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THE MASK OF CIVILIZED REFINEMENT

La hora's critique of Buenos Aires drew on a long tradition of questions the place of the capital city in the country's historical development. However, as Nissa Torrens noted in her 1988 essay, the most important literary precursor for Solanas and Getino was Martínez Estrada's La cabeza de Goliat.9 Although produced almost thirty years apart, both can be considered denunciateions of the project of modernization. For Martínez Estrada, the growth of Buenos Aires around the turn of the twentieth century signaled the downfall of the nation, as the citys insatiable appetites sucked vital resources from the surrounding provinces, which were figured as the "true" or "authentic" Argentina. Solanas and Getino's film drew out the anti-imperialist connotations of this earlier argument by taking particular aim at the obsessive consumption of imported goods by the porteño elite. For La hora, it was this privileging of foreign cultural products and norms, rather than urbanization itself, that betrayed the nation. As the male narrator noted, "Buenos Aires, ciudad a espaldas al país, abierta hacia en gran río" [Buenos Aires, city with its back to the nation, facing the great river]. In the film's rhetoric, the Argentine capital was implicitly feminized--represented as an Argentine Malinche. In opposition to this cultural prostitution, this desire to "be looked at" and coveted by the dominant foreigner, stood the virile and brawny actions of male militants of the Peronist party.10

La hora's diagnosis of the city's ills has other, more explicitly parallels to La cabeza de Goliat . Both works envisioned Buenos Aires as a site of alienation--though Martínez Estrada used other terms like repression--where effete displays covered over the absence of authentic cultural formations. For instance, they both rejected the city's grandiose architecture as a vehicle of false consciousness. Martínez Estrada denigrated the opulent government buildings as the means by which the state "retained the faith of [its] incredulous" citizens (212-13).   His words seem to echo through the fourth section of La hora's Part I in which numerous traveling shots highlight modernist skyscrapers, Beaux Arts facades, and the neo-classical Teatro Colón as the male narrator intones, "Buenos Aires, epicentro de la política neocolonial...cuidad apéndice de las grandes metropolis" [Buenos Aires, epicenter of the neo-classical politics...city-appendix of the great metropolises] against the sounds of a baroque concerto. For Solanas and Getino, little was to be gained, and much to be lost, by dressing up Argentina to look like the First World metropolis. To quote Martínez Estrada, those who called for this type of imitation were "canallas encorados en cuyo interior hay un propósito de lucro legítimo" [despicable men with an underlying desire for money] (127).

For Solanas and Getino, just as for Martínez Estrada, the ultimate engine of alienation was mass media. La hora's critique of the record, film, and advertising industries develops right out of La cabeza de Goliat's dismissal of radionovelas and sports events as cathartic distractions meant to placate the masses (176, 249-53). Ultimately, La hora drew on such passages in La cabeza de Goliat to invert Sarmiento's assocications of Buenos Aires with civilization. Solanas and Getino argued that "los medios de dedifusión de masas tartan de hacer hombres más 'informados'...indivduos más 'civilizados' 9lease más colonizados), no hombres más cultos desde que la verdadera cultura está íntimamente vinculada al desarrollo de la liberación" [mass media tries to make men more "informed," more "civilized" (read more colonized), but not more cultured, as true culture is intimately tied to the struggle for liberation].11

While Solanas and Getino's film drew on Martínez Estrada's critique of Buenos Aire's privileged socioeconomic position, it also refracted images of the city present in film and literature in the late 1950s and early 1960s--particularly films of the Nuevo Cine. As seen in Chapter 1, Kohon's 1958 film Buenos Aires anticipated Solanas and Getino's debunking of the association of the city with civilzation and progress. In fact, particular scenes in La hora de los hornos mirrored ones found in Kohon's short. Like Kohon's film, La hora associates the modernizing, upward promise of the high-rises with increasing impersonalization and dehumanization. The third section of Part I titled, "Vioencia cotidiana" [Daily Violoence] begins with a series of frontal shots that emphasize the buildings' compartmentalizing geometry (Illustration 28 versus Illustration 14).12 Such shots suggest that the modern dwellings do not so much improve the lives of their residents as help canalize and entrap them. The film also examines the impoverished living conditions found in rural areas and in outlying neighborhoods like Villa Sapito in Avellaneda. Although less interested than Kohon's Buenos Aires in humanizing the poor and celebrating their honest labor, La hora simply foregrounds their daily suffering. Instead of the close-ups of villeros favored by Kohon, there are slow tracks along a line of men in an unfinished brick house waiting for a young prostitute to finish her lunch. As a patriotic aria compares Argentina to a soaring bird, the camera frames a caged bird against one of the walls.

This bitter portrait of Buenos Aires's dependence and decadence contrasts sharply with the type of melancholic elegy presented in the fiction film s of Nuevo Cine. Nevertheless, even though the liberal humanism of the Nuevo Cine and the radical politicizing project of La hora de los hornos were clearly different, they share similar urban preoccupations. In the films of the Nuevo Cine focused on the alienation of young adults trapped by social expectations and economic hardships in confining family homes, La hora de los hornos spoke of other types of urban entrapment, critiquing the way in which the city's "bright lights" blinded Argentine citizens to the harsh realities of the nation's underdevelopment.13

While taking aim at porteño infatuation with European high culture, La hora saved its most scathing critique for the effects of U.S. consumer culture and, more particularly, for the effects of mass communication on the city's middle classes. Despite the sections chronicling Argentina's cultural and economic dependency in the colonial period and the nineteenth century, La hora was primarily interested in contemporary society. More specifically, it was a response to the particular types of changes occurring in the 1960s when conspicuous consumption took off in Buenos Aires--spurred on by the new "advertising age."

9  See her article "Contemporary Argentine Cinema," in Garden of the Forking Paths, ed. John King and Nissa Torrents (London: BFI, 1988), 94.
10  Although Ché Guevarra also becomes the object of the filmic gaze at the end of Part I, the film ultimately deeroticizes his dead and wounded body through an uncomfortably long, three-minute shot that intends to provoke the spectator into revolutionary action.
11  Solanas and Getino, "La situación del cine en Argentina," in Cine , cultura y descolonización , 1973: 32. Given Solanas and Getino's heavy dependence on la Cabeza de Goliat as a source, and their open quotation of other Argentine writers who had inspired them, it is puzzling that the film never cites Martínez Estrada explicitly.   As outlined above, his nationalist orientation clearly resonated with them, as did his rejection of Sarmiento's paradigm privileging Buenos Aires as civilizing engine of the country.   But his antipathy for Perón--whom he accused of having turned Buenos Aires into a "Tiranópolis" in the third edition of his essay published in 1956--probably prompted Solanas and Getino to suppress any attribution.  
12  As noted by Robert Stam, these shots in La hora also resemble ones in the work of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (whom Solanas and Getino cite in "Hacia un tercer cine") where "frontal shots of office buildings with their abstract geometricality are superimposed with sirens; innocuous images take on overtones of urban anxiety" (1990: 258).
13  The different vision of the urban landscape portrayed in these films are affected by the political sympathies of their respective directors and by the specific moment in which they were produced.   Emerging in the early 1960s, soon after the Revolucíon Libertadora that threw out Perón and in the midst of the breakdown of Frondizi's coalition, the Nuevo Cine expresses disbelief in the recuperative possibilities held out by liberalism and the liberatory possibilities of city life.   Produced several years later as Primera Plana , the Di Tella, and new publishing houses promoted Buenos Aires as a modern(izing) city against the backdrop of a further deteriorating political situation, La hora de los hornos located the problem of Argentina in the false consciousness of urban elites.