Through a series of radically edited sequences, "The Hour of the Furnaces" uses said editing techniques and other images to paint a negative portrait of Latin America’s upper-class elite (and the “rich nations” of certain European countries and the US) and to help us sympathize with the working class “common folk”, who, through the government’s practice of neocolonialism, are having their dignity taken away from them. Right off the bat, we are swayed to sympathize more with the non-elite of Latin America - the revolutionaries that is - with this introduction that reads like a propaganda poster with its bold, capitalized words and phrases spliced in between footage of the police harming innocent civilians. Furthermore, during a part entitled "A Daily Violence", the sound of a punch-in clock shown at the beginning gets repeated throughout, which illustrates the constant repetition and dull monotony these workers have to face everyday making minimum wage in crap conditions, all for nothing, really. The phrase “To dominate man, napalm and poison gas are not yet necessary” leads one to believe that the government, or high powers rather, don’t need weapons or harmful tools to take over their citizens, because they already have taken them over through neocolonialism. And at some points during the film I couldn’t help but to feel like I was watching the introduction to Ingmar Bergman’s "Persona". To drive my point of a Bergman-esque influence running throughout this film home (specifically "Persona"'s intro, that is), during the scene which showcases the cemetery of the elite, the camera is constantly focusing on a statue, or switching focus between two, or panning around from one to another, and the editing, which splices in shots of lightning, is just madcap and all over the place. The "Persona" influence is once again felt later on in the film when a montage is shown depicting staples of the US middle class (e.g. Coca-Cola, cars, meat, etc.) spliced between shots of a slaughterhouse. The slitting of the lambs’ throats immediately recalls the shot in the intro of Persona where a farmer is draining all the blood out of a lamb (followed by a shot of said lambs’ organs). Sure, this influence of Bergman may sound a bit farfetched, but, seeing as this film was released in 1968, and Persona in 1966, it’s possible that directors Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas saw Bergman’s film and were influenced by it’s raw and experimental editing style. This would make The Hour of the Furnaces fall into the category of being a radical, revolutionary film that covers a radical and revolutionary subject, as we’ve discussed in class. The penultimate sequence, which simultaneously splices clips of horrifying events, paintings and other mediums of art, and adverts over upbeat music and videos of students dancing, and then ultimately only shows horrifying clips with audio of someone laughing insanely, uses this radical editing to give the viewer a great sense of unease at viewing this events caused by bad, imperialist nations Sight & Sound’s article declared this film “the film that established the paradigm of revolutionary activist cinema”, and because of my previous paragraphs, I’m inclined to agree with that. P.S. One thing I did not understand the significance of or meaning behind was having two narrators as opposed to one. I don’t know if this is just to break up the monotony of having one voice or if it holds any meaning. Any of you guys have any thoughts on this?
John, I find it really interesting that the you explain the last sequence as one "which simultaneously splices clips of horrifying events, paintings and other mediums of art, and adverts over upbeat music and videos of students dancing" to "give the viewer a great sense of unease at viewing this events caused by bad, imperialist nations." I wrote my response before reading the comments, and to me it wasn't an attempt to guilt anyone into thinking anything, as much as it was to show the reality of trying to find an identity when what is depicted on screen is daily life for people there.
Similarly, I think this brings up the importance of communication. Clarification of message--of sharing points of view. I think, perhaps, my viewing was affected by having read the interview with Rocha's interview, where he claims his films "are not specifically propagandist. I try to reveal the political problems of the underdeveloped world but I refuse to call this political propaganda," (Dan Georgakas, 13). This to me reinforced the idea he's speaking to his people, not trying to create bad propaganda of imperialists nations--as much as imperialism in general, that is.
To build on Jessica’s topic, A Common topic that is brought up in each of our films this week, “The Hour of the Furnaces”, and “Antonio das Mortes” is the value of the American dollar, and the effects on its citizens. The Colonel in Antonio das Mortes speaks of the dollar as a way to revive and bring prosperity to his people. In the scene where the Colonel is giving food, you can get an understanding that these people are starving and need help, and that by being exploited will not stop their determent. The Colonel and his support in the dollar are not good for the people, but I feel that what the director is trying to accomplish with this scene is to show that handouts don’t necessarily make everyone happy, nor does it actually solve the problem. Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema” , mentions the term film guerillas that I feel accurately reflects the filmmaker of “The Hour of the Furnaces” Sudden Extreme close ups, as well as slow zooming out by the film give context to the society. The use of black screens with large text does more than just grab the attention of its viewers; it pulls them in and incorporates them. A parallel can be seen in “Antonio das Mortes” with how important the folksongs are to the director. It aligns the viewer with that culture and the authenticity of it. Mentioned in “Toward a Third Cinema”, the importance of depicting the image of reality, rather than reality. The reality of it is simple, imperialism and capitalism are forcing changes in Latin American countries and it’s not willingly by the working people. The purpose of the film may not be black and white, but it becomes clear when you see the film though the eyes of the worker.
There’s a line in Alex Cox’s film, “Walker” (1987), that bears repeating given this week’s Latin American focus. Before Walker (Ed Harris) is executed he makes a speech where he claims, “You all might think that there will come a day when America will leave Nicaragua alone. Well, I am here to tell you that day will never happen. Because it is our duty to be here. It is our duty to control you people. So no matter what you do – no matter how hard you fight – we’ll be back.” This speech probably never happened in reality, but it might as well have. From the time of William Walker in 1850 to present day, it’s strange to watch films like “Antonio Das Mortes” and “The Hour of Furnaces” and see how the dreams of expelling American imperialism has been a continuous fight in Latin America.
Both “Antonio Das Mortes” and “The Hour of the Furnaces” function as politically radical films in their content and form in an attempt to find “new modes of expression” that highlight a cultural revolution within a political one (Cineaste, 14-15). The films we watched blatantly work to distance themselves from American cinema in almost every sense possible. Going back to the discussion that was raised by “Something in the Air” whether films should be made in order to reach a mass audience through standard cinematic techniques that have “been imposed by colonial conditioning” or creating a new artistic form that “sets itself apart from the commercial industry because the commitment of Industrial Cinema is to untruth and exploitation” (Esthetic of Hunger, Rocha).
Where “Antonio Das Mortes” uses traditional Brazilian history and mythology, distinguishing the fact that it is made for a Brazilian audience, and “if bourgeois audiences find them difficult it is because of their lack of understanding of the popular culture” in Brazil.” “The Hour of the Furnaces” lays the entire history and social conditions of Latin America out in chapters so anyone could see the struggle, albeit using Eisensteinian (is this a word?) editing (Rocha). “Antonio Das Mortes” ends on a sad note, despite the death of the landowning colonel, with Antonio walking along the highway with a “shell gas” logo above his head; American imperialism owns the land and places itself over the revolutionary. “The Hour of the Furnaces” “anticipates a liberated time” that, with the benefit of living in 2014, never comes completely to fruition (Brenez). And considering the amount of refugee children that are coming from South America today, being greeted with disdain and hatred from the reactionary right-wing, it should seem that we owe them a little more sympathy, given the fact that we created the turmoil in their countires.
The long take [which, I’ve just learned, is the proper term for what I’ve been calling a long shot; l.s. refers to distance from subject/width of camera angle, while l.t. is a time-expansive uninterrupted shot] has been used, and used powerfully, by many an experimental filmmaker over the years. And, though Glauber Rocha makes a conscious effort to distance himself from the European avant-garde [‘Cinema Novo vs. cultural colonialism’], it’s hard to watch Antonio Das Mortes and deny the effect European art films have had on Rocha’s work. The fight sequence between Antonio and the cangaciero in particular felt like something Godard would have appreciated, especially with its emphasis on rotation; the long take toward the end of Breathless, where Michel and Patricia are circling each other during a bedroom conversation, is sufficiently similar to mark a common influence.
Given the political nature of Rocha’s films, though, it’s not enough to discuss the aesthetic impact of the long take. In Antonio Das Mortes, Rocha uses the long take to make the viewer feel complicit in the revolutionary action of the film. Rocha literally positions the audience on the side of the cangaciero by making our viewpoint identical to that of one of his followers on multiple occasions, and in being so positioned, in feeling like we are participating in the events of the film, we are compelled to act as Antonio Das Mortes does in realigning ourselves with the protesters.
I could select several examples, but as I don’t have the film in front of me/only have room in this blog post for one, I’ll try to synthesise my general experience w/the film. Many of the shots when the cangaciero is travelling in a dancing, singing mob -- specifically, the one where the cangaciero himself is shown taunting Antonio Das Mortes -- are composed of long takes with a dynamic, fluid camera that is positioned within the crowd, moving with it. The bandits themselves are also moving, some spinning, some walking, and some orbiting the vortex: in other words, performing the exact same movements as the camera. In terms of approximating viewer presence, this is as close as it gets. The camera is eye-level, its movements mirror those of the actors, and our presentation of the many subjects is uninterrupted. It’s like we’re one of them.
For Rocha, this is an important point. Rocha wanted his films to be authentically Brazilian, aesthetically challenging, and above all, populist. Antonio Das Mortes is, regardless of Scorsese’s opinion, intensely political, and its position is that of the people. To drive this point home, Rocha frames us as one of them.
