Historical Stasis: Solanas and the Restoration of Political Film after the 2001 Argentine Crisis

Abstract

This article argues that Fernando Solanas’s documentary production in the wake of the 2001 Argentine institutional crisis (especially his 2004 film Social Genocide) should not be straightforwardly assimilated to his 1960s film The Hour of the Furnaces, nor to the project of Third Cinema as it was fostered by Solanas and Getino’s theorization of the relation between cinematic practice and national liberation. The argumentation points out a series of differences in the rhetorical structure of the films and in the political proposals at stake, to focus on the most important difference: the way each film relates and constructs a historical sequence. This methodological transformation in the narration of history accounts for a radically different conceptualization of agency and the role of the subject, which conflicts with recent statements on the “return of the political” to Latin America.