By LUIZ RENATO MARTINS*
Comment on the film “Memoria del Saqueo”
Crises and alternatives
In the face of a crisis, like the current one, what to do? Let's start by diagnosing it: is it, perhaps, a government crisis, the resolution of which only requires other criteria for spending and investment? And in political terms, is it perhaps a crisis that can be overcome through a change of government, through direct elections – to stay only with the best of the alternatives under consideration? Or is it, rather, a regime crisis, demanding radical ruptures in the mode of accumulation and domination, that is to say, in the power relations between classes?
Two cases of preceding crises are at hand. What do they have to teach? The first resulted in the Brazilian transition of 1984, via the electoral college. It was the perspective in power that triumphed: the regime itself wove its transition, authorizing the consenting opposition to win, point by point, the scene.
But a defeat is not only woven from the strength of the winner, but also from the weakness of the defeated. In this case, the weakness of the defeated opposition lay in the electoral path, which abstracted from the street struggle in favor of the approval of direct elections, entrusted to the hands of a puppet congress. This crisis that, for Brazil, began with the explosion of the foreign debt, due to the high interest rates in the USA, in 1981-2, has not yet ended – in fact, it has only been reinvigorated: it gained new ingredients and more strength.[I]
But I suspend this flashback here, because the way of facing this crisis, in Brazil, was always negotiated behind closed doors, and it would be of little use to discuss it – if not to conclude that there is a univocal and complete model of preservation of the foundations of the mode of domination and oligarchic triumph.
The second case at hand, that of the Argentine crisis of 2001, is of more interest. In fact, this crisis was also originally a chapter in the dependency process, exacerbated by fluctuations in the US interest rate. But, in the case of Argentina, the crisis (although not yet overcome) brings more acute aspects, contradictions that have not been pacified and new factors that are of interest to the discussion, starting with the strong popular offensive unleashed against the State.
In Buenos Aires, the crisis led to the escape of President Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001, União Cívica Radical-UCR), through the roof of the Casa Rosada, by helicopter, recalling other escapes from above: the evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon on 29-30.04.1975; and the escape of Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989), who had also been forced, ten years earlier, to escape from the palace in Bucharest through the roof, in December 1989.
film against myth
In addition to involving a popular offensive against the presidential palace – something unheard of from the Brazilian angle –, the chapter of the Argentine crisis of 2001 brings, for us, the benefit of having resulted in a cinematic synthesis of the historical process. Such a combination is rare in recent Brazilian cinema, which is generally averse to epic objectivity and historical reflection, as it is accustomed to the chronicle or the personal tone about the peculiarities of the world in a small key. Therefore, the Argentine crisis and the narrative issues raised by Memory of the Saqueo (2002-2004) are of direct interest, due to their originality, to our discussion here.[ii]
I begin with the myth that has shaped the Brazilian crisis for several years now and shapes its appearance in the general perception, determining an entire psychosocial state. This is marked by the end of historical judgment and by extensive passivity, or by the notion that there is very little or nothing to do (at most, changing presidents).
It is, in short, the myth of the “end of history”. This myth has another face, which also rests on extensive passivity and the annulment of historical judgment: wishing for the advent of a redeeming figure, strong president or chief personality – when breaking or making history, as a direct and collective action, no longer seems possible.
totem, farce, fetish
It is known today that the reach of popular fury did not go as far, after all, as it could have gone, in the Argentine crisis, and even less, here (just think of the reflux of the June 2013 days). Why?
In order to decipher such a sphinx, it is convenient to remember that Bonapartism, as defined by Marx in the 18 Brumaire…,[iii] constitutes a shield against the crisis proper to the bourgeoisie. In addition to the totemic belief in the powers of Bonapartism and redemptive leadership, and the recent myth of the “end of history”, other smaller totems line up in a procession behind these. Its reproduction is guaranteed by a legion of economists, journalists from media conglomerates, marketers, opinion technicians, managers and preachers of the public sphere, who spread dogmas and beliefs about the immutability of dependency and debt relationships, of contracts, of the imperative of adjustments accounting etc.
