The production of a documentary means creating one’s own truth, establishing a new way of seeing the world, creating order in the framework of the chaos of everyday. The genre and, really, the cinematographic language, has limitless facets of experimentation, but it has at the same time a limit which is the ethical treatment of the reality depicted. It is there that the documentalist distances him or herself from a form of production and distribution constantly questioned like the mass media televised machinery with its formal uses paralyzed in the sub-genre of news reports, with editorial lines supported by business groups and hegemonic power.

The mass television is patrimony of a hierarchy that makes and unmakes, perverts, educates with doubtful values, denounces with clear hegemonic objectives, alienates with kaleidoscopes of superficial attraction. This hierarchy is nothing more than the bourgeoisie class that dictates to us the form in which we must live or survive. While the cinema in its form of construction and exhibition has its correlative with the aforementioned, it has been able starting from certain elements to create fissures that contribute to critical discourses.

It is known that in our country there have been experiments with alternative and community television during the 90´s with more or less happy results. And also it is certain that society in the wake of the consequences of December 2001 argued through the editorial lines of the media denouncing Canal 13, Clarín or Radio 10. But up to this moment, certain experiences produced by the Argentine working class are not reproduced by the media: none of the stations were occupied and operated under the control of the workers and the popular sectors in order to bring to light different contents. In the cinema, and more specifically in the production of video developed for exhibiting “cinematographically”, adaptations of other modes of production and language are created. In this manner, in said space, the values that have been institutionalized to the cinema such as merchandising are broken and they are exchanged in favor of cinema as a tool for social criticism.

In the cinematographic production of fiction we find new subjects and settings that reflect our nation in crisis. Many of its products create an axis in the construction of the marginal and lumpen world that don’t contribute new elements to overcome the said crisis. The motivation of the authors may be to denounce, but in many cases, the products become sensationalist portraits of the marginalized, with a violence framed perhaps in a more credible aspect but sterile in the end.

There is an other kind of motivation, inherited until the moment of the documentary production, in which the individual or group author develops empathy with the reality depicted in such a way that the narrative is in function of the overcoming of social conflict. Then the films are made keeping in mind a social necessity and no only for an authorial motivation. The cinema as a place of prestige and glamour is exchanged for a place of the idea.

What reaches does this kind of cinema have that drink consciously or unconsciously from the experiences of our cinematographic past – political, militant, revolutionary or interventionist cinema – or in more contemporary experiences like video activism? Here it is necessary to open a parentheses: from now on that a film by itself cannot generate social change. But on the other hand, we are conscious of the historic roll that has been assigned to the cinema from different ideological tendencies for specific ends. Worth mentioning as examples are the first Soviet cinema and the posterior Stalinist degeneration of socialist realism, Nazi propaganda cinema, North American cinema during the course of the Cold War, the current corollary of the great ideological industry of Hollywood and its new forms of penetration starting with virtual games on the web, and a long list of etceteras. Without going on much further we should not ignore the roll of ideological and financial control of the CIA over the televised media, so well analyzed by the Venezuelan semiologists by virtue of the failed coup that occurred in that nation in 2002.

All of these elements indicate to us the importance from the point of view of power that this language lends itself. And this parenthesis obligates us to consider more seriously the value of critical documentary cinema. A cinema that comes from a normal course and is laid on other foundations. A cinema that in many cases has been thrown out the window due to its urgency and its imperfection. But how does a luxurious cinematographic prison with bars of gold serve us? There have been examples of this new cinema – returning to the introduction of this writing – that had extracinematographic impediments. This is what is called intervention cinema. These are not films to be seen passively but rather they have an ulterior objective which is to foster the spectator to intervene in reality.

Since 2001 to date, the critical documentary occupies multiple spaces of transmission outside of the movie theaters that are each time more inaccessible to a significant part of the population. And it has been an activator, in the great majority of cases, of intense debates not centered on how the film was made, but rather on the way in which the social conflicts could be overcome, in what or who are the causes of the current situation of the nation. This is how this cinema becomes not just an instigator of debates of ideas, but also, for example, an instigator of freedom for political prisoners, of solidarity for support of a factory strike, a counterinformer or directly an informer of realities that are slanted by other media.

The people in their struggle for liberation, or seeking their basic necessities, take imaginative and decisive actions. Imagination and decisiveness are aspects that also concern documentary cinema which is committed to its context and promotes the revealing of the reversal of the scheme that closes us in as human beings.

* Publicado en el catálogo del V Festival Internacional de Cine
y Video de Derechos Humanos, Buenos Aires, 2003.-