Grupo Cine Liberación
Encyclopedia
The Grupo Cine Liberación (The Liberation Film Group) was an Argentine film movement that took place during the end of the sixties. It was founded by Fernando Solanas
, Octavio Getino
and Gerardo Vallejo (1942–2007). The Grupo Cine Liberación became linked to the Peronist Left, and in later years, other films directors (grupo Realizadores de Mayo, Enrique and Nemesio Juárez, Pablo Szir, etc.) revolved around this activist core.
Along with Raymundo Gleyzer's Cine de la Base in Argentina, the Brazilian Cinema Novo
, the Cuban revolutionary cinema and the Bolivian film director Jorge Sanjinés
, the Grupo Cine Liberación was part of the Tercer Cine movement. The name of Tercer Cine (or Third Cine, in an obvious allusion to the Third World
) was explicitly opposed to "First World" cinema, that is, Hollywood, and was also contrasted with auteur film
, deciding to engage itself more explicitly in the social and political movements.
From his exile in Francoist Spain, Juan Peron
sent in 1971 two letters to Octavio Getino, one congratulating him for this work of liberation, and another concerning two documentaries that were to be done with him (La Revolución Justicialista and Actualización política y doctrinaria).
The graphist
Raimundo Ongaro
, also founder of the CGT de los Argentinos (CGTA) trade-union, was also close to this movement.
films, in an endeavour to favorite collective creation processes, to create a collective discourse, and also to protect themselves from political repression. According to Lucio Mufud, the collective authorship movement of the 1960s and 1970s was "among other things, about erasing any authorial mark. It concerned itself, on the one hand, with protecting the militant creators from state repression. But it was also about having their voice coincide with the 'voice of the people.' " Another similar group included the Grupo Cine de la Base (The Base Film Group), which included the film director Raymundo Gleyzer, who produced Los Traidores (The Traitors, 1973), and was later "disappeared
" during the dictatorship
.
Both Grupo Cine Liberación and Grupo Cine de la Base were especially concerned with Latin American integration
, neo-colonialism and advocated the use of violence as one of the alternative possible means against hegemonic power.
collaborated with Octavio Getino
and Fernando Solanas
on the four-hour documentary Hora de los hornos, about foreign imperialism in South America. The title of the film itself comes from a writing by 19th Century Cuban poet and independence leader José Martí
, who proclaimed, in an eponymous manifest, the need to start the independence war against Spain again.
Among the other subjects explored in this film were the musical and cultural scene in Latin America
and the dictatorship
s which gripped the region — at the same time, several Latin American authors, including the Mexican Carlos Fuentes
and the Argentine Julio Cortázar
, initiated the Dictator Novel
genre. The movie was diffused only in alternative circuits, both by choice and by censorship
obligations.
riots and the assassination of the trade-unionist Augusto Vandor
on 30 June 1969. Other images included those of the massive funerals of Emilio Jáuregui, another trade-unionist shelled three days before Vandor's death during a demonstration in protest of Nelson Rockefeller
's (owner of Miramax there) arrival to Argentina.
The film, entirely made clandestinely, criticized Juan Carlos Onganía
's dictatorship and the media's
official discourse. Ya es tiempo de violencia was thought to have been destroyed in the turmoil of the 1976 coup d'état and the "Dirty War
," but a copy of it was in fact stored by the Cuban film institute Icaic. In 2007, the film was brought back to Buenos Aires
by Fernando Krichmar, a member of the Grupo Cine Insurgente (Insurgent Cine Group), and Aprocinain (Asociación para el Apoyo Patrimonial Audiovisual y la Cinemateca Nacional) made another copy of it to insure its preservation.
In this film documentary, Enrique Juárez used a multiplicity of voice-over
s (among which an anonymous narrator
and an anonymous Peronist activist, among others) against censorship
exerted by the hegemonic discourse
— the voices are in fact those of Juárez himself, the actor Héctor Alterio, etc.
The film itself was almost exclusively composed from media images, with the editing
used to contradict the official discourse by using contradictory voices and images (i.e. a civil servant of Juan Carlos Onganía
's dictatorship states that everything is well, contradicted by images showing the Cordobazo
riots). Furthermore, the voice-over often address itself directly to the spectator, urging him to take action.