In the street scene
Memory of the Saqueo deals with all of that.[iv] The film, made in 2002 and 2003 by Pino Solanas, was born directly – as a social commission (in the Russian constructivism sense) – from the popular insurrection that took to the streets of Buenos Aires in December 2001.
The film was innovative in many ways, which I will comment on. On the other hand, it left a crucial and decisive question in the air, without specifying it. A question that, in fact, grew over time and challenges us: what are the limits of popular fury, or spontaneity, witnessed and alleged by Memory of the Saqueo? But I propose that this question be left for the end, because, for the time being, we are still short of the preliminaries of such a discussion.
Adirect action
When popular fury finally exploded in Argentina, a turning point took place: from the totemic individual subject to the collective and historical subject (“the nadies”, according to Solanas’ next film)[v] – anonymous subject who went from inaction to direct action. In short, this turn was publicly translated into a shift from submission to popular insurrection.
Referring to a similar mutation, but to a lesser extent, more diffuse and more timid, which occurred in Brazil during the June 2013 journeys, urbanist Raquel Rolnik stated that on the street, the excluded reappropriated their own destiny "with their own bodies, through direct action.[vi]
Assault on Heaven: Camera in Hand and traveling
The conjunction between body, street, direct action and construction of destiny, synthesized in a new historical and discursive subject is analogous to the synthetic function exercised by a mode of cinematographic narration, which I propose to examine here: the traveling or filming, in this case, with the camera in hand – a way that, let us remember, was central in the cinema of Glauber Rocha (1939-81) – and which, in Memory of the Saqueo, operates as the pivot of the film.
O traveling camera in hand is born from the reciprocal determination between the action of the body, as a historical-social subject, therefore, of the direct action and the correlated movement of the camera – in this case, independent of the theatrical mediation of the representation. Such traveling thus expresses the first degree of the historical-reflective synthesis of the narrative subject of this film, which, at a later level, will also make use of montage, in order, as a visual and vocal discourse of the collective political subject, to appropriate its own destiny, synthesizing reflection and praxis.
In the meantime, a separate observation: I am certainly not thinking here about the traveling in abstract. For example, the initial sequence of Revelation Now (1979), by Francis Ford Coppola, based entirely on traveling shots showing a genocidal raid of helicopters, to the sound of Cavalcade of the Walkyries (1851), by Richard Wagner (1813-83), presents a way of traveling aerial in everything opposite to that of Memory of the Saqueo. Having made the counterpoint, let us now see how Solanas cinematographic itinerary reached the centrality of the way of traveling, developed in Memory of the Saqueo.
From retroaction to voluptuousness: direct action
Solanas' previous film, The Cloud (La Nube), 1998),[vii] focused on situations of stagnation and defeatism. The plot brought together – in a neighborhood deteriorated part of Buenos Aires, targeted by real estate speculation – a theater in ruins, old people dying, debts, crimes, police terror and penury.
In this scenic setting, inherent to a dramatic and depressing period of Argentine history – typical of the monetary ups and downs and the transition (1983-89), also orchestrated from above, as in Brazil and Chile – the reverse filmic movement constituted a recurrent narrative mode, a summary form of the entire narration. the fable of The Cloud it featured lives suffocated by debt, fundamental rights annihilated under the empire of monetization. Inserted in the film, neoliberal economists, then converted into vulture legislators and administrators, advocated the so-called “actuarial reasoning”. The reverse movement therefore translated the pathos majority of the protagonists, their desire to go back to another era, prior to that of debts and neoliberal occupation. Indeed, Solanas' narrative mode never intended to be neutral or alien to the scene and the fate of his characters.
Criticism of dualist discourse
When he performed in 1980, in exile in France, The Look of Others (Le Regard des Autres)[viii] – a film about people with disabilities, or about the condition of dependence as a permanent determination –, Solanas used a fixed camera or immobile. He sought, said the filmmaker, a “language (…) to capture intimacy”, so that only people with disabilities “witness about themselves”. Thus, Solanas shot, in his words, “the entire film in closed shots and medium shots […], in contrast to long shots – about the habitat, the city etc…”.[ix]
This is useful to highlight a contrast to the narrative of Memory of the Saqueo. The discursive duality of the 1980 film – given by the closed shots (due to the intimacy) and the long shots, indicating the exclusion of the city, seen from afar – was replaced, in the 2002 film, by the synthesis of the traveling. The dichotomy – between the interviewee's intimacy and the director's self-abstraction – gave way to voluptuousness (insurrectional) of the street population and its double: the camera – in hand and in traveling – integrated into the insurrectionary movement.
