George Mürer
The world is often articulated in terms of incomplete binaries: the sacred and the profane; the natural world and the manmade world; the spirit world and the physical world; the human and the non-human; male and female; Christendom and heathendom; dar ol-Islam and dar ol-ḥarb; have and have not; dominant and subjugated; East and West; Global North and Global South; capitalist and communist/Marxist/socialist; bourgeoise and proletariat; White and BIPOC; gay and straight; neurotypical and neurodivergent. On certain levels, none of these make any actual sense; on other levels they speak acutely to inescapable realities that shape human experience, including tremendous social constraints, economic obstructions, unequal power dynamics, and frankly, regimes of violence and death.
Understanding the ways people unevenly benefit from or are forced to weather or submit to such structurations has given rise to the idea of First, Second, Third, and Fourth cinema, a typology anchored in a range of solidarities and dynamics of mutual empowerment, with attention to who is communication with whom, how the communication is enabled in material terms, and how structures are perpetuated and reinforced versus contested, challenged, and confronted. Among the most tenuous of the binaries listed above are East and West and Global North and Global South, since East and West are based on horizons that shift depending on where you are, and Global North and South disregard the symmetry in climate between the poles and the tropics. Nonetheless, we understand the expressions as rooted in an arc of about two millennia where the concept of European was articulated in terms of notions such as empire, civilization, religious authority, racial supremacy, military-technological-economic-educational superiority, and rational humanist values, in contradistinction with color-coded cultural realms variously expressed as African, Asian, and Indigenous, or for instance, Indian, Muslim, Arab, Black, Latin, Native, Nomadic, and of course, all kinds of epithets that more overtly reflect hostility, condescension, and insurmountable difference, the implicitly or explicitly “less than” other.
First and second cinema rely on the privileging of these Eurocentric metropole—its sense of importance and artistic heritage and its circuits of profit driven self-enrichment, the same infrastructure from which the world-famous museums of London, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin emerged as monuments to plunder (cf. Hicks 2020). Third and fourth cinema reject the formulae, standards, canons, and agendas of first and second cinema, vigorously pushing back against not just the latter as bourgeois, often unambiguously white-supremacist establishment, but more vitally the prevailing order and circumstances to which people have been subjected in the name of the ideals and objectives in which claims to European supremacy have been manifested.
The narratives that emerge are most often post-conquest and postcolonial in tenor—what kinds of agency can be mobilized to purge the residual impacts of slavery and genocide, of colonial rule and military occupation, of the plundering of wealth and resources and the degradation of ecological health? And in some cases, how can these structures and their imposed epistemologies be bypassed and transcended?
Two myths that demand to be dismantled are (1) the notion that human beings are cordoned off from the rest of “creation” and uniformly incline towards an understanding of what the world is that can easily be expressed in terms of empirical science—and this epistemological diversity is a major theme in the pushback against the legacies and perpetuations of Euro-colonialism and (2) that the actual bases for a Christian worldview and “European” or “Western” thought are of a “European” genealogy. The Mediterranean world of the Greco-Roman period gave us the concepts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, but these were internal divisions with the rest of the world—Northern Europe, the so-called Western Hemisphere, East Asia and the Pacific, and Africa’s central and southern expanses, falling outside. Greece, Rome, Egypt, “Barbary,” Abyssinia, and Persia were all part of the core, surrounded by an unquantifiable periphery, if a Mediterranean world perspective is privileged. Like notions of race, notions of European and other are fictions that have solidified into lived experience in ways that are likely to persist for at least several more lifetimes.
At the same time that filmmaking is an endeavor that naturally links practitioners of filmmaking as an artistry, filmmaking is also—certainly in the second, third, and fourth cinema domains— a subset of expressive cultural and intellectual endeavor that includes other forms of writing, plastic arts, and performance, all with an implied social and political consciousness, or conscience. This makes for some very interesting resonances and confluences.
Beginning with literary spheres, consider the rise of Amazigh advocacy in North Africa, including the still Spanish-ruled Canary Islands, Ceuta, and Melilla. The Kabyle (an Amazigh region/culture in Northeast Algeria) journalist, writer, and playwright Kateb Yacine, championed both colloquial Arabic in opposition to French and sojourned in the Soviet Union and Vietnam. The activism, the speaking out against colonialism and military aggression, through writing and filmmaking, of Chris Marker, Jean Luc Godard, Susan Sontag, and Jean Genet, is justifiably famous. Algerian voices, including Amazigh Algerian voices, taking aim at these same targets contain a different kind of authority and defiance if also tending to dwell in greater obscurity. Think of Kateb Yacine’s open letter to Richard Nixon:
Hanoi, le 16 Decembre, 1970
Monsieur le Président,
En me promenant dans la rue, j’ai vu deux petites filles qui déblayaient la terre avec leurs mains. Près d’elles, les garçons jouaient au billes.
