“I’m still resisting” a sentence in a recent tweet by the left-wing militant and Argentine filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas (1936-2020). Since the beginning of his struggle against dictatorship, he has never stopped resisting, through cinema and politics together. He was the one who was threatened several times, as well as for an attempted kidnapping, and was deported outside the country, even for an assassination attempt, which he survived despite the presence of several bullets in his body. His voice could never be silenced. Despite his penetration into his country’s history, civilization and culture, he was able to reach international audiences and achieve fame that transcends national borders. Solanas never abandoned others, having held political positions in his country. He left his parliamentary post to accept the invitation of the newly elected Argentine president, Alberto Fernandez, to become the representative of Argentina at UNESCO in Paris. His last official visit to Rome was in early October. That day, Pope Francis received him. Both are from Buenos Aires, and despite the formal nature of the meeting, they chatted with great affection. But a few days later, he and his wife contracted the Coronavirus. His last tweet, written from the intensive care unit, told us that his condition is sensitive, and that his wife is also in the hospital. We bid farewell to a small commandment: “Do not stop taking care of yourself.”
Although he studied literature, music and law, cinema always enticed him. He is one of the Argentinian militants who have taken cinema as a means of resistance. “I am making a revolution, so I exist,” which he and his companion Okavio Genino wrote in the middle of the manifesto that we publish in the “Three Continents” magazine in 1969, which was like a new ideology and theory of cinema. The manifesto was titled “Towards a Third Cinema”. Accordingly, his cinema was responding to a need and a political reality, a need to think about the country as it was a form of resistance. The Manifesto is considered one of the most well-known texts mentioned and mentioned in political and social cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, and the best document for the “Liberation Film Group” that expanded greatly in the non-aligned and third world countries.
The third cinema is the cinema that recognizes the struggle in all its cultural, scientific and artistic forms, and considers it the most important manifestation of the era, as well as a tool for human liberation as a starting point for the dismantling of the external colonial culture, and the internal corrupt dominant. Solanas was a Bruneian. In 1968, he directed with Gennino the most influential political documentary of the era. A film that was the mainstay of the third cinema, establishing the model of revolutionary cinema. It is the “hour of the ovens”, in which the two directors condemned the economic and social situation in the country and called for an armed struggle against the decision to hand over Argentine lands. Four hours and twenty minutes, divided into three parts, and it could be several things at once: a tool for left-wing political and social protest, a statement, an educational cinematic debate, a cinematic essay on the cultural atmosphere of Latin America in general and Argentina in particular, and the unofficial history of a country. The film presented the causes of dependency, backwardness, the dire economic situation and the social misery of the peoples of Latin America. In it, reference is made to responding to the voices of citizens who are aware of the problems and the situation in the country, and it talks about the history of Peronism and workers’ resistance to the regimes, and introduces the world of Latin American fighters through the testimonies and words of veterans such as Ernesto Che Guevara.
After a short exile, in 1973 he returned to Argentina, made some changes to the film, and released it publicly. A new military coup in 1976 prevented him from completing the changes, and forced him to leave the country again for France. There, his actions underwent fundamental changes without losing their political mission. He began directing fictional films such as “Tangos: Gabriel’s Exile” (1986), in which he blended contemporary realities with the political and cultural myths of Argentina. When he returned from exile in 1988, he presented the film “The South” about a political prisoner, who went out to freedom after five years of detention, and tried to accept the present. The movie is the love story of a woman, a city and a country. In the years following his return to a new, democratic Argentina, which was supposed to be tolerant of political and cultural criticism, Solanas produced a variety of films such as Journey (1992) and articles critical of successive Argentine governments, especially those of Carlos Menem. Although Menem was also a Peronist, he ended up destroying the Peronist movement, and “selling” the country by privatizing the state’s resources. The criticism and mockery of the government did not pass without consequences. Solanas’ criticism was met with violence, and unknown assailants attempted to assassinate him.
The film “The Hour of the Furnaces” was the mainstay of the third cinema
In 2001, Solanas returned to the streets with protests across the country, due to economic and social conditions. Here, he felt the need to explore current events in order to understand the historical moment, as well as the events that would follow it. First of all, he wanted to set his sights on a long history of government corruption on the one hand, and the history of popular resistance on the other. Three decades into the “kiln hour”, Solanas is discovering the street again. He regained his youth and directed four documentaries within just five years, including “Social Genocide” (2004) and “Nobles’ Dignity” (2005). In these works, Solanas spoke personally in front of the camera about the story of the “plundering” of Argentina through the policy of privatization and the penetration of corruption into the country, which led to a financial and economic disaster.
In 2009, Solanas allied with the left. He worked tirelessly in Parliament, for women’s rights and more. In parallel with his political work, he photographed and documented major issues in the environment and society using his own camera. In 2018, the documentary “Journey to the Smoky Cities” was presented at the “Berlin Film Festival”. A tape about villages that disappeared due to soy cultivation, and maternity wards treating disfigured children poisoned by agricultural chemicals. The last film, produced with his son, Juan Solanas and shown at the Festival de Cannes in 2019, titled “Let It Be Law,” documented the struggle of women in Argentina for safe, free and free abortion.
Fernando “Pino” Solanas went out on November 6, 2020, in Paris. The Argentine embassy, in front of which he demonstrated in the 1970s against the military dictatorship, hung a picture of him, in honor of the committed artist and politician. Solanas always referred directly and names to the accused in his films. In his works he embraces all aspects of complex Argentine reality. Dictatorial regimes feared him, and the military feared his films.
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