This article tries to address established notions of ‘Third
Cinema’ theory and its film-makers from developing and postcolonial nations.
The ‘Third Cinema’ movement called for a politicised film-making practice in
Africa, Asia and Latin America, since its first appearance during the 1960s and
1970s, taking on board issues of race, class, religion, and national integrity.
The films investigated, from directors such as Sembene, Getino, Solanas and
Guzman, are amongst the most culturally significant and politically
sophisticated from this movement, and denote the adoption of an independent,
often oppositional stance towards commercial genre emanating from the more
developed capitalist world. However, despite the contemporary popularity and
critical attention enjoyed by films from Asia and Latin America in particular,
Third Cinema appears to have lost its momentum. This article wants to bring
Third Cinema back to attention. There are difficult and challenging questions
Third Cinema posed and continues to pose, and this article seeks to suggest new
methodologies and redirections of existing ones, but also reread the entire
phenomenon of film-making in a fast-vanishing ‘Third World,’ with case studies
of the cinemas of Argentina, Chile, Senegal as well as from European Third
Cinema movements.
Overview
There is an endless debate about Third Cinema and its
strategies in offering valuables tools of documenting social reality. From the
1970s to recent days, appreciation of its value and aesthetics has unfolded
through controversial approaches and different views on this ‘radical’ form of
cinema. The idea of Third Cinema was raised in the 1960s as a set of radical
manifestos and low-budget experimental movies by a group of Latin American
filmmakers, who defined a cinema in opposition to Hollywood and European
models. This new form of expression was coming largely from three different
areas of the world: Asia, Africa and Latin America. At that time these three
zones were labelled ‘Third World’ (and in some places they sometimes still
are). Even though scholars such as Paul Willemen explained how the notion of
Third Cinema was most emphatically not Third World Cinema, these two concepts
have often been confused either voluntarily or accidentally.
As an idea, the roots of Third Cinema came from the Cuban
Revolution (1959) and the figure who supported this revolution – Che Guevara.
Also, the Brazilian “Cinema Novo,” where Glauber Rocha provided an uproar with
his polemical manifesto entitled The Aesthetics of Hunger (July 1965), was an
important element of this new wave. Some roots of Third Cinema also grew out of
Italian neo-realism and John Grierson’s notion of social documentary, and were
ultimately influenced by elements of Marxist aesthetics. Filmmakers influenced
by Latin American documentary include Fernando Birri, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, and
Julio Garcia Espinosa.
The term Third Cinema was invented by the Argentinean
film-makers, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino who had produced and directed
the most important Third Cinema documentary of the 1960s La Hora de los Hornos
(The Hour of Furnaces, 1968). Contemporaneously they wrote an important essay
sustaining the radical ideas of Third Cinema: “Towards a Third Cinema.” During
the time of the release of La Hora de los Hornos a tri-continental revolution
was supported by figures such as Frantz Fanon, Ernesto Che Guevara and Ho Chi
Minh.
The principle characteristics of Third Cinema do not really
reflect the country of origin, or the film-maker, but the ideology espoused and
the consciousness displayed. Although a simplification, we may not be far from
the truth if we claim Third Cinema as the cinema of the Third World, which
stands in opposition to imperialism and class oppression in all its
ramifications and manifestations.
The Third Cinema has offered a significant means of
documenting social reality through the analysis of documentaries from
Argentina, Chile and Algeria and, on the other side of the Ocean, from Black
Independents documentaries made from a British context.
Self-conscious ideological opposition to Hollywood was the
first marker of Third Cinema, while identification with national liberation was
the next most common theme, at least in the early writings on the subject. The
idea of the nation in this discourse, however, always rubbed up against
globalized Third World identification. On the one hand, the tri-continental
definition of radical film aesthetics defies national boundaries. On the other
hand, if any cinema is determinedly ‘national’ even ‘regional’ in its address
and aspirations, it is Third Cinema.
The political-cultural trends of the 1980s and 1990s have
demonstrated the need for a definitive reappraisal of the terms in which a
radical practice like Third Cinema had been conceived in the 1970s: questions
of gender and of cultural identity received new inflections, and traditional
notions of class determined identity were seen as inadequate as the forms of
struggle that corresponded to them.