I need to acknowledge that in this particular viewing, I could not achieve intellectual detachment, which in turn affected the way I received it—without reservations, a substantial amount of nodding, and as a purely emotional response. Nevertheless, from my intoxicated state of bias, it is important to highlight its masterful importance for the oppressed voice to speak—or in these cases, to sing—in a fight against domination. The documentary highlights over and over the issues with illiteracy, the bias of the education system, and the usage of mass media as a mechanism. However, it seems to focus on the problems in an abstract manner. Does it fall victim to some of the problem it denounces? It rebels against the manner of thought deriving from colonization, but its direct address seems only to the Latin American man and woman. Perhaps, conscious of the lack of appeal this issue has to the world powers, its “teachings” are to the colonized. It briefly showcases problem, but the delineation is undermined, under stressed. In its path to denounce neo-colonialism, it critiques colonization without daring to do a direct critique of the colonizer. It is trying to showcase the struggles of Latin America by attacking a system, but not an identifiable one. In its opposition, the voice of the oppressed continues to lack authority. It denounces corporations, brand names, propaganda, cultural influence, etc., but it refuses to point fingers to the governments—a politically deliberate and safe move. By not directly accusing, it denounces the action of colonization without making itself a target for a reprise. This seemed represented in the documentary by which songs were translated. While the song about “hovering above the radiant dawn….the eagle is the flag of my country born of the sun which God gave me,” the song playing during the scene at the statue cemetery does not feature subtitles. Granted, the song is hard to follow, but the snippets that come through seem too important to not translate: “the bridge,…we want…unaware of the ideas and minds…in Buenos Aires…to rebel…shall be showered in blood…in blood.” The diegetic role of the music is obvious in this documentary, as much as it was in “Antonio das Mortes” (1969). Furthermore, I think the music is the secret language used between the filmmakers and the audience. “The Hour of the Furnaces” (1968) delves a bit on the importance of eradicating theoriginal roots of the population, music being one aspect. Inside a repressed country, the daily violence, the desperation of the economic situation, the cultural poverty, the hunger, and the impotence, leads to wanting escapism. Since early on, the ideal, the aspiration, the role-model is the unreachable status of “the other.” We are taught to turn our back from the origins, from the “segregated, the sub-developed, the sub-man.” The films oppose this. By using music to reach deeper than the ingrained ideologies, they beg for the resurgence of unity neo-colonialism has destroyed through class building. Like the chanting in “Antonio das Mortes,” the documentary uses music, semi-muted dialogue, the secondary voices lost in the background, and the mutters to convey a message not graspable in translation. It’s there. You hear it. But it’s gone. Too quick to be translated—unimportant in the eyes of the colonizer’s mentality—but vital for the message to the repressed. In all, the ending sequence of “The Hour of the Furnace,” in a confusion of English, Spanish, French, violence, glamorization, propaganda, real emotion, and fiction, seems the most effective sequence to teach and reach. The confusion expressed, the juxtapositions, the paradoxes are life. That is the life inside a repressed country—a ceaseless ambush of confusing images, conflicting messages, identity crisis, daily struggle, and incomprehensible ominous laughter coming from seemingly nowhere…
In my opinion, In the films Antonio Das Mortes, and The Hour of the Furnaces, there are 2 main themes that encapsulated the culture of Latin America in 1968, the time in which both The Hour of the Furnaces, and Antonio Das Mortes where released. These 2 themes are constant violence, and the struggle between the landowners and the poor working class in Latin America during this time. Glauber Rocha, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas express the same issues in their respective films. One of the main themes was the proletariat land owner. In Antonio Das Mortes, this was the Coronel, Horatio, the wealthy blind land owner. I think the fact that he was blind was a metaphor for him being spiritually unjust with his greed in regards to his land. In The Hour of the Furnaces, the say that “50% of the land is in the hands of 1.5% of the landowners, while 80% of the population has no land at all”. This fact really emphasizes the fact that the land ownership was wildly disproportionate, with only a few wealthy people owning most of the land, embodied by the Coronel in Antonio Das Mortes. The Hour of the Furnaces really drives home the point that many people in Latin America at this time were in poverty. They show some very startling stills and footage of starving children, shanty towns, slums and slums, often called favelas, and people struggling to make ends meat. Another fact that demonstrates the vast gap in the upper and lower class, is that “the average income of the lower class, is 20 times less than that of the upper class. For 110 million people (half the population) income does not reach 120 dollars a year”. The constant violence in Latin America is shown in Antonio Das Mortes by the battle between the Cangaceiros, and Antonio Das Mortes. In one scene, Antonio is telling the story of how he killed Corisco, who he thought to be the last of the Cangaceiros, 29 years earlier. And then a new Cangaceiro appears in the town of Jardim Das Piranhas. After 29 years the battle is still not over, and the violence continues. In The Hour of the Furnaces, the violence is shown throughout the film. In one scene, it shows to men fighting, with the camera frantically moving about them, and one guy stabs the other. In another, it shows frightened children, dead people, and mass chaos as tanks roll through the streets. There is a quote early on in The Hour of the Furnace: “the violence visited on the Latin American peoples is a constant, planned, systematic violence” This point is proven by the constant and systematic violence shown throughout the film.
After having done a few of the readings before watching this week’s at home viewing, I find that “The Hour of the Furnaces” is exhibits of the kind of decolonization that Franz Fanon discusses in his essay “Concerning Violence.” The main conflict highlighted by the film, that of the cultural identity of Argentina working against the United States and its westernizing influence, is precisely the kind of struggle for which Fanon advocates the use of violence. The idea that the defeat of the colonized, as Fanon states, occurs when he “admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values” is a reoccurring theme in the film that serves as a rallying cry for the people of Argentina to reject the colonizing culture (25). For example, a significant time in “The Hour of the Furnaces” is spent just listening to the inconsequential “western” conversations of the Argentinean bourgeois. Voiceovers of men singing the praises of a general because he “translated Dante” and a woman discussing the merits of vacationing in America over France make a poignant point about how deeply absorbed the Argentinean elite were into the culture of their colonizers (especially when the voiceovers are played over footage of demonstrators being arrested by armed policemen in the streets.
Fanon’s alternative scenario, the goal of decolonization in which “the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up,” is also very present in the film, especially at the end (25). John and Jess have already made a note of the waning moments of the film in which a woman’s laughter plays after a montage of western cultural images, such as comic books and movie stills, and accompanies clips of aggression, a sequence that seems to mock and devalue quite overtly the culture that the western powers have imposed. Also in defiance of colonial culture is a montage that occurs just after the laughing sequence, one in which stills with American cultural markers like Batman and car ads are edited to flash on screen to match the rhythm of a firing machine gun. This sequence can be interpreted as both an indictment of the American consumer culture that is just as effective as a military force at suppressing the Argentinean people or as an aesthetic attack by the filmmakers against the influence and meaning of such images. In either case, the sequence evokes the violent position advocated by Fanon in the struggle decolonization and the determination of the filmmakers to contribute to the violence, if only initially with aesthetic violence.
Both “Antonio das Mortes” and “Hour of the Furnaces” feature what Scorsese calls “those who have not” in his interview discussion. In his essay “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” Glauber Rocha explains that the films of the Cinema Novo movement that he was a part of fail to, “Communicate his real misery to the ‘civilized’ European, nor does the European truly comprehend the misery of the Latin American.” In this way, though Western audiences may see these images, they will fail to actually relate to the situation of the colonized. Rocha goes on to say, “For the European observer the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only insofar as it satisfies a nostalgia for primitivism.” This is particularly interesting since the word “primal” is exactly the word Scorsese uses to romantically describe the people “who have not” in Rocha’s film. In his essay “Concerning Violence,” Frantz Fanon seems to similarly argue that the colonizers have a failure to see anything but traits such as envy of the life of the colonizer in the eyes of the colonized. Rocha argues that he is not representing a primitive people, but a starving people, “and the violence of the starving is not primitive.” Though the Western audience may only see the primitive qualities of the people depicted in these films, what Rocha wishes to communicate to his audience is to stand up to the colonizing powers to avoid starvation. “A first policeman had to die for the French to become aware of the Algerians” (Rocha). Once hit, the colonizers will not see the colonized as primitive, but as a people pushed to uprising by the conditions put on them by their oppressors.
The “Hour of the Furnaces” depicts, perhaps more appropriately termed, “the hungry” with an investigative eye. It closely captures the faces of the rural peoples of Argentina. The camera follows them around and zooms quickly into extreme close-ups of the faces of adults and children while delivering a monologue of information on the literacy rates, birth rates, and other stats on starvation and malnutrition of these rural communities. Given the unconventional aesthetics of the documentary, especially during a sequence that intercuts brutal footage of animals being butchered with popular cartoony and artificial advertisements, the documentary seems to be after a similar response of revolutionary action as Rocha and the Cinema Novo movement as he describes it. As Rocha says, this violent uprising didn’t necessarily have to come from a place of hatred, but of a certain type of love. “The love that this violence encompasses is as brutal as the violence itself because it is not a love of complacency or contemplation but rather of action and transformation.” The filmmakers are fighting for freedom from their colonialist oppressors, and attempting to reveal the truth of the colonized “hungry” in their films to provoke a political reaction from audiences.
Octavio Getino and Fernando Solana’s “The Hour of the Furnaces” is a stark and honest account of the acts of neocolonialism perpetrated against Latin America’s working classes by the region’s own elite upper and ruling classes. The film is revolutionary both in content and in execution, unafraid to tell the true story of the oppression of the working classes in a poignant and effective documentary style.
The film itself is not unlike an analytical essay. In the words of Nicole Berenez of BFI Film, “the film is a comprehensive analysis of the history, geography, economy, sociology, ideology, culture, religion and daily life of Latin America. Each dimension and source of oppression is documented and pondered, as is each link between determinations and their consequences.” The film is thoughtful and thorough, proving itself to be a well-researched source of information on the topic.
The way it conveys the information is revolutionary. Narrated by one man who speaks clearly and calmly off screen, the audience is walked through a verbal recount of neocolonialism in Latin America while being shown stark, high-contrast black and white images to illustrate the points more clearly. We see images of police brutality juxtaposed with rich people smiling, driving in automobiles. We see images of cattle being violently slaughtered juxtaposed with advertisements of American goods. The varying content of the images highlight the extreme differences in treatment and lifestyles of the working classes and the elite, while the extreme contrast of the black and white images highlights how stark and grim the circumstances were for the working class.
