The film has been the detonator of the act, the agent that mobilizes the old spectator. Furthermore, we believe in what Fanon said: ‘ If we must involve everyone in the fight for our common salvation. Jean Luc Godard

Godard and Solanas in Conversation
Jean- Luc Godard: How would you define your film, The Hour of the Furnaces?

Fernando Solanas: As an ideological and political film-essay. Some people have talked about a film-book and this is correct because we supply information, elements for reflection, titles, and didactic forms….The structure of the narration is constructed as its in book: prologue, chapters and the epilogue. It is a film absolutely free in its form and its language. We have used everything that was necessary or useful for our educational ends: from direct sequences or interviews to others whose form approaches that of a story, or tale, or a song, or even montage of concepts as images. The subtitle of the film shows its documentary character, it is intended to be a proof, a testimony, concrete evidence of a particular reality that wants to educate and to research. It is a film whose contribution lies in its orientation; its points a direction, it points a way. Because the film is not addressed to anyone, it is not addressed to an audience that believes in ‘cultural coexistence’, but, on the other hand, it is addressed to the masses who suffer the great neoco-parts, because the first tells that which the masses already know, The Hour of the Furnaces is also a film ‘Act’ an anti-show, because it denies itself as film and opens itself to the public for debate, discussion and further developments. Each shows becomes a place of liberation, an act in which man takes cognizance of his situation and of the need for a deeper praxis to change the situation.

Godard: How does the ‘Act’ take place?

Solanas: There are pauses in the film, interruptions so that the films and the topics presented can pass from the screen to the theatre, that is, to life, to the present. The old spectator, the subject who beholds, the onlooker, according to the traditional film that develops from the bourgeois concepts of the arts of the 1800s, that non-participant, becomes the live protagonist, a real actor in the story of the film and in the history itself, since the film is about our contemporary history.

And it is a film about liberation, about an unfinished stage in our history; it cannot be anything but an unfinished film, a film open to the present and to the future of this act of liberation. That is why the film must be completed by the protagonist, and we are not discarding the possibility of adding new notes and film testimonies if were to find in the future new occurrences that needed to the incorporated. The ‘Acts’ end when the participants decide to end them.

The film has been the detonator of the act, the agent that mobilizes the old spectator. Furthermore, we believe in what Fanon said: ‘ If we must involve everyone in the fight for our common salvation, there can be no spectators, there can be no innocents. We all dirty our hands in the swamps of our soil and in the emptiness of our minds. Every spectator is either a cowards or a traitor. ‘ That is to say, that we are not facing a film for expression, nor a film for communication, but a film for action, a film for liberation.

Godard: What sort of problems did you have?
Solanas: Besides all the problems common to any economic production. I could say that the biggest problem was to overcome our dependence on foreign cinematographic models. It is the dependence, fundamentally aesthetic, of our film via-a-vis the American and European film, which is its biggest limitation. And this could not be understood separately from the analysis of the Argentine cultural situation. The official Argentine culture, the culture of the Neocolonial Bourgeoisie, is a culture of imitation, models of the oppressive, imperialist bourgeoisies. A culture parte of Argentine films made today are built upon the productive, argumentative and aesthetics models of yankee films or are no inventions, no search of our own. There is translation, development or copy. There is dependence…

Godard: American film is a film to be sold…
Solanas: Exactly, a film tied up with shows and business; sub-servient to and condition by capitalist exploitation. Of this profit- seeking mode of production are born all genres, techniques, language and even the duration of present day films. It was to break with these conceptions, with these conditioning, which gave us the most difficulty. We had to liberate ourselves: film made sense if we could use it as a writer or a painter to accomplish the task.

If we could bring out our experience starting from our needs. So we decided to risk, to try, to search before conditioning ourselves to the masters of the ‘Seventh Art’, who could only express themselves through the novel, the short story or drama. We started to liberate ourselves of the Visconti’s, Renoirs, Giaconda’s, Resnaises, Paveses, etc… committed to find a form, our form, our language, our structure…that which would save the needs of our audiences and with the needs of the total liberation of the Argentine man; meaning that this search in the film media did not come as an aesthetic category, but as a category of the liberation of our people and our country. This is a way new film was born that gave us the holding of the theme, novel or the film of concepts, of thoughts, of topics. History as a novel gave away to history told with ideas, to a film to see and to read, to feel and to think, a film of research equivalent to the ideological essay…
Godard: What role can this film play in the process of liberation?

