The Third Cinema - Essay Example

The term "Third Cinema" was first used in an interview with the Argentine Cine Liberación group, published in the journal Cine Cubano (March 1969). The term was developed into an idea and a cinematic concept by Fernando Solanas (b. 1936) and Octavio Getino (b. 1935), members of that group in their manifesto "Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World," . “Third Cinema” is not an isolated movement. It should be considered as a part of the new Latin America cinema movements, which in turn was a part of the new cinema movements world over. It was a reaction against making films the objects of commerce than art. It was a reaction to big commercial internationalism influencing the national cinemas. It was a movement against the cultural and political hegemony of the American commercial cinema over the subjugated under developed economies. Historically it was the continuation of a resistance to the dominance of the Hollywood’s commercialization of cinema and its duplication of products called national cinema in underdeveloped countries. Cinema is an art that developed from man’s incorrigible wish to record the movement and the moving objects, as it was the moving objects that interested him and not static ones. So the first film show, the Lumier Show was just a shot of a train coming into the railway platform. The viewers were not sure whether what they were seeing on the screen was real or myth. They were afraid that the train would come forward towards them and hence many were reported to have sat back on their chairs scared. This make-belief quality is the charm of cinema. On one side cinema is documenting reality, the reality of the train coming to the platform, here in the Lumier show. On the other hand cinema is making the viewer believe that the train coming towards him is real, making the unreal look real. These two qualities of Cinema led to the division of cinema into documentaries and feature films. (According to Ingmar Bergman “When film is not a document it is a dream”—The Magic Lantern Page73) Of these the feature films or story telling films developed into the commercial cinema or the mainstream cinema. The revolt against the commercialization of the art of cinema led to the emergence of the experimental cinema, including the “Third Cinema”. THE DREAM FACTORY: It was the studio system that came into existence in Hollywood that made the films typically commercial. The studio system emerged due to the increase in demand for films. The studio system consisted of companies that owned the studios where films were produced. These companies decided the material to be filmed, they owned and controlled the regularly paid stars who were treated like workers, dictated which directors would make which films .Their motto was to produce more movies at lower cost. It was this powerful studio system that ran Hollywood from the late 20s through the 60s. It was an entertainment factory with clear division of labor. The production plan for every year is prepared well in advance; budget decided and the assembly line is kept flowing as in a dream factory , a factory that produced dreams on celluloid. CRITIQUE OF HOLLYWOOD: The studio system was slanted more towards commerce than art. Because of this, many critics refused to see Hollywood studio films as art at all. Mass production and assembly lines are alien to art. The studio movies entertained people, with dream like myths far removed from the realities of life. “The stars, the glamour, the glossy perfection of the studio films played upon the audience’s wishes and dreams, transporting them to a far more satisfying kingdom than the dreary reality outside the movie theatre.” (Gerald Mast1981) Critics like Andrew Sarris (1976), refused to consider Hollywood even as a centre of cinematic art: Somewhere on the western shores of United States, a group of men have gathered to rob cinema of its birth right. If the forest critic (Of course, the forest to which I refer is called Hollywood) be politically oriented, he will describe these coastal conspirators as capitalists. If aesthetically oriented, he will describe them as philistines. Either way, an entity called cinema has been betrayed by another entity called Hollywood. (Towards A Theory of Film History, Andrew Sarris, Movies and Methods, Vol.1, page 239) Hollywood carried along with it an ideology; it carried along with it a “successful” cinema model “for the national cinemas to emulate”. In short it dominated the both the content and form of the cinema of the underdeveloped countries, living in neo colonial environment with the national bourgeois controlling the power of the State. Thus this cinema not only protected the commercial interests of the production companies but al so imposed the bourgeois world view over the viewers. The bourgeoisie considers human beings as objects. “Man is accepted only as passive and consuming object; rather than having his ability to make history recognized, he is permitted to read history, contemplate it, listen to it and undergo it.” (Solanas/Getino, Towards A Third Cinema -1971). The cinema, like the Hollywood cinema is a “cinema as a spectacle aimed at a digesting object is the highest point that can be reached by bourgeois film making.” (Ibid). Solanas and Getino points out that the national characteristics have disappeared in cinema. Earlier there were German, Italian and Swedish cinemas with clear national cultural identities. Today such differences have disappeared. The borders were wiped out along with the expansion of US imperialism and the film model that it imposed: Hollywood movies.” (Ibid) The same sentiment was echoed by the Brazilian film master Glauber Rocha while criticizing the Brazilian national cinema. The audiences now expect from all films only those images they are accustomed to seeing in Hollywood cinema. … When