Revisiting the Argentine Political Documentary of the Late 1950s and Early 1960s

Criticism has tended to see the pioneer documentaries of the New Latin American Cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s as reproducing what they denounced. Close analysis of the formal strategies of three classic Argentine films of the period-Fernando Birri's Tire Die, Humberto Rios's Faena, and Raymundo Gleyzer's Ceramiqueros de Traslasierra-suggests, instead, that the questions and contradictions in these political documentaries are illuminated by the desire to imagine and address a new audience as an agent of social change.