Third Cinema

The third cinema movement, which emerged as a corollary to the worldwide decolonization movement, exploded in the late 1960s and thereafter went through several incarnations. In particular, one could discern three breaks. The inaugural moment of third cinema, which carried the movement through the 1970s, was followed by an academic and institutional revitalization during the mid-1980s that focused on reception and interpretation as well as the practice of filmmaking. This mid-1980s resurgence of interest in third cinema occurred in part because it was felt that both national and perhaps more pointedly festival audiences did not easily fit into a standard differentiation between colonizer and colonized.

The uneasy fit of spectators into opposing first and third worlds, colonizers and colonized, which were formerly imagined as polar opposites, was exacerbated by the relative failure of revolutionary uprisings in the colonies to bring about the liberation of colonized peoples despite the fact that the colonies themselves had achieved nominal independence. It was further complicated by the growing numbers of third-world diasporic populations who faced difficult and vexing questions of existence and identity in the Western metropoles. Claiming that the unequal economic exchange between the first and the third world had its analogue in the unequal symbolic exchange between the first and the third world, Teshome Gabriel suggested that one of the effects of third cinema was to displace the Western(ized) viewer from his accustomed position of the privileged interpreter of the image. In assigning the category of thirdness to cinema, the spectators' reception became part of that assignation and Gabriel proposed that it was also possible to read "first" or "second" cinema (cinema which registered the malaise or alienation of third world subjects but was not in itself revolutionary) in a third cinema way. However, despite the blurring of some polar distinctions between oppressive colonizer and oppressed colonial subject, many if not most of the intellectuals, organizers, and filmmakers involved with what was still, if with some reservations, called third cinema, worked in solidarity with ongoing revolutionary activity in places like Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Philippines. Finally, in the opening years of the twenty-first century, there was a growing reassessment of third cinema practices, which took account of postcolonial theories, globalization, and the emergence of what might be called a world media system.