Ces enfants vous connaissent, Monsieur le Président.
Monsieur le Président.
Vous êtes venu au Viêt Nam, il y a déjà vingt ans.
Vous y êtes venue en touriste américain, c’est-à-dire en voyage d’inspection militaire.
Vous connaissez sans doute la route de Diên Biên Phu.
Vous avez entendu parler du general Giap? Ce nom barbare qui éclate comme un coup de fusil à vos oreilles civilisées.
Et ce Pham Van Dông!
Ce n’est pas un nom, c’est une rafale de mitraillette. Ces gens-là, il fallait les batter et leur apprendre enfin le mode de vie américain. Il était temps, à votre avis, de prendre la relève.
Vous les trouviez ridicules, tout ces petits soldats de France et de Navarre! Mais la France s’obstinait. Et vous n’étiez encore que vice-président.
Aujourd’hui, vous réalisez votre ambition suprême.
Vous êtes le président des États-Unis.
Le guerre continue sous votre direction.
Vous le tenez enfin votre héritage impérialiste.
Mais où est la victoire Monsieur le Président?
Et comment se fait-il que vos hautes fonctions vous rendent si nerveux?
Est-ce l’approche du Têt qui trouble votre rêve?
Ah! Ces Viets avec leurs petards!
Ils osent encore lever la tête!
Ils se croient donc chez eux, à Hanoi, comme à Saigon!
Ne vont-ils pas encore jeter leur Nouvel An à l’ambassade américaine?
Le rêve tourne au cauchemar, vous êtes en pleine incohérence.
D’une part, vous discutez et vous feignez de retirer progressivement vos troupes, tout en laissant prévoir que vous en laisserez quelques centaines de milliers pour protéger vos mercenaires.
D’autre part, vous recommencez à agiter publiquement la vieille menace de l’escalade.
Battu au Sud-Viêt Nam, vous attaquez la plaine des Jarres.
Il faut croire que ces Jarres étaient empoisonnées.
Les patriotes du Laos tiennent toujours la plaine.
Et vos soldats sont encerclés devant Louang Prabang.
Alors, vous décidez d’enhavir le Cambodge, forçant un prince neutre à prendre le maquis!
Les deux tiers du pays sont ainsi libérés.
En voulant par la force diviser le Viêt Nam, vous avez réuni les peuples de l’Indochine! Joli travail en vérité.
Ce n’est pas tout. La plus belle des gaffes, vous venez de la faire, en envoyant au Nord-Viêt Nam toute une armada aérienne, avec mission de délivrer vos chers pirates prisonniers.
Mais les nouveaux pirates ont rencontré le vide.
Ce coup d’épée dans l’eau a bien fait rire le monde entier.
On comprend mieux, après tour ça, vontre fureur et vos menaces.
Savez-vous bien ce que vous faites, Monsieur le Président?
Vos actes insensés sont votre propre punition.
Votre fauteuil présidentiel, c’est la chaise électrique réservée aux grands criminels par les loies de votre pays.
Permettez-moi de vous le dire: jusqu’aux électrons de 1972, vous entendrez toujours, comme le tic-tac d’une montre à l’heure du châtiment, ces syllabes fatidiques: Viêt Nam! Viêt Nam! Viêt Nam!
Monsieur le Président,
Je termine ma lettre devant une rose rouge, au parfum enivrent. Eh oui, la vie est belle sur la terre vietnamienne.
D’autant plus belle que menacée.
On the other hand, contemporary Amazigh letters often look to French literary resonances as a means to pointedly bypass the dominant presence of Arabophone culture, which is seen as having eroded a sense of indigenous selfhood. Here is a dual language (French and Tachelhit) edition of Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris. One might ask to what extent even native speakers of Tachelhit can enjoy the translation, as it the book is probably best understood as a symbolic undertaking, the Tachelhit translation forged from a lexicon that seems to stray far from the familiar vernacular of either everyday life or the sung poetic idioms.