Even the methods used to create and to screen “The Hour of the Furnaces” were revolutionary. As Berenez tells us, “the film was made clandestinely under a dictatorship, and signed by the Cine Liberación Group. Each screening was a rick and created a ‘liberated space, a decolonized territory,’ within which the film could be stopped for as long as necessary to allow discussions and debates (hence the compartmentalized structure.)” Films are rarely created in such a way to promote the interruption of viewing to discuss what is going on. There is much debate in “Something In The Air” in regards to revolutionary filmmaking; should revolutionary film be created in traditional ways, to help it reach a wider audience, or should revolutionary film be created in revolutionary ways? Clearly, “The Hour of the Furnaces” opted for the latter, effectively showcasing the plight of Latin America’s working classes and creating space within itself for discussion and debate.
As other students have already brought up (particularly Collin’s reference to Eisenstein), editing plays a very important role in both films. Specifically, in “The Hour of the Furnaces,” the editing effectively juxtaposes images of the poor and their struggle for survival with the lives of the wealthy “elite” who control most of the land and economy. As Collin also mentioned, the film methodically lays out the history of Argentina in order to set the stage for where things were at in the country while the film was being made. The way the film does so, however, is very integral to its effectiveness. From the very beginning, “The Hour of the Furnaces” blends together text (read by the narrators), with the ever present “black screen”, and then also includes historical footage and documents, all working as a new form of cinema towards the explanation of political issues and what must be done about it. The editing of all these parts into one, powerful structure allows the film to attack the politics of the time on all fronts. As Nicole Brenez states, “It conjoins the powers of didacticism, poetry and agogy (the agogic qualities of a work concern its rhythmic, sensible, physical properties…” and she later continues, “The Hour of the Furnaces stands out for its powerful balance between its strong literary structure and its many audiovisual innovations. These establish the film as a central reference for cinematic activism”. Combined, these different aspects explain the power and effectiveness of the film as a tool for education as well as action. There are also many instances in the film where the editing of images and film are powerful and effective all on their own. One such sequence is when the children are running on the side if the train, looking up at the passengers with their hands raised as they beg for some sort of assistance (whether it is money or food). These images are directly intercut with the images of tall buildings and skyscrapers in the city, as if they have taken the place of the “charitable” passengers on the train. Through the editing in this sequence it becomes clear that the children are representative of the poor masses of the country, looking up for help at the buildings, which represent the neo-colonialism that has invaded the country, and continues to do nothing for those poor in need, except help itself (the wealthy elite) and shine on in its own glory.
"The Hour of the Furnace" paints a very bleak picture for South America in the 60's at a time when the gap between classes could not seem to get any larger. Unlike most of the other films we've seen in class so far, this was the first film where things truly looked hopeless for the people. The film is a barrage of depressing images and facts. Early on, it became almost hard to stomach the how desperate the entire continent had become. As I was taking notes, I constantly had to rewind because I wasn't able to write down all the facts that were being presented. Whether it be the 900 thousand abandoned children in Argentina, to the fact that 50% of the land belonged to 1.5% of the people, the film had nothing positive to say about the situation for those in South American countries.
"The Hour of the Furnace" gives a perspective that is almost necessary to understand or even enjoy "Antonio das Mortes." Class struggles have been around well longer than cinema so the story of the "haves" versus the "have nots" is nothing new, but without the background of what is going on in the country at the time, it's pretty much impossible to see just how bad the situation has become. Even with the opening title crawl, it can only do so much to clue the viewer in on the climate of the culture at the time. It'd be interesting to have watched "Antonio das Mortes " before having watched "The Hour of the Furnace" and then re-watching it after because a completely clueless viewer probably would not be able to pick up on most of what's going on with zero background in what was happening at the time.
I would very much agree that one should watch "The Hour of the Furnace" prior to watching "Antonio das Mortes" because it gives you some societal perspective on south america at the time. Although one would be able to see that it was a very class divide oriented film, one would not be able to truly gauge how terrible and bleak the situation had actually become.
I had quite a bit of free time this morning, which is when I watched "The Hour of the Furnace" this being said, when I watched "Antonio das Mortes" I didn't have that much needed societal perspective. After watching "The Hour of the Furnace", I decided to re-watch "Antonio das Mortes", after doing so I enjoyed and appreciated the film far more than I did my first screening.
Despite the spontaneous qualities of its content, Hour of the Furnaces follows a predictable documentary structure through the use of use of title cards (or chapters) and an off–screen narrator to dictate what images will be seen. The clarity of its rhetoric, then, makes it much more identifiable as “propaganda” than revolutionary, because as Glauber Rocha argues, the film is counter–revolutionary for its reliance on documentary conventions. He says, “The style does not interest me” after earlier stating that revolutionary cinema should be in opposition to public taste. Mariano Mestman, on the other hand, argues that the film’s juxtaposition of various image sources and editing techniques “articulates an original experimental language” even if the film borrows earlier avante–garde techniques used worldwide. Rocha’s criticism begs the question, can a film truly exist as an independent creation, and a thus a “revolutionary” film, or is the concept of a “revolutionary” film purely speculative in that all films essentially offer nothing new cinematically for they contain “identifiable markers” that signal their past influences? Rocha considers his film, Antonio Das Mortes, as a product of revolutionary cinema for its “opposition to Hollywood cinema” and this is true to a certain extent through both the heightened level of theatricality in its performances (ex: characters “direct addressing” the camera, characters exiting the frame only to later return tot eh frame, the exaggeration of death and violence) but the film very much resembles a “western” semantically through its costumes, locations, props, and music. Possibly one of the more avante–garde moments in the film, the “long take” that slowly tracks a group of character from right–to–left, which opposes the “traditional” left – to–right screen direction, may distance the viewer temporarily, but is essentially nothing new as long takes have been around since the earliest days of cinema before editing was invented. The Hour of the Furnace’s static “long take” of Che Guevara’s face essentially works much in the same manner as a distancing effect for its extended duration, but in that film, it could be argued that the film not only provides a bookend image to close the first chapter, but Guevara’s piercing “gaze” on the viewer allows him or her to assess “their” role in revolutionary struggle. The long take in Antonio Das Mortes, however, builds a high level of anxiety in the viewer because the camera does not show the “effect” of the long take (i.e. the narrative motivation for moving the camera”) other than allowing the background music to fully play out.
Nice. Does GR directly criticize HotF, tho, as you seem to suggest? (If he does in the readings can you provide specific reference, for I don't recall this...)
"Antonio de Mortes" has an overall theme of the conflict between the government and the working class. The film was released in 1969, and had a very big effect on the world. The film talked about politics without having to actually talk about it. The conflict between the opposing characters paralleled the actual conflict between the working class and the political powers of Brazil. The leaders of the religious group that includes Congonciero and Santa stirred a lot of commotion in whatever was happening before Antonio had returned. The "government" side of the movie, with Mattos, laura, and the professor were the overbearing "Rulers" of a land that didn't want to be ruled. Especially like that. The way the movie was filmed, created very jarring moments, just because the lack of music at some parts and then picking it up back again in the next scene. I think the main reason that I feel that way, is because of how a lot of movies are made so differently now than they did then. The movie has this effect on the viewers as though we are waiting for something to happen when there isn't any music. I want more from those scenes, just like the village people wanted more from the leaders that controlled the town. The are also a lot of different relationships within the "Government" side of the movie. Laura has relations with many men and through those actions, the men die because of jealousy and impulsive temperament. It can almost be thought of as the corruption of the actual government in Brazil at that time.
European influence is the key issue discussed in The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino & Fernando Solanas, 1968). Certainly, the problems are found in Latin America – as that is the setting for the conflict – but the causes are all attributed to Europe. The chaos embroiling the continent is displayed through the frantic drumming and vocals, in the rapid editing between frenetic news footage and moving title cards, and in the fervent revolutionary rhetoric of the title cards. The fact that each section uses a slightly different tone and format/method for each topic underlines the disjointed state of affairs that goes back to European action (more on this specifically in a moment). These all culminate portraying the “climate of agitation,” as it is called by Mariano Mestman in “The Hour of the Furnaces: Crafting a Revolutionary Cinema,” that filled the region in the late 1960s as a result of neo-colonialism.
Neo-colonialism is the true villain in the film’s narrative. In declaring “manufacturers *invaded* internal markets,” the filmmakers equate neo-colonial economic action with physical subjugation, like that of the conquistadores on indigenous peoples (emphasis added). However, they make clear that neo-colonial problems are more insidious because “neo-colonial violence does not have to be put into practice; it is enough that it exists” to harm the campesinos and other members of the poor and working classes. While the most obvious harmful results of neo-colonialism are found in rural areas, the problems are, again, more subtle in the cities, as the better conditions are a result of Europeanism; it’s deleterious because 1) it is biased toward helping those who are already wealthy enough to live in cities and 2) the intellectual success is based in European/non-Native ideas, which degrades an older culture for the benefit of the new oppressors.
Glauber Rocha’s following statement in “An Esthetic of Hunger” very effectively explains the ideology of The Hour of the Furnaces: “While Latin America laments its general misery, the foreign onlooker cultivates the taste of that misery, not as a tragic symptom, but merely as an esthetic object within his field of interest. The Latin American neither communicates his real misery to the ‘civilized’ European, nor does the European truly comprehend the misery of the Latin American.” What this gets at is the global crisis that can be found in Latin America is, in fact, of worldwide concern, and this is due to the asserting of European control over other cultures.
The Hour of the Furnace (1968) is a film that is taken in very different parts. Unlike many of the others types of documentaries we have seen in our classroom, specifically Children of the Revolution (2010) which really only focused on four people, Furnaces focuses on a myriad of others topics affecting the Latin-Americans nations. This allows the director to give a wider example of how the horrors of 68 were affecting a variety amount of individuals, empowering the politics while sensitizing of people. Mariano Mestman, in this article, “Crafting a Revolutionary Cinema,” believes that “the film establishes a close relationship between form and content, seeking to sensitize its ideas and varying each section according to the topic dealt with (para 7).” The film ‘s cinéma vérité like feel plays an important aspect on how the politics of the film is portrayed. Everyone is affected by this turmoil and the viewer can see from the uncomfortable close-ups and grimy feel of the scenery. Antonio das Mortes (1969) however, presents form and content as mere opposites of each other. Mortes (1968) almost acts of a parody of the whole spaghetti Western genre, but has a very serious understanding of the politics around it. The comparison between the two films really highlights how different types of films can express the same political message. Furnace (1968) is this very serious documentary exposing the turmoil’s of the Latin American nation while criticizing the political nature of its time. While, Mortes (1969) does feature some of the same political elements as Furance 1968), it exposes those injustices through the themes of a western farce.
