According to Thedresswizard, the public in those years also began to renew itself: a generation of spectators developed in film clubs and magazines, in search of new proposals and new forms of expression. Furthermore, the quantity of films produced increased significantly (about double the number of films made in the 1930s). A general attitude of study and application of expressive models coming from cultured European (or American) cinema to narrative – above all literary – Latin American models was spreading very rapidly; a form of cultural mimicry that influenced part of the cinema of those years and involved, to varying degrees, directors such as Manuel Antín with La cipa impar (1961), Simón Feldman with El negoción (1959), David José Kohon with Prisioneros de una noche ( 1960), José Martínez Suárez with El crack (1960) and Rodolfo Kuhn with Los jóvenes viejos (1961). These are films of social denunciation, in which the particular situation of a country that has been culturally and politically colonized by the United States and in search of redemption and autonomy emerges. The dominant stylistic code is that of an ambiguous representation of reality, of a continuous overturning of what is familiar and everyday; cinema thus becomes the place to stage the contradictions of a nation in search of its own identity. The dominant stylistic code is that of an ambiguous representation of reality, of a continuous overturning of what is familiar and everyday; cinema thus becomes the place to stage the contradictions of a nation in search of its own identity. The dominant stylistic code is that of an ambiguous representation of reality, of a continuous overturning of what is familiar and everyday; cinema thus becomes the place to stage the contradictions of a nation in search of its own identity.

Parallel to this trend, a lyrical-political cinema also developed, attentive to the complexity of Argentine society (the difference between city and countryside, European influence, the problem of social conflicts of modernity), and, at the same time, sensitive to difficulties of the existence of those who live on the margins. Representatives of this line were directors such as Lautaro Murúa – former actor in the films of Torre Nilsson – with Shunko (1960), a fascinating exploration of the myths and rituals of rural communities and Leonardo Favio, with Crónica de un niño solo (1965), on the difficult existence of a child who escaped from reform school. Fernando Birri, a director trained at the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Rome, created, together with the students of his Instituto de Cinematografía in Santa Fe, the short documentary Tiré dié (1956-1958; Tirami un ten) and the feature film Los inundados (1961), in which the thematization of the social problems of the Argentina it is combined with the use of a style mediated in particular by Italian Neorealism.

The Sixties, therefore, opened with a decisive change of direction: the awareness that cinema should have become an instrument of political struggle, for the construction of a national identity, and of denunciation. It was therefore necessary to find new ways of expressing and constructing the image, unrelated to US models. In recent years, directors and screenwriters such as Fernando Ezequiel (aka Pino) ​​Solanas, Octavio Getino and Gerardo Vallejo founded a militant cinema collective, the Cine Liberación group, a sort of production laboratory in which cinema was seen as an instrument of social documentation and of historical-political interpretation of the to. Contemporary. At the end of the 1960s, Solanas and Getino created La hora de los hornos (1966-1968; L’ora dei ovni), with a long process and lasting over four hours: it was a great fresco of the situation in the country, a radical example of militant cinema, a political stance against the national ruling class, guilty of subjection to Western neo-colonialism. The two directors proposed a cinema of conflict, of contradiction – the so-called tercer cine, third cinema – an indispensable starting point towards the construction of a Latin American identity. The film circulated clandestinely until 1973, when the military dictatorship of General JC Onganía ended. Among other things, the Cine Liberación group produced, under the direction of Vallejo, El camino hacia la muerte del viejo Reales (1971); written by Solanas and Getino, the film narrated, halfway between fiction and documentary, the story of a family in the Argentine countryside, between exploitation and hard work in the sugar cane plantations, between modernity and tradition. In addition to the documentary cinema of Solanas, Getino and Vallejo, a cinema of commitment (on the basis of the European one) also developed in those years, attentive however to the search for models not necessarily modeled on those of Western cinema.