Lecture:  Third Cinema

What is Third Cinema?

The term Third Cinema relies on a distinction between the First and Third worlds which originated out of the colonial era’s division of the world into the center (Europe) and the margins (all of the rest). As the 20th century developed, and the United States rose to superpower status, North America (the New, or "second" world) was folded under the umbrella of the First World, now considered the Western, or industrialized world. Today, when we talk of the Third World, we mean the countries of "underdevelopment," in Latin America, in Asia, and in Africa.

The confusion of applying the colonialist geographical divisions to global cinema results in the fact that the historical distinction between the First and New Worlds does not accurately describe the global expansion of cinema. First Cinema has to be Hollywood cinema, which has, since the beginning of World War I, dominated global film distribution relatively unalterably. Thus, the Second Cinema, the New Wave European film movements (like the French New Wave), is so named because it formed a modernist assault on Hollywood cinema. However, as we have seen, this assault was certainly not totalizing. As in Breathless, the New Wave films preserve much of what the European filmmakers loved about Hollywood: Godard’s films maintain a focus on individual heroes as characters, much as did the Hollywood films by Fritz Lang that Godard adored so much. Third Cinema thus represents a true cinema of resistance to Hollywood, often spoken of as a "guerrilla cinema" for this very reason.

There is no necessary relationship between the Third World and Third Cinema

1. Not all Third World countries have a tradition of Third Cinema. For example, India is a Third World country without a prevalent tradition of Third Cinema. For the most part, the very successful Indian film industry is an extremely commercial popular cinema. One of the major studio systems in Bombay is nicknamed "Bollywood" because of its use of the Hollywood studio system as its model. Conversely, India’s most famous filmmaker in the West, Satyajit Ray, makes films in the tradition of the French New Wave; his films can be traced directly back to European film movements. He was inspired to make his famous Apu Trilogy (1955, 1957, and 1958) by working with Jean Renoir on his film, The River (1950), shot in India. Ray’s first film in the Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955), about a little boy growing up in India, autobiographically detailing Ray’s childhood, is a film directly in keeping with the ideas of personal cinema developed in France in the 1950s.

2. Many First World countries have thriving marginalized, independent Third Cinema traditions. For example, some American independent cinema is also built on a model of "guerrilla" warfare with Hollywood. African-American filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles’ completely independently produced, distributed and exhibited Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadassss Song (1971) is a very good example of a Third Cinema film made in the United States. One might pursue some connections between Third Cinema and the United States economically: if Third Cinema develops out of economically impoverished social conditions, then it might make sense that underprivileged populations within the United States (ghetto areas, for example, which have higher infant mortality rates than those in Third World nations) would begin to formulate similar representational responses.

Post-colonialism and Third Cinema

To study Third Cinema, one must begin by considering the economic and political conditions of the contemporary Third World. Post-colonial studies is the name given to the examination of these conditions. Post-colonialism refers to the period in the life of the Third World after the successful wars of liberation against the colonial powers. The dates for this liberation vary from country to country, some coming as early as the late 1940s (Ghandi’s revolution against the British in India), most coming in the 1960s (Castro’s revolution against the United States in 1960), some coming as late as the 1970s (Ho Chi Minh’s victory over the United States in 1973). After independence, most of the colonial powers became the major trade partners with their former colonies, replicating colonialism in an economic, as opposed to military, context. (It is worth noting that the big exception to this was the case of the United States, which imposed draconian trade embargos against their rebellious enemies, which continue to this day). In addition, European countries, because of the worker shortage caused by World War II, encouraged formerly colonized people to leave their native countries and move to Europe to be "Guest Workers," mostly to perform low paying blue collar jobs not able to be filled by whites. We will hear about the "Guest Worker" issue again during the New German Cinema lecture, when we discuss R.W. Fassbinder’s film about the subject, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Much post-colonial art deals with the split in subjectivity caused by the post-colonial condition: people came to Europe, leaving their native land behind, and then were subject to a new form of racial oppression. The most famous theorist of this post-colonialist split subjectivity is Salman Rushdie, the novelist banished from the Arab world because his novel, The Satanic Verses, was ruled sacrilegious by the fundamentalist government in Iran. In a British Film Institute monograph on The Wizard of Oz, Rushdie provides a radical reading of the film, suggesting that he knows exactly how Dorothy feels, because she is neither home in grimy Depression-era Kansas nor in the garish Technicolor Oz, just as he is neither home in the underdeveloped Third World nor in the overdeveloped First World.