The Hour of The Furnaces (1968) is very different than any film that we have seen yet. This film had the most impact on me in terms of a social revolution. It was an effective film because of the successful mixture of emotional and empirical devices used. This film contained data and numbers that were astonishing. The numbers showed how great the divide between the wealthy and poor was in Argentina at the time. Numbers alone rarely have enough effect to move an audience to action however. There needs to be some sort of emotional connection to the situation. The film shows the humanity and how it differs between the rich and poor. There were several shot v. shots that really highlight this divide. The one that stands out the most to me is the slaughterhouse scenes. In one shot we are shown the workers and in the next the animals. We then get shots of the works and then the animals being killed. This is a metaphor for divide of the wealthy and poor. The wealthy will flourish almost always at the expense of the poor, especially when it comes to things like agriculture where there is no possible way to compete with people who are so entrenched in the politics of the society and own all of the land, (means of production).
The other topic that I found very interesting that we had not really encountered in films before is the desire of the wealthy to be Europeans. They fetishize the European lifestyle and culture. This is particularly interesting especially when thinking about colonization. Colonization is all about exploitation and profit. In order for the colonizers to exploit and profit, they must use the locals. Those who side with the colonizers end up profiting at the expense of their own countrymen, which is hugely important in this case. The wealthy still want to be European as the profit while their countrymen suffer.
The class divide and the oligarchy is very real in modern America, which is why I believe the film to be the most effective at conveying a message. It really captures a systemic and global issue.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) seems to be a complete embodiment and representation of Glauber Rocha's 1965 essay, "The Aesthetics of Hunger" not only in its content but in its form. Rocha emphasizes a violent and unjustifiable disconnect between the colonizers and those who've been colonized. He discusses "the relationship between our culture and 'civilized' culture in less limiting terms than those which characterize the analysis of the European observer" (1) and chooses to view that relationship from the workers' eyes as opposed to the oppressive and muffling view of the rich. The Hour of the Furnaces magnificently shows the relationship in an interesting use of the conventional shot-reverse-shot. We see a group of children running alongside a train, begging. From the passenger's perspective we see a young boy running beneath us with his hands cusped for food. When we get his perspective, all we see is towering, ominous shinny buildings from the city. While the shot-reverse-shot is not a literal one, it demonstrates the cold, dominating and immovable image of the colonizers as seen by the starving.
Another point that Rocha makes in his essay is that the colonization has not changed from when the Europeans first arrived to the present. He says, "What distinguishes yesterday's colonialism from today's is merely the more refined forms employed by the contemporary colonizer" (1). Again, through The Hour of Furnaces' seamless editing, Rocha's argument is boldly established. While the film explains the history of Brazil's colonization, images and paintings of the Spanish and English invaders are displayed. Laced between these images, however, are images of the modern day bourgeoisie putting at a golf course. The narrator does not explain their presence in the scene, and the viewers therefore associate the modern day rich with the historical colonizers as Rocha does in his essay.
Glauber Rocha also explains how the hunger that is felt all over Brazil and Latin American in general is not fully understood. He explains that, similarly, in his work, his films are "ugly, sad films, those screaming, desperate films in which reason has not always prevailed" (1) and where the hunger can't be hidden by the "cloak of technicolor" (1). In other words, his films are as raw, untainted and confusing as the situation itself. He says that the industrial cinema is committed only to untruth and exploitation. The Hour of the Furnaces touches on a similar topic. During a scene where a group of young men are in a record shop, the narrator explains that the films and magazines of the bourgeoisie exist to depoliticize people and to encourage escapism. (I don't think that it's unimportant to note that an American song is playing in the background) This film, however, is far from escapism and does everything but depoliticize. With its ideas and it's form, it strongly exemplifies what Rocha probably thought the cinema should be and do.
Glauber Rocha states, in his interview entitled Cinema Nova vs. Cultural Colonialism with Cineaste, “As regards Antonio Das Mortes, I might say that I think I made a revolutionary film in that I made a film opposed to the aesthetic principles of the cinema of domination.” Now, how is Antonio Das Mortes directly and completely opposed to Hollywood cinema? As Ben has mentioned earlier, there are certain aesthetic similarities between shots in Antonio and shots from Godard. There are many reminiscences to the American and Italian genres of the western. Although the film is opposed to the aesthetics of American and European cinema, it uses various tools from both, albeit, for different political differences. It is still a film meant for popular consumption, but it is not meant to “stimulate the conformity,” but rather to “provoke revolution.” The closest the film gets to aesthetic revolution, is in the use of the Brazilian mythos, which is unique and singular to Brazil. Also, the use of music montages which seem to be detached from the narrative, being more scenes of expression than scenes on plot, is also somewhat against the grain of the standard Hollywood film.
La Hora de las Hornos is a film blatantly trying to provoke revolution, but it is also not a film meant for popular consumption, unlike Antonio das Mortes, which is. The film is almost more of a Power Point than a film, a political speech, rather than an entertainment. It is also a film that “speaks about a reality but is not at all objective.” Now, taking reality and bending it to prove your political views is nothing new to Europe and America. What is new, is the aesthetic of the documentary, the lack of interviews, the sounds of a machine gun bombarding the viewer with American propaganda.
For my response I have decided to focus on the character of Antao in Glauber Roche’s 1969 film Antonio das Mortes. Antao, the black angel counters Barbara, the santa, throughout the film. When Coirana, the Cangaceiro, is introduced, and he is making his raison d’etat, Antao stands to left and santa stands to the right, countering each other in placement, but both ‘standing by’ the Cangaceiro. I am not sure if the black angel represents a messenger of the devil or the angel of death, but it is clear that he is not a physical entity, but a spiritual one. The same goes for Santa which represents a messenger of God, neither are killed in the massacre, however they are both present witnesses, unaffected by physical harm. Where Barbara wears white robes with a veil, Antao wears red clothes with a large headdress. The clothes of Antao possibly connotate the devil, or flames. Another scene, shortly after the massacre (1:15:40), Mata-Vaca laughs in the face of Antao, and takes off his headdress and throws it on the ground. An interpretation of this is that Mata-Vaca laughs at the face of death, his massacre does not bother him, rather he gets pleasure from it. After this removal the headdress by Mata-Vaca, Antao is forced to crawl on all fours. Is this another sign of Mata-Vaca being a messenger of the devil, being forced to crawl (I’m thinking about the story of the fall), or is this a more literal visual of death stalking the land. When Antonio and the professor see the massacre, Antao is there, and he is ridden by the professor, who jumps on his back and smacks him. Here the intellectual rides death, or the devil depending how you look at it, and this propels him into that odd scene where he is trying to get a ride out of town, but fails. I interpret that this leads him to being lost, deserted. He is stuck in nowhere.
I admittedly struggled to follow Antonio Das Mortes (1969). And watching Scorsese's interview on the film made me feel ashamed for it. At first the feeling came from the drastic difference between my and Scorsese's reactions, but then again when I realized that I shouldn't need Scorsese telling me how great the film is before I pay closer attention to it.
I found myself having an easier time with (arguably) the more challenging of the two films this week The Hour of the Furnaces (1968). Perhaps it is because the language of documentary style filmmaking is more universal and easy to digest, even if the content is not. Ironic, because the film attributes the troubles of Latin America to Neocolonialism, which I would consider documentary style filmmaking to most at home to. It provokes the question raised by Something in the Air (2012), that is should revolutionary ideas use revolutionary filmmaking? That isn't to say that the film doesn't flirt with communicating its ideas in revolutionary ways. One such moment occurs in part 9) Dependence when the film inter-cuts scenes from a slaughterhouse with 60's American pop iconography playing alongside carefree music. I found it very hard to watch (which is certainly saying something having visited a slaughterhouse myself). The punishment dealt to the animals echoed the punishment dealt to the poor peoples of Latin America by the perpetrators of Neocolonialism. The fact that this sequence was tougher to watch than the scenes involving dead and starving children begs the question of why? Are we the viewers so detached from the struggles of these peoples that we have more sympathy for animals? One could argue that the reason for this is because of the graphic nature of the violence inflicted on the animals, but is it truly uglier than the centuries old violence inflicted on these people? Certainly challenging. However, most of the film (for its benefit) makes use of more traditional means of communicating its ideas. The choice to present statistics alongside grievances against Neocolonialism and imagery of the destitute in such a matter of fact manner speak in a more digestible form for the bourgeois and petty bourgeoisie. It is because of this that the fleeting moments of more revolutionary cinema like the one mentioned above and the scene of the man being stabbed are able to work so well. Were the film to be comprised of only moments such as these, it would never allow the viewer to lower their defenses against the material.
Thankfully, after watching The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) I came to a better understanding and greater appreciation of Antonio Das Mortes (1969). I think what I needed most was context, which Furnaces(1968) helped with. Learning that their class struggle reaches all the way back to the times Colombian Exchange cleared up a lot. Namely, how truly old the struggle of Antonio Das Mortes (1969) is. The use of ritual finally made sense to me. Ritual being something done repeatedly, often symbolizing the eternal. While the film may have ended on a seemingly happy note (Antonio Das Mortes has won), the ritualistic nature of the film bleakly implies that this struggle will go on forever.
Through a series of radically edited sequences, "The Hour of the Furnaces" uses said editing techniques and other images to paint a negative portrait of Latin America’s upper-class elite (and the “rich nations” of certain European countries and the US) and to help us sympathize with the working class “common folk”, who, through the government’s practice of neocolonialism, are having their dignity taken away from them.