In the streets filled with jubilation, fraternity dominates and the camera is an active part. Occupying the place of theatrical decoupage, the traveling it plays a pivotal role, which overcomes the duality of the 1980 film, as well as the introspective modes of confession and personified transference. In fact, the narrative of the insurrection comes, above all, from the links established between the camera and the popular offensive.
direct action, traveling, kinesthesia: an economy
Thus, it is the popular offensive that instils a rhythm to the traveling shots, releases memory streams and triggers the narrative process of the film. A sequence, located in the opening moments, works as an explicit scheme of the narrative perspective. The dynamics of its construction is exemplary. Thus, to present the spontaneous response of the population to the state of siege announced by the voice of Fernando de la Rúa (1937-2019), the camera shows, in a frontal shot, people leaving their homes at night, with pots in their hands, and converging in a wave: the pot comes towards the camera, which joins the human flow, infected by the voluptuousness of the torrent.
But, in fact, already in the first succession of traveling shots presented by the film – as a prelude or operatic opening, interspersed with the signs and credits –, one can experience a new feeling of space, which invites one to vibrate according to the rhythm of the narration, whose development later on will set the tone of the film.
In 1968, The Hour of the Horns, the film by Pino Solanas and Octavio Getino about the 1966 military coup, highlighted the motto, borrowed from Frantz Fanon (1925-61): “Each spectator is a coward or a traitor”.[X] An imperative disjunction probably derived from the polarization of the various Latin American “sixty-eights” – generally divided between perplexity and armed struggle. Now in Memory of the Saqueo, such a dichotomy was replaced by a direct appeal to the kinesthetic sensation linked to the “assault on heaven”. Its elementary form is the traveling.
Political economy of sensations
Such traveling shots develop from the ways and practices of popular struggles. They specify the objects, prepare and serve the fight. In the fight, the look must be incisive and ready for action. The unemployed, known as piqueteros, developed as a fighting tactic "the road cuts” (road and street blocks), now adopted in many countries.
The analogue cinematic mode in Memory of the Saqueo is traveling in a dramatic crescendo, which culminates, as a corollary, in a closed shot, equivalent to melee, the apex of the assault on power through direct action, depending on popular protagonism.
image intifada
The fall of the totems, triggered by direct action, reverses the suffering of the evoked dispossession, leading not only to the end of the offensive, but also to the discursive regeneration and reconstruction of the collective political subject. But what can a film do? What can a intifada? Furthermore, one that only throws images, instead of stones, against the fetish effect of the great totems of monopoly capitalism?
From listening to editing
The first aspect of a traveling is tactile and similar to an abrupt sentence: the traveling seems to break out of a state of inaction and aphasia. What generates such a change?
Another function, apparently inverse to the kinematic aspect of the traveling, is inseparable from him and, in fact, actively participates in Solanas' starting point: listening. In its own way, the interview translates into a traveling-audio, because its active principle, that of listening, is that of movement towards the other. There is, therefore, a dialectical reciprocity between the two functions (listening and movement), which finds its synthesis in the traveling, which is exercised in a combined way in the hand and in the street.
What else intervenes in the dialectical combination of functions that constitute narration? The powers of remembering, synthesizing and narrating come from the activity of listening, which, in this case, is combined with direct action, linked to an appeal from oneself or from the other. Such is the voluptuousness, the celebration of Eros – or the gathering of a people in insurrection.
Archaeology
What are the other elements of the filmic economy of Memory of the Saqueo? One of the distinguishing marks of traveling shots, in this case, are the long sequence shots that explore the archeological site of power, venturing into vast halls and empty corridors.
