Trails of ink: An approximation to the historiography on The Hour of the Furnaces

Abstract

To critically address the abundant bibliography produced on The Hour of the Furnaces is an enormous undertaking. Although, not driven by a statistical and quantitative impulse, we run only a small risk in suggesting that it is the Argentine film that received the greatest attention in academic studies and in specialised film criticism. The fifty years separating the film's first projections and this text are traversed by trails of ink about this emblematic work. This anniversary, most probably, will put again in circulation some of the aesthetic, political and ideological debates the film opened the door to in its time and this constitutes a singular fact if we want to ask ourselves what does the Grupo Cine Liberación's (Liberation cinema group) film say today to contemporary Argentina, Latin America and the world? Half a century after its appearance, The Hour of the Furnaces is an object in which it is impossible to distinguish between the aesthetic and the political; an event (Alain Badiou 1999) that does not stop gathering meanings from the course of history (distant and recent), from the memories, more and more dense and produced by the mass media, of the 1960s and from the conflicts characteristic of a present in which certain social actors protagonists of the film went through a transformation even if they present themselves dressed in old clothes.