Third Cinema

What Fanon identified as the cultural and psychological dimensions of a racist—that is, white supremacist, imperialistic—capitalism, Solanas and Getino saw as being extended and intensified through mass communications:

As early as the 17th Century, Jesuit missionaries proclaimed the aptitude of the [South American] native for copying European works of art. Copyists, translator, interpreter, at best a spectator, the neocolonized intellectual will always be encouraged to refuse to assume his creative possibilities. Inhibitions, uprootedness, escapism, cultural cosmopolitanism, artistic imitation, metaphysical exhaustion, betrayal of country all find fertile soil in which to grow. (p. 47)

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In seeking an alternative to mass communication's cooptation and colonization of spectators, all of the cultural conditions noted above become themes for various third cinema filmmakers: The culture, politics, psychology, and metaphysics of colonialism are analyzed at great length. For example, another of Sembene's films, Xala (1973), depicts a postcolonial high government official of Senegal replicating the same patterns of domination practiced by the colonial masters: he steals the people's rice and fills the radiator of his Mercedes Benz with imported Evian water—but eventually he pays the price for his betrayal. In Gutierrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), the bourgeois protagonist, unable to identify with the project of the Cuban revolution despite his nationalist inclinations, cannot tap his creative powers and wastes away into "metaphysical exhaustion" and irrelevance. In Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka's great Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), a provincial couple is lured by the glitz of Manila to the metropole in search of a better life, only to meet with betrayal and destruction.

The three films mentioned above along with myriad others foreground the pitfalls of what has been referred to in shorthand as a colonial mentality. Solanas and Getino bring the question of colonial culture to the question of neocolonial media as follows: "Mass communications tend to complete the destruction of a national awareness and of a collective subjectivity on the way to enlightenment, a destruction which begins as soon as the child has access to these media, the educational culture of the ruling classes.… Mass communications are more effective for neocolonialism than napalm" (pp. 48–49). They are more effective than napalm, for Solanas and Getino, because first world, capitalist mass communication's industries structure the imagination and organize the desire of viewers in terms or patterns that run counter to their own individual and collective/nationalist best interests. In this view, aside from seducing viewing subjects away from the immediate materiality of their own problems and the potential, collective solutions that may be at hand, "mass communications" as they stand under capitalism effect the ongoing normalization of, in Solanas and Getino's words, "Violence, Crime and Destruction … [as] Peace, Order and Normality." For this reason, "Truth then amounts to subversion. Any form of expression or communication that tries to show national reality is subversion" (p. 49).