Third World Cinema

1. Third World Cinema

2. First Cinema – high budget, globalized commercial cinema (Hollywood, Europe, massive Asian epics, etc.) Second Cinema – Art cinema and auteur Third Cinema –with an agenda and/or from the developing world, usually political. [there is debate as to whether or not all films from developing nations should be considered ‘third cinema.’] A short definition: A radical cinema launched as an attack on globalization (1st cinema,) and aesthetics (2nd cinema)

3. Neo-colonization Colonization – we take over your country by force (old-school). Post-colonization/Neo-colonization – we take over your country with money and culture (new school). Slowly, you begin to speak their language, buy their products, and idealize their lifestyle. You begin to see their taste as better than your taste. You begin to consult with them on how they do things because you are convinced that they know better. Before you know it, you can’t distinguish between what came from you and what came from them - and call it progress. THIRD CINEMA aims to expose this process and fight back.

4. Readings “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and experiences for the development of a cinema of liberation in the third world” By. Fernando Solanas and OctavioGetino Problems with 1st Cinema: “Until recently, film had been synonymous with spectacle or entertainment: in a word, it was one more consumer good…a cinema of mystification or anti-historicism…caught up in these conditions, films, the most valuable tool of communication in our times, were destined to satisfy only the ideological and economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the lords of the world film market, the great majority of whom were from the United States.”

5. Problems with 2nd cinema: “The most daring attempts of those filmmakers who strove to conquer the fortress of official cinema ended, as Jean-Luc Godard eloquently put it, with the filmmakers themselves ‘trapped inside the fortress.” “The mechanistic takeover of a cinema conceived as a show to be exhibited in large theatres with a standard duration, hermetic structures that are born and die on the screen, satisfies, to be sure, the commercial interests of the production groups, but it also leads to the absorption of forms of the bourgeois world-view…man is accepted only as a passive and consuming object; rather than having his ability to make history recognized, he is only permitted to read history, contemplate it, and undergo it. The cinema as a spectacle aimed at a digesting object is the highest point that can be reached by bourgeois filmmaking.” Marx: “It is not sufficient to interpret the world; it is now a question of transforming it.”

6. FOR AN IMPERFECT CINEMA – by Julio Garcia Espinosa Art is controlled by guilt complexes: “[The artists is driven by]…the need to justify himself as a ‘worker,’ or as an ‘intellectual,’ as a ‘professional,’ as a disciplined man…anyone engaged in an artistic task activity asks himself at a given moment what is the meaning of whatever he is doing. The simple fact that this anxiety arises demonstrates that factors exist to motivate it – factors which, in turn, indicate that art does not develop freely.” “We are no longer interested in the problems of neurosis; we are interested in the problems of lucidity.” – Glauber Rocha quoted. “A neurotic can produce art, but art has no reason to produce neurotics. For Imperfect Cinema, ‘lucid’ people are the ones who think and feel and exist in a world which they can change; in spite of all the problems and difficulties, they are convinced that they can transform it in a revolutionary way.”

7. “Imperfect Cinema therefore has no need to create an “audience.” On the contrary, it can be said that at present a greater audience exists for this kind of cinema than there are filmmakers able to supply that audience.” “We should endeavor to see that our future students, and therefore our future filmmakers, will themselves be scientists, sociologists, physicians, economists, agricultural engineers, etc. without ceasing to be filmmakers.” “Imperfect Cinema is no longer interested quality or technique…in predetermined taste, and much less ‘good taste...’ the only thing it is interested in is how an artists responds to the following question: what are you doing to overcome the barrier of the ‘cultured’ elite audience which up to now has condition the form of your work?”

8. HOUR OF THE FURNACES, or TIME BURNING, 1968 (Argentina) Dir. by Grupo Cine Liberacion A ‘film act’ against the latest military coup, a dictatorship installed in 1966. End of every section designed to be a pause for discussion. The film was only part of a larger gathering, an instigator for progress that put the power in the hands of the audience. “discovery through transformation”

9. “Our time is one of hypothesis rather than of thesis, a time of works in progress – unfinished, unordered, violent works made with the camera in one hand and a rock in the other.”

10. SANTIAGO ALVAREZ – “The Tiger Leaped and Killed…” Worked as a coal miner in U.S. and returned to Cuba after Castro’s revolution. Made first film at 40 with no training. He directed the Cuban Film Institute’s newsreel division over the next 30 years and directed nearly 700 films, and supervising 1500 weekly newsreels. “…and in the process transformed a banal and utilitarian genre into a veritable laboratory of radical innovation.” Director of “NOW!” – prev. screened with Michael Renov.

11. AN AESTHETICS OF HUNGER – by Glauber Rocha “The Latin American neither communicates his real misery to the ‘civilized’ European, nor does the European truly comprehend the misery of Latin America.” “Our originality is our huger and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not understood.” “Wherever one finds filmmakers prepared to film the truth and oppose the hypocrisy and repression of intellectual censorship there is the living sprit of Cinema Novo; wherever filmmakers, of what ever age or background, place their cameras and their profession in the service of the great causes of our time there is the spirit of Cinema Novo…”

12. “It is this ethical question that will be reflected in our work, in the way we film a person or a house, in the details we choose, in the moral that we choose to teach. Cinema Novo is not one film, but an evolving complex of films that will ultimately make the public aware of its own misery.”

13. BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL, or GOD AND THE DEVIL IN THE LAND OF THE SUN By Glauber Rocha, 1964 Tells the story of a poor farmer, Manuel who kills his boss and takes his wife on a journey to become a follower of a violent self-proclaimed saint. Manuel eventually joins a gang and meets an assassin, and all comes to a tragic end. Won the Golden Palm awarded at Cannes, 1964. RED LIGHT BANDIT By RogerioSganzerla, 1969 Fictional treatment of a real criminal from São Paulo in the 1960’s. Comes after 4 years of dictator rule. Director was only 22. Not protest, but playful “nihilistic” cinema that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Example of “Cinema Marginal,” a break-off from Cinema-Novo by younger filmmakers. Although different than the Novo directors, they are still concerned with social agendas and issues of poverty.