*** Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award ***

Fernando Birri

The Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker whose work is crafting documentaries, short films, animation or work for television.

The Unity of Poetry and Politics
by Sergio de la Mora

Fernando Birri, now in his late 70s, is one of the founding figures of the New Latin American Cinema movement that, since its inception in the mid-'50s, has been influencing social change across the Americas.

Birri, a poet, painter, puppeteer, artist, actor and master of manifestos as well as a filmmaker, defines this movement as "a poetics of the transformation of reality." Birri considers cinema to be the ideal form through which to pose social problems and the ideal vehicle to promote social transformation. In particular he defines the New Latin American Cinema as "a nationalist, realist, critical and popular cinema which tried to interpret, express and communicate with the people.

It's a cinema for and of liberation, for economic, political and cultural liberation, and also the liberation of the imagination." He conceptualized this new cinema not only as an alternative to the prevailing Argentine film industry but also as an integral component of a new social movement. Film would thus play a pivotal role in the revolutionary politics of '60s national liberation discourse.

As one of the movement's original practitioners and theorists, Birri reconceptualized film production, distribution, exhibition and reception as an anti-imperialist, anticolonial weapon for consciousness-raising. His dream was to create an active audience that would be completely transformed and would join in this struggle for social change and (trans)national liberation. "It is the only cinema," he continues, "in the history of cinema that expresses a continent in all the diversity of its cultural-historical connotations." Indeed, the continental and global impact of this movement was immense; the manifestos and films traveled around the world and inspired people and movements everywhere, including the filmmaking efforts of the Chicano civil rights movement in the late 1960s and such disparate filmmakers as Paul Leduc and Patricio Guzmán. Birri returned to his hometown Santa Fe in central Argentina after having studied filmmaking (and worked as an assistant to Vittorio de Sica) at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome during the postwar height of Italian neorealism. In 1956 he founded the Documentary Film School-the first of its kind in Latin America-at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe. He adopted the techniques he learned in Italy in his effort to create an alternative national cinema that would engage with and assist in transforming the social conditions of the most marginalized sectors of Argentine society.

He wrote his first groundbreaking manifesto, "For a National, Realist and Critical Cinema," for the first public screening of Tire Dié, a two-year documentary project made with his film students about the lives of impoverished barrio residents on the edges of modern urban Argentina. Both film and manifesto proposed an alternative, low budget filmmaking model, conceived for mass audiences: working class, middle class, peasants. His work inspired a dialogue that continued throughout the '60s in other famous manifestos such as "For an Imperfect Cinema" by Julio Garcia Espinosa and "Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World" by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas.

Birri devoted his energies to opposing social class inequalities in Argentina, yet with the Frondizi government ousted by the military, Birri was forced to leave the country in late 1963. While in political exile he traveled throughout Latin America teaching young filmmakers his craft, eventually returning to Rome due to lack of resources. He spent ten years making the little-seen experimental art film, Org. When it was finally finished in 1978 it so outraged its producer that he ordered it destroyed (though reportedly a print still exists).

Birri, a man of great humor and precociousness, has dedicated much of his life to inspiring and teaching children and young filmmakers. In 1982 he founded the Laboratorio Ambulante de Poeticas, a mobile film school, which he took to Italy, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua and throughout Argentina.

In 1986 he cofounded, with novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the Escuela de Cine y Televisión (School of Film and Television) in San Antonio de los Baños, near Havana, Cuba. In this period he also made a film about Che Guevara, My Son Che (SFIFF 1986), which has become a classic portrait of the great revolutionary leader's life. Still a tireless activist, teacher and writer, in 1999 he founded the Birri Foundation, which is dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of film, video and media education to emerging young artists.

Speaking as someone who was introduced and inspired in the early 1990s during my undergraduate education by the New Latin American Cinema to dedicate much of my energy into teaching and writing about Latin American and U.S. Latina/o cinema, I am confident that Birri would agree with me that being honored with this year's Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award is not only important recognition of Birri's contribution to world cinema, but also an acknowledgment of the ongoing vitality of audiovisual technologies that contribute to social change, justice and to the freedom of the imagination of marginalized and oppressed peoples around the globe.

Sergio de la Mora is Assistant Professor in Chicana/Chicano Studies, University of California, Davis.
The original version of this article appeared first at the San Francisco International Film Festival No. 45

Copyright © 2002 San Francisco Film Society