Third Cinema - Third Cinema And The Third World, Formal Dimensions, Periodizing Third Cinema, Ideology: Racism And Identification
struggle liberation including western
"The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognizes in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point—in a word, the decolonization of culture." These sentences were penned in 1969 by the revolutionary Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in an essay titled "Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World."
This essay, along with several other manifestos, including the Brazilian Glauber Rocha's "Aesthetics of Hunger" and the Cuban Julio Garcia Espinosa's "For an Imperfect Cinema," placed questions regarding the interpenetration of political struggle, cultural struggle, and mass media squarely at the center of a global struggle against the intensification of Western imperialism. Other such proclamations, including Fernando Birri's "Cinema and Underdevelopment" and Tomás Gutierrez Alea's "The Viewer's Dialectic," underscored and elaborated the concerns of Latin American revolutionaries with media and mass movements. What Solanas and Getino called "third cinema" was imagined, in short, as a cinema of liberation. Third cinema was to be filmmaking that would aid nationalist movements in creating a new sociocultural solidarity in the struggle against Western imperialism and for national self-determination.
Additional Topics
Roy Armes, in his important work Third World Film Making and the West, suggests that during the 1960s "the steady development of industrialization combined with growing national awareness led almost imperceptibly to a belief, which came to be widely held, that an era of socialist revolution was dawning throughout the Third World." This belief was based in part upon Cuban resistance d…
The inception of third cinema brought together participants in a variety of anticolonial revolutions during a period in which the world was understood to be fundamentally polarized along lines of nation and class. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many third world writers and filmmakers saw themselves working in their own national contexts but connected intimately to a global uprising a…
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…
Third cinema set out to destroy various aspects of what has been called the colonial mentality and to replace it with various forms of cultural affirmation. Summing up the situation of the third world and its peoples in 1969, Solanas and Getino wrote, "Just as they are not masters of the land upon which they walk, the neo-colonized people are not masters of the ideas in their heads" …
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, inter…
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…
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'…
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 im…
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 Un…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments