Third Cinema

Roy Armes, in his important work Third World Film Making and the West, suggests that during the 1960s "the steady development of industrialization combined with growing national awareness led almost imperceptibly to a belief, which came to be widely held, that an era of socialist revolution was dawning throughout the Third World." This belief was based in part upon Cuban resistance during an invasion orchestrated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and the success of Algerian nationalists after eight years of armed struggle against French rule in 1962. Armes notes that there gradually emerged what Gérard Chaliand called "a sort of third world euphoria" over the potential for genuine political change. This euphoria was connected to a host of factors including widespread "anti-colonial struggle, opposition to the Vietnam war, student revolt, a new consciousness on the part of American blacks, the emergence of armed guerilla groups in Latin America," and a reconceptualization of revolutionary strategies from the ferment of China and the Soviet Union. From so many uprisings and changes of consciousness there emerged the distinct possibility of what was to be a tri-continental revolution imagined via figures such as Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh.

This possiblity of a tricontinental revolution informed the work of many third world revolutionaries and filmmakers. The people aided by their leaders and artists would reinvent the terms of a new social order free from domination by outsiders, or indeed by anyone. To put an end to the systematic, violent, and continuous exploitation of the third world by first world economies, militaries, and persons, it was necessary to invent revolutionary strategy on several levels and, moreover, revolutionary culture. Filmmakers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even Europe bent themselves to this task. The ideas of strategy and culture are important here because the category of "thirdness," as it turns out for many theorists of third cinema, was to be assigned according to a film's aesthetic and political strategy as much as by either its geographical provenance or its thematic content. In many cases, the operative question both for film commentators and filmmakers was, What can a cinema of liberation accomplish in bringing about the overthrow of Western imperialist domination and creating revolutionary culture? Given the ways in which colonized nations are dominated by their colonizers at economic, geographical, cultural, intellectual, and psychological levels, this cinema of liberation was understood to be, necessarily then, a cinema of subversion. Revolutionary cultural politics needed to subvert the dominant paradigms of social organization and interpersonal relations. As the filmmaker Glauber Rocha, whose masterfully subversive works including Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (1963; Black God, White Devil) and Antonio das Mortes (1969) remain staples of film-history courses, put it, "When one talks of cinema, one talks of American cinema. The influence of the cinema is the influence of American cinema, which is the most aggressive and widespread aspect of American culture throughout the world.… For this reason, every discussion of cinema made outside Hollywood must begin with Hollywood" (cited in Armes, p. 35).