ReplyDeleteRight off the bat, we are swayed to sympathize more with the non-elite of Latin America - the revolutionaries that is - with this introduction that reads like a propaganda poster with its bold, capitalized words and phrases spliced in between footage of the police harming innocent civilians.
Furthermore, during a part entitled "A Daily Violence", the sound of a punch-in clock shown at the beginning gets repeated throughout, which illustrates the constant repetition and dull monotony these workers have to face everyday making minimum wage in crap conditions, all for nothing, really. The phrase “To dominate man, napalm and poison gas are not yet necessary” leads one to believe that the government, or high powers rather, don’t need weapons or harmful tools to take over their citizens, because they already have taken them over through neocolonialism.
And at some points during the film I couldn’t help but to feel like I was watching the introduction to Ingmar Bergman’s "Persona".
To drive my point of a Bergman-esque influence running throughout this film home (specifically "Persona"'s intro, that is), during the scene which showcases the cemetery of the elite, the camera is constantly focusing on a statue, or switching focus between two, or panning around from one to another, and the editing, which splices in shots of lightning, is just madcap and all over the place. The "Persona" influence is once again felt later on in the film when a montage is shown depicting staples of the US middle class (e.g. Coca-Cola, cars, meat, etc.) spliced between shots of a slaughterhouse. The slitting of the lambs’ throats immediately recalls the shot in the intro of Persona where a farmer is draining all the blood out of a lamb (followed by a shot of said lambs’ organs).
Sure, this influence of Bergman may sound a bit farfetched, but, seeing as this film was released in 1968, and Persona in 1966, it’s possible that directors Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas saw Bergman’s film and were influenced by it’s raw and experimental editing style. This would make The Hour of the Furnaces fall into the category of being a radical, revolutionary film that covers a radical and revolutionary subject, as we’ve discussed in class.
The penultimate sequence, which simultaneously splices clips of horrifying events, paintings and other mediums of art, and adverts over upbeat music and videos of students dancing, and then ultimately only shows horrifying clips with audio of someone laughing insanely, uses this radical editing to give the viewer a great sense of unease at viewing this events caused by bad, imperialist nations
Sight & Sound’s article declared this film “the film that established the paradigm of revolutionary activist cinema”, and because of my previous paragraphs, I’m inclined to agree with that.
P.S. One thing I did not understand the significance of or meaning behind was having two narrators as opposed to one. I don’t know if this is just to break up the monotony of having one voice or if it holds any meaning. Any of you guys have any thoughts on this?
John, I find it really interesting that the you explain the last sequence as one "which simultaneously splices clips of horrifying events, paintings and other mediums of art, and adverts over upbeat music and videos of students dancing" to "give the viewer a great sense of unease at viewing this events caused by bad, imperialist nations." I wrote my response before reading the comments, and to me it wasn't an attempt to guilt anyone into thinking anything, as much as it was to show the reality of trying to find an identity when what is depicted on screen is daily life for people there.
DeleteSimilarly, I think this brings up the importance of communication. Clarification of message--of sharing points of view. I think, perhaps, my viewing was affected by having read the interview with Rocha's interview, where he claims his films "are not specifically propagandist. I try to reveal the political problems of the underdeveloped world but I refuse to call this political propaganda," (Dan Georgakas, 13). This to me reinforced the idea he's speaking to his people, not trying to create bad propaganda of imperialists nations--as much as imperialism in general, that is.
To build on Jessica’s topic, A Common topic that is brought up in each of our films this week, “The Hour of the Furnaces”, and “Antonio das Mortes” is the value of the American dollar, and the effects on its citizens. The Colonel in Antonio das Mortes speaks of the dollar as a way to revive and bring prosperity to his people. In the scene where the Colonel is giving food, you can get an understanding that these people are starving and need help, and that by being exploited will not stop their determent. The Colonel and his support in the dollar are not good for the people, but I feel that what the director is trying to accomplish with this scene is to show that handouts don’t necessarily make everyone happy, nor does it actually solve the problem.
DeleteFernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema” , mentions the term film guerillas that I feel accurately reflects the filmmaker of “The Hour of the Furnaces” Sudden Extreme close ups, as well as slow zooming out by the film give context to the society. The use of black screens with large text does more than just grab the attention of its viewers; it pulls them in and incorporates them. A parallel can be seen in “Antonio das Mortes” with how important the folksongs are to the director. It aligns the viewer with that culture and the authenticity of it. Mentioned in “Toward a Third Cinema”, the importance of depicting the image of reality, rather than reality. The reality of it is simple, imperialism and capitalism are forcing changes in Latin American countries and it’s not willingly by the working people. The purpose of the film may not be black and white, but it becomes clear when you see the film though the eyes of the worker.
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ReplyDeleteThere’s a line in Alex Cox’s film, “Walker” (1987), that bears repeating given this week’s Latin American focus. Before Walker (Ed Harris) is executed he makes a speech where he claims, “You all might think that there will come a day when America will leave Nicaragua alone. Well, I am here to tell you that day will never happen. Because it is our duty to be here. It is our duty to control you people. So no matter what you do – no matter how hard you fight – we’ll be back.” This speech probably never happened in reality, but it might as well have. From the time of William Walker in 1850 to present day, it’s strange to watch films like “Antonio Das Mortes” and “The Hour of Furnaces” and see how the dreams of expelling American imperialism has been a continuous fight in Latin America.
ReplyDeleteBoth “Antonio Das Mortes” and “The Hour of the Furnaces” function as politically radical films in their content and form in an attempt to find “new modes of expression” that highlight a cultural revolution within a political one (Cineaste, 14-15). The films we watched blatantly work to distance themselves from American cinema in almost every sense possible. Going back to the discussion that was raised by “Something in the Air” whether films should be made in order to reach a mass audience through standard cinematic techniques that have “been imposed by colonial conditioning” or creating a new artistic form that “sets itself apart from the commercial industry because the commitment of Industrial Cinema is to untruth and exploitation” (Esthetic of Hunger, Rocha).
Where “Antonio Das Mortes” uses traditional Brazilian history and mythology, distinguishing the fact that it is made for a Brazilian audience, and “if bourgeois audiences find them difficult it is because of their lack of understanding of the popular culture” in Brazil.” “The Hour of the Furnaces” lays the entire history and social conditions of Latin America out in chapters so anyone could see the struggle, albeit using Eisensteinian (is this a word?) editing (Rocha). “Antonio Das Mortes” ends on a sad note, despite the death of the landowning colonel, with Antonio walking along the highway with a “shell gas” logo above his head; American imperialism owns the land and places itself over the revolutionary. “The Hour of the Furnaces” “anticipates a liberated time” that, with the benefit of living in 2014, never comes completely to fruition (Brenez). And considering the amount of refugee children that are coming from South America today, being greeted with disdain and hatred from the reactionary right-wing, it should seem that we owe them a little more sympathy, given the fact that we created the turmoil in their countires.
The long take [which, I’ve just learned, is the proper term for what I’ve been calling a long shot; l.s. refers to distance from subject/width of camera angle, while l.t. is a time-expansive uninterrupted shot] has been used, and used powerfully, by many an experimental filmmaker over the years. And, though Glauber Rocha makes a conscious effort to distance himself from the European avant-garde [‘Cinema Novo vs. cultural colonialism’], it’s hard to watch Antonio Das Mortes and deny the effect European art films have had on Rocha’s work. The fight sequence between Antonio and the cangaciero in particular felt like something Godard would have appreciated, especially with its emphasis on rotation; the long take toward the end of Breathless, where Michel and Patricia are circling each other during a bedroom conversation, is sufficiently similar to mark a common influence.
ReplyDeleteGiven the political nature of Rocha’s films, though, it’s not enough to discuss the aesthetic impact of the long take. In Antonio Das Mortes, Rocha uses the long take to make the viewer feel complicit in the revolutionary action of the film. Rocha literally positions the audience on the side of the cangaciero by making our viewpoint identical to that of one of his followers on multiple occasions, and in being so positioned, in feeling like we are participating in the events of the film, we are compelled to act as Antonio Das Mortes does in realigning ourselves with the protesters.
I could select several examples, but as I don’t have the film in front of me/only have room in this blog post for one, I’ll try to synthesise my general experience w/the film. Many of the shots when the cangaciero is travelling in a dancing, singing mob -- specifically, the one where the cangaciero himself is shown taunting Antonio Das Mortes -- are composed of long takes with a dynamic, fluid camera that is positioned within the crowd, moving with it. The bandits themselves are also moving, some spinning, some walking, and some orbiting the vortex: in other words, performing the exact same movements as the camera. In terms of approximating viewer presence, this is as close as it gets. The camera is eye-level, its movements mirror those of the actors, and our presentation of the many subjects is uninterrupted. It’s like we’re one of them.
For Rocha, this is an important point. Rocha wanted his films to be authentically Brazilian, aesthetically challenging, and above all, populist. Antonio Das Mortes is, regardless of Scorsese’s opinion, intensely political, and its position is that of the people. To drive this point home, Rocha frames us as one of them.
I need to acknowledge that in this particular viewing, I could not achieve intellectual detachment, which in turn affected the way I received it—without reservations, a substantial amount of nodding, and as a purely emotional response. Nevertheless, from my intoxicated state of bias, it is important to highlight its masterful importance for the oppressed voice to speak—or in these cases, to sing—in a fight against domination.
ReplyDeleteThe documentary highlights over and over the issues with illiteracy, the bias of the education system, and the usage of mass media as a mechanism. However, it seems to focus on the problems in an abstract manner.
Does it fall victim to some of the problem it denounces? It rebels against the manner of thought deriving from colonization, but its direct address seems only to the Latin American man and woman.
Perhaps, conscious of the lack of appeal this issue has to the world powers, its “teachings” are to the colonized. It briefly showcases problem, but the delineation is undermined, under stressed. In its path to denounce neo-colonialism, it critiques colonization without daring to do a direct critique of the colonizer. It is trying to showcase the struggles of Latin America by attacking a system, but not an identifiable one. In its opposition, the voice of the oppressed continues to lack authority. It denounces corporations, brand names, propaganda, cultural influence, etc., but it refuses to point fingers to the governments—a politically deliberate and safe move.