, and depicted the exploitation
of sugarcane
workers. Persecuted by Ongania's dictatorship, Vallejo fled to Rome and finished the film there. Although the movie won several awards abroad, it was censored in Argentina in 1972, and diffused in clandestine networks. It only re-appeared legally due to a decree
passed by Juan Peron
's after his return in 1973 to Argentina. Vallejo returned from exile after Peron's return, but he was again forced into exile after a bomb exploded in his home in December 1974.
Fernando Solanas
Fernando Ezequiel 'Pino' Solanas is an Argentine film director, screenwriter and politician....
, Octavio Getino
Octavio Getino
Octavio Getino is an Argentine film director who is best known for co-founding, along with Fernando Solanas, the Grupo Cine Liberación and the school of Third Cinema....
and Gerardo Vallejo (1942–2007). The Grupo Cine Liberación became linked to the Peronist Left, and in later years, other films directors (grupo Realizadores de Mayo, Enrique and Nemesio Juárez, Pablo Szir, etc.) revolved around this activist core.
Along with Raymundo Gleyzer's Cine de la Base in Argentina, the Brazilian Cinema Novo
Cinema Novo
Cinema Novo was practised by Brazilian filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s. In Portugal, Novo Cinema flourished after the 1960s, where it lasted, inspired by Italian Neo-Realism and the French movement of the New wave, the direct cinema techniques, and by the ideals the Carnation Revolution up to...
, the Cuban revolutionary cinema and the Bolivian film director Jorge Sanjinés
Jorge Sanjinés
Jorge Sanjinés is a Bolivian film director and screenwriter. He founded the production group Groupo Ukamau. He won the ALBA Prize for Arts in 2009.-Film career:...
, the Grupo Cine Liberación was part of the Tercer Cine movement. The name of Tercer Cine (or Third Cine, in an obvious allusion to the Third World
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
) was explicitly opposed to "First World" cinema, that is, Hollywood, and was also contrasted with auteur film
Auteur theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
, deciding to engage itself more explicitly in the social and political movements.
From his exile in Francoist Spain, Juan Peron
Juan Perón
Juan Domingo Perón was an Argentine military officer, and politician. Perón was three times elected as President of Argentina though he only managed to serve one full term, after serving in several government positions, including the Secretary of Labor and the Vice Presidency...
sent in 1971 two letters to Octavio Getino, one congratulating him for this work of liberation, and another concerning two documentaries that were to be done with him (La Revolución Justicialista and Actualización política y doctrinaria).
The graphist
Graphism
The word graphism is not defined in any dictionary, but it refers to the "expression of thought in material symbols". Graphism began some 30,000 years BC, not as a photographic representation of reality but as an abstraction that was geared toward magical-religious matters...
Raimundo Ongaro
Raimundo Ongaro
Raimundo Ongaro is a prominent Argentine labor leader.-Early career and rise to prominence:Raimundo José Ongaro was born to a middle-class family of Italian Argentines from the Lombardy region, in the Argentine seashore city of Mar del Plata in 1924...
, also founder of the CGT de los Argentinos (CGTA) trade-union, was also close to this movement.
Theory and practice
One of the principles of the Grupo Cine Liberación was to produce anonymousAnonymity
Anonymity is derived from the Greek word ἀνωνυμία, anonymia, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, anonymity typically refers to the state of an individual's personal identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown.There are many reasons why a...
films, in an endeavour to favorite collective creation processes, to create a collective discourse, and also to protect themselves from political repression. According to Lucio Mufud, the collective authorship movement of the 1960s and 1970s was "among other things, about erasing any authorial mark. It concerned itself, on the one hand, with protecting the militant creators from state repression. But it was also about having their voice coincide with the 'voice of the people.' " Another similar group included the Grupo Cine de la Base (The Base Film Group), which included the film director Raymundo Gleyzer, who produced Los Traidores (The Traitors, 1973), and was later "disappeared
Forced disappearance
In international human rights law, a forced disappearance occurs when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned by a state or political organization or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the...
