Furnace Trouble: Documenting Argentina’s Social Genocide

by Jared Rapfogel

It’s a sad inevitability that many people will approach Fernando Solanas’ Memoria del Saqueo and Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s The Take, two documentaries concerning Argentina’s recent economic and social devastation, as of only marginal interest to those without a particular curiosity about the state of Latin America. This is patently not the case, as suggested by an anonymous note handed to Lewis and Klein while shooting the film which reads, “We are the mirror to look into, the mistake to avoid. Argentina is the waste that remains of a globalized country. We are where the rest of the world is going.” Arguing with overwhelming persuasiveness for this perspective, Memoria del Saqueo (which showed earlier this year at the Berlinale and Tribeca) and The Take (which recently premiered at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival before screening at Hot Docs) are vitally important films, sharing not only their subject matter but also their political orientation, commitment, and courage.

One of Argentina’s most respected filmmakers, Solanas is best-known for The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), the collectively made, four-hour long, radical documentary/manifesto. A sprawling, convulsive film, The Hour of the Furnaces is a call for violent revolution designed to be used as a tool for education, information, and debate (complete with titles signaling intervals for discussion). Cinematically, it is a varied catalogue of aesthetic approaches, encompassing interviews, cinema vérité footage, newsreels, sophisticated montage, and even minimalism (most famously, a still image, held for two-and-a-half minutes, of Che’s dead face). Memoria del Saqueo, unsurprisingly then, is comprehensive and broad in scope. Its subject is the political, social, and economic condition of Argentina—the dimensions of its ruination and how exactly the country came to such a pass.

Memoria del Saqueo is, cinematically speaking, a far less radical film than The Hour of the Furnaces. Though it superficially resembles any number of conventional documentaries, Solanas hasn’t sold out his ambition to create a new, revolutionary film language so much as he has resigned himself to the fate that has befallen his 60s experiments: he realizes that an Hour of the Furnaces today would face little chance of reaching anything like a wide audience. The differences between The Hour of the Furnaces and Memoria del Saqueo are, after all, much more than aesthetic. The earlier film, made at a time of revolutionary conviction and idealism, conceived of itself not simply as a film, but as a film act, as a component of revolutionary action. The Hour of the Furnaces had a precise and concrete goal: to incite violent and political struggle.

Not only did the revolution Solanas and his comrades worked and hoped for fail to appear, but in the years following, the political and social situation in Argentina became far worse. A series of brutally repressive military juntas ruled the country during the 70s, culminating in the “dirty war,” only to be followed by a series of leaders, culminating with Carlos Menem, who, according to both Memoria del Saqueo and The Take, betrayed their people by ruthlessly pursuing a policy of neo-liberal privatization. This resulted in the selling-off of a large part of the nation’s assets—the plunder (“saqueo”) of the country by foreign banks and companies and by its own upper classes—and, eventually, the severe economic crisis of 2001. Memoria del Saqueo, pedestrian as it appears, is no measured, “balanced” reportage: it is an accusation, a cry of indignation, though its analysis is always penetrating and persuasive. A member of the Argentine parliament from 1993 to 1997, and the victim of a shooting in response to his attempts to bring charges against Menem for selling off the state oil company, Solanas has not compromised or softened his fury at all. He has changed his approach, though; the relationship between film and action is much different now than it was 35 years ago. Memoria del Saqueo is not a film-act; it is something more familiar to us today—a record, an account, of action.

Memoria del Saqueo starts and ends with footage of the momentous, spontaneous mass street protests which erupted across Buenos Aires in December 2001, after the country effectively declared bankruptcy, causing the banks to shut down. Solanas was on the scene, and the footage he shot is almost unbearably powerful, as hundreds of thousands of people crowd the streets, throwing rocks, toppling barricades, and banging on pots and pans. There are images of violence, of protesters beaten, bloodied, and, in one instance, possibly killed. But just as often the images are charged with a remarkable joyfulness, the elation of people demonstrating their collective power after decades of suffering. Solanas captures the overwhelming spectacle of a people suddenly realizing what they are capable of. But now Solanas is a witness rather than an instigator.

