Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2001 A Closer Look at Third Cinema JONATHAN BUCHSBAUM, Queens College, The City University of New York Who today does not know the classic lms of Brazil’s cinema novo, the pamphlets of the Bolivian Jorge Sanjine´s, the works of the Cuban cinema, the Chilean, Argentinian experiences, and others? [1] This rhetorical question introduced a poll on ‘The in uence of third cinema in the world’ published in Revue Tiers Monde in 1979. Some 10 years earlier, Latin America was the site of an explosion of militant cinema theory and practice. This cultural activism accompanied progressive political movements throughout the region, stimu- lated most signi cantly by the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. Military repression during the 1970s crushed the progressive movements, and ended the creative lmmaking episodes. With the so-called return of democracy in the 1980s, lmmaking revived in Latin America, but no longer under the same militant banner. At the same time, no comparable theoretical work emerged. The younger lmmakers did not churn out theoretical statements as their predecessors had done in Brazil, Ar- gentina, Cuba, Bolivia and Chile. As the theoretical impulses faded, however, non- Latin American critics reached back to the earlier period to pluck one particular document as a metonymy for Latin America’s contribution to a renewed militant criticism. Indeed, the third cinema became the of cial rubric for this renewal. While it is true that the 1969 manifesto ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ does merit a special position in the critical tradition, these writers reinforced the marginalization of Latin American lm theory by ignoring so much of what made the manifesto unique. More conscien- tious critics respected the context of third cinema, but no account draws on the extensive complementary material by the authors to clarify some of the central ideas of the manifesto. This article helps ll in those missing contours of third cinema by drawing on both the manifesto and numerous untranslated commentaries on the topic by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas. One reason behind this phenomenon is linguistic. The manifestoes found their way into English only sporadically in militant lm journals on both sides of the north Atlantic, in Cineaste, Jump Cut, Afterimage, and Framework. Only the third cinema manifesto was anthologized in lm theory and criticism textbooks, and the group of contemporaneous manifestoes was never available in one place before the publication by the BFI of Michael Chanan’s invaluable but not easily available Twenty- ve Years of Latin American Cinema in 1983 [2]. Scholars of Latin American lm discussed the manifestoes on many occasions, but Latin American lm theory remained a backwater to the wave of Anglo-American-French theory sweeping the academy [3]. Early in the 1980s, critics less familiar with Latin American cinema began to detach the concept of third cinema from its source document. The Ethiopian-born, US-based scholar Teshome Gabriel, in the rst book devoted to third cinema, Third Cinema in the Third World (1982), went so far as to claim that ‘The notion of “Third Cinema” is not the creation of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino alone’ [4]. In 1985 Clyde Taylor, ISSN 0143-9685 print/ISSN 1465-3451 online/01/020153-14 Ó 2001 IAMHIST & Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/01439680120051497 154 J. Buchsbaum somewhat cryptically, announced that ‘The lms made by progressive directors in pre-revolutionary China from 1936 on [represent] the historical beginning of Third Cinema’ [5]. The key turning point occurred when the organizers of the Edinburgh lm festival decided to hold a conference on third cinema in 1986. Held at a time when identity politics was roiling the political scene, the conference sparked sharp polemics played out in a number of publications, punctuated by charges of a repressive Euro- centrism [6]. The renewed interest in third cinema culminated in the publication of Edinburgh conference papers in 1989 in Questions of Third Cinema, a collection that managed to exclude any writer from Latin America, let alone Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, authors of the original manifesto [7]. In the preface, Paul Willemen signals the importance of the work of Teshome Gabriel in the rethinking of third cinema (without mentioning once Solanas and Getino): his work ‘provided another important source of inspiration’ (p. viii), effectively anointing him as a valuable interpreter of third cinema; two articles by Gabriel follow Willemen’s introductory essay. While surely one cannot object to the adaptation of critical ideas, the problem here is the surprising indifference to the context from which the expression was taken. Gabriel blithely claims that The concept and proposition of ‘Third Cinema’ used to refer to a special kind of Latin American lm. Of late its use encompasses all lms with social and political purpose. The term is being widely accepted by the progressive Third World cineast [sic] [8]. Gabriel does not deign