Reiko Tahara, Hunter College, City University of New York, July 2016
Western cinema studies often regard Third Cinema as a film “movement” from revolutionary Latin America in the 60s-70s. The term “Third Cinema” was coined by Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino to denote revolutionary cinema existing outside Hollywood (First Cinema) and European auteur cinema (Second Cinema). It normally encompasses Brazil’s Cinema Novo, Cuba’s Imperfect Cinema, and Argentina’s Third Cinema[1]. The degrees of clandestineness, militancy, state support, as well as the levels of commercial viability or willingness to enter their work into the domestic and international film market varied depending on and reflecting the political phases of each nation, but the common thread of Third Cinema was to see film as a tool to stir up and ignite discussions among the workers, peasants, and city intellectuals to recognize their oppressive and neo-colonial realities and encourage them to participate in the debates and actions to “name the world”. Those films showed images of people themselves not the stars, and invited them to stop being a passive spectator of the spectacle (=cinema), but to be a decipherer and participant in changing the reality on and off the screens. They raised many questions–about the economy system supported by the division of class and of labor, filmmakers’ and educated people’s positions in that division, corporate exploitation of the natural resources, neocolonialism, national vs pan-continental or trans-continental identity, and race. Through a series of fiery manifestos[2], Latin American filmmaker-theorists tried to propose the attitude, purpose, aesthetic, production, and distribution methods for the revolutionary people’s cinema.
Nowadays, Colonialism and the Cold War seem to be relics of the past and rarely is the connection between the two or to our current lives questioned. The neoliberal economic system now has a firm grip over the political economy of the assimilated, and thus “globalized” world. Still, politically committed media makers continue to use the media to make the world more equal. If you look at the questions that Third Cinema “movement” raised, you will notice that they are still relevant and important because they are essentially unsolved if not worsened. And in fact, today’s independent media often chooses to tackle similar topics. If so, why do we rarely learn about Third Cinema in media studies? If so, why are most of these talented filmmakers still enamored of recognition only from the prestigious film festivals and middle class white audiences in Europe and the United States? Where is outside the First or Second cinemas today?
In the Spring semester of 2016, I taught a “Third Cinema” course in Hunter College’s MFA in Integrated Media Arts (IMA) program with student mentee/co-teacher Claudia Zamora Valencia. We (“teacher-students,” to borrow Paulo Freire’s term), together with eleven students (“students-teachers”), studied classic Third Cinema films and texts from revolutionary Latin America, as well as films and texts from around the world across time that potentially embody the Third Cinema spirit. We wanted to explore whether we could find connections between our media making today and Third Cinema, and if it can be considered a theory that would help our practice.
Through our study, we found that the idea of Third Cinema didn’t die in Latin America. Teshome Gabriel, an Ethiopian-born US scholar, taught Third Cinema to students of color at UCLA’s film program during the 70s and contributed to the rise of the LA Rebellion, an important Black cinema movement in the US (Daughters of the Dust, Sankofa, Killer of Sheep, etc). In his seminal book “Third Cinema in the Third World (1982),” Gabriel argues for aligning “Third World[3]” cinemas made for liberation with Third Cinema and attempts to theorize them using the words of Louis Althusser, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral. In the early 80s, another important Black diaspora film movement arose in the UK (Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Film and Video Collective), influenced by Stuart Hall as well as other Caribbean-born diaspora Black writers such as Aimé Césaire and Fanon, the very writers who influenced the original Third Cinema filmmakers. These American and European Black filmmakers sought to deepen their relationships with African and Latin American struggles for independence and revolution. They also started to project their own images in which they raised questions of class, race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation.
After Gabriel, a handful of influential scholars[4] in post-colonial film and cultural studies continued to redefine Third Cinema by reevaluating the original Third Cinema texts and applying it to their close readings of more recent films. From their work, it is clear that Third Cinema is a theory, not an isolated movement. The themes of Third Cinema diversified and its regions expanded to include the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, as well as indigenous (Fourth Cinema) and minority cinemas in the First World. In the 80s, many filmmakers, scholars, and activists began to recognize the common struggle of oppressed people and realized the importance of building a coalition. A large Third Cinema conference organized by the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1986 is a good indication of the mainstream festivals’ interest in Third Cinema (although Latin American filmmakers were not invited). Even during the premature decline of identity politics in the West in the late 90s to 2000s, Third Cinema continued to be discussed and two books entitled “Rethinking Third Cinema” were published. With the recent global race problems including the mainstream West’s hostility toward Arabs and Muslims, massive migrations of refugees and the poor, Black Lives Matter, and rising white identity politics, Third Cinema seems quite relevant today[5].
