Third Cinema

To equate the "showing of reality" with "subversion" does not necessarily lead to a naive theory about a medium that can transparently represent reality. Rather, what passes for reality is inexorably tied to the forms by which it is rendered. It was understood that representational forms, from news formats to standard Hollywood narratives of individual heroism, were and are part of the functioning of institutions, as well as the functioning of cultural and economic power. Therefore, it was also understood that control of the spectator is central to the maintenance of power. Opposed to such hegemonic functionality, third cinema creates an activist relation to knowledge making; third cinema makers work with "a camera in one hand and a rock in the other." They tried to show that because all representation is shot through with power relations, the most pernicious representations are generally those in which the process—that is, the mode of representing—is naturalized and/or made invisible. If representation appears larger than life, as something like a second nature, human beings are simultaneously persuaded of their powerlessness. Third cinema endeavors, in one way or another, to show the world as being constructed in and through social relations.

In bourgeois cinema, write Solanas and Getino, "Man is accepted only as a passive and consuming object; rather than having his ability to make history recognized, he is only permitted to read history, contemplate it, listen to it, undergo it" (p. 51). This leads to another important set of distinctions impacting the term third cinema, for "thirdness" is to be distinguished from a "firstness" and "secondness" in the cinema. First cinema is the dominant Hollywood product, a "spectacle aimed at a digesting object." "The world, experience and historic process are enclosed within the frame of a painting, the same stage of a theater, and the movie screen; man is viewed as a consumer of ideology, not as the creator of ideology" (p. 51). Auteurist cinema, including the French new wave and Brazilian Cinema Novo, constitute second cinema. Here the filmmaker seeks a new film language and endeavors to challenge social constraints, but ultimately finds him or herself "'trapped inside the fortress' as [Jean Luc] Godard put it" (Solanas and Getino, p. 52). The second cinema often thematizes the situation of disaffected colonial subjects but can neither posit nor effect a social basis of transformation, caught up as it is in the ideology of bourgeois individualism. It thus remains closer to forms of existentialism but is not yet revolutionary. Third cinema sets out to fight "the system," and sees itself as a weapon in a collective struggle against racist, capitalist domination. It is defined as a cinema of liberation. It understands the collective character not only of history making but of historically individuated subjects.