Seeking to assemble a perspective on the ciné-genealogy of some key figures associated with Third Cinema in Africa, the Caribbean, and Black communities in the United States, using sources ranging from books on post-colonial African cinema to journal articles and yes, Wikipedia entries, the confluences between the careers of key figures with centers for cinema pedagogy in Western Europe and Russia and circles of avant-garde writers, filmmakers, and theater collectives is striking if hardly surprising. Just to list a few examples:
Abdurrahmane Sissako, from Mauritania, father from Mali, spend portion of childhood in Mali, studied film in Moscow at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (other notable alumni include Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé as well as Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky), lived in Moscow for 12 years before moving to Paris in 1994. He married Ethiopian filmmaker Maji-da Abdi.
Maji-da Abdi grew up in Ethiopia and Kenya but moved to Canada when she was 17. She interned for Bernado Bertolucci when he was making Little Buddha in Nepal. While Brahim el-Guabli rightly criticizes Bertolucci’s adaptation of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky as recycling “Saharanist fantasies by romanticizing the desert, exaggerating its dangers, and fetishizing young Black/Brown bodies,” Abdi went on to make important work on Ethiopia-Eritrea war.
Ousmane Sembène from Senegal, worked on docks in Marseille (and found inspiration in Claude McKay, whose 1929 novel Banjo also takes place on docks of Marseille). Sembène studied in 1962-63 at Gorky Film Studio in Moscow alongside French-Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror.
Sarah Maldoror was born in France to a French mother and Afro-Guadeloupean father. Born Sarah Duscado, she took the name Maldoror after Isadore Ducasse/Comte de Lauréamont’s work, after moving to Paris where she become involved with the theater group Les Griots, known for their association with Jean Genêt, Haitian actress and singer Toto Bissainthe, and director Roger Blin, an important director of Beckett’s plays who had worked as assistant to Antonin Artaud. She married Angolan nationalist activist and literary figure Mário Pinto de Andrade and they moved to Morocco and then to Algiers, where she served as assistant to Gillo Pontecorvo for Battle of Algiers. She made her first film in Algeria, and her second in Congo-Brazzaville, with her husband, both films concerned with Angolan independence struggle but could not be shot in Angola.
Pearl Bowser, grew up in Harlem, became director of theater at Third World Newsreel, wrote novels that were adapted for film by Julie Dash, and co-directed (with Christine Choy, co-founder, with Paul Robeson’s granddaughter Susan Robeson, of Third World Newsreel and co-director of Who Killed Vincent Chin?) the documentary film Namibia: Independence Now! (1985), basing herself in Angola and Zambia because of difficulties filming in Namibia during war for independence. Bowser is considered an authority on Oscar Micheaux and Raul Robeson.
Ahmed el-Maânouni is most famous for his film Trances (Hâl) (1981), about Nass el-Ghiwane, an avant-garde music-theater group in Morocco. Around the same time, he served as cinematographer for Julie Dash’s illusions (1982).
Raoul Peck, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, grew up in Haiti, Kinshasa, Orleans, and New York. He attended Humboldt University in Berlin, and then the German Film and Television Academy Berlin, working as a New York City taxicab driver in between. He was mentored as a filmmaker by Christine Choy and Hailie Gerima (Ethiopian filmmaker known for Sankofa) and made two important films about Haitian politics, Haitian Corner, set in Brooklyn, and L’homme sur les quaies, filmed in Haiti (see Peck 2012). Both feature the aforementioned Haitian actress-singer Toto Bissainthe. He went on to make films about Patrice Lumumba (two films in fact), the Rwandan Genocide, James Baldwin, the brutality of slavery and genocide of native people due to European colonization of the “Western” hemisphere, Karl Marx, and is currently making a film about George Orwell.
These connections go on and on and an exhaustive diagram would look like an unruly mass of unraveled twine.
References
Baudelaire, Charles. 2008. Le Spleen de Paris/Tigudiwin N Bariz. Translated by Larbi Moumouch. IRCAM.
el-Guabli, Brahim. 2025. Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and its Radical Consequences. University of California Press.
Harrow, Kenneth W. 2007. Post-Colonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Post-Modernism. Indiana University Press.
Hicks, Dan. 2020. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution. Pluto Press.
Peck, Raoul. 2012. Stolen Images. Seven Stories Press.
Sawadogo, Boukary. 2023. African Film Studies: An Introduction. Routledge.
Yacine, Kateb. 1999. Minuit passé de douze heures: ecrits journalistiques 1947-1989. Éditions de seuil.