Greetings, I recently obtained "Hour of the Furnaces" and it looks like it could be pretty good. Would anyone be interested in watching it Thursday night or something? The description follows:
This is a complete high quality rip of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 1968 revolutionary documentary Hour of the Furnaces (Hora de los hornos). Included are English, French, and German subtitles for all parts. The source is from a dvd. This legendary underground film criticized neo-colonialism and called for the overthrow of the Argentine government. Intended to be a film which "the System finds indigestible," La Hora was made and distributed outside of the commercial film industry. Because watching the film was illegal, the film transcended bourgeois entertainment: "We also discovered that every comrade who attended such showings did so with full awareness that he was infringing the System's laws and exposing his personal security to eventual repression. This person was no longer a spectator; on the contrary, from the moment he decided to attend the showing, from the moment he lined himself up on this side by taking risks and contributing his living experience to the meeting, he became an actor, a more important protagonist than those who appeared in the films." This brilliant documentary launched the Third Cinema movement and put Latin American cinema on the international map. It combines new and old film footage to explain the history of Argentina and the wave of revolutionary fervor that swept many countries in Latin America. From the Spanish invaders to modern military concerns financed by foreign powers, this feature examines racism, social upheaval, native massacres and the precarious political situations that could change in the wake of revolutionary rebellion. In a noted sequence, director Solanas juxtaposed images of American commericalism and scenes from a slaughterhouse with snatches of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band playing over top. The scene climaxes with a rapid staccato montage of starving children, bleeding cows and Coca-Cola signs matched with the sound of machine gun fire. The sequence is as thrilling as it is haunting--a masterpiece of pure cinema. This feature took the Critics Award at the Pesaro New Cinema Festival. ~ Dan Pavlides