Post-colonialism, Third Cinema and African Cinema

I will attempt to define and explore Third Cinema by using post-colonialist theory to engage two case studies, one of African cinema and the other of Cuban cinema.

To begin, I choose the first feature film made in sub-Saharan Africa, the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl (1966) as my point of departure, because this film explores many of the issues important in post-colonial theory.

Black Girl concerns a Senegalese woman, Diouana, who gets a job as a maid for a French family living in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Diouana follows the family on vacation to the French Riviera, where she is forced to suffer these new kinds of racial oppression characteristic of the treatment of Third Worlders in First World countries. Post-colonial art subjects these new forms of oppression to a microscopic examination. First Worlders tend to exploit the exotic, Other nature of Third World culture, as when the French family decides to put a tribal mask owned by Diouana’s family onto their wall as a piece of art.

Various Scenes in Black Girl Illuminate the Post-colonial Condition

1. The film also links racial oppression via exoticism to the sexual oppression of women of color as exotically pleasing to white men.

CLIP: Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 1966): Diouana makes rice at the dinner party

2. The film is concerned with the social containment of "Guest Workers," denying them subjectivity in the First World, solely exploiting their potential as workers, rendering the term "guest" extremely ironic and problematic.

CLIP: Black Girl: Diouana looks at the mask, voice over narration about what France means to her

3. One way of denying the Third World subject a voice is by silencing her, symbolically denying the Third World a voice, speaking for it.

CLIP: Black Girl: To get Diouana to work, her French bosses forge a letter from her mother

4. The film resists a negativist stance, refusing to admit that the post-colonial world merely represents another victory by the First World powers. Instead, Sembene’s film ends radically, with a new generation representing the future of an Africa which can symbolically chase the economic and political power of Europe off of the continent.

CLIP: Black Girl: Ending (Young boy chases Frenchman out of Africa)

Third Cinema as an Alternative Filmmaking Practice

The best way of seeing Third Cinema as a radical, alternative cinema is to compare it to classical Hollywood cinema.

Features of Classical Hollywood Cinema

1. "Effaces the medium"
2. Tells stories of individual agents by using stars as actors
3. Tells goal-centered narratives
4. Features plots with happy endings as resolutions
5. Feigns political neutrality, while endorsing consumer capitalism, white supremacy, male supremacy, and heterosexuality

versus

Features of Third Cinema

1.  A dialectical cinema which draws attention to the construction of narrative as a fiction. This often occurs by juxtaposing fictional and documentary footage.

CLIP: Black Girl: Diouana at the National Monument

2. A Marxist approach which calls for collective action as opposed to praising the power of individual heroes.

3. Non-linear narratives which employ many characters intertwined with one another. Often, these stories are told with aggressive flashback and flash forward structures.

CLIP: Black Girl: Diouana flashes back to her life in Dakar with her lover

4. The plots often do not resolve. Thus, no happy ending-based easy solutions are available to be represented.

CLIP: Black Girl: Diouana’s suicide

5. Third Cinema is always defined by its political engagement. Third Cinema’s purpose is to support revolutionary social and political change.

The Contemporary State of African Cinema

Despite the horrific economic conditions in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa, Sembene’s filmmaking legacy continues on to this day in many of the more stable African countries. While the number of films produced is quite low, artistically African cinema has produced many of the most visually ravishing films in the Third Cinema tradition in the 1990s. I choose to do a case study of a filmmaker from Mali, Chieck Oumar Sissoko, because I think his latest film, Genesis (1999), represents the most complex achievement ever in African cinema.

The Films of Chieck Oumar Sissoko

In The Wretched of the Earth, post-colonial critic Franz Fanon argues that there are three phases of liberation from colonization. In the first phase, the colonized subject is still bound by the ideological brainwashing of the colonizer. Thus, the subject believes that the best way of life must be the West’s way, full of technological developments. In the second phase, the colonized subject makes a complete rejection of the colonizer’s culture, returning to the native traditions before the colonizers came. This results in a primitive way of life that is not particularly tenable in the late 20th century. In the third phase, the colonized subject finds a balance between what is useful from the West and from the native traditions that pre-date colonization. In this synthetic phase, colonization has finally been undone. Malian filmmaker Chieck Oumar Sissoko’s films represent what Third Cinema in Africa looks like when it finds such a balance. Sissoko’s films use Western technology, the cinema, and Western culture (Shakespeare, the Bible) in order to tell stories that are distinctly related to the customs and traditions of Mali, the Saharan country that is Sissoko’s home.

