Ronald Bergan explained last week how Godard embodied the spirit of May 68, managing to "go beyond film, beyond image into the other arts and into politics". It was reassuring to hear the voice of someone who had actually experienced these events first-hand, and that refused to curtsy to the cynical postmodern opinions that so often reduce Godard's body of work to a series of Brechtian clichés.
Perhaps we are losing sight of the potential of film as something that not only deals directly with personal/material experience but that can also help us understand the past and define the present: history is now. Godard's films may no longer be capable of inciting revolution but they continue to act as historical documents of a time when additional merit was given to art for its ability to embrace and formulate change.
With the "art meets politics" rhetoric in full swing this week, I decided to go to see a film that aimed to bypass art entirely, preferring instead to openly incite violence in an unashamedly propagandist way. The film was the 1968 documentary The Hour of the Furnaces, co-directed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. This Third Cinema classic was supposed to be an alternative to European art film, which the Grupo Cine Liberacion argued was too focused on the individual expression of the auteur director.
At four hours long, this dialectic epic was an exploration of Argentina's neo-colonial policies that continued to dominate its politics throughout the late 1960s as well as the imperialist powers that lay behind them. It was both shot and screened clandestinely to its target audience of the Argentinean working classes in an attempt to highlight the supposed inseparable relationship between liberation and violence.
The film is epitomised by its relentless, convulsing montage of violence and suffering; images of hundreds of cows being bludgeoned to death with sledgehammers are intercut with advertisements for consumer novelties and the Vietnam war. Not since Johan Grimonprez's Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y have I felt so nauseated and moved by the combined violence of politics and consumerism - the film's most pertinent themes. This was no "angry brigade" of Oxford-educated "anarchists" but, rightly or wrongly, a real attempt to orchestrate and instruct a tangible manifesto.
With the help of its minimalist shots (a dead Che Guevara staring at the camera for over two minutes) and its use of continual montages, The Hour of the Furnaces is contemplative art whether Solanas or Getino liked it or not. Some of the most highly criticised documentaries have been those films that proclaim to represent specific truisms - Michael Moore's films, for example.
However, those documentaries that embody more cautious grasps of the truth, such as Alain Resnais's Night and Fog or Nicolas Philibert's Every Little Thing, continue to stand out from the rest. While blurring the lines of fact and fiction, these films reassign power to the audience, the power to be judges of their own thoughts.
