Grupo Cine Liberación 1968-2012

October 2, 2012 12:39 PM

"The death in Buenos Aires of Argentine filmmaker (in Spanish) and theorist Octavio Getino was reported on the same day as that of the historian Eric Hobsbawm in London. Worlds apart and different spheres of activity, perhaps, but both contributed in major ways to the broad current of independent and international critical culture that grew up after 1968, even though Hobsbawm remained a Communist and Getino was always a Peronist." - Michael Chanan, with a video interview of Mr. Getino from 1982.
posted by parmanparman (5 comments total)

Another late Marxist, Eugene Genovese, is often forgotten in this discussion of differing career arcs that occasionally converged with Eric Hobsbawm. An interesting piece from 1995 when Genovese reviewed Hobsbawm can be found here.
posted by piercestanley at 1:20 PM on October 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, a good place for a historian of empire, in 1917, a good year for a communist. Obit.
posted by Rashomon at 1:46 PM on October 2, 2012

Anyone acquainted with his work want to compare and contrast Peronism and Communism?
posted by Apocryphon at 10:03 PM on October 2, 2012

"Peronist" is an extremely broad and ill-defined category. It has purportedly included nearly everything from an avowed admirer of Mussolini and personal friend of Franco (Juan Peron himself) to Marxist guerrillas (the Montoneros), but also a spectacularly crooked neoliberal (Carlos Menem) and an almost equally crooked recent scourge of neoliberals (Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner).

The only things that appear to link all different branches of Peronism is an exacerbated jingoism, a cult of strong leaders (somewhat contradicted by the movement's intense fractiousness) and a strong attachment to "truthiness".
posted by Skeptic at 2:44 AM on October 3, 2012

It would be more precise to identify Getino as a left-wing Peronist, who shared Hobsbawm's anti-imperialist views.
posted by Skeptic at 2:53 AM on October 3, 2012