By not directly accusing, it denounces the action of colonization without making itself a target for a reprise. This seemed represented in the documentary by which songs were translated. While the song about “hovering above the radiant dawn….the eagle is the flag of my country born of the sun which God gave me,” the song playing during the scene at the statue cemetery does not feature subtitles. Granted, the song is hard to follow, but the snippets that come through seem too important to not translate: “the bridge,…we want…unaware of the ideas and minds…in Buenos Aires…to rebel…shall be showered in blood…in blood.”
The diegetic role of the music is obvious in this documentary, as much as it was in “Antonio das Mortes” (1969). Furthermore, I think the music is the secret language used between the filmmakers and the audience. “The Hour of the Furnaces” (1968) delves a bit on the importance of eradicating theoriginal roots of the population, music being one aspect. Inside a repressed country, the daily violence, the desperation of the economic situation, the cultural poverty, the hunger, and the impotence, leads to wanting escapism. Since early on, the ideal, the aspiration, the role-model is the unreachable status of “the other.” We are taught to turn our back from the origins, from the “segregated, the sub-developed, the sub-man.”
The films oppose this. By using music to reach deeper than the ingrained ideologies, they beg for the resurgence of unity neo-colonialism has destroyed through class building. Like the chanting in “Antonio das Mortes,” the documentary uses music, semi-muted dialogue, the secondary voices lost in the background, and the mutters to convey a message not graspable in translation. It’s there. You hear it. But it’s gone. Too quick to be translated—unimportant in the eyes of the colonizer’s mentality—but vital for the message to the repressed.
In all, the ending sequence of “The Hour of the Furnace,” in a confusion of English, Spanish, French, violence, glamorization, propaganda, real emotion, and fiction, seems the most effective sequence to teach and reach. The confusion expressed, the juxtapositions, the paradoxes are life. That is the life inside a repressed country—a ceaseless ambush of confusing images, conflicting messages, identity crisis, daily struggle, and incomprehensible ominous laughter coming from seemingly nowhere…
Very nice!
DeleteIn my opinion, In the films Antonio Das Mortes, and The Hour of the Furnaces, there are 2 main themes that encapsulated the culture of Latin America in 1968, the time in which both The Hour of the Furnaces, and Antonio Das Mortes where released. These 2 themes are constant violence, and the struggle between the landowners and the poor working class in Latin America during this time. Glauber Rocha, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas express the same issues in their respective films.
ReplyDeleteOne of the main themes was the proletariat land owner. In Antonio Das Mortes, this was the Coronel, Horatio, the wealthy blind land owner. I think the fact that he was blind was a metaphor for him being spiritually unjust with his greed in regards to his land. In The Hour of the Furnaces, the say that “50% of the land is in the hands of 1.5% of the landowners, while 80% of the population has no land at all”. This fact really emphasizes the fact that the land ownership was wildly disproportionate, with only a few wealthy people owning most of the land, embodied by the Coronel in Antonio Das Mortes. The Hour of the Furnaces really drives home the point that many people in Latin America at this time were in poverty. They show some very startling stills and footage of starving children, shanty towns, slums and slums, often called favelas, and people struggling to make ends meat. Another fact that demonstrates the vast gap in the upper and lower class, is that “the average income of the lower class, is 20 times less than that of the upper class. For 110 million people (half the population) income does not reach 120 dollars a year”.
The constant violence in Latin America is shown in Antonio Das Mortes by the battle between the Cangaceiros, and Antonio Das Mortes. In one scene, Antonio is telling the story of how he killed Corisco, who he thought to be the last of the Cangaceiros, 29 years earlier. And then a new Cangaceiro appears in the town of Jardim Das Piranhas. After 29 years the battle is still not over, and the violence continues. In The Hour of the Furnaces, the violence is shown throughout the film. In one scene, it shows to men fighting, with the camera frantically moving about them, and one guy stabs the other. In another, it shows frightened children, dead people, and mass chaos as tanks roll through the streets. There is a quote early on in The Hour of the Furnace: “the violence visited on the Latin American peoples is a constant, planned, systematic violence” This point is proven by the constant and systematic violence shown throughout the film.
After having done a few of the readings before watching this week’s at home viewing, I find that “The Hour of the Furnaces” is exhibits of the kind of decolonization that Franz Fanon discusses in his essay “Concerning Violence.” The main conflict highlighted by the film, that of the cultural identity of Argentina working against the United States and its westernizing influence, is precisely the kind of struggle for which Fanon advocates the use of violence. The idea that the defeat of the colonized, as Fanon states, occurs when he “admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values” is a reoccurring theme in the film that serves as a rallying cry for the people of Argentina to reject the colonizing culture (25). For example, a significant time in “The Hour of the Furnaces” is spent just listening to the inconsequential “western” conversations of the Argentinean bourgeois. Voiceovers of men singing the praises of a general because he “translated Dante” and a woman discussing the merits of vacationing in America over France make a poignant point about how deeply absorbed the Argentinean elite were into the culture of their colonizers (especially when the voiceovers are played over footage of demonstrators being arrested by armed policemen in the streets.
ReplyDeleteFanon’s alternative scenario, the goal of decolonization in which “the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up,” is also very present in the film, especially at the end (25). John and Jess have already made a note of the waning moments of the film in which a woman’s laughter plays after a montage of western cultural images, such as comic books and movie stills, and accompanies clips of aggression, a sequence that seems to mock and devalue quite overtly the culture that the western powers have imposed. Also in defiance of colonial culture is a montage that occurs just after the laughing sequence, one in which stills with American cultural markers like Batman and car ads are edited to flash on screen to match the rhythm of a firing machine gun. This sequence can be interpreted as both an indictment of the American consumer culture that is just as effective as a military force at suppressing the Argentinean people or as an aesthetic attack by the filmmakers against the influence and meaning of such images. In either case, the sequence evokes the violent position advocated by Fanon in the struggle decolonization and the determination of the filmmakers to contribute to the violence, if only initially with aesthetic violence.
Both “Antonio das Mortes” and “Hour of the Furnaces” feature what Scorsese calls “those who have not” in his interview discussion. In his essay “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” Glauber Rocha explains that the films of the Cinema Novo movement that he was a part of fail to, “Communicate his real misery to the ‘civilized’ European, nor does the European truly comprehend the misery of the Latin American.” In this way, though Western audiences may see these images, they will fail to actually relate to the situation of the colonized. Rocha goes on to say, “For the European observer the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only insofar as it satisfies a nostalgia for primitivism.” This is particularly interesting since the word “primal” is exactly the word Scorsese uses to romantically describe the people “who have not” in Rocha’s film. In his essay “Concerning Violence,” Frantz Fanon seems to similarly argue that the colonizers have a failure to see anything but traits such as envy of the life of the colonizer in the eyes of the colonized.
ReplyDeleteRocha argues that he is not representing a primitive people, but a starving people, “and the violence of the starving is not primitive.” Though the Western audience may only see the primitive qualities of the people depicted in these films, what Rocha wishes to communicate to his audience is to stand up to the colonizing powers to avoid starvation. “A first policeman had to die for the French to become aware of the Algerians” (Rocha). Once hit, the colonizers will not see the colonized as primitive, but as a people pushed to uprising by the conditions put on them by their oppressors.
The “Hour of the Furnaces” depicts, perhaps more appropriately termed, “the hungry” with an investigative eye. It closely captures the faces of the rural peoples of Argentina. The camera follows them around and zooms quickly into extreme close-ups of the faces of adults and children while delivering a monologue of information on the literacy rates, birth rates, and other stats on starvation and malnutrition of these rural communities. Given the unconventional aesthetics of the documentary, especially during a sequence that intercuts brutal footage of animals being butchered with popular cartoony and artificial advertisements, the documentary seems to be after a similar response of revolutionary action as Rocha and the Cinema Novo movement as he describes it. As Rocha says, this violent uprising didn’t necessarily have to come from a place of hatred, but of a certain type of love. “The love that this violence encompasses is as brutal as the violence itself because it is not a love of complacency or contemplation but rather of action and transformation.” The filmmakers are fighting for freedom from their colonialist oppressors, and attempting to reveal the truth of the colonized “hungry” in their films to provoke a political reaction from audiences.
Nicely done. I very much appreciate your use of a number of assigned readings, and doing so in meaningful ways.
DeleteOctavio Getino and Fernando Solana’s “The Hour of the Furnaces” is a stark and honest account of the acts of neocolonialism perpetrated against Latin America’s working classes by the region’s own elite upper and ruling classes. The film is revolutionary both in content and in execution, unafraid to tell the true story of the oppression of the working classes in a poignant and effective documentary style.
ReplyDeleteThe film itself is not unlike an analytical essay. In the words of Nicole Berenez of BFI Film, “the film is a comprehensive analysis of the history, geography, economy, sociology, ideology, culture, religion and daily life of Latin America. Each dimension and source of oppression is documented and pondered, as is each link between determinations and their consequences.” The film is thoughtful and thorough, proving itself to be a well-researched source of information on the topic.
The way it conveys the information is revolutionary. Narrated by one man who speaks clearly and calmly off screen, the audience is walked through a verbal recount of neocolonialism in Latin America while being shown stark, high-contrast black and white images to illustrate the points more clearly. We see images of police brutality juxtaposed with rich people smiling, driving in automobiles. We see images of cattle being violently slaughtered juxtaposed with advertisements of American goods. The varying content of the images highlight the extreme differences in treatment and lifestyles of the working classes and the elite, while the extreme contrast of the black and white images highlights how stark and grim the circumstances were for the working class.
