PRADO, Antonio. "Anarchism and Counterinformation in Documentaries : From Civil War Spain to Post-2001 Argentina"

Guerre civile en Espagne (1936-1939)Argentine.- Histoire de l’anarchisme* bibliographie

Latin American Perspectives (2013) 40 : 50

Summary

The work of anarchist collectives in the film industry during the Spanish Civil War
and the video documentaries of Grupo Alavío in post-2001 Argentina, as represented in
two documentaries that attest to historical moments of worker self-management, shows
historical and aesthetic intersections. Both were devoted to disseminating information
counter to the official line of the mass media, and in neither was there a desire to take over
the state ; instead, the movements they represented denied the very legitimacy of the state.
In the tradition of the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, both crafted meanings out of
sequences of images of all kinds, and both paid homage to the masses awakening to social
emancipation. Similarly to the Soviet film vanguard of the 1920s, both can be understood
as organic parts of the transformations that they portrayed.