Could it be that such shots, mimetically retracing the steps of subjects in the anti-popular plot, fulfill a taboo or commandment? After all, is it possible to retrace steps without finding yourself bewitched by them? Or will the traveling does it work, in this case, as a cathartic and redemptive remembrance of a nightmare overcome?
Do cinephiles remember the precious journeys through the luxurious labyrinths of memory, …Marienbad (1961), by Alain Resnais (1922-2014) – that is, those back-and-forth abstractly evoked, as in a scholastic of narration? Here, on the contrary, in Memory of the Saqueo, the memory details the scenography and concretely names the authors of the dark agreements in favor of monopoly capital. There are accurate serve imputations.
The narration then develops a process of objectification, at the same time critical and cathartic. It outlines an Ariadne thread that asserts popular sovereignty and frees the viewer from the labyrinth of submission.
But what happens so that the gaze, here, does not become contemplative prey, bewitched by the fascination function of palace environments? How can the camera look – in mode traveling – enter the labyrinthine theater of power without being captured by it? Indeed, the opposite is what often happens: union leaders or workers' representatives end up co-opted – and Peronism, like others, has a fleet of examples in this regard.
Ariadne's thread or critical construct, for the filmic discourse, here, not to be swallowed by the labyrinthine theater of power is the montage - the reflective and ordering instance situated beyond the immediacy of the traveling shots. Editing, although at a distance from filming, operates in the film in tune with the leitmotiv do traveling - but not only. She will then combine many times traveling shots of diverse or opposite senses, so suddenly enhancing the kinesthetic sensation; will also combine the disparity of traveling shots through the empty rooms of the palaces, with sound extracts from other moments.
Eros and Ariane
But how to connect what is diverse – sometimes opposite? How to make Ariadne (critical reason for the logos labyrinthine) roll the dice of Eros, which proposes connections, without attenuating differences or oppositions? while in The Hour of the Horns, for example, the collisions or ironic connections between sound and image sensibly accentuated the contrasts whose meanings had previously been given and designated by other means (intertitles or indirect narrative discourse), now more than constituting a new rhetorical trope, the shocks – not suppressed in the joints – exert a structural function and combine to a new level. They bring a decisive value, both for historical clarification and for catharsis and mnemonic recovery.
Indeed, there is now a dialectical demand. Not a return as it were of two objective and well-defined enemies – “colonized” and “colonizers”, to simplify –, as in the 1968 film, but, rather, a narration that needs to articulate opposing forms, inversions and masks, observing them from the inside out and vice versa.
In fact, the anamnesis must face a farce in this case, since its object combines not the binary scheme of violent oppression, but democracy, persuasion and fraud. Indeed, the looting plot inherent in financialization, which is the object aimed at by the film, implied massive forms and scales of consent, hence the involvement of the collective psyche as a whole.
Unique maze? Unhappiness or Argentine peculiarity? No. Widely consented political mandates, articulated to criminal policies, much more than frequent accidents, are current facts in the modern era; that say the 18 Brumaire…, by focusing on the rise of Louis Bonaparte as a paradigmatic case. Soon – as in several countries today subjected to confiscations (of health and social security systems, of labor legislation, etc.) due to imaginary deficits and austerity policies –, in the case of Argentina in 2001, the enigma culminated in the injunction of an odious mega-debt, neither contracted nor enforced for the benefit of those supposedly designated as debtors.
In any case, the problem now in question did not appear as a relationship between objectified opposites. That is, it only became plausible and understandable from the consideration of the psychically functional facets of the totemic aspects of the State, such as the mask of electoral representation and the effects of transference linked to the State; prodigious effects, which articulated – in this case, through the contraction of neoliberalism and Peronism, under the presidency of Menem (1989-99) – the collective consent of the population, even in the most odious conditions, to the spoliation of the present and future of the majority. But how can anamnesis face the thick web of symbols and affections that protects the dependent State and its clientele? There is no betrayal that is easy to decipher, until the spell is broken. Such is the course of the antitotemic epic of Memory of the Saqueo.