" during the dictatorship
Dirty War
The Dirty War was a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 until 1983. Victims of the violence included several thousand left-wing activists, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers, either proved or suspected...
.
Both Grupo Cine Liberación and Grupo Cine de la Base were especially concerned with Latin American integration
Latin American integration
The integration of Latin America has a history going back to Spanish American and Brazilian independence, when there was discussion of creating a regional state or confederation of Latin American nations to protect the area's newly won autonomy...
, neo-colonialism and advocated the use of violence as one of the alternative possible means against hegemonic power.
Hora de los hornos (1968)
In 1968, the Cuban film director Santiago ÁlvarezSantiago Álvarez
Santiago Álvarez Román was a Cuban filmmaker. He wrote and directed many documentaries about Cuban and American culture...
collaborated with Octavio Getino
Octavio Getino
Octavio Getino is an Argentine film director who is best known for co-founding, along with Fernando Solanas, the Grupo Cine Liberación and the school of Third Cinema....
and Fernando Solanas
Fernando Solanas
Fernando Ezequiel 'Pino' Solanas is an Argentine film director, screenwriter and politician....
on the four-hour documentary Hora de los hornos, about foreign imperialism in South America. The title of the film itself comes from a writing by 19th Century Cuban poet and independence leader José Martí
José Martí
José Julián Martí Pérez was a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. In his short life he was a poet, an essayist, a journalist, a revolutionary philosopher, a translator, a professor, a publisher, and a political theorist. He was also a part of the Cuban...
, who proclaimed, in an eponymous manifest, the need to start the independence war against Spain again.
Among the other subjects explored in this film were the musical and cultural scene in Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
and the dictatorship
Dictatorship
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
s which gripped the region — at the same time, several Latin American authors, including the Mexican Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes Macías is a Mexican writer and one of the best-known living novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. He has influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages.-Biography:Fuentes was born in...
and the Argentine Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
, initiated the Dictator Novel
Dictator novel
The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship,...
genre. The movie was diffused only in alternative circuits, both by choice and by censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
obligations.
Ya es tiempo de violencia (1969)
In 1969, the film director Enrique Juárez thus anonymously produced Ya es tiempo de violencia (Now is the Time for Violence), mainly concerned with the events of the May 1969 CordobazoCordobazo
The Cordobazo was a civil uprising in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, in the end of May 1969, during the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, which occurred a few days after the Rosariazo, and a year after the French May '68...
riots and the assassination of the trade-unionist Augusto Vandor
Augusto Vandor
Augusto Timoteo Vandor was an Argentine trade unionist leader, military and politician.-Career:Vandor was born Bovril, Entre Ríos Province, to a Dutch father and a French mother, in 1923. He enlisted in the Argentine Navy in 1940, and later became an officer in the ARA Comodoro Py warship...
on 30 June 1969. Other images included those of the massive funerals of Emilio Jáuregui, another trade-unionist shelled three days before Vandor's death during a demonstration in protest of Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States , serving under President Gerald Ford, and the 49th Governor of New York , as well as serving the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a variety of positions...
's (owner of Miramax there) arrival to Argentina.
The film, entirely made clandestinely, criticized Juan Carlos Onganía
Juan Carlos Onganía
Juan Carlos Onganía Carballo was de facto president of Argentina from 29 June 1966 to 8 June 1970. He rose to power as military dictator after toppling, in a coup d’état self-named Revolución Argentina , the democratically elected president Arturo Illia .-Economic and social...
's dictatorship and the media's
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
official discourse. Ya es tiempo de violencia was thought to have been destroyed in the turmoil of the 1976 coup d'état and the "Dirty War
Dirty War
The Dirty War was a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 until 1983. Victims of the violence included several thousand left-wing activists, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers, either proved or suspected...
," but a copy of it was in fact stored by the Cuban film institute Icaic. In 2007, the film was brought back to Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
by Fernando Krichmar, a member of the Grupo Cine Insurgente (Insurgent Cine Group), and Aprocinain (Asociación para el Apoyo Patrimonial Audiovisual y la Cinemateca Nacional) made another copy of it to insure its preservation.
