Films › Documentary
The Hour of the Furnaces
Directed by Octavio Getino, Fernando E. Solanas, 1968
Fernando Solanas structures The Hour of the Furnaces as a three-part militant documentary essay, mixing agitprop intertitles, advertising parody, interview footage and montage into a single argumentative machine rather than an observational documentary. Solanas and editor Antonio Ripoll cut advertising imagery against footage of poverty and labor exploitation at a rhythm designed to provoke immediate ideological recognition, a technique indebted to Eisensteinian collision montage but redirected toward explicitly Third Cinema politics. The film was designed with built-in intermissions where projectionists were instructed to stop the reel and hold audience discussions, making exhibition itself part of the film's form, an idea almost no narrative filmmaker considers. Long unbroken interview takes with workers and intellectuals are intercut with propagandistic montage bursts, creating deliberate tonal whiplash between sober testimony and aggressive argument. For documentary makers, this shows how form itself can be political statement, and how radically intended exhibition context can be built into editing structure from the start.
What to watch for
Note the specific points where the film's structure explicitly cues an intermission, built directly into its editing rhythm.
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