CLIP: Guimba the Tyrant (1995): Ending (Guimba gets his come-uppance)

In Guimba the Tyrant, Sissoko tells a story familiar to anyone who has ever read a Shakespearean tragedy: a ruler takes control of a town, rules it with an iron fist, and then suffers death when his oppressed people rise up against his domination. Yet, the film is thoroughly descriptive of contemporary African life, as petty thugs grab power and oppress their people in the poorest regions of the current global economy.

CLIP: Genesis (1999): Opening (Esau prepares his revenge against Jacob)

In Genesis, Sissoko takes the most significant text of Western culture, the Hebrew Bible, and turns it into an allegory meaningful to contemporary Africa. Focusing on the story of Jacob and Esau, Sissoko tells a story about the devastating effects of fratricide. In the story from the Book of Genesis, Jacob makes Esau sell his birthright for a bowl of soup. This literal story of brotherly conflict becomes the symbolic structure on which the rest of Sissoko’s film is built. He is interested in how and why various factions in Africa compete violently for paltry resources rather than join together in building strength. The film ends with a solution to this fratricidal strife. Unlike the Book of Genesis, which ends much later, Sissoko’s film ends with hope for the unification of Africa. Jacob’s sons, who have formerly sold their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt, leave Mali in order to make peace with him.

CLIP: Genesis: Ending (Jacob’s sons leave to find Joseph in Egypt)

Third Cinema in Latin America

For my second case study of Third Cinema, I have chosen Cuban cinema. Latin America has perhaps the strongest tradition of Third Cinema, and is the most useful place to study its formation during the radical political movements of the 1960s, which led to anti-colonialist wars of liberation in many places, for example, Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba.

In their manifesto, "Toward a Third Cinema," radical Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino argue that resistant cinema cuts across national borders, always focusing on the mechanisms of oppression at the hands of colonialism. Thus, we should speak of Third Cinema, and not exclusively of Argentine and Cuban cinema separately. Solanas and Getino’s film work is an excellent example of Third Cinema. Their three-part The Hour of the Furnaces (1966-68) is a four hour politically radical epic. Part I, "Neo-colonialism and Violence" deals with Argentina’s economic and cultural dependency on Europe.

Beyond political analysis, Third Cinema films also try to break down the complacency of the spectator encouraged by Hollywood cinema. Following Brecht’s modernist attempt to activate the spectator’s intellect, Part II of The Hour of the Furnaces ends with a voice-over narration: "Now the film is pausing, it opens up to you for you to continue it. Now you have the floor." This section had begun with a quote from Franz Fanon, the important post-colonial theorist: "The political meeting is a liturgical act, it is a privileged moment for men and women to hear and speak. To politicize is to open up the spirit, awaken the spirit, give birth to the spirit, it is a means of inventing souls. If it is necessary to involve the whole world in the fight for common salvation, then there are no clean hands, no spectators, no innocents. We all dirty our hands in the mud of our soil and in the emptiness of our brains. Every spectator is a coward or a traitor."

CLIP: The Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas and Getino, Argentina, 1968): Beginning of Part III ["Violence and Liberation"]: Rebellious worker predicts the rapid death of capitalism

Here we see how the Third Cinema filmmakers have explicitly drawn on the Soviet traditions from the 1920s. Like Dziga Vertov’s Kino Fist documentaries, The Hour of the Furnaces uses aggressive intertitles to tell us the political content of the images. Then, the realist potential of cinema is fully employed as we see an interview with a witness to brutal attacks on unionizing workers.

The History of Cuba

Cuba was won from Spain by the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898. During the 20th Century, Cuba became a plaything for American corporate and criminal interests: the Cuban sugar cane industry served American corporate interests well, while Havana became a location for the Mafia to run drugs and prostitutes. In 1952, Batista seized power in Cuba and canceled planned democratic elections. He snuggled up to American governmental interests, assuring him that he would enforce the status quo. In 1953, Fidel Castro led a revolt which failed, resulting in his imprisonment. In 1955, Castro was released from prison, fled to Mexico, and began organizing opposition to Batista. In 1956, Castro landed a small guerrilla force in Cuba. The revolutionary movement, led by Castro’s guerrillas in the jungle and students in the cities, rapidly gained force. By January 1959, Castro’s revolution had succeeded in forcing Batista to flee the country. Castro immediately nationalized the sugar cane industry, much to the chagrin of multinational corporations in the United States. A U.S. trade embargo with Cuba ensued, resulting in Cuba’s increased trade with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc Communist countries. In April 1961, the CIA helped plan an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban army quickly defeated the invading forces. As a result, the United States initiated a full embargo of Cuba, including a naval blockade. In October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis resulted from the USSR’s placement of missiles in Cuba pointed at the United States. Nuclear war was barely avoided as the USSR agreed to withdraw its missiles if the U.S. promised not to interfere militarily in Cuban domestic affairs. The American economic embargo of Cuba continues to this day, resulting in the impoverishment of a country with significant natural resources.