La Hora de los Hornos, The Battle of Chile, Salvador Allende
The importance of Solanas and Getino’s works is due to both
their manifesto on Third Cinema and the striking documentary of 1968, La Hora
de los Hornos. This documentary’s importance within revolutionary cinema comes
from the way it encourages its audience to take subversive action against
imperialist politics through the dynamism of its style and the radical and
systematic way that it frames political and ideological issues. Several authors
have labelled this cinema as ‘Guerrilla cinema’ or ‘cinema like a gun’ because
of the force of their images and of the violence with which the film-makers
addressed the social and political issues of Latin America. The montage of La
Hora de los Hornos is divided into thirteen chapters and three sections. Each
chapter is supported by statements, quotations and slogans. At that time La
Hora de los Hornos tried to unfold episodes and characters that, as stated by
Teshome H . Gabriel, aimed to “raise the consciousness of its audience.”
La Hora de los Hornos represents a multi layered form of
documentary. As a documentary film it is a combination of two or more modes of
facing social reality. According to Bill Nichols, documentary modes can range
within four categories: expository, observational, interactive and reflexive.
Even though lacking in impartiality and so consequently not in the
observational mode, Solanas and Getino’s work defiantly encompasses expository,
interactive and reflexive modes of documentary.
As noted above, La Hora de los Hornos is divided into three
sections: the first, ‘Neo-colonialism and Violence,’ relates Argentina to its
European influences; the second section, ‘An Act for Liberation,’ explains the
opposition struggle during Peron’s exile; in the third section, ‘Violence and
Liberation,’ the audience alternately appreciate documents, interviews and
quotations framing the path to a revolutionary future for the people of Latin
America.
The use of direct address spoken and written commentary in
which the spectator is called to act against imperialism is just one example of
‘Guerrilla Cinema’ form. From an editing point of view, recorded noise and
distorted music plays a discursive and demystifying role in explaining the
purposes behind this way of filming.
The Third Cinema was trying to develop a new web of
production and distribution away from the mainstream channels. La Hora de los
Hornos worked toward this goal by finding a way to circumvent censorship with
the creation of an underground system of distribution. Sometimes these
screenings (such as those featuring the films of Solanas and Getino) had to be
protected by militant armed guards to avoid the risk of government retaliation.
Enhanced by this concept of specific national roots that comes from African,
Asian and Latin American Third Cinema, La Hora de los Hornos has mirrored the
pursuit in avoiding the industrial-political domination of Hollywood.
Since its release La Hora de los Hornos has an unchanged
value because of its attempt to frame an ideological-political argument.
Indeed, the politics used by US strategies as described by the documentary of
the two Argentinean filmmakers is not that different from the strategies raised
by the US administration of the last few years of post-colonialism and the
savage wars under George W. Bush’s rein. Without losing its force or relevancy,
La Hora de los Hornos could be easily screened today as a denouncement of the
crisis that affected Argentina in 2000, due to economical struggles provoked by
IMF and its ‘bizarre’ financial strategies.
Solanas and Getino contributed greatly in building one of
the most important pillars and reason of debate within Third Cinema, including
such notions as national culture and identity. La Hora de los Hornos is
probably the most influential documentary ever released in Latin America, not
only useful as a device to understand the culture and political discourses of
the late 1960s, but because it is still meaningful in deciphering the actual
social problems in the Latin America continent.
In the manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” Solanas and
Getino stated the goals they intended to achieve through Third Cinema: “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 recognises
in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic
manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated
personality with each person as the starting point –in a word, the
decolonisation of culture.”
Many years later (2004) in Latin America another important
documentary was released by Patricio Guzman –Salvador Allende, a documentary
which tells us about the life and death of the socialist president of Chile,
who in 1973 was killed or forced into suicide [1] by both Pinochet and CIA in a
coup d’etat. As Guzman did in 1977 withThe Battle of Chile, a three-part
documentary about Chilean socio-political life in the early 1970’s, Salvador
Allendehas a particular mode of production that creates an epic work poised
between direct and dramatized, immediate and mediated modes of describing
historical and dramatical events. Through the use of a voice-over both films
mark the differences between these features and those concepts of direct
cinema. Although the sequence shots and the mobile framing, reframing, focus
shifts, and movements within the image could code the film as “direct,” the
voice-over reinscribes the filmic discourse as an authored discourse.
Third Cinema in Africa: past and present
In a continent like Africa, due to the long-term difficult
situation of the cinema industry, the first point on a filmmaker’s agenda is
looking for funds, and this need shows how the Third Cinema’s struggle for
survival is still harsh. In this section I will take into account the period in
which Third Cinema was born in Africa, through such works by Ousmane Sembene as
Ceddo, Emitai and Xala.
