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Universies Arts Festival '72 Auckland

Instruction

1. Organise the film section of Universities Arts Festival.

2. The search - for anti-imperialist films, preferable 3rd World, in particular, La Hora de Los Homos.

"I have your letter of March 22. I'm afraid I can't help you with any of my films since I am unable, by contract to licence any in the Australasian territory" (New Yorker Films New York)

"Thank you for your letter. Unfortunately it is not feasible to rent films internationally" (Other Cinema London)

And there were many more - all from distributors who avow "leftist" tendencies.

3. The break through came with a letter from a U.S. group who are prepared to send some 3rd World Films, including La Hora de Los Homos.

4. Response to this?

"I'm delighted to see that you're able to mount this festival - am I mistaken in thinking that N.Z. was too isolated to take this sort of thing (A Martin British Film Institute), and again there were many more.

5. Why La Hora de los Homos?

An impression from a North American viewer.

La Hora de los Homos by Argentinian Fernando Solanos is film as a weapon. Like rapid fire it lifts the cataracts from your eyes.

It struck me as an incisive painful but necessary operation. Years of consumptive movie viewing are cut through & there is no way to separate the artistic power from the history & politics of Argentina. It is seeing Latin America, violence through neo-colonialism. The U.S. runs it. Violence is overt. - 41 armed interventions, subtle - children dying of starvation while the U.S. extracts S4 for every $1 invested in Latin America. Cynics should watch this flick, it overwhelms any attempt at armchair criticism. It is new, it comes from the struggle of the 3rd World.

Argentina has the primary contradiction of foreign funded obligarchy of 5% of the population controlling 42% of the wealth. The facts are there in the film, but incorporated so visually that percentages become people, and dollars are blood. I am looking again and again in my mind at La Hora de los Homos, at Sears & Pepsi revolution or death.

Argentina like all of Latin America except Chile, is teetering on broken pillars. There is a small minority of decadent whites aspiring to be a European aristocracy and others, the military, industrialists who fawn and grovel for the U.S. The middle class culture is a shuck. Culture indigenous to Argentina is given little credence. All that is modern, jet-set or hip comes from the monster. Everybody knows that.

Starved in every sense of the word Latin America becomes violent. Repression of thought and act through Americanisation normalises the insanity of pig commercialism at the underdeveloped level. Solanas has made a brilliant film. It is the embrace of a brother. It is not difficult to see, when Solanas shoots the Buenos Aires graveyard of dead despots, landowners and aristocracy with its mausoleums marble shepherd boys and angels that the sons of dracula are taking it with them as their last decadent act.

As Solanas reflects in the first part of the flick, the Vietnamese know from Napalm who the enemy is, in Latin America much is concealed because language colour and religion are the same. The glitter of modern culture as it floods the city creates mental dependence on the U.S. for the people of Argentina. This film casts away illusions which hurts those who would smog the world's brains or blow them out."

I impression. 1 film. There'll be 10 other 3rd world films shown at the Arts Festival this year. And New Zealanders Euro/U.S. cataracts?