Following the leads mentioned in these inspiring texts, and Gabriel’s proposal to use the plural term “Third Cinemas,[6]” we hunted for films, documentary and fiction, from Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, India, Philippines, Mexico, Senegal, China, Mali, Egypt, and various Indigenous cinemas. Many of them were innovative in form and content even by today’s standard. We analyzed how these films incorporated the elements of the musical or soap opera, or used allegory and black humor, all of which were characteristics of the original Third Cinema, to penetrate the mass market dominated by First and Second Cinema. Since the original Third Cinema was a masculine movement, we tried to catch a glimpse of how women filmmakers from Latin America, the Middle East, or the Black or LGBT communities in the US used film to project the nuanced hybridity of their lives in their complex struggle for liberation. We looked at more recent film movements as well—the Chinese independent documentary movement since the 90s, the Nollywood (Nigeria) and Ghollywood (Ghana) phenomena, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade —and discussed how to look at them in light of Third Cinema “theory.”
In 1996, at a British Film Institute-supported conference, John Akomfrah, a UK filmmaker born in Ghana, declared Third Cinema to be dead. If you define Third Cinema as a socialist, militant cinema, it sounds like a reasonable death announcement. But if you see the raison d’être of Third Cinema in its urgent cultural and economic need to establish cinema as a projection of a nation, or a group, against the triumphant mainstream Western cinema, and if the reason of its death is the weakening of the Western hegemony and the subsequently diminishing need to fight against it, its “death” could be seen as positive. Akomfrah, a member of the aforementioned UK black cinema movement in the 80s, studied Third Cinema as well as various films from the non-Western world (especially Ritwik Ghatak from India). In an interview in 2012[7], he expresses his appreciation of today’s multicultural cinemascape existing in his neighborhood in London. He talks about a typical day in which he catches an art film by a UK-based Thai filmmaker in a local independent cinema and then crosses the road to check popular titles from Nollywood from presumably a street vendor. He urges us to “recognize the change in circumstances in which people consume images.” Today, Bollywood and Nollywood exceed Hollywood in the number of films they produce annually. Putting the debates on escapism and piracy aside, the way Nollywood came about through their pursuit for self-projection and self-sufficiency (no foreign aids) is revolutionary and inspiring. It provides entertainment and cultural pride for numerous African migrants and Black Diaspora people across the globe. I’ve recently noticed that some of my Black independent filmmaker friends in the US have started distributing their works using Nollywood online platforms. The world has begun to see a trend in which we can consume each other’s self-projections via various online platforms, without relying on centralized European or American distributors. But of course, Netflix and Hulu are distributing American values worldwide at lightning speed. Some of the progressive ones certainly reflect new kinds of values and cannot be simply tossed, but it is again a concern for economic and cultural domination…
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So, how are we doing as independent media makers with political and creative passions? What are our aims? From whom do we desire recognition? With whom do we want to start dialogues? Whose perceptions do we want to change? How can we distance ourselves from the competition in the core (or take advantage of them?) and build a coalition with unknown others in the periphery, thereby transferring power from one place to another?
The original Third Cinema “theorists” often pondered the responsibilities of intellectuals in revolution. It sounds pretentious today, I agree. But the fact that we could continue our study after a college diploma and make films means that we already possess power and privilege. Some of those privileges came to us through our own efforts, but some purely through our families’ or nations’ wealth, and perhaps sacrifices too. What is our responsibility then? The degree of hybridity and power we possess depend on our race, class, nationality, gender, religion, sexual orientation, body type and feature, skin color, limitation in body, language, upbringing, personality, and experiences. It keeps changing as we keep changing. Knowing our own intersectional position in the spectrum is as important as deciding what kind of power you want to distribute to others. This question of to whom you want to give power, is directly connected to the question of production, distribution, and consumption. As a viewer and filmmaker, how do our ways of consuming and distributing images affect the power dynamics of the world? Showing your work at film festivals or up-and-coming alternative media venues in Brooklyn filled with potentially influential and smart audiences may be one good way. But we can seek other ways too—Third Cinema ways—to bring our work into the streets and begin a dialogue with the people we say we want to help empower.
