Directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas.

Argentina, 1968, 16mm, black & white, 260 min.

Spanish, English and Portuguese with English subtitles.

In its second issue, published to coincide with a major gathering of filmmakers and films for the Underground Film Festival in 1970, Afterimage devoted its content to experimental, avant-garde cinema. For No. 3, the journal returned to one of the determining factors in the journal’s foundation: the emergence of a New Latin American independent cinema in the late 60s and early 70s, which was accompanied by a number of fiercely political manifestoes arguing for a new, radical cinema. In translation Afterimage printed Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Violence” in No. 1 and devoted No. 3 to Third World Cinema, publishing Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “For An Imperfect Cinema” as well as Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’ “Towards A Third Cinema,” a manifesto for a new militant revolutionary Latin American cinema with low-budget aesthetics and guerrilla distribution that paralleled the aesthetic directions and new distribution circuits of political filmmaking in the west.

Shot on 16mm without sync sound and exploring the possibilities of sound against image, La hora de los hornos is a monument of that Third Cinema: polemical, partisan and agitational. An immense “essay film” in three parts, it furiously encompasses documentary footage (often pirated), intertitles, quotations and voiceover to tell a political history of Argentina, its oligarchs, its violence, its neocolonialism.