“When one creates one does not think of the world; one
thinks of his own country. It is, after all, the African who will ultimately
bring change to Africa.” (Sembene)
This quote embeds most of the philosophy with which
Senegalese Ousmane Sembene realised and supported the project of Third Cinema
in Africa. Sembene encountered constant interference from Senegal censorship,
with his works often being delayed or forbidden. Sembene often portrayed Africa
as a land peopled with oppositional groups, who fight for their independence
and for their cultural identity. His work Ceddo (1977) represented one of the
most important pieces of Third Cinema in Africa. The title itself –which in
English is translated to ‘outsider’– was quite critical of the colonization
process. This word aimed to portray African’s struggles in resisting conversion
to Islam, and to a certain extent also Christianity. In Sembene’s words “The
Ceddo is a lively mind or spirit, rich in the double meaning of words and knows
the forbidden meanings. The Ceddo is innocent of sin and transgression. The
Ceddo is jealous of his/her absolute liberty.”
Ceddo is set in a traditional African village during the
period when North African Arabs were building Islamic colonies all over Africa.
The village depicted in the film included three symbols of foreignism which
invades African spirituality: a European trader, a Catholic priest and an Arab
Muslim. The movie shows the desire of colonization of African culture by these
three different icons, faced by the local ‘outsiders,’ among whom we find
‘Ceddo.’ The feature is dominated by icons which represent the opposing
cultures that struggle to survive.
Ceddo is set in an unidentified Wolof Kingdom perhaps in the
eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries; the film abstracts itself from
absolute chronological precision in order to function as a depiction of the
pre-twentieth century political and cultural forces that were the melting pot
of the modern Senegalese nation. Two of the most important icons represented in
Ceddo can be seen firstly in the Black African power versus foreign power and
influence, and secondly in the religious divisions within the foreigners and
within the Wolof. With regard to the first reference, the decision-making
powers of the king and his aristocracy are at stake in the game being played by
the characters prevesiously mentioned such as the European slave trader, the
European Catholic priest, and the Arab imam. Most of the common people are
Ceddo. They resist the imported influences in a traditional way, which is to
kidnap a hostage, Princess Dior, against their demands to the king to restore
their rights to be heard and their traditional freedom of choice. The imam’s
goal is achieved late in the film, when he takes the position of king and puts
his own disciples in positions of aristocratic power. The second icon-reference
is placed at the beginning of the film, the Muslim import has already defeated
the Christian import among the Wolof aristocracy led by the family of the king;
however, the bulk of the population is Ceddo, and the most explicit narrative
issue is whether or not the entire nation will accede to Islam. In the film,
the Ceddo are the common people, who remain true to the traditional fetish
religion against the increasingly successful convertion zeal of the Muslims.
The recession of the traditional religion upsets the self-determining balance
of indigenous African political structures, leading to a loss of institutional
continuity.
For a long time African Third Cinema was also the ‘cinema of
silence’ whereby the silence witnessed the African spirituality to be protected
and filmed without any form of invasion. Even though the first part of
Sembene’s career was characterised by this element of silence, as featured in
Emitai, Ceddo lost this cinematic approach to African culture. The silence in
Third Cinema produced in Africa and specifically by Sembene seems to have two
levels of reading: firstly, tradition is instinctual and articulation is not
necessary for active opposition to the external religions; secondly, the
silence echoes the reverence for traditional culture which, in spite of
attempts of imperialism, remains deeply bound to African identity.
Recently, a new form of Third Cinema coming from the African
continent is that of video-film features. According to Ukadike, it is useful to
underline how almost all the video-films showing Ghanaian and Nigerian
contemporary life are painted with “ostentatious allure.” It seems the
representation of African culture seen through naked breasts of village women
has ended; instead today we see the high-profile upper class, especially
businessmen and women.
Particularly the cinema of Nigeria, also universally known
as Nollywood, is a nascent film industry in Africa, growing up within the last
two decades to become the second largest film industry on the planet. Nigeria
shares its place amongst the most prolific countries in the world for film
production with India, which is the first in the World, and the U.S. The rise
of affordable digital filming and editing technologies has stimulated the
country’s video film industry. Typically producing each film in less than a
fortnight, for $15,000 a time, the country’s high-speed, low-budget movie
industry is one of Nigeria’s few success stories. Nigerian films are still sold
mainly on videocassette, not in cinemas, and are so cheap and widely available
that even the poor in rural areas can watch this new, and more closer to their
own perspective, depiction of dreams and fears of contemporary Nigerian
society.