From the maze-palace to the picket
Os traveling shots inside the palaces, they dialectically simulate the visual experience of fraudsters and hoaxers in the service of monopolies. Thus, the movements of tactile perception in front of the carpets, curtains and furniture take shape visually, becoming sensations of the theater of power – to come to be opposed, as such, to elements, such as sounds, that come from the acts of direct action, in the streets.
In this way, nuances, signs and details that reproduce the totemic process are rescued here and combined with the anti-totemic sounds of the popular offensive. The unusual elements, thus captured and recombined as opposites, give the remembrances the sense of a dialectical appropriation, as well as an antitotemic and cathartic flavor, evoking a critical victory that is not merely abstract, but rather direct and objectified, obtained as if in a body the body.
The combination of sensations from the palace, with others that consist of signs emanating from the clash of classes, produces a direct confrontation equivalent to the dialectical synthesis between, on the one hand, traces of sensitive particularism discovered in a seizure of power and, on the other, the universality of the workers' perspective, sharpened by clashes in the streets.
The resulting synthesis directly reflects the leitmotiv of the workers' offensive, which nourishes the anamnesis and constitutes the narrative sequences from sets of objectified antitheses. These bring mnemic precision sharpened by the clashes and, from there, a refined narrative functionality.
Of course, “spontaneity” cannot be the cornerstone of every struggle, and The Hour of the Horns since 1968, it has marked many of its limits – for example, to resist a military coup, such as that of 1955 in Argentina (or, let us add that of 1964, in Brazil, and that of 1973, in Chile). However, under certain circumstances, direct action enjoys the effect of surprise, it constitutes an offensive weapon or a sudden form of resistance, with great power of negativity. Its energy surprises, interrupts, suspends and explodes the course of continuous time, managed by capital. Direct action, even individual ones, as the emblematic case of Edward Snowden demonstrated, has shown itself capable, nowadays, of overcoming formidable barriers such as that of planetary electronic surveillance.
From an aesthetic point of view, the discoveries provoked by direct action were so decisive for Solanas that they structured, from the angle of poetic and political praxis, his next five films – constructed as “social orders”, always articulated to organized struggles –, which raised the damage and resistance to the neoliberal devastation in Argentina.[xi]
Decisive lessons were thus posed both from the angle of cinema and from the historical judgment. Based on the direct action mode, Argentine cinema managed to overcome the “culture of defeat” and the mythology of the “end of history” – endemics, which dominate, even in the most lyrical cases or of critical resistance, Brazilian and Chilean cinemas. contemporaries.
On the political level, direct action in Argentina led to the occupation of numerous factories and service companies, under workers' self-management – which began to function as concrete laboratories and embryonic experiments of direct democracy and revolutionary power.[xii] Furthermore, state terror was, in Argentina, more than in any other country, paradigmatically brought to light and submitted to the courts.
The key to this difference consisted in the exercise, in Argentina, of direct action as an act of political sovereignty by the people – a major prerogative of the social formation and a permanent principle of democracy nourished by the direct expression of the working class.[xiii]
In summary, the dividing line posed by direct action crucially distinguishes the Argentine process from two others, both born directly from the model of the Pact of La Moncloa and often presented as examples of successful democratic transitions: the cases of Brazil and Chile. In Spain, the Pact of Moncloa conserved the heritage of the Francoist regime, restored the monarchy and preserved the class foundations of the regime born of the putsch (1937) from Phalanx against the Republic. He froze the investigation of fascist crimes and the historical process as a whole. Long after the Moncloa fraud, Spaniards, Brazilians and Chileans continue to suffer the farce of conciliation, the cover-up of practices of torture and genocide in the past, and the bitterness of its validity in the present. They suffer from fictitious and empty political institutions, from exclusive and largely privatized state services.
Finally, to the practices of direct action, exemplified by the Argentine working class, we owe lessons in the permanent reconstruction of history against the “principle of reality” of the “culture of defeat” – or against what Walter Benjamin named, in the face of the totalitarianisms of his time, of “indolence of the heart” – indolence verified today in the face of “neoliberal totalitarianism”.
