A Ciné-Geography of Militant Cinema in the age of Three Worlds. Making Global History Appear in the Long 1960s

Abstract

This essay questions the historical narrative of liberation struggles in the long 1960s by looking into two documentary films: La Hora de los Hornos, by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Argentina 1968), and Le Fond de L’Air est Rouge, by Chris Marker (France 1977). A comparative analysis of the two films – two long narratives of neocolonialism and anti-imperialism – will allow us not only to revisit the periodization of the sixties, but also the ability of militant cinema to overcome the shortcomings of traditional historiography to render the global geopolitics of its struggles. More specifically, the deployment of montage in La Hora decentred the political hierarchies of the capitalist world-system from the perspective of the third world, thus opening history to a global approach of the long 1960s; as for Le Fond, the film can be seen as a global archive of images reinforcing the worldwide scope of the period’s struggles while simultaneously giving it a sense of historical closure. The formal experiments in La Hora and Le Fond allow us to reflect on these films’ status as forms of historical mediation. Showing 1960s political struggles through the formal procedures of film, however, challenges traditional history in fundamental ways. Accordingly, the essay concludes with a reflection on the historicity of film narratives. In particular, it will try to point to how film montage and duration may constitute appropriate narrative forms to come to terms with some of the major challenges currently put to historiography: the global circulation in the history of capitalism and the temporality of the end of communism.