most Brazilians make films they make them “a la Americana” and it is primarily for this reason that Brazilian spectators try to make any Brazilian film they view into a Brazilian film “a la Americana.” If the film is not “north American” it disappoints. (Glauber Rocha, Beginning at Zero: Notes on Cinema and Society) And according to Solanas and Getino “ The 35mm camera, 24 frames per second , arc lights , and a commercial place of exhibition for audiences were conceived not to gratuitously transmit any ideology , but to satisfy , in the first place , the cultural and surplus value needs of a specific ideology , of a specific world view: That of US financial capital .” (Ibid). SECOND CINEMA: The “First Cinema”, with Hollywood as the universal model has to be resisted not only for aesthetic reasons but also for political reasons. The resistance began with the Italian Neorealism. Italian Neo realists came out of the studios, and went to shoot films in real locations. The Hollywood inspired start system too was resisted by this movement .The actors became the common people, as in most of the films of Sergie Eisenstein, the master of the era of Soviet silent cinema. These two factors – shooting in real locations and making the real people, actors -- influenced the Third Cinema, though neither Solanas nor Getino acknowledge it directly. Another movement that got inspired by the Italian Neo realism and which resisted the Hollywood was the French New wave. In an oft-quoted interview in the French film journal, Cahiers du cinema, Godard one of the leaders of French New wave, describes his works thus: “Today I still think myself as a film critic and in a sense I am., more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them.” (Cahiers du Cinema, 1962) Goddard’s concept of cinema as an essay is reflected in this quote.This is another factor that had influenced Solanas and Gettino ---- conceiving cinema as an essay Another movement that influenced the “Third Cinema" is the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil. .Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Galuber Rocha were the leading film makers of this movement. They also rejected the studio made star studded film aesthetics of the Hollywood as well as the aesthetics of the rich colonial European cinema. This cinema tried to alien the spectator by employing the Brechtian and Eisenstenian techniques. The spectator is never allowed to get emotionally involved in the film. . This cinema demanded an alert, thinking and questioning and a politically active spectator. He was never allowed to remain passive but is constantly disturbed. Glauber Rocha (Johnson and Stam 1982) calls it the “film of discomfort” made out of “crude images, muffled dialogue and unwanted noise on the sound track, of editing accidents and unclear credits and titles”. But Solanas and Getino don’t fully accept this cinema, which they call the “second Cinema". They admit that these film makers were expressing in “non standard language" and were attempting at cultural decolonization. But they argue that what the second cinema was doing was only what the system permitted them to do. They were not subverting the system. “The second cinema filmmaker has remained “trapped inside the fortress”, as Godard put it, or is on his way to becoming trapped”. (Solanas/Getono, Towards A Third Cinema -1971) They only became institutionalized as “the youthful, angry wing of society’. They help only to endorse the democratic pretensions of the neo-colonial capitalist State. GUERRILLA FILM: The third cinema is one that tries to subvert the State. It is the cinema that tries to be like a guerrilla group revolting against the system. The First Cinema supports the system; the Second Cinema is tolerated or permitted by the system. The Third Cinema is one that the system cannot assimilate. Because this cinema is directly or explicitly trying to fight the system. This is a cinema of liberation. The Third Cinema cannot work without a language of its own. This language is to be discovered by the film maker “from a militant and transforming world-view and from the theme being dealt with….. Pamphlet films, didactic films, report films, essay films, witness bearing films--- Any militant form of expression is valid and it would be absurd to lay down a set of aesthetic work norms.” (Ibid) Thus here the film makers are part of the liberation army. They form a Film-guerrilla group, with camera as the rifle. UNIQUE: The Hour of the Furnaces, no doubt is one of those rarest types of films ever made, in its cinematic form, the content and even in the process by which the film was made. It was a guerrilla film shot along with a guerrilla group revolting against the system, which was controlled by the anti democratic military junta. As Solanas and Getino theoretically argued, while making this film the camera was used as the rifle, and the film makers were living like a Film-guerrilla group .They were part of the armed struggle for liberation against the military junta , thus making the filmmaking process it self a militant political activity. The shot footages were shown among the militants, discussions were held, thus making a militant film happen during and as a part of political activities --- Thus The Hour of the Furnaces is in every sense a democratic cinema out of the hold of neo colonial ideologies and Hollywood formulas. May be that’s why it has unusual cinematic running time of almost four and a half hours. It took two years to make this unusually long film , it was shot clandestinely , away from the searching , torturing eyes of the State , it was screened clandestinely too, thus making it unique in production as well as exhibition processes with unique a cinematic structure This agitprop cinema follows Brechtian structure of episodes and is divided into three episodes. Incidentally, one