In 2020
The first version of this work, dated 2013, concluded at this point, with the presentation of the final sequence of the film, focusing on a parade, with the style of a carnival block, rhythmed by a battery of workers in factory clothes, meandering in jubilation for what it seemed to be one of the side streets of Av. 9th of July.
Such a conclusion was due, as far as I am concerned, to the momentum of the expectation that the June 2013 journeys, in Brazil, would have an effective unfolding. The subsequent backflow, as well as the similar failure or hollowing out, of so many acts of popular rage and spontaneous outbursts in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Spain, France, the USA demand that we face, in new terms, the discussion of revolutionary organization and transition.
Dialectic and metaphysics
For this reason, this time, I will conclude by bringing to the debate some notes by Trotsky on France, written in March 1935, that is, one year after the act of the fascist forces in Paris (06.02.1934), and a year before the government of Popular Front (05.1936-04.1938) and the wave of workers' strikes, which achieved historic achievements at that time: a 40-hour week, paid vacations and collective work agreements, among others.
Nevertheless, shortly afterwards, the cards on the table turned to others, as is well demonstrated by the welcoming handshake with which Marshal Petain, at the head of the Vichy regime, received, on October 24.10.1940, XNUMX, at the Montoire railway station, Hitler and Ribentropp, Nazi Foreign Minister. Who changed the deck?
In a topic, under the ironic title “Dialectics and metaphysics”, written, as I said, months before the Popular Front come to light, Trotsky warns and lectures, at first, like a quiet schoolmaster: “Marxist thought is dialectic: considers all phenomena in their development, in their passage from one state to another. The thinking of the conservative petty bourgeois is metaphysical: their conceptions are immovable and immutable; between the phenomena there are impermeable walls. The absolute opposition between a revolutionary situation and a non-revolutionary situation is a classic example of metaphysical thought, according to the formula: what exists, exists; what does not exist, does not exist, and the rest is a matter of sorcery”.
In the historical process there are absolutely non-revolutionary stable situations. There are still notoriously revolutionary situations. There are also counterrevolutionary situations (we must not forget that!). But what exists above all in our epoch of decomposing capitalism are intermediate, transitory situations: between a non-revolutionary situation and a pre-revolutionary situation, between a pre-revolutionary situation and a revolutionary situation…, or counter-revolutionary. It is precisely these transitional states that are of decisive importance from the point of view of political strategy.
What would we say of an artist who could not distinguish more than two extreme colors in the spectrum? That he is colorblind or half-blind, and that he must renounce the brush (…).
A revolutionary situation is formed by the interplay of objective and subjective factors. If the party of the proletariat proves incapable of analyzing the trends of the pre-revolutionary situation in time and of actively intervening in its development, a counter-revolutionary situation will inevitably arise instead of a revolutionary situation. It is precisely Faced with this danger, the French proletariat finds itself today. (...) [28.03. 1935]” [xiv].
* Luiz Renato Martins he is professor-advisor of PPG in Economic History (FFLCH-USP) and Visual Arts (ECA-USP). Author, among other books, of The Long Roots of Formalism in Brazil (Chicago, Haymarket/ HMBS, 2019).
Review and research assistance: Gustavo Motta.
References
Fernando “Pino” Solanas, La Hora de los Hornos, 1968, b/w, 35 mm, 260'. For details, see .
_________, The Cloud, 1998, color, 35 mm, 114', Argentina/France/Germany/Italy, shot in Buenos Aires. For details, see .
_________, Memory of the Saqueo, 2004, color, 35 mm, 120', Argentina/France/Switzerland; filmed in 2002, in the regions of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Rosario, Tucumán, Corrientes and Neuquén. For production details, see .
_________, La Dignidad de los Nadies, 2005, color, 35 mm, 120', Argentina/Brazil/Switzerland; shot in Greater Buenos Aires, central Argentina and Patagonia. For details, see .
_________, Latent Argentina, 2007, color, HD digital video transposed to 35mm, 100', Argentina/Spain/France, shot in Patagonia and central and northern Argentina. For details, see .
_________, La Próxima Estación: History and Reconstruction of the Ferrocarriles, 2008, color, digital/35mm, 115', Argentina/France, shot in Greater Buenos Aires. For details, see .