Cuban Film History

As in most countries, film came to Cuba with the Lumiere cameras. Early film cameras in fact captured their first war footage in Havana during the Spanish-American War. Significantly, the record of Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill became famous because it was captured on film. Unfortunately, for the ideological history of the documentary, Roosevelt’s horses arrived a week after the war had ended, so this filmed record was nothing more than a recreation of the actual events!

Before Castro’s Revolution, film in Cuba was dominated by films imported from Mexico and Hollywood. The image of Cuba in these films centered on life in Havana as one of exotic splendor. Havana was advertised in these films as a place for Americans to come and get drunk in a vibrant party city. Unfortunately, none of the American-sanctioned impoverishment of the island was represented in these films. During this period, the cinema was quite popular in Cuba. Somewhere around 600 films per year were imported. Out of a population of 7 million people, some 1.5 million people attended the cinema per week.

Obviously, the 1960s is the most significant period in Cuban film history because of the Castro Revolution. In March 1959, Castro, realizing the importance of cinema as a force for social change, created the ICAIC (The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry). This was a government-funded institution which controlled all native Cuban films. As was the case with the VGIK in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, it was initially set up to make documentary records of the Revolution. The major filmmaker of this period, Santiago Alvarez, is one of the masters of documentary form.

Screening: NOW (Santiago Alvarez, Cuba, 1965)

The film obviously emerges from the Cuban government’s ridiculing of the backward gender and racial policies of the United States: one of the first things Castro did when he came to power was to make gender or racial discrimination illegal. Now, of course, Latin America features one of the most patriarchal cultures around, so this clearly did not make gender discrimination magically disappear, but the Cubans were very interested in exploiting the flaws of an unfettered capitalist system’s inability to correct racial and gender injustice. This sort of aggressive politicization characterizes the early films of Communist Cuba. Alvarez himself made a biography of Ho Chih Minh, called Hanoi, Tuesday the 13th (1967) and a critical film about Lyndon Johnson, entitled LBJ (1968).

Now is extremely aggressive aesthetically, emphasizing the image track (featuring the abuses of African-Americans in the United States) by using the political anthem, "Now" on the soundtrack. Ironically, these sorts of aggressively politicized documentaries had fallen out of favor in the United States with the rise of the cinema verite documentary movement.

These documentaries were the hallmark of the ICAIC in the early 1960s, attempting to use cinema to educate the population. Many of ICAIC’s programs were geared to these goals of forming a knowledgeable Cuban film culture. For example, this goal was furthered by the founding of a national film journal, Cine Cubano, tying film studies to film production, something that does not happen to this day in the United States. The Revolution also sought to use cinema to educate the rural spectators of the country. In April 1962, the ICAIC embarked on a "Mobile Cinema" program in which film equipment was loaded onto trucks and taken to rural areas around the country. Similar programs continue today using video technology.

The hallmark of the ICAIC, and of most film industries in the Third World, is the ability to make significant films on very tight budgets. For example, in the mid 1980s, the entire yearly budget of the ICAIC was $7 million, at a time when the average Hollywood feature cost $14 million! Thus, by the mid-1960s, as the Cuban film industry began to venture into feature filmmaking, the watchword was low cost. In this way, a cinema of underdevelopment, a Third Cinema, began to arise which fought the high-gloss concept of an expensive Hollywood film. The major practitioner of this form of cinema in Cuba is Tomas Gutierrez Alea, whose masterpiece is Memories of Underdevelopment.

Screening: Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Cuba, 1968)

Many of Gutierrez Alea’s films are about weighty topics, such as the role of intellectual life in the Revolution, as in Memories of Underdevelopment. His most serious indictment of pre-Revolutionary Cuba is to be found in his film, The Last Supper (1976), in which a guilt-ridden plantation owner gathers twelve slaves together to wash their feet (as in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet). Instead of behaving like the apostles, the slaves organize a mutiny and burn down the sugar mill where they have been enslaved all of their lives. The owners of the mill hunt down these revolutionaries and decapitate eleven of them. However, one of the slaves avoids the punishment. The film ends with him escaping, thus ending on a note of hope, a hope that would purportedly be fulfilled by Castro’s revolution.

