Introduction

During the 18 months that followed the Peronist victory at the polls in 1973, the Argentine film industry went through a process of regeneration in which film-makers like Solanas and Getino, together with other film-makers of their generation and directors who had been working in the industry since the 1940s, found themselves working for the cultural project of the new Peronist government. Exploiting the favourable political context which allowed an approach to certain themes, films like La Patagonia rebelde (Rebellion in Patagonia, Héctor Olivera, 1974) and Quebracho (Ricardo Wullicher, 1974) inaugurated a new trend in political film-making. Following the industry’s principles, conventions and goals, the films portrayed respectively the annihilation of the rural anarchist movement in Patagonia in 1921 and the peasants’ struggles for their political rights in the first decades of the last century. As Getino puts it in his book on Argentine cinema, ‘never until that moment had the industry ventured a denunciation of this kind, which implied an open confrontation with the position of the armed forces’ (1998, 64).

These films accompanied the nation's general ‘mood of nationalist, populist, anti-imperialist euphoria’ (King, 1990, 89), and while anchoring their referent in the authoritarian acts of Argentine history, they appealed to the spectator's ideological commitments by proposing a dialectical relationship between past history and present times (Manetti, 1996, 378). Conceived within a mainstream mode of production and concerned with what Getino identifies as a thematic trademark of the Argentine cinema of the period, namely social injustice (1998, 63), such films were socially committed and had a generally didactic purpose; yet they lacked the revolutionary political agenda that had characterised the Argentine and Latin American political cinema of the 1960s and, in particular, the Third Cinema films. Thus, blurring ‘the division between the two important film groups of the early 60s’ (Torrents, 1988, 101) – the auteur cinema of the Nuevo Cine Argentino (New Argentine Cinema) and the politically militant cinema promoted by Solanas and Getino, among others – La Patagonia rebelde, Quebracho and also Leonardo Favio's epic vindication of the figure of the gaucho in Juan Moreira (1973) showed that consciousness-raising films could be produced in the margins of the industry. Likewise, these films were directed by people who not only exposed their ideological standpoint, but who aimed to establish themselves as a new kind of film auteur who were not just politically aware but also historically critical.