Solanas: First of all, to transmit the inromation that we do not have. The means of communication, the mechanism of culture, are in the hands of or are controlled by the system. The information that is made available is that which the system wants to make available. The role of the film of liberation is, above all, to prepare and to propagate our information. Bringing up once again: that which is theirs and that which is ours. From another point of view, the whole concept of our film-open film, film of participation etc-points to one and only one fundamental objective: to help set free, to liberate man. A man who is oppressed, repressed, inhibited and manacled. It is a film for this combat. To raise the level of consciousness and understanding of those sectors of the people who are the most uneasy above their condition. Will it just reach a limited circle? Maybe. But the so-called film of the masses only transmits that which the system allows, that is, it becomes an instrument of escape, of evasion of mystification. Film of liberation, on the other hand, reaches, at this stage, smaller groups, but reaches them in greater depth. It comes with the truth, it is better to disseminate ideas that help liberate a single man, than to contribute to the mass colonization of the people.

Godard: The Cubans say that the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution. What is the duty of the revolutionary filmmaker?

Solanas: To use film as a weapon, or as a gun, to transform the work itself into an act, into a revolutionary act. What is for your this duty or commitment?

Godard: To work fully as a militant, to make less films and be more militant. This is very difficult because the filmmaker has been educated in the realm of individualism but in films too it is necessary to stare anew…

Solanas: Your experience after the ‘May events’ (May ‘68) are paramount. I’d like you to share them with our Latin American colleagues.

Godard: The ‘May events’ have brought us a fantastic’s liberation. ‘May’ has imposed its truth; it has forces us to talk and to articulate the problems in a different light. Before ‘ May; here in France all the intellectual had an alibi which permitted them to live comfortably, that is, to have a care, an apartment…But ‘ May’ has created a very simple problem, that of changing our lifestyles, of breaking with the system. To the successful intellectuals ‘May’ ushered in a situation analogues to that of a worker who must abandon the strike because he owes the grocer for four months. There are filmmakers, like Truffaut, who sincerely say that they are not going to change their lifestyles, and others just keep playing a dual game, like those of Cahiers….

Solanas: Is it the ‘Author-oriented’ film a bourgeois film category?
Godard: Exactly, the ‘Author’ is something like a professor in a university…
Solanas: How do you ideologically define this type of ‘Author’ film?
Godard: Objectively, today’s Author films are allied with the reaction
Solanas: Who stand out as examples?
Godard: Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Bresson, Bergman…
Solanas: What about young ones?
Godard: In France, Godard before May, Truffaut, Rivette, Demy, Resnais….everyone ….in England, Lester, Brooks….in Italy, Pasolini, Bertolucci…lastly Polanski…everyone
Solanas: Do you think these filmmakers are integrated within the system?
Godard: Yes, they are integrated and they do not want to be de-integrated…
Solanas: And the more critical filmmaking is it also covered by the system?

Godard: Yes, these films are also covered by the system because they are not strong enough in relation to their integrating potentialities. For example, the American ‘Newsreels’ are as poor as you and me, but if CBS offered them $10,000 to project one of their films, they would refuse because they would be integrated…and why would they be integrated? Because the structure of American television is so strong that it recovers for the system everything that it shows. The only way in which we would get back at TV in the USA would be not to project anything during two or four hours that the TV station pays precisely for showing and recovering. In Hollywood they are not preparing a film about Che Guevara, and there is even a film with Mao Tse- Tung…those Newsreel films. If they were to be shown by French TV, they would not be viable, at least not totally because they are coming from another country… Similarly my films, which here are viable, have a certain worth in Latin America.

Solanas: I don’t agree with the last thing you said. I believe that when a national film deals with a subject from the point of view of the oppressed classes, when it is clear and deep, it becomes practically indigestible for the system… I do don’t believe that CBS would by a film about ‘Black Power’ or a film about Carmichael talking to Blacks about violence, or that French TV would show a film about Cohn-Bendit saying everything he believe…in our countries there are a lot of things allowed when they refer to foreign problems, but when these same problems are international, because of their political nature, they cannot be absorbed… A few months back, censorship prevented Strike and October by Eisenstein…On the other hand; most of all ‘Author-oriented’ films deal with bourgeois problems from all the point of view of the bourgeoisie. They are not only absorbed by the system, they actually become in our countries the aesthetics and thematic models of our neocolonized ‘Author’ filmmaking.

Godard: I agree. But when, here in France, the political becomes difficult for them, (the system) can no longer absorb like before… This is the case with your film, which I am sure will not be absorbed, and will be censored…But it is not only in the political scene that absorption occurs, it also happens in the aesthetic field.

My most difficult to be absorbed were the last ones that I made within the system, where the aesthetic was turned political, like in Weekend and La Chinioise…. A political position must correspond to an aesthetic position. We must not make an ‘Author – oriented’ cinemas, but a scientific cinema. Aesthetics must also be studies scientifically. Every investigation in science, as in art, corresponds to a political line, even if you ignore it. In the same manner as there are scientific discoveries, there are aesthetics discoveries. This is why we must consciously clear the role we have chosen and to which we are committed. Antonioni, for example, at a certain moment accomplished some valid work, but he no longer does…He did not radicalize himself. He makes a film about students as it would be done in the United States, but he does not make a film coming from the students.