of the earliest revolutionary films in the history of cinema, Battleship Potemkin by Sergie Eisenstein (the film indirectly refers to Potemkin, while calling the motivation of the militants struggle as “for having loved so much”, which is a direct quote from Potemkin) too had this episodic structure. The title of the film comes from one of Che Guevara’s last public statement called “Message to the Tri-continental” (1967). He quotes Jose Marti, the nineteenth century national hero of Cuba in this speech thus: “It’s the hour of the furnaces and only the light shall be seen”. Thus the very title of the film that echoes the words of two revolutionaries makes clear its political bias. It’s a film against the system and hand in hand with the armed struggle against the system. The film thus becomes a revolutionary discourse through revolutionary means of representation. The three episodes of the film becomes thesis, anti thesis and synthesis on the politico-economic realities of Argentina ---the thesis is on the current status quo; antithesis is continuing peronist struggle against the military junta and synthesis is on the futuristic liberation from the dictatorship. Thus this is a film with a dialectical structure. The first episode analyses neo colonial violence against the people with all its manifestations. On one side there is violence in the form of crime and destruction. On the other side even peace, order and normality in the society is violence as well. The same is the situation in Africa, Vietnam and even in United States. This analysis is emphasized by the audio of the frivolous laughter of a woman, a wonderful cinematic example of the sound becoming a montage element clashing with the images and creating another level of meaning. The film moves into a wonderfully edited montage sequence of images from the world of advertisements and the slaughter house images of cows being slaughtered to drive home the connection between consumerism and exploitation. This sequence is often described as a tribute to the master craftsman of Montage theory, sergie Eisenstein. The film calls for a new vocabulary to express the anguish against the oppressive State. It asks the spectators not to be spectators in the social drama, but to be the actors. It demands a new spectator and quotes Franz Fanon thus: “every spectator is either a coward or a betrayer”. The episode ends with the shots of the sacrificed Che Guevara, which gives the film’s approval to violence as the only tool for liberation. The second episode, “Act for Liberation”, discusses Peronism between 1945 and 1955, when the proletariat gained power. It was in 1955 that Peron was ousted by the military junta. The second part of this episode reviews the strategies of the peronists to oppose the military rule. It takes the shape of a political discourse with the possible threat of U S military intervention hanging over the whole of Latin America after the Cuban revolution. The episode ends with the screen going black and inviting spectators to initiate a discussion among themselves on the issues discussed by the film. The third episode enforces the argument put forward by the film that revolutionary violence is the only way out for the exploited to liberate themselves. It quotes liberation theologians like Camilla Thorus of Columbia saying revolutionary violence has the sanction of even Christianity. The film has an open ending asking the spectators to continue the discourse and action. The uniqueness of the film is in its cinematic form. It is both a Godardian cinematic essay as well as a cinematic discourse. The variety of aesthetic tools used to achieve this discourse on exploitation, and liberation through revolutionary violence are wonderfully divergent. All varied aesthetic approaches from interviews to cinema verite footages from films ranging from that of Fernando Birri to Joris Ivens, News reels and very sophisticated and expressively powerful montages. The most famous minimalist technique used in the film is the still image of dead face of Che Guevara, held for two and a half minutes on the screen. Another uniqueness of the film is that it redefined and reinvented a new spectator who is not outside the cinema but inside it. This is something which the “First Cinema” never wanted, and the “second cinema” never could achieve. As Ram swami Harindranath points out: “The openness of the film lies somewhere: In the political relationship between the film and the viewer, at least in the clandestine circumstances in which the film was viewed in Argentina in the years before 1973” (Perspectives on Global Culture PP103).The Third cinema film makers made possible a new conception of the audience who is not passive but active and even participative. Thus here is a film which merges theory and practice so wonderfully well. Sources cited: 1) Bergman Ingmar, The Magic Lantern ,Penguin Books, Viking Penguin inc.,40West, 23rd Street, New York, 1988 2) Cahiers du Cinema, Paris, December 1962 3) Harindranath Ramaswamy, Perspectives on Global Culture: Issues in Cultural and Media Studies, Open University Press, June 2006. 4) Mast Gerald ,The Studio Years, The American Cinema, Edited by Donald E. Staples, Voice of America Forum Series, United States International Communication Agency Washington , D.C. 5) Sarris Andrew, A Theory of Film History , Movies and Methods, Vol.1, Edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California 6) Solanas Fernando and Getino Octavio, Towards A Third Cinema –After Image , No3,1971 7) Rocha Glauber, Beginning at Zero: Notes on Cinema and Society, The Drama Review, On Latin American Theatre, Volume 14, Number 2(T46) winter 1970, New York University Publication. 8) Rocha Glauber, The Tri-continental Film Maker: That is Called the Dawn , Robert Stam and Randal Johnson,eds.,Brazilian Cinema, Associated University Press 1982 Read More