Third Cinema

The inception of third cinema brought together participants in a variety of anticolonial revolutions during a period in which the world was understood to be fundamentally polarized along lines of nation and class. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many third world writers and filmmakers saw themselves working in their own national contexts but connected intimately to a global uprising against worldwide racist and capitalist colonization. These uprisings extended from the Cuban and Algerian revolutions to political upheavals in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Senegal, and Vietnam. Many of these films appear crude and characterized by low production values but revolutionary filmmakers found it necessary to work on very small budgets with whatever materials were available. Most of the films are black and white and made with few takes. However, Espinosa's idea of "imperfect cinema" is central here because the practical and economic challenges to film production have formal consequences that speak to and of the problems faced by emergent nations.

Third cinema often uses a realistic style associated with cinema verité or sometimes with Italian neorealism. At times it uses nonprofessional actors or even workers and ordinary people doing their everyday tasks (as in the Chilean director Patricio Guzmán's three-part documentary The Battle of Chile [1975–1978]). Some of the films are forms of social realism that take a typical figure or situation and create an archetypical narrative that shows how the prevailing social order limits and often destroys individual possibilities. Filmmakers such as Lino Brocka (Philippines), Hector Babenco (Brazil), and Dariush Mehrjui (Iran) have worked in this manner. At the same time, figures such as Rocha, Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal), and Gutierrez Alea (Cuba) use mythic elements and modernist devices of fragmentation. In almost every case, films that are considered to be part of the third cinema corpus make difficult demands on their viewers, who are addressed such that they must not only understand the films' nontraditional portrayals of the world but act upon that portrayal in order to change the world.