struggle.²⁰

In its very title, Palestina, Otro Vietnam asserts a parallel between Palestine and Vietnam. By the late 1970s, the centrality of Vietnam was evident in the tricontinental movement. Both the atrocities committed by the American military and the Viet Cong’s resistance became emblematic of neocolonialism and the tricontinental struggle against it. The successes of the Algerian and Cuban revolutions, of course, made the two countries examples of the possibility of victory for national liberation movements. The Palestinian Revolution asserted its ties to these anticolonial lineages. In Christian Ghazi’s Limatha al-muqawama (Resistance – Why?, 1971), for example, the camera pans to the wall behind Ghassan Kanafani as he gives an interview. Photos of Ho Chi Minute, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Lenin, Marx, and Leila Khaled, as well as Picasso’s Guernica, are collaged on the wall. In Mustafa Abu Ali’s Lays lahum wujud (They Do Not Exist ,1974), inter-titles read: Vietnam / Genocide / Mozambique / Genocide / American Indians / Genocide / South Africa / Nazi Massacres / Genocide. Just as Ghazi, Kanafani, and Abu Ali situate Palestine in the tricontinental struggle against imperialism and neocolonialism, Denti and Giannoni seek to assert the opposite correlation: they assert that an internationalist, Third Worldist left should pay attention to the liberation struggle in Palestine, just as they do in Vietnam.

Another film that comes to mind is Chris Marker’s Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967), which articulates the tension between what Eshun and Gray call the “distant proximities” of the ‘here’ of Marker’s France and the ‘elsewhere’ of the Vietnamese Liberation Front.²¹ Echoed by Godard’s Ici et ailleurs, Marker and his collaborators assert the Western viewer’s implication in the violence in Vietnam and demand his solidarity.²² By directly asserting that Palestine is another Vietnam, Denti and Giannoni’s film asserts the Palestinian struggle as warranting international solidarity equal to that of Vietnam. By screening the film not only in Baghdad but also in Latin America, where solidarity with the Palestinian struggle was still nascent, Denti and Giannoni expanded the transnational and tricontinental connections of the Palestinian Revolution. 

The Afterlives of Palestina, Otro Vietnam

Filmmaker Rodrigo Vázquez uploaded the version of the film currently available online from a DVD copy housed in a bookstore in Buenos Aires, leant out only to conocidos. According to Vázquez, the original film positives were lost in Mexico City after a screening at the UNAM; the filmmakers, busy with post-screening festivities, only realized the next day that they had lost the film. It could be lost, or the positives might still be somewhere in Mexico City.²³

Just as the pixelated, blown-up version of Palestina, Otro Vietnam available online contains the promise of its original film positives and the fantasy of its rediscovery, Amengual’s A Non-Coincidental Mirror attempts to recuperate what is left after the silences of political repression and defeat. The suppression of memory, as Vázquez noted, was a survival mechanism for Argentines during and after the dictatorship. The recuperation and circulation of almost-lost films works against the suppression of memory. Perhaps this exercise can help us trace alternate political lineages in times of crisis.

Endnotes