Third Cinema

It is important to draw out the implications of third cinema as a practical critique of third world populations within the first and second worlds. Third cinema is put forward by Solanas and Getino as "above all, a new conception of filmmaking and the significance of art in our times" (p. 54).

Their phrase "I make the revolution; therefore I exist," echoes Rocha's important formulation in his essay from the same period, "The Aesthetics of Hunger": "The moment of violence is the moment when the colonizer becomes aware of the colonized." In other words, within the regime of institutionalized violence, any claim to existence, any assertion of will by the colonized, is taken as an act of violence or revolution by the colonial regime—for it is the working conceit of colonial regimes that colonial populations do not have will, do not suffer pain, humiliation, starvation, torture, and death, have no legitimate claims on the placid, beneficent world of colonial domination; and indeed, do not exist.

From such claims regarding revolution and violence emerges a theory of knowledge: "There is no knowledge of a reality as long as that reality is not acted upon, as long as its transformation is not begun on all fronts of struggle." To emphasize this point, Solanas and Getino invoke Marx's eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." Connecting third cinema to Marxism indicates that the historical development of class consciousness must be linked to developments of race consciousness and nationalist consciousness in the process of knowledge making. The world is not given merely in its representations. Representations present an interested picture of the world; in short, a worldview. This point connects the decolonization movements with the history and theory of Marxist revolution, and these thematics as well as those that arose with the negritude movement inform to varying degrees the work of many third cinema filmmakers.