Even though this new form of cinematic expression embraces a
certain wealthy life style, at the same time these new video-films are filled
by national heroes, local and famous songs, in an MTV style, and an iconography
of identity that is not portrayed fairly either by mainstream Hollywood cinema
or European cinema. Thus these new forms embrace Third Cinema strategies of
analysis whereby images, sounds and music function as frames which channel the
struggle against past and contemporary forms of post-colonialism.
The debate among African filmmakers nowadays seems to be
about the uniqueness of their cinema also finding ways of differentiation from
Euro-American cinematic expressions. The aim pursued today by most of Third
Cinema African filmmakers lies in fighting against all the obstacles that are
retarding the development of their continent, trying to find a common thread
between post-colonialism, film and local identities.
Third Cinema within a European border: Black Independents
Third Cinema includes an infinity of subjects and styles so
this form of cinema can be practised anywhere, opening the way towards new
formulations of Third Cinema also within Europe. From this point view and from
the Diasporas’ element in it, we can analyse the importance of the Black
Independents operating in the UK which helped to create a new notion of Third
Cinema.
The importance of Third Cinema as a medium produced also
within European boundaries is raised by the position of the Black Audio Film
Collective formed in the 1980s within UK borders. Even with their struggles in
finding a new form of expression under Thatcherism, Black Audio Film Collective
assumed a fundamental role in the presence of Third Cinema in today’s reality
of globalization. Thus to talk about Third Cinema as cinematic expression coming
only from the areas of Latin America, Africa and Asia is to dismiss its
powerful impact on the European borders of this cinematic reality. In the past
few years black Diaspora has led to an expression of new groups of ethnicity
all over Europe such as Paris, London, Madrid and it would be unfair to dismiss
those realities as a potential expression of the same thematic and aesthetic
issues raised in the past by the three previously mentioned National areas.
As recalled by Reece Auguiste, a spokesperson for the Black
Audio Film Collective, Third Cinema in Britain needed to find its own
distinctiveness and this group helped in this direction. Even though the
filmmakers who represented Black Audio Film Collective are working now as
individual artists rather than members of that group project, the importance of
a new alternative visual grammar is fundamental to address the needs of this
new Diasporas generation which deals with the same issues of demarginalization
as their parents once did in their old lands.
It’s also by supporting groups of filmmakers such as those
coming from Black Audio Film Collective’s experience that it will be possible
to redefine the borders and the tools of Third Cinema in these years of
migration, globalization and –in one word– Diaspora. The multiplicity of
identities and histories needs to be displayed through subjects that are able
to weave a dialogue between new technologies, class gender and a mix of
languages.
Third Cinema as ‘third space’
Third Cinema may relevantly result as the ‘third space’
which displaces the histories and needs that constitute it and sets up new
structures of identity and political initiatives, which are inadequately
understood through the current mainstream channels of production and
distribution. Due to the changing multiracial and multicultural world reality,
Third Cinema must reinvent itself in terms of gender, class and geographical
identity and consequently in terms of narrative structure and aesthetics.
The challenge between those cosmopolitan images and the
struggle of local identity continues to move film authors looking for new ways
to co-produce Latin American, African and Asian cultural identities through
collaborative practices that have as their ultimate aim not the removal of the
local, but a meaningful relocation of it into the global community.
As happened also for Solanas, the Third Cinema needs to
configure itself as authorial icons representing their respective national
culture within the global market, without losing their status as oppositional
figures to the mainstream cinema; and without losing the local identities
either coming from the Third World area or from a European context.
These concerns to define a necessary and new form of Third
Cinema must not leave behind the primary concerns in the production of
‘revolutionary films.’ The need for Third Cinema is undoubtedly a call for
social and cultural transformation. Even though historical contexts and
aesthetic responses may change, its mandate to face post-colonialism and to
protect local identities still holds. Obviously the present aim of Third
Cinema, ignoring geographical borders, is to continue in seeking its own place
in a global context. Third cinema is not the cinema of the Third World but is
the cinematic expression of the desire to express themselves and their
identities, even though a general tendency of politics and culture is pushing
towards a way of homologation and annulment.
Footnotes
1 There is still a lot of controversy on this point,
although the latter seems the most accepted version.
