The worker's voice in post-1968 Argentine political documentary

Abstract

In the late 1960s, the political cinema of Latin America gave relevance and a prominent place to the voices of the people. In the case of Argentina, the worker's voice increased its presence in the films during a period of militant cinema that began in 1968 with the legendary La hora de los hornos [The Hour of the Furnaces]. Later films also incorporated the voice of the workers who played a central part in the largest popular uprising of the period, the Cordobazo (1969) and those of the militants in the so-called Peronist Resistance (1955 onwards). Amid criticisms of ‘the limits of direct cinema’ and the proposal of ‘giving voice to the people’ or of directly ‘seizing the right to speak,’ the worker's voice began to share the textual authority of films, an authority hitherto given almost exclusively to an omnipresent voice-over, typical of one important documentary tradition. If in many cases the voices of the people were connected, if not subordinated, to the theses of the filmmakers, they were nevertheless elaborated in all their complexity, with their place negotiated into the ensemble of the film's textual authority. This article analyses various ways of configuring working class voices/testimonies (those of the workers, the farm workers, and the Resistance), and considers the dialogues and negotiations between these voices and the revolutionary theses and imaginaries that were widespread in this period, as put forward in films concerning social protest and class identity in Argentina.