… Pasolini has talent, lots of talent, he knows how to make films on a particular topic as one learns to make compositions at school…For example, he can make a beautiful poem about the Third World…But it is not the Third World that has made the poem. Then, I believe it is necessary to be the Third World and then one day it is the Third World who has made the poem and if you are the one who sings it, it is simply because you are a poet and you must know how to do it….as one says, a film must be a weapon, a gun… But there are still people in the dark and they need more than a pocket flashlight to bring light around themselves, and this is precisely the role of theory…We need a Marxist analysis, did not make a theoretical analysis, but rather an analysis in terms of production, so that there could be films everywhere. Only Eisenstein and Dizga Vertov occupied themselves with this topic.

Solanas: How do you film now? Do you have a producer?
Godard: I have never had a producer. I had one or two producer friends of mine, but I ever worked with the usual production houses. When I did it, once or twice, it was an error…It is now impossible for me. I don’t know how the others do it. I see some of my comrades, like Cournot or Bertolucci, for example who are forced to ring the bell at the house of a cretin to save their work. But I never did this. Now I am the producer with whatever I have…and I film much more than before, because I film in a different way, in 16 MM, or with my small TV equipment …and different also in another sense, even if it sounds preposterous to use the Vietnamese examples. I refer to how the Vietnamese use the bicycle in combat or resistance. Here a champion cyclist could not make use of the bicycles as a Vietnamese does. Well, I want to learn to use the bicycle as Vietnamese. I have a lot to do with my bicycle, a lot of work ahead, and this is what I have to do, and this is what I must do. This is why now I film so much. This year I made four films.

Solanas: What is the difference between what you used to do and the sort of film you make now?

Godard: Now I try to make a film that consciously tries to participate in the political struggle. Earlier it was unconscious, a sentimentalist…I was in the Left. If you please, although I started from a position in the right, and also because I was bourgeois, an individual. Afterwards I evolved psychologically to the Left, until I reached not the position of a ‘parliamentary left’, but a revolutionary left’, radicalized, with all the contradictions that presupposes…

Solanas: And cinematographically?

Godard: Cinematographically, I always tried to do that which was never done, even when I worked with the system. Now I try to tie up. ‘What is never done’ with revolutionary struggle. Earlier, my search was an individual’s struggle. Now I want to know if I am wrong, why I am wrong, and if I am right, why I am right. I try to do that which is not done because everything that is done is almost totally imperialist. The cinema of the East is imperialist cinema; the Cuban cinema-with the exception of Santiago Alvarez and one or two documentary filmmakers- is a cinema that functions half-way with an imperialist model.

All the Russian cinema has turned rapidly into imperliast, it has been bureaucratized, with the exception of two are three persons who have struggles against this: Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Meterkin, who is absolutely unknown…Now I make cinema with workers, I do what they ideologically want, but I also say: ‘Careful! It is necessary that in addition to making this type of films, they do not on Sundays patronize the system’s crappy films. This is our obligation and our way to help “The struggle of the filmmakers. ‘ In short, I have reached the conclusion that the movie scene being so confused and complicated, it is important to make films with people who are not filmmakers, with people who are interested in what they see on the screen bearing a relationship with themselves

Solanas: Why do you work with people who do not belong to filmmaking?

Godard: Because with regard to the language of filmmaking it is a small handful of individuals, in Hollywood or in Mosfilm, or wherever who impose their language, their speech, on the whole population, and it is not enough to get away from the this small group and say, ‘I make a different cinema’….Because one still has the same ideals about filmmaking. This is why to overcome this, one must create for those people who have never had the chance, an opportunity to make cinematographic speech…A very extraordinary thing about the events of last May in Paris happened when all the people started writing on the walls…

The only ones who had the right to write on the walls were advertisers….People were made to believe that writing on the wall was dirty and ugly, but I also had the impulse to write on the walls and I have kept it up since ‘ May’….It was no longer an anarchistic idea but a deep desire…In filmmaking too it is necessary to begin anew…I made a film with students talking to workers and it was very clear: the students talked all the time and the workers never….But where are their words? Not in the newspapers, not in the films. Where are the words of the people who constitute the 80 percent? We must allow the word of the majority to be expressed. That is why I do not want to belong to the minority who talk and talk all the time, or the minority who make a film, but I want my language to express what the 80 percent want to say…this is why I do not want to make films with film people but with the people who constitute the great majority of humanity….

Recorded shortly after the US and European release of The Hour of the Furnances, in 1969 .

Tags: Interviews, Jean Luc Godard, Solanas

Posted By Anuj | Friday, June 18th, 2010 | Filed under Interviews