Bibliography
Alberto E., Díaz López, M. 2006. The Cinema of Latin
America. Wallflower Press, London.
Armes, Roy 1987. Third World Film Making and the West.
University of California Press, Berkeley.
Barnard, Tim 1986. Argentine Cinema. Nightwood Editions,
Toronto.
Burton, Julianne 1990. The Social Documentary in Latin
America. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.
Downing, John D. H., 1987. Film and Politics in the Third
World. Praeger, New York.
Gabriel, Teshome H. 1982. Third Cinema in Third World. UMI
Research press, Michigan.
Guneratne A., Dissanayake W. 2003. Rethinking Third Cinema.
Routledge, New York.
Karen, Alexander 2000. “Black British Cinema in the 90s:
Going Going Gone” in Robert Murphy British Cinema of the 90s. BFI, London.
Loizos, Peter 1993. Innovation in ethnographic film.
Manchester University Press, Manchester.
MacDonald K. Cousins M. 1996. Imagining Reality: The Faber
Book of Documentary. Faber and Faber, London.
Martin, Michael T. 1995. Cinemas of the Black Diaspora:
Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality. Wayne State University Press,
Detroit.
Nichols, Bill 1991. Representing Reality. Indiana University
Press, Bloomington.
Pines J. Willemen P. 1991. Questions of Third Cinema. BFI,
London.
Rocha, Glauber 1995. “The Tricontinental Filmmaker: That Is
Called the Dawn” in Johnson and Stam Brazilian Cinema, pp.76-80. Columbia
University Press, New York.
Rosenthal, Alan 1988. New Challenges for Documentary.
University of California Press, Los Angeles.
Renov, Michael 1993. Theorizing Documentary. Routledge,
London.
Schnitzer, J&L. 1973. Cinema in Revolution – The Heroic
Era of the Soviet Film. Secker & Warburg.
Stam, Robert, Toby Miller, 2000. Film and Theory: An
Anthology. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford and Malden.
Swann, Paul 1989. The British Documentary Film Movement,
1926-1946. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank 1994. Black African Cinema.
University of California Press, Los Angeles.
Wayne, Mike 2001. Political Films: The Dialectics of Third
Cinema. Pluto Press, London.
Filmography
Los Olvidados (Mexico, 1950)
Ultramar Films
Producer: Óscar Dancigers, Sergio Kogan, Jaime A. Menasce
Director: Luis Buñuel
B/W, 85 mins.
Terra em transe (Brazil, 1967)
Mapa Filmes
Producer: Glauber Rocha
Director: Glauber Rocha
B/W, 106 mins.
La Hora de los Hornos (Argentina, 1968)
Grupo Cine Liberacion, Solanas Productions
Producer: Fernando Solanas, EdgardoTallero
Director: Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino
B/W, 260 mins.
Barravento (Brazil, 1969)
Iglu Filmes
Producer: Rex Schindler
Director: Glauber Rocha
B/W, 78 mins.
Emitai (Senegal, 1971)
Filmi Domirev
Producer: Ousmane Sembene
Director: Ousmane Sembene
Colour, 103 mins.
Xala (Senegal, 1974)
Films Domireew, Ste. Me. Production du Senegal
Producer: Paulin Vieyra
Director: Ousmane Sembene
Colour, 123 mins.
The Battle of Chile (Chile, 1977)
Equipe Tercer Ano Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industrias
Cinematográficos
(ICAIC)
Producer: Chris Marker
Director: Patricio Guzman
B/W, 300 mins.
Ceddo (Senegal, 1977)
Films Domireew, Sembene
Producer: Ousmane Sembene
Director: Ousmane Sembene
Colour, 120 mins.
Handsworth Songs (UK, 1986)
Black Audio Film Collective
Producer: Lina Gopaul
Director: John Akomfrah
B/W, 61 mins.
Salvador Allende (Chile, 2004)
JBA Productions, Les Films de la Passerelle (co-production),
CV Films (co-production), Mediapro (co-production), Universidad de Guadalajara
(co-production), Patricio Guzmán Producciones S.L. (co-production), Centre
National de la Cinématographie (CNC) (participation), Canal+ (participation),
Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) (participation), arte (participation), Yleisradio
(YLE)
Producer: Jacques Bidou
Director: Patricio Guzman
B/W, Colour 100 mins.
Spurce: offscreen.com
No comments:
Post a Comment