_________, Tierra Sublevada I/ Impuro Gold, 2009, color, digital/35mm, 92', Argentina/Venezuela, shot in the provinces of Tucumán, Salta, La Rioja, Catamarca, San Juan, Santa Fe and Buenos Aires. For details, see .
_________, Tierra Sublevada II/ Oro Negro, 2010, color, digital/35mm, 107', Argentina/Venezuela (link not available).
Notes
[I] For an analysis of the Brazilian transition as a farce and imitation of the celebrated “Pacto de la Moncloa”, see at The Earth is Round, LR Martins, “The declared civil war”, 21.05.2020; idem, “The war continues”, 26.05.2020, available at and , respectively.
[ii] Work presented under the title “The many faces of austerity: totem, farce and fetish”, on 03.07.2017/XNUMX/XNUMX, at the International Seminar Work in Action and Discussion in Post-68 Film and Arts (University City, Univ. of São Paulo, 03/07.07.2017/XNUMX), org. PPG in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature/ Program of Literary Studies in English/ Centro de Estudos DESFORMAS-USP.
[iii] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Terrell Carver, in M. COWLING and J. MARTIN (ed. by), Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire”/ (Post)Modern Interpretations, London, Pluto Press, 2002, pp. 19-109; idem, The 18th Brumaire and Letters to Kugelmann, trans. revised by Leandro Konder, Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra, 1986.
[iv] See F. Solanas, Memory of the Saqueo, 2004, color, 35 mm, 120', Argentina/France/Switzerland; filmed in 2001-2002, in the regions of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Rosario, Tucumán, Corrientes and Neuquén. For details, see at the end.
[v] See F. Solanas, La Dignidad de los Nadies, 2005, color, 35 mm, 120', Argentina/Brazil/Switzerland; shot in Greater Buenos Aires, central Argentina and Patagonia. For details, see at the end.
[vi] “Occupying the streets, reorganizing the spaces and re-appropriating their forms (…), those who are excluded from the decision-making power over their destiny take that destiny with their own body, through direct action”. Cf. Raquel Rolnik, “The voices of the streets: the June riots and their interpretations”, in Vv.Aa., Rebel Cities: Free Pass and the Demonstrations that took over the streets of Brazil, São Paulo, Boitempo / Carta Maior, 2013, p. 10.
[vii] See F. Solanas, The Cloud, 1998, color, 35 mm, 114', Argentina/France/Germany/Italy, shot in Buenos Aires. For details, see at the end.
[viii] See F. Solanas, The Mirada of the Others, 1980, color, 16 mm, 100', France. For details, see at the end.
[X] See F. Solanas, The Hour of the Horns, 1968, b/w, 35 mm, 260'. For details, see at the end.
[xi] To list the set, in addition to the two films already mentioned (Memory of the Saqueo, 2004; La Dignidad de los Nadies, 2005), include: Latent Argentina, 2007; La Próxima Estación: History and Reconstruction of the Ferrocarriles, 2008; Tierra Sublevada I/ Impuro Gold, 2009; and Tierra Sublevada II/ Oro Negro, 2010. For more details, see at the end.
[xii] For a recent study, see Ricardo Festi, Factory Without a Boss: When the Working Class Challenges Capital, Marília, Anticapital fights, 2020.
[xiii] When this work was first prepared in 2013 for the association's annual conference Historical Materialism, at the University of London, as well as later, at the time of its re-elaboration in the first half of 2017, there were still no visible signs of the outbreak of the October 2019 Chilean movement, except for my oversight.
[xiv] Cf. Leon Trotsky, "Once more, where is France going?", in idem, Where is France going?, trans. s/n, preparation and revision Gilson Dantas and Luciane Pereira, Brasília, Kiron, 2012, pp. 132-3. The text, written (without identified signature, given his status as an exile) between March 21 and 26, 1935, was published in Truth [28.03.1935, weekly organ of the Ligue Communiste (Oposition de Gauche)], as the result of the work of a commission of the Bolshevik-Leninist Group, at the time a member of the SFIO [French Section of the Workers' International], one of the roots of the current PS.