CLIP: The Last Supper (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Cuba, 1976): Ending (the twelfth slave escapes)

However, not all of Gutierrez Alea’s films, nor all of Third Cinema in general, is nearly so serious and bleak. In fact, the films that Gutierrez Alea is known for the United States, including his last films (1993's Strawberries and Chocolate and 1997's Guatanamera) are light comedies about how difficult life is in contemporary Cuba. These films are so bittersweet they are often mis-interpreted in the United States as anti-Castro films, which they are clearly not.

A Case Study of Fiction Filmmaking in Communist Cuba:  Death of a Bureaucrat

We can see this embracing of comedy by examining the first fiction feature in Castro’s Cuba, Gutierrez Alea’s Death of a Bureaucrat (1966). The film concerns a boy named Juanchin who is desperately trying to help his Aunt bury his Uncle, who has died in an accident involving a machine he’s invented. Juanchin runs into bureaucratic red-tape that impedes the burying of the Uncle at every step. The genius of the film is that it critiques the absurd Cuban bureaucracy in a thoroughly cine-literate way. As Third Cinema, Death of a Bureaucrat offers both an intertextual reworking of First and Second Cinema.

1.  Death of a Bureaucrat draws on the leftist comedic tradition of Hollywood cinema

CLIP: Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936): Chaplin falls into the machine

CLIP: Death of a Bureaucrat (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Cuba, 1966): The uncle invents the machine

2.  Death of a Bureaucrat draws on the modernism of Second Cinema

Third Cinema is, however, most clearly characterized by its goal of fighting political oppression

Slavery as a capitalist institution became one of the dominant points of focus for Third Cinema in Cuba. In addition to Gutierrez Alea’s The Last Supper, a number of other films about the subject were made, the most interesting of which is Sergio Giral’s The Other Francisco (1973). Set in the 19th Century, when Spanish colonizers forced native Cubans and African slaves to work on sugar plantations, the film critiques the colonialist capitalist system for oppressing workers, problems that the Cuban Revolution set out to rectify by nationalizing the sugar cane industry.

The Other Francisco is a good example of Third Cinema because it is modernist in its self-consciousness about the story it is telling, yet applies these modernist techniques to the life of everyday people in the Third World. The film is a radical adaptation of a bourgeois novel about Cuba in the 19th Century (the Cuban equivalent of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind). The Other Francisco incorporates three narrational frames. First, we have "the fictional plot" concerning a black slave, his mulatto girlfriend and her aristocratic rapist. Second, we have the narration of the liberal, bourgeois author of the film’s source novel. The novel intends to indict the slavery system by turning the slave into a passive hero, as he commits suicide over the aristocrat’s raping of the woman he loves. Third, we have the radical stance of Giral’s film, which indicts both the social system in which the slaves lived as well as the wishy-washy liberalism of the novel which seeks to martyr, and thus pacify, the slave hero.

CLIP: The Other Francisco (Sergio Giral, Cuba, 1973): Opening (The transition to the Marxist narrator)

After we have learned that the melodramatic story we are watching is being read to us by the author of the bourgeois novel, the third, Marxist narrator arrives to critique both positions by attempting to tell us facts about slave conditions at the time. Thus, it is the Marxist narrator’s hope that telling us about the reality of the slave’s experience, not its Romanticization, will allow us to truly feel for the slave and thus make us want to work actively for the eradication of this sort of oppression. As Third Cinema, The Other Francisco thus works to undercut the techniques of Hollywood melodrama and its "effacement of the medium." Rather than offering us a bourgeois liberal romanticization of the slave’s position, this film offers us the material conditions at the heart of the historical situation.

It’s worth noting that the Cuban government criticized The Other Francisco because it saw a growing black cultural awareness as politically divisive for the goals of the Revolution, the unification of the proletariat. Yet, another interpretive possibility surfaces when we consider the film’s historical context. In 1975, Cuba had completed sending 300,000 troops, many of whom were black soldiers, to Angola to help the Marxist government there against aggression from the, shall we say, less than progressive South Africans. The film ends with a harmonious community of black rebels who have escaped the plantation and attained their freedom.

CLIP: The Other Francisco: Ending (the slaves win their freedom)

The Other Francisco can thus be seen as the representation of a strong and militant black community in Cuba, a target audience for a jingoistic Cuban government intent on building an ability to wage war internationally.

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This page was last updated on January 8, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to: metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theater Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman