Cinema as “nucleus of political action” in Los hijos de Fierro by Fernando Solanas

Abstract

In an article published in the magazine Third World Cinema in 1969 the filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino —members of the Liberation Film Group— criticized the movie Martín Fierro directed by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (1968) for establishing a distorted view of history that eliminated the presence of masses in line with the ideological interests of the military government. On the contrary, the transposition Los hijos de Fierro (1972-75) by Fernando Solanas intended to distance itself from the movie by Torre Nilsson through the inclusion of people in a political rereading that proposed an analogy between the literary work and the peronist resistance.

Because of this, the aim of the present paper is to study in the film Los hijos de Fierro by Solanas the use of literature in militant cinema for political practice. For that reason, it’ll investigate the figure of the gaucho Martín Fierro as representative of people (Marechal, 1998), integrated by “the sons of Fierro” (Astrada, 2006). Besides, the analysis will focus on the role of militant cinema as “nucleus of political action” (González, 2007) which politically committed actions produced effects on the same history that it was telling in an audiovisual way.