This week in class we watched excerpts from Octavio Getino and Fernando Solana’s La Hora de los Hornos, as well as excerpts from some of Santiago Alvarez’s documentaries. I was really surprised by the use of stop-motion like editing, specifically in one of Alvarez’s documentaries of the local women dancing to music. I’m not sure if it is just different pictures edited together or if the stop-motion effect was just done when editing film footage. Like Alvarez’s documentary, La Hora de los Hornos also uses stop-motion like editing to direct the attention of the viewer. We can see this in the sequence of the slaughterhouse, edited with the bold statements stating Argentina’s economic corruption, as well as the heavily stylized imagery of western consumption through popular advertisements of the time. These different pictures edited together create a sort of Kuleshov effect for the audience; they derive their own meaning of this segment of the documentary as the edited clips and images create their own meaning together instead of outwardly telling the audience what the conflict is. The audience can almost immediately make the connection between the rise of consumption under a growing capitalist economy and the oppression of the Argentinean working class because of the editing. I was surprised that both of these documentaries used these editing techniques since they were made over 50 years ago, and the films I have seen using these techniques are fairly more recent. 

By Tea del Valle