to mention how the term has come to encompass ‘all lms with social and political purpose’, nor does he mention a single lmmaker who ‘accepts’ the term. In fact, Zuzanna Pick recently noted that Latin America lmmakers had criticized her (in 1979!) for applying the term to their work, and that she had used the term improperly when calling her edited collection Latin American Film Makers and Third Cinema [9]. In the special dossier on the in uence of third cinema compiled by Cine´mAction in 1979, the Latin American lmmakers wrote of the lack of in uence of third cinema [10]. Paul Willemen, after warning against dehistoricizing the term, discussed the mani- festoes together as third cinema ‘manifestoes’, though only ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ even mentions the term. Furthermore, Willemen identi es lmmakers throughout the world as practitioners of third cinema, including Gitai, Angelopoulos, Chahine, Kaige, Ghatik, Julien, among others, but exclusively for their lm productions, not for their active political work for speci c political organizations. Finally, he places third cinema in the great political avant-garde tradition beginning with the revolutionary artists of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and incorporates the concept into the modern European critical tradition of Benjamin, Bakhtin, and Brecht. As a European intellectual, Willemen wanted to formulate a progressive critical practice for committed intellectuals. For this reason he reaches back to the Soviet artists and intellectuals of the 1920s—Tretyakov, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky—as the founding moment of a criticism which engages the audience in understanding their particular situations of oppression: The Latin Americans’ emphasis on lucidity echoes Brecht’s con dence in the emancipatory power of reason, something he shared with many Soviet artists allied to Lunacharsky’s Commissariat of Enlightenment … . (p. 12) Willemen tries to use the ‘re-actualisation of the Third Cinema debates in the UK in the 80s’ (p. 28) to advance a form of criticism, a ‘necessarily utopian image of what a A Closer Look at Third Cinema 155 socialist critical-cultural practice might/should be’. He concludes his Introduction with a forthright admission: … my primary aim in drawing attention to the issues which the notion of Third Cinema allows me to raise is an attempt to help change the ( lm) culture which I inhabit … . (p. 29) Anyone reading ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ would nd this modest, circumscribed goal a faint echo of the ery aspirations of third cinema—‘a gun [the projector] that can shoot twenty four times per second’—in struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism. Notwithstanding the distortions, there are in fact several compelling reasons to distinguish ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ from the other Latin American theoretical writings, for the manifesto was unparalleled in fundamental ways. First, the written manifesto emerged from a speci c and concrete practice: the production, distribution, and exhibition of the epic Hour of the Furnaces. In 1982, Getino recalled ‘The fact that still today it is dif cult to separate the concept of Third Cinema from The Hour of the Furnaces once again proves the intimate dependence of the theoretical elaboration on concrete practice’ [11]. The lm itself was also unprecedented in its 4 hour and 20 minute length, and had a powerful impact on other Latin American lmmakers. Raul Rui´z claimed at Vin˜a del Mar (Chile) in 1969 that the lm ‘hurled us against the walls and left us breathless’ [12]. Though the lm did not meet unanimous praise, its undeniable power guaranteed wide exhibition, particularly in Europe, where it rst showed at the Pesaro (Italy) lm festival in 1968: When the projection ended, they prepared a demonstration and carried us out of the theater on stretchers. The demonstration reached the Pessaro [sic] town square, where it joined with another demonstration of students. The thing ended with the police attacking and nally several directors were arrested. From that moment, La hora de los hornos was a big event and they demanded it everywhere [13]. In subsequent interviews in Europe and Latin America, the lmmaker/theoreticians discussed the ideas in their manifesto, conjoining theory and practice around the dual text of lm and manifesto. No other manifesto was so inextricably linked to a particular lm. Second, the Cubans published the manifesto in Tricontinental. Tricontinental rst appeared in 1967, simultaneously published in four languages (Spanish, French, English, and Italian) by the Organization for the Solidarity of African, Asian and Latin American Peoples (OSPAAL). The journal expressed the aspirations of peoples from three continents struggling against ‘the criminal policies of intervention, plunder and aggression employed by the world-wide imperialist system and particularly by U.S. Imperialism against the Afro-Asian-Latin American peoples’ (inaugural issue, July/Au- gust 1967). The rst issue included articles by Franz Fanon, Kim Il Sung, and Fidel Castro.