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Tierra sublevada: oro negro. Dir. Fernando Solanas. Argentina. 201 1 . Dur.: 107 mins.
With La hora de los hornos (1968) and the accompanying manifesto Hacia un tercer cine, Fernando "Pino" Solanas and Octavio Getino provided a model and theoretical foundation for a formally avant-garde anti-colonial cinema. In the five decades since, Solanas' politics has remained central to his work, most recently in a series of documentaries that sharply critique the implementation and effects of neoliberal economic policy in Argentina. The latest, Tierra sublevada: oro negro, has particular resonance with the recent re-nationalization of YPF, historically the state oil company, by the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
After a couple of decades in which he made only narrative features, Solanas' work of the last ten years constitutes a return of sorts to the militant documentary mode for which he became known, now in the context of the economic crises of the first years of the millenium and beyond. Solanas' return to documentary was presaged in 2002 with his formation of a movement that advocated the re-nationalization of the public resources sold off or leased in the 1990s, which he had been in a privileged position to witness as senator and member of commissions on Culture, Energy, Communications and Environment from 1993 to 1997. His recent work exhorts the viewer to take up the struggle against the corrupt selling-off of the Argentine patrimony. He now works in a less formally radical mode than he did in the 1960s, and the tone is no longer optimistic, since the metanarratives that guided his first works are long-shattered after the dictatorship's violence and the neoliberalism of the '90s. In tandem with his recent film work, Solanas has stayed active in national politics, founding the "Proyecto Sur" movement, running for president in...