Even the methods used to create and to screen “The Hour of the Furnaces” were revolutionary. As Berenez tells us, “the film was made clandestinely under a dictatorship, and signed by the Cine Liberación Group. Each screening was a rick and created a ‘liberated space, a decolonized territory,’ within which the film could be stopped for as long as necessary to allow discussions and debates (hence the compartmentalized structure.)” Films are rarely created in such a way to promote the interruption of viewing to discuss what is going on. There is much debate in “Something In The Air” in regards to revolutionary filmmaking; should revolutionary film be created in traditional ways, to help it reach a wider audience, or should revolutionary film be created in revolutionary ways? Clearly, “The Hour of the Furnaces” opted for the latter, effectively showcasing the plight of Latin America’s working classes and creating space within itself for discussion and debate.
Good job.
DeleteAs other students have already brought up (particularly Collin’s reference to Eisenstein), editing plays a very important role in both films. Specifically, in “The Hour of the Furnaces,” the editing effectively juxtaposes images of the poor and their struggle for survival with the lives of the wealthy “elite” who control most of the land and economy. As Collin also mentioned, the film methodically lays out the history of Argentina in order to set the stage for where things were at in the country while the film was being made. The way the film does so, however, is very integral to its effectiveness. From the very beginning, “The Hour of the Furnaces” blends together text (read by the narrators), with the ever present “black screen”, and then also includes historical footage and documents, all working as a new form of cinema towards the explanation of political issues and what must be done about it. The editing of all these parts into one, powerful structure allows the film to attack the politics of the time on all fronts. As Nicole Brenez states, “It conjoins the powers of didacticism, poetry and agogy (the agogic qualities of a work concern its rhythmic, sensible, physical properties…” and she later continues, “The Hour of the Furnaces stands out for its powerful balance between its strong literary structure and its many audiovisual innovations. These establish the film as a central reference for cinematic activism”. Combined, these different aspects explain the power and effectiveness of the film as a tool for education as well as action.
ReplyDeleteThere are also many instances in the film where the editing of images and film are powerful and effective all on their own. One such sequence is when the children are running on the side if the train, looking up at the passengers with their hands raised as they beg for some sort of assistance (whether it is money or food). These images are directly intercut with the images of tall buildings and skyscrapers in the city, as if they have taken the place of the “charitable” passengers on the train. Through the editing in this sequence it becomes clear that the children are representative of the poor masses of the country, looking up for help at the buildings, which represent the neo-colonialism that has invaded the country, and continues to do nothing for those poor in need, except help itself (the wealthy elite) and shine on in its own glory.
"The Hour of the Furnace" paints a very bleak picture for South America in the 60's at a time when the gap between classes could not seem to get any larger. Unlike most of the other films we've seen in class so far, this was the first film where things truly looked hopeless for the people. The film is a barrage of depressing images and facts. Early on, it became almost hard to stomach the how desperate the entire continent had become. As I was taking notes, I constantly had to rewind because I wasn't able to write down all the facts that were being presented. Whether it be the 900 thousand abandoned children in Argentina, to the fact that 50% of the land belonged to 1.5% of the people, the film had nothing positive to say about the situation for those in South American countries.
ReplyDelete"The Hour of the Furnace" gives a perspective that is almost necessary to understand or even enjoy "Antonio das Mortes." Class struggles have been around well longer than cinema so the story of the "haves" versus the "have nots" is nothing new, but without the background of what is going on in the country at the time, it's pretty much impossible to see just how bad the situation has become. Even with the opening title crawl, it can only do so much to clue the viewer in on the climate of the culture at the time. It'd be interesting to have watched "Antonio das Mortes " before having watched "The Hour of the Furnace" and then re-watching it after because a completely clueless viewer probably would not be able to pick up on most of what's going on with zero background in what was happening at the time.
I would very much agree that one should watch "The Hour of the Furnace" prior to watching "Antonio das Mortes" because it gives you some societal perspective on south america at the time. Although one would be able to see that it was a very class divide oriented film, one would not be able to truly gauge how terrible and bleak the situation had actually become.
DeleteI had quite a bit of free time this morning, which is when I watched "The Hour of the Furnace" this being said, when I watched "Antonio das Mortes" I didn't have that much needed societal perspective. After watching "The Hour of the Furnace", I decided to re-watch "Antonio das Mortes", after doing so I enjoyed and appreciated the film far more than I did my first screening.
ReplyDeleteDespite the spontaneous qualities of its content, Hour of the Furnaces follows a predictable documentary structure through the use of use of title cards (or chapters) and an off–screen narrator to dictate what images will be seen. The clarity of its rhetoric, then, makes it much more identifiable as “propaganda” than revolutionary, because as Glauber Rocha argues, the film is counter–revolutionary for its reliance on documentary conventions. He says, “The style does not interest me” after earlier stating that revolutionary cinema should be in opposition to public taste. Mariano Mestman, on the other hand, argues that the film’s juxtaposition of various image sources and editing techniques “articulates an original experimental language” even if the film borrows earlier avante–garde techniques used worldwide.
Rocha’s criticism begs the question, can a film truly exist as an independent creation, and a thus a “revolutionary” film, or is the concept of a “revolutionary” film purely speculative in that all films essentially offer nothing new cinematically for they contain “identifiable markers” that signal their past influences? Rocha considers his film, Antonio Das Mortes, as a product of revolutionary cinema for its “opposition to Hollywood cinema” and this is true to a certain extent through both the heightened level of theatricality in its performances (ex: characters “direct addressing” the camera, characters exiting the frame only to later return tot eh frame, the exaggeration of death and violence) but the film very much resembles a “western” semantically through its costumes, locations, props, and music. Possibly one of the more avante–garde moments in the film, the “long take” that slowly tracks a group of character from right–to–left, which opposes the “traditional” left – to–right screen direction, may distance the viewer temporarily, but is essentially nothing new as long takes have been around since the earliest days of cinema before editing was invented. The Hour of the Furnace’s static “long take” of Che Guevara’s face essentially works much in the same manner as a distancing effect for its extended duration, but in that film, it could be argued that the film not only provides a bookend image to close the first chapter, but Guevara’s piercing “gaze” on the viewer allows him or her to assess “their” role in revolutionary struggle. The long take in Antonio Das Mortes, however, builds a high level of anxiety in the viewer because the camera does not show the “effect” of the long take (i.e. the narrative motivation for moving the camera”) other than allowing the background music to fully play out.
Nice. Does GR directly criticize HotF, tho, as you seem to suggest? (If he does in the readings can you provide specific reference, for I don't recall this...)
Delete"Antonio de Mortes" has an overall theme of the conflict between the government and the working class. The film was released in 1969, and had a very big effect on the world. The film talked about politics without having to actually talk about it. The conflict between the opposing characters paralleled the actual conflict between the working class and the political powers of Brazil. The leaders of the religious group that includes Congonciero and Santa stirred a lot of commotion in whatever was happening before Antonio had returned. The "government" side of the movie, with Mattos, laura, and the professor were the overbearing "Rulers" of a land that didn't want to be ruled. Especially like that. The way the movie was filmed, created very jarring moments, just because the lack of music at some parts and then picking it up back again in the next scene. I think the main reason that I feel that way, is because of how a lot of movies are made so differently now than they did then. The movie has this effect on the viewers as though we are waiting for something to happen when there isn't any music. I want more from those scenes, just like the village people wanted more from the leaders that controlled the town. The are also a lot of different relationships within the "Government" side of the movie. Laura has relations with many men and through those actions, the men die because of jealousy and impulsive temperament. It can almost be thought of as the corruption of the actual government in Brazil at that time.
ReplyDeleteEuropean influence is the key issue discussed in The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino & Fernando Solanas, 1968). Certainly, the problems are found in Latin America – as that is the setting for the conflict – but the causes are all attributed to Europe. The chaos embroiling the continent is displayed through the frantic drumming and vocals, in the rapid editing between frenetic news footage and moving title cards, and in the fervent revolutionary rhetoric of the title cards. The fact that each section uses a slightly different tone and format/method for each topic underlines the disjointed state of affairs that goes back to European action (more on this specifically in a moment). These all culminate portraying the “climate of agitation,” as it is called by Mariano Mestman in “The Hour of the Furnaces: Crafting a Revolutionary Cinema,” that filled the region in the late 1960s as a result of neo-colonialism.
ReplyDeleteNeo-colonialism is the true villain in the film’s narrative. In declaring “manufacturers *invaded* internal markets,” the filmmakers equate neo-colonial economic action with physical subjugation, like that of the conquistadores on indigenous peoples (emphasis added). However, they make clear that neo-colonial problems are more insidious because “neo-colonial violence does not have to be put into practice; it is enough that it exists” to harm the campesinos and other members of the poor and working classes. While the most obvious harmful results of neo-colonialism are found in rural areas, the problems are, again, more subtle in the cities, as the better conditions are a result of Europeanism; it’s deleterious because 1) it is biased toward helping those who are already wealthy enough to live in cities and 2) the intellectual success is based in European/non-Native ideas, which degrades an older culture for the benefit of the new oppressors.
Glauber Rocha’s following statement in “An Esthetic of Hunger” very effectively explains the ideology of The Hour of the Furnaces: “While Latin America laments its general misery, the foreign onlooker cultivates the taste of that misery, not as a tragic symptom, but merely as an esthetic object within his field of interest. The Latin American neither communicates his real misery to the ‘civilized’ European, nor does the European truly comprehend the misery of the Latin American.” What this gets at is the global crisis that can be found in Latin America is, in fact, of worldwide concern, and this is due to the asserting of European control over other cultures.
The Hour of the Furnace (1968) is a film that is taken in very different parts. Unlike many of the others types of documentaries we have seen in our classroom, specifically Children of the Revolution (2010) which really only focused on four people, Furnaces focuses on a myriad of others topics affecting the Latin-Americans nations. This allows the director to give a wider example of how the horrors of 68 were affecting a variety amount of individuals, empowering the politics while sensitizing of people. Mariano Mestman, in this article, “Crafting a Revolutionary Cinema,” believes that “the film establishes a close relationship between form and content, seeking to sensitize its ideas and varying each section according to the topic dealt with (para 7).”
