Temel Sinema

In the latter half of the 1960s, the Cine de la Base group emerged as the leading exponent of the cultural arm of the revolutionary left-wing faction ERP (People's Revolutionary Army), within the context of an Argentina marked by military dictatorship, the proscription of Peronism, and the birth of the revolutionary struggle. Led by filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer, they created a body of work unique for its urgent political content and its heterogeneous modes of representation within the documentary format. Producing a significant number of short films—some of which have been lost forever—and establishing a clandestine distribution and exhibition network, they found themselves at a historical juncture that placed them at the center of the aesthetic-political debate: how to advance the construction of a militant aesthetic that could reach the working masses without using the representational models of classical cinema? This article aims to provide an initial approach to this cinema, which Gleyzer termed "counter-information."