What you find in “What’s Happening” tab are the fruit harvested from the Third Cinema course’s term project that examined existing alternative distribution (or production) models for the kind of media that students want to create. The assignment was to come up with a list of at least 10-15 curated findings accompanied by a text reflecting the research and highlighting 2-3 entries that the researchers found particularly interesting and worth sharing. Because IMA students’ interests are so diverse, we are able to read reports on topics ranging from the artmaking and exhibition in the US rust-belt cities, exhibition spaces for new cinema in the Arabic-speaking world, alternative distribution channels in China, to Latin American film festivals supporting pan-continental dialogues.
Some student-teachers expressed the challenge and joy of finding groups or works that don’t surface through quick internet searches because our internet sphere is occupied by Euro-American-centric ideas and activities. It is actually appalling to see how the information technology and computing world has been conquered by the English language.
To me, as a teacher-student, developing this course and studying with the class has been a productive and transformative experience of finding scholars and works that my progressive American postgraduate education didn’t teach me. It made me realize that I, too, have unconsciously been assimilated. Many films mentioned in the text sources were not easily found and required extensive research and going places. It was exciting to discover and share surprises with the class. Important voices and images exist, but they may not come into view unless we dig more than usual.
I hope this Third Cinema report will continue to grow and that the IMA community members will find it useful in finding and reaching their audiences or consuming images from unfamiliar places. I think each research project can be a component of a beautiful tapestry that we all can use. Sharing the results of one’s search is a generous act when the competition for independent filmmakers seems fierce. But with this collective spirit, and keeping in mind the concept of the elite filmmaker’s inevitable disappearance, as taught to us by Third Cinema “theory[8],” the student-teachers from our course present their findings here. A profound thank you to Claudia Zamora Valencia and Third Cinema’s inaugural class.
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[1] The most well-known films categorized as classic Third Cinema include Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, Brazil, 1964), Entranced Earth (Rocha, 1967), The Hour of the Furnaces (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Argentina, 1968), all of them released under the military dictatorships, and post-revolution Cuban films such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) and Humberto Solás’ Lucía (1969). The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) is often also considered a Third Cinema as well as Second Cinema.
[2] Rocha’s “Aesthetic of Hunger” 1965 (Brazil), Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema” 1969 (Cuba), Solanas and Getino’s “Toward a Third Cinema” 1969 (Argentina), and Jorge Sanjine’s “Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema” 1976 (Bolivia) are often considered to be the main Third Cinema texts.
[3] The definition of “Third World” is open for discussion and keeps changing. It was a Cold War era term originally created to categorize the nations that remained not aligned with either NATO (First World) or the Communist Bloc (Second World). But since most of those countries fell among the periphery nations economically, the term was and still is often used to describe the “developing” nations regardless of their past or present political backgrounds. It is also used by the formerly colonized or minority filmmakers and activists since the 60s to bring a sense of coalition among themselves (i.e. Third World Newsreel).
[4] A non-exhaustive list includes, besides Gabriel, a UK-based filmmaker/scholar Michael Chanan (Cuban cinema), an American scholar Robert Stam (French and Brazilian cinema), a US-based Iraqi Israeli scholar Ella Shohat (the Middle-eastern women’s cinema), an American scholar Jonathan Buchsbaum (Political films in the US, Latin America, and France), an American scholar Michael T. Martin (Black diaspora film, Latin American films), and a UK theorist Mike Wayne (Marxist scholar).
[5] Post-script note: This introduction article was written in July 2016 but we are finally publishing this in Feb 2018, well into the post-Trump America. Therefore, I would add “a sense of impotent helplessness felt among fair-minded American youth in the era of fake news and never-ending bickering between conservative and liberal parties, their delegates, and their fans, who rarely question America’s hegemony over the world and how we got here” as another factor that Third Cinema is relevant today.
[6] “Third Cinema Updated: Exploration of NomadicAesthetics & Narrative Communities An article Gabriel wrote for his upcoming book “Third Cinema: Exploration of Nomadic Aesthetics and Narrative Communities” for Blackwell Publishing (according to http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/teshome-gabriel-1939-2010-160530) . But he passed away in 2010 and it seems this article remains unpublished.
[7] “De-Westernizing Film Studies” ed. Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee. Routledge. 2012. P.272.
[8] In “Imperfect Cinema,” Espinosa aligns himself with Rocha and advocates to find Latin American popular cinema’s interest in “the problems of lucidity,” not in “the problems of neurosis” that the European art cinema focuses. He persuades filmmakers not to make films for “personal self-realization” and concludes his manifesto with this: “Art will not disappear into nothingness; it will disappear into everything.”