ReplyDeleteThe film ‘s cinéma vérité like feel plays an important aspect on how the politics of the film is portrayed. Everyone is affected by this turmoil and the viewer can see from the uncomfortable close-ups and grimy feel of the scenery.
Antonio das Mortes (1969) however, presents form and content as mere opposites of each other. Mortes (1968) almost acts of a parody of the whole spaghetti Western genre, but has a very serious understanding of the politics around it.
The comparison between the two films really highlights how different types of films can express the same political message. Furnace (1968) is this very serious documentary exposing the turmoil’s of the Latin American nation while criticizing the political nature of its time. While, Mortes (1969) does feature some of the same political elements as Furance 1968), it exposes those injustices through the themes of a western farce.
The Hour of The Furnaces (1968) is very different than any film that we have seen yet. This film had the most impact on me in terms of a social revolution. It was an effective film because of the successful mixture of emotional and empirical devices used. This film contained data and numbers that were astonishing. The numbers showed how great the divide between the wealthy and poor was in Argentina at the time. Numbers alone rarely have enough effect to move an audience to action however. There needs to be some sort of emotional connection to the situation. The film shows the humanity and how it differs between the rich and poor. There were several shot v. shots that really highlight this divide. The one that stands out the most to me is the slaughterhouse scenes. In one shot we are shown the workers and in the next the animals. We then get shots of the works and then the animals being killed. This is a metaphor for divide of the wealthy and poor. The wealthy will flourish almost always at the expense of the poor, especially when it comes to things like agriculture where there is no possible way to compete with people who are so entrenched in the politics of the society and own all of the land, (means of production).
ReplyDeleteThe other topic that I found very interesting that we had not really encountered in films before is the desire of the wealthy to be Europeans. They fetishize the European lifestyle and culture. This is particularly interesting especially when thinking about colonization. Colonization is all about exploitation and profit. In order for the colonizers to exploit and profit, they must use the locals. Those who side with the colonizers end up profiting at the expense of their own countrymen, which is hugely important in this case. The wealthy still want to be European as the profit while their countrymen suffer.
The class divide and the oligarchy is very real in modern America, which is why I believe the film to be the most effective at conveying a message. It really captures a systemic and global issue.
The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) seems to be a complete embodiment and representation of Glauber Rocha's 1965 essay, "The Aesthetics of Hunger" not only in its content but in its form. Rocha emphasizes a violent and unjustifiable disconnect between the colonizers and those who've been colonized. He discusses "the relationship between our culture and 'civilized' culture in less limiting terms than those which characterize the analysis of the European observer" (1) and chooses to view that relationship from the workers' eyes as opposed to the oppressive and muffling view of the rich. The Hour of the Furnaces magnificently shows the relationship in an interesting use of the conventional shot-reverse-shot. We see a group of children running alongside a train, begging. From the passenger's perspective we see a young boy running beneath us with his hands cusped for food. When we get his perspective, all we see is towering, ominous shinny buildings from the city. While the shot-reverse-shot is not a literal one, it demonstrates the cold, dominating and immovable image of the colonizers as seen by the starving.
ReplyDeleteAnother point that Rocha makes in his essay is that the colonization has not changed from when the Europeans first arrived to the present. He says, "What distinguishes yesterday's colonialism from today's is merely the more refined forms employed by the contemporary colonizer" (1). Again, through The Hour of Furnaces' seamless editing, Rocha's argument is boldly established. While the film explains the history of Brazil's colonization, images and paintings of the Spanish and English invaders are displayed. Laced between these images, however, are images of the modern day bourgeoisie putting at a golf course. The narrator does not explain their presence in the scene, and the viewers therefore associate the modern day rich with the historical colonizers as Rocha does in his essay.
Glauber Rocha also explains how the hunger that is felt all over Brazil and Latin American in general is not fully understood. He explains that, similarly, in his work, his films are "ugly, sad films, those screaming, desperate films in which reason has not always prevailed" (1) and where the hunger can't be hidden by the "cloak of technicolor" (1). In other words, his films are as raw, untainted and confusing as the situation itself. He says that the industrial cinema is committed only to untruth and exploitation. The Hour of the Furnaces touches on a similar topic. During a scene where a group of young men are in a record shop, the narrator explains that the films and magazines of the bourgeoisie exist to depoliticize people and to encourage escapism. (I don't think that it's unimportant to note that an American song is playing in the background) This film, however, is far from escapism and does everything but depoliticize. With its ideas and it's form, it strongly exemplifies what Rocha probably thought the cinema should be and do.
Glauber Rocha states, in his interview entitled Cinema Nova vs. Cultural Colonialism with Cineaste, “As regards Antonio Das Mortes, I might say that I think I made a revolutionary film in that I made a film opposed to the aesthetic principles of the cinema of domination.” Now, how is Antonio Das Mortes directly and completely opposed to Hollywood cinema? As Ben has mentioned earlier, there are certain aesthetic similarities between shots in Antonio and shots from Godard. There are many reminiscences to the American and Italian genres of the western. Although the film is opposed to the aesthetics of American and European cinema, it uses various tools from both, albeit, for different political differences. It is still a film meant for popular consumption, but it is not meant to “stimulate the conformity,” but rather to “provoke revolution.” The closest the film gets to aesthetic revolution, is in the use of the Brazilian mythos, which is unique and singular to Brazil. Also, the use of music montages which seem to be detached from the narrative, being more scenes of expression than scenes on plot, is also somewhat against the grain of the standard Hollywood film.
ReplyDeleteLa Hora de las Hornos is a film blatantly trying to provoke revolution, but it is also not a film meant for popular consumption, unlike Antonio das Mortes, which is. The film is almost more of a Power Point than a film, a political speech, rather than an entertainment. It is also a film that “speaks about a reality but is not at all objective.” Now, taking reality and bending it to prove your political views is nothing new to Europe and America. What is new, is the aesthetic of the documentary, the lack of interviews, the sounds of a machine gun bombarding the viewer with American propaganda.
For my response I have decided to focus on the character of Antao in Glauber Roche’s 1969 film Antonio das Mortes. Antao, the black angel counters Barbara, the santa, throughout the film. When Coirana, the Cangaceiro, is introduced, and he is making his raison d’etat, Antao stands to left and santa stands to the right, countering each other in placement, but both ‘standing by’ the Cangaceiro. I am not sure if the black angel represents a messenger of the devil or the angel of death, but it is clear that he is not a physical entity, but a spiritual one. The same goes for Santa which represents a messenger of God, neither are killed in the massacre, however they are both present witnesses, unaffected by physical harm. Where Barbara wears white robes with a veil, Antao wears red clothes with a large headdress. The clothes of Antao possibly connotate the devil, or flames. Another scene, shortly after the massacre (1:15:40), Mata-Vaca laughs in the face of Antao, and takes off his headdress and throws it on the ground. An interpretation of this is that Mata-Vaca laughs at the face of death, his massacre does not bother him, rather he gets pleasure from it. After this removal the headdress by Mata-Vaca, Antao is forced to crawl on all fours. Is this another sign of Mata-Vaca being a messenger of the devil, being forced to crawl (I’m thinking about the story of the fall), or is this a more literal visual of death stalking the land. When Antonio and the professor see the massacre, Antao is there, and he is ridden by the professor, who jumps on his back and smacks him. Here the intellectual rides death, or the devil depending how you look at it, and this propels him into that odd scene where he is trying to get a ride out of town, but fails. I interpret that this leads him to being lost, deserted. He is stuck in nowhere.
ReplyDeleteI admittedly struggled to follow Antonio Das Mortes (1969). And watching Scorsese's interview on the film made me feel ashamed for it. At first the feeling came from the drastic difference between my and Scorsese's reactions, but then again when I realized that I shouldn't need Scorsese telling me how great the film is before I pay closer attention to it.
ReplyDeleteI found myself having an easier time with (arguably) the more challenging of the two films this week The Hour of the Furnaces (1968). Perhaps it is because the language of documentary style filmmaking is more universal and easy to digest, even if the content is not. Ironic, because the film attributes the troubles of Latin America to Neocolonialism, which I would consider documentary style filmmaking to most at home to. It provokes the question raised by Something in the Air (2012), that is should revolutionary ideas use revolutionary filmmaking? That isn't to say that the film doesn't flirt with communicating its ideas in revolutionary ways. One such moment occurs in part 9) Dependence when the film inter-cuts scenes from a slaughterhouse with 60's American pop iconography playing alongside carefree music. I found it very hard to watch (which is certainly saying something having visited a slaughterhouse myself). The punishment dealt to the animals echoed the punishment dealt to the poor peoples of Latin America by the perpetrators of Neocolonialism. The fact that this sequence was tougher to watch than the scenes involving dead and starving children begs the question of why? Are we the viewers so detached from the struggles of these peoples that we have more sympathy for animals? One could argue that the reason for this is because of the graphic nature of the violence inflicted on the animals, but is it truly uglier than the centuries old violence inflicted on these people? Certainly challenging. However, most of the film (for its benefit) makes use of more traditional means of communicating its ideas. The choice to present statistics alongside grievances against Neocolonialism and imagery of the destitute in such a matter of fact manner speak in a more digestible form for the bourgeois and petty bourgeoisie. It is because of this that the fleeting moments of more revolutionary cinema like the one mentioned above and the scene of the man being stabbed are able to work so well. Were the film to be comprised of only moments such as these, it would never allow the viewer to lower their defenses against the material.
Thankfully, after watching The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) I came to a better understanding and greater appreciation of Antonio Das Mortes (1969). I think what I needed most was context, which Furnaces(1968) helped with. Learning that their class struggle reaches all the way back to the times Colombian Exchange cleared up a lot. Namely, how truly old the struggle of Antonio Das Mortes (1969) is. The use of ritual finally made sense to me. Ritual being something done repeatedly, often symbolizing the eternal. While the film may have ended on a seemingly happy note (Antonio Das Mortes has won), the ritualistic nature of the film bleakly implies that this struggle will go on forever.