Fernando Ezequiel Solanas, born in 1936, took the Argentine cinema world by storm with his his first feature film La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, co-directed in 1968 with Octavio Getino). The film is a magnificent documentary on neocolonialism, violence and exploitation in Latin America, in fact a revisionist take on the whole history of the region. Filmed and shown clandestinely during a military dictatorship, the film grabs your attention to the last minute in spite of its length (260 minutes). I still remember the deep impression left on me after viewing it in Los Angeles in 1969. The film won several international awards and was screened around the world.
Solanas was a founder of the Grupo Cine Liberación. This group proposed a new path for Argentine cinema, independent of, or opposite to the studio system (which had a rich history in Argentina, beginning in the silent era) and of the "auteur", heavily intellectual, European inspired movement that took hold in the period 1956-1975. Together with Getino, Solanas wrote the manifesto "Toward a Third Cinema" which inspired film makers in developing countries in South America and other regions for many years.
Solanas went on to film many other outstanding documentaries (the last in 2011) dealing mostly with recent Latin American history such as the plunder of Argentine resources in the 1990s by local and foreign capital and on its consequence, the implosion of the Argentine economy in 2001 under the weight of an unsustainable foreign debt. His work attained international recognition; he won the Special Jury Award and the Critics Award at Venice, Best Director Palm at Cannes and a special Golden Bear at Berlin.
His uncompromising militancy was not without personal consequences; he lived in forced exile from 1976 to 1983 and there were at least two attempts on his life, one before he left Argentina, the other after he returned. He has been heavily involved in Argentine politics, being elected representative of his party, Proyecto Sur, for the city of Buenos Aires in 2009.
Solanas had a parallel career as a fiction filmmaker, although "fiction" has a relative meaning here; his movies are always informed by Argentine political and economic reality in the recent past. His style is poetic, intensely personal and at times surrealistic, incorporating musical and dance numbers and mixing freely reality and fantasy, with characters from different eras interacting, both dead and alive. His main works in this area are Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (1985), The South (1988), The Journey (1992) and The Cloud (1998). Los Hijos de Fierro (the Sons of Fierro, 1972) is a forerunner of his later fiction work. The characters are taken from José Hernández's poems El Gaucho Martín Fierro (The Gaucho Martín Fierro, 1872) and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (The Return of Martin Fierro, 1879), which, over the years have attained the status of Argentina's national epic; references to these works are readily understood by Argentinians of any age or background. Solanas places these characters in the period between the overthrow and expulsion of president Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 and his return to power in 1973. The movie centers on the harsh repression of the labor movement by the military and the police after 1955 and on the resistance (both violent and nonviolent) of the workers and the Peronist left, which gradually created the conditions for Peron's return.
Solanas' fiction style is sometimes rambling and unfocused, but this movie remains a powerful work. It is dated; Peron's return did not produce the expected results. Good acting by a mostly nonprofessional crew. Excellent voice-over by Aldo Barbero, both prose and verse (the latter in the"gauchesque" style used in Hernandez's poems). Gritty cinematography by Juan Carlos Desanzo matches perfectly the movie's intentions (Desanzo went on to direct some significant movies in Argentina).
At the moment, none of Solanas' movies is readily available in DVD Region 1. We hope this will be remedied.