In this film documentary, Enrique Juárez used a multiplicity of voice-over
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice which is not part of the narrative is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations...
s (among which an anonymous narrator
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
and an anonymous Peronist activist, among others) against censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
exerted by the hegemonic discourse
Cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is...
— the voices are in fact those of Juárez himself, the actor Héctor Alterio, etc.
The film itself was almost exclusively composed from media images, with the editing
Film editing
Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling...
used to contradict the official discourse by using contradictory voices and images (i.e. a civil servant of Juan Carlos Onganía
Juan Carlos Onganía
Juan Carlos Onganía Carballo was de facto president of Argentina from 29 June 1966 to 8 June 1970. He rose to power as military dictator after toppling, in a coup d’état self-named Revolución Argentina , the democratically elected president Arturo Illia .-Economic and social...
's dictatorship states that everything is well, contradicted by images showing the Cordobazo
Cordobazo
The Cordobazo was a civil uprising in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, in the end of May 1969, during the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, which occurred a few days after the Rosariazo, and a year after the French May '68...
riots). Furthermore, the voice-over often address itself directly to the spectator, urging him to take action.
El Camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales (1968)
El Camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales was mainly produced by Gerardo VallejoGerardo Vallejo
Gerardo Vallejo is the name of:*Gerardo Vallejo , Colombian footballer*Gerardo Vallejo , from the Grupo Cine Liberación...
, and depicted the exploitation
Exploitation
This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...
of sugarcane
Sugarcane
Sugarcane refers to any of six to 37 species of tall perennial grasses of the genus Saccharum . Native to the warm temperate to tropical regions of South Asia, they have stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sugar, and measure two to six metres tall...
workers. Persecuted by Ongania's dictatorship, Vallejo fled to Rome and finished the film there. Although the movie won several awards abroad, it was censored in Argentina in 1972, and diffused in clandestine networks. It only re-appeared legally due to a decree
Decree
A decree is a rule of law issued by a head of state , according to certain procedures . It has the force of law...
passed by Juan Peron
Juan Perón
Juan Domingo Perón was an Argentine military officer, and politician. Perón was three times elected as President of Argentina though he only managed to serve one full term, after serving in several government positions, including the Secretary of Labor and the Vice Presidency...
's after his return in 1973 to Argentina. Vallejo returned from exile after Peron's return, but he was again forced into exile after a bomb exploded in his home in December 1974.
Films
- Ya es tiempo de violencia (1969, completely anonymous, produced by Enrique Juárez)
- La desconocida (1962), also by Enrique Juárez
- El Camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales (1968, by Octavio GetinoOctavio GetinoOctavio Getino is an Argentine film director who is best known for co-founding, along with Fernando Solanas, the Grupo Cine Liberación and the school of Third Cinema....
, Fernando SolanasFernando SolanasFernando Ezequiel 'Pino' Solanas is an Argentine film director, screenwriter and politician....
and Gerardo VallejoGerardo VallejoGerardo Vallejo is the name of:*Gerardo Vallejo , Colombian footballer*Gerardo Vallejo , from the Grupo Cine Liberación...
)
See also
- Grupo Cine de la Base (The Base Film Group), a similar contemporary group
- Colectivo Situaciones, modern groups inspired by these collective creation principles
- Lavaca
- Grupo Alavio, modern group inspired by these principles
- AgoraTV, modern BrazilBrazilBrazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian group inspired by Cine Liberación - Films depicting Latin American military dictatorshipsFilms depicting Latin American military dictatorshipsThis is a list of movies that, in one way or another, are closely related to the military dictatorships in Latin America that appeared during the context of the Cold War.-Argentina:* Funny Little Dirty War * The Official Story...
- The Dictator Novel
- Underground filmUnderground filmAn underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre, or financing.-Definition and history:The first use of the term "underground film" occurs in a 1957 essay by American film critic Manny Farber, "Underground Films." Farber uses it to refer to the work of...
External links
- Interview with Fernando Solanas (text in English, audio file)