Third Cinema
Authors Of History
According to Solanas and Getino, the connection of third cinema to revolutionary practice led to the discovery of "a new facet of cinema: the participation of people who … were [formerly] considered spectators" (p. 61). Thus, unlike in first and second cinema, film is seen not as a spectacle but as a "detonator or a pre-text." Third cinema is experimental, and impels its audience toward social change: spectators become actors, the authors of history. "The film act means an open-ended film; it is essentially a way of learning" (p. 62). Thus, as opposed to traditional cinema, third cinema is "cinema fit for a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of becoming" (p. 63). The third cinema movement therefore represents a consciousness of the history-making and knowledge-making aspects of film and understands the historical role of cinema as creating a liberated society. The function of third cinema, while centrally concerned with the objective transformation of society, is not only extrinsic to viewing subjects but intrinsic as well. For all of the debates that have occurred over the tenability and fate of third cinema, the urgent call of Solanas and Getino may yet be heard: "The decolonization of the filmmaker and of films will be simultaneous acts to the extent that each contributes to collective decolonization. The battle begins without, against the enemy who attacks us, but also within, against the ideas and models of the enemy to be found inside each one of us" (p. 63).
See also Anticolonialism: Latin America; Marxism; Nationalism: Cultural Nationalism; Negritude; Neocolonialism; Third World.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armes, Roy. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Beller, Jonathan. Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalism and the World-Media-System. Manila, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004.
Birri, Fernando. "Cinema and Underdevelopment." In New Latin American Cinema, edited by Michael T. Martin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
Chaliand, Gérard. Revolution in the Third World. Translated by Diana Johnstone. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York: Penguin; 1978.
Espinosa, Julio Garcia. "For an Imperfect Cinema." In New Latin American Cinema, edited by Michael T. Martin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. 1952. New York: Grove, 1967.
Gabriel, Teshome H. "Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films." In Questions of Third Cinema, edited by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen. London: BFI, 1989.
Gutierrez Alea, Tomás. "The Viewer's Dialectic." In New Latin American Cinema, edited by Michael T. Martin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
Pines, Jim, and Paul Willemen, eds. Questions of Third Cinema. London: BFI, 1989.
Rocha, Glauber. "Aesthetics of Hunger." In New Latin American Cinema, edited by Michael T. Martin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. "Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World." In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, edited by Bill Nichols. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Wayne, Michael. "The Critical Practice and Dialectics of Third Cinema." In The Third Text Reader: On Art, Culture, and Theory, edited by Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, and Ziauddin Sardar. London and New York: Continuum, 2002.
Jonathan Beller
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Thallophyta to ToxicologyThird Cinema - Third Cinema And The Third World, Formal Dimensions, Periodizing Third Cinema, Ideology: Racism And Identification