Pablo Alvira
Latin American political cinema must be understood as part of a "structure of feeling": a shared critical imagination, developed since the late 1950s and which became revolutionary in the late sixties, with the participation of the filmmakers along with other artists. In this context, key aspects of the discourses of the "new left" permeated militant film production. One of them is a “utopian mode”, which arose fragmentary, but deeply rooted in the present. Considering the production of militant cinema as a suggestive way to recognize the imagination of the left, here we will analyze a series of Brazilian and Argentine films made between 1962 and 1974, tracking the “marks of the future”: references to the alternative society project present in the films. This imagination does not emerge pristine and isolated but with a number of related topics: political violence, subjects of revolution or interpretations of the past. This work attempts a different approach to the history of Latin American political cinema, while it is intended to add elements to the discussions about the left, the revolution and utopia in the recent history of Argentina and Brazil