Even if this new situation reflects the failure of the goals and predictions of the earlier film, the tone of Memoria del Saqueo is, nevertheless, one of optimism, hopefulness, and even triumph. Towards the end of The Hour of the Furnaces, the narrator rousingly declares, “If 150,000 Marines…cannot defeat the heroic little Vietnamese people, how many Marines will it take to defeat more than two-thirds of humanity: the Chinese, Cubans, Koreans, Latin Americans, Arabs, African Americans, the Socialist world, and the progressive forces of the industrial countries? Imperialism is going to lose…As Mao said, it is a paper tiger.” While most of Memoria del Saqueo is devoted to the countless ways imperialism has proven itself a nearly inexorable force, the foundation of the film is the December 2001 protests. Solanas sees in them a flaring up of the hopes which have lain dormant for so long, and evidence that the defeat of imperialism, though so greatly and tragically delayed, remains a possibility. Memoria del Saqueo draws to a close with words complementing those from Solanas’ earlier film: “It may appear that the reality can’t be changed, that the plunderers won the day, and we are the losers. It’s closer to the opposite: neither the dictatorship, nor Menem, nor De La Rua brought their projects to fruition, and the wealth they gave away isn’t lost forever…It all led to the great December 2001 uprising—as on Oct. 17, 1945, and in Cordoba in 1969, Argentinean history was changed.”

Solanas’ stubborn optimism is admirable, even if, after so many betrayals, it may seem a bit premature. The Take, though, a National Film Board production directed by Canadian political power couple Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, provides small-scale but concrete evidence that this may be more than simply wishful thinking. The two films complement each other beautifully, the one with its broad scope and dramatic protest footage, the other sharply focused and concerned with a very different, less flashy, but more organized form of political action.

The subject of The Take is the struggle of the former workers of Forja San Martin, a newly bankrupt Buenos Aires factory, to re-open and run the factory themselves. Lewis and Klein, who also include material on previously successful, mutually supportive worker-owned and run factories, have made a deeply moving and informative film, a glimpse at the kind of grass-roots, incremental political work which movies rarely bother to portray. Early on in the film, Klein is accused by a hostile British talk show host of constantly criticizing neo-liberal policies without ever offering a viable alternative, to which Klein, in voiceover, responds, “He never let me finish a sentence but he had a good point: there’s only so much protesting can accomplish. At a certain point you have to talk about what you’re fighting for.” The Take is an honest attempt to do just that—to portray the practical steps which can be and are being taken in this particular corner of the world. Even if it’s unclear how powerful and widespread this movement is destined to be, these factories have, at the very least, undeniably improved the lives of those workers directly involved with them.

Though modest and small-scale, The Take succeeds in some ways where Memoria del Saqueo falls short. The challenge presented to Klein by the television interviewer is one Solanas could be accused of shirking. It’s not simply that he fails to formulate a concrete plan of action, but that, for all his indignation at the suffering inflicted on the people of Argentina and his enthusiasm for their spontaneous rebellion, the people themselves largely remain an abstraction. In The Take, Lewis and Klein concentrate their attention not on “the masses” but on a specific community of workers and their families, and on their day-to-day efforts to obtain a small measure of agency.

This is not just a matter of “human interest,” either. In focusing on these particular people, Lewis and Klein capture the complex, ambiguous, and sometimes troubling nature of human behaviour, qualities that elude Solanas in his account of the big picture. Always passionate and uncompromising, Solanas is still apt to ignore certain uncomfortable truths in his eagerness to portray the situation as a case of clear-cut exploitation. When he asks, “How many Marines will it take to defeat more than two-thirds of humanity?” it’s hard not to think, “If only it were so simple.” In The Take, we see why it’s not: cheering throngs of Menem supporters; the information that Menem, running for a third term in 2003, quickly goes from last in the polls to first; and most disturbingly, the revelation that there is one man among the factory workers who is pro-Menem. As one woman, a staunch supporter of the opposition candidate, Nestor Kirchner, says, “Sad, very sad. You can see that Argentines, from 1976 up to now, have erased their memories.” This kind of acknowledgment that the problem is much more complicated than we might like to think, that it runs deeper than conscious corruption at the top, is nowhere to be found in Memoria del Saqueo. The problem is not simply the Marines, the politicians, or the bankers—it is the more subversive, invisible, and internalized forces of capitalism, which Menem and his like merely represent.

Precisely because it more fully acknowledges these things, engaging more fully with the true nature of the problem, The Take is, finally, even a more hopeful and optimistic film. On the national level, Kirchner succeeds in defeating Menem. And locally, after a hard-fought and exhausting legal struggle, the Forja workers succeed in re-opening the factory and running it as a cooperative. Having conveyed the emptiness and anxiety of the workers’ lives in the absence of work, and the resulting desperation and fear which underlie their efforts to take back the factory, the film ends with a palpable feeling of joy, relief, and pride. Lewis and Klein wisely resist the temptation to burden this particular success story with an unrealistic amount of optimism, though: their intention is not to celebrate, but to encourage other workers, in other factories, perhaps even in other countries similarly dominated and oppressed by the forces of globalization, to follow the example of those at Forja San Martin. In this sense, The Take is close in spirit to The Hour of the Furnaces. Its purpose is to inspire further battles such as the one it portrays—not violent revolution but small-scale, incremental political progress, the kind that doesn’t make news, but does make real change.