Raymundo Gleyzer attacked the authoritarian Argentinean government with revolutionary cinema. 

“I don’t believe in revolutionary cinema. I believe firmly in the revolution.” 

Here we have, in writing, the artistic philosophy of radical Third Cinema pioneer Raymundo Gleyzer. The Argentinean filmmaker spent his career telling stories on shoestring budgets and evading the censorship of an authoritarian government. A rare artist who lived without vanity or the need for self-expression, his films were the ammunition of a revolution fated to fail him. 

Armed with only a 16mm camera, Gleyzer dropped out of film school in the early 1960s and set out to make his own documentaries. Focusing his lens on small peasant towns, Gleyzer honed his abilities to listen and tell the stories of the oppressed and marginalized. Born with an extraordinary capacity for empathy and an aptitude for engendering the trust of others, Gleyzer captured on-camera interviews with both the poverty-stricken village inhabitants and the wealthy landowners living in self-imposed ignorance of their workers plights. 

As Gleyzer grew as an artist, the Marxist themes of his work became more pronounced. His films shifted focus from farmers to factory workers. Against the background of the re-establishment of the Perónist regime, Gleyzer documented the frustration and struggle of factory workers, and captured daring idealism of underground socialist revolutionaries. Three documentaries from this period are included in The Short Films of Raymundo Gleyzer: Swift (1971), Don’t Forget, Don’t Forgive (1973), and They Kill Me If I Work and If I Don’t Work, They Kill Me (1974). 

Gleyzer’s candid films invoked the universal ire of the authoritarian Argentinean government. His films never received traditional distribution in his home country or Latin America as a whole, but Gleyzer still hoped to use his documentaries to power the coming revolution. He formed Cine de la Base, a collective organization with goals of producing and showing their films to the masses. Theaters were built entirely from found materials. Films were projected on to factory walls and the sides of buildings. No single member of the organization received individual credit. 

The fervent Marxist saw his films as weapons to be used in the war against capitalist tyranny. Their power lies in their simplicity. Rather than using experimental techniques, bombarding audiences with a tidal wave of sight and sound like his contemporaries, Gleyzer shows the workers as they explain their struggles and march in protest. In Swift, he joins workers in line for factory distributed food and blankets. In Don’t Forget, Don’t Forgive, Gleyzer puts us in the middle of a meeting of socialist leaders as they work out the terms of their peaceful surrender. For the vast majority of the film, we hear these young revolutionaries speak with confidence and idealism, but the conclusion reveals that days later they were all shot by police troops at the Trelow Massacre. 

The most stylized of these short films in the collection is They Kill Me If I Work and If I Don’t Work, They Kill Me which chronicles an outbreak of lead poisoning among factory workers due to inhumane factory conditions. The apathy of factory owners, government officials, and medical professionals borders on the ridiculous. The absurdity is brought to our attention by the juxtaposition of the workers’ arduous struggle with cheerful satirical ditties, which include the title song and another bitterly funny tune entitled “The Communal Pot.” The authentic footage of protests and interviews is still present, but this time, it’s accompanied by a vaguely patronizing animated short intended to define capitalism, and the bitter humor of men well aware that they have nothing happy to sing about. 

There are few filmmakers who would identify themselves as revolutionaries first and artists second. Each frame of Gleyzer’s films was another spark, a single twig in a much larger bonfire. He produced films purely to produce change and devoted his life to a cause that would eventually lead to his own early end. In 1976, like 300,000 others deemed threats to the government, Gleyzer was officially declared “disappeared.” Thrown into a maze of prisons and concentration camps from whence he never returned, all that remains of Gleyzer’s legacy are these short films, the documentaries intended to set tyranny ablaze. 

The Short Films of Raymundo Gleyzer is available on DVD from Facets. Buy your copy today. 

Author: Ora Damelin is a freshman film student at Columbia College Chicago. She loves to share her opinions on film and is delighted-and slightly befuddled-that those opinions are now published online.