Historical Developments
—three most important historical developments of 70s-80s were
- Emergence of Third World Cinema as an intl. move.
- Spectacular renaissance of film in West Germany
- Conglomeration of the structure of the American film industry
Third World Cinema (1963),
“Third World” is an early political designation originally used (1963) to describe those states
- not part of the first world—the capitalist, economically developed states led by the U.S.
- or the second world—the communist states led by the Soviet Union.
When the term was introduced, the Third World principally consisted of the developing world, the former colonies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. With the end of the Cold War and the increased economic competitiveness of some developing countries, the term lost its analytic clarity.
Ethiopian-born American cinema scholar Teshome Gabriel identified a three-phase path along which films have emerged from Third World countries.
- In the first phase, assimilationist films, such as those of Bollywood in India, follow those of Hollywood in focusing on entertainment and technical virtuosity and de-emphasize local subject matter.
- In the second phase, films feature local control of production and are about local culture and history, but they tend to romanticize the past while neglecting social transformation.
- In the third phase, combative films, such as Chilean film director Miguel Littin’s La tierra prometida (1973; The Promised Land), place production in the hands of the people (instead of local elites) and use film as an ideological tool.
Third Cinema films concerned with urgent social realities- oppressed masses, poverty, ignorance, and injustice. A guerilla cinema –a cinema fit for a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of becoming.
Third Cinema was rooted in Marxist aesthetics generally and was influenced by the socialist sensibility of German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, who called for an end to the division between art and life and to insist on a critical and intuitive, rather than a propagandist, cinema in order to produce a new emancipatory mass culture. Read more about Third Cinema
WATCH: Third cinema video essay
The term “THIRD CINEMA” was coined by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, the producers of La hora de los hornos (1968; The Hour of the Furnaces), one of the best-known Third Cinema documentary films of the 1960s,
Hours of the Furnaces melded archive material with intertitles, graphs, interviews, and reconstructions to form a collage that was intended to spark debate and action. Solanas shows us a society where the price of human life is forgotten, where people do more work and make less money and the world with no human value. It is a synthesis of agitation and poetry. .….and a call to arms. The intention of The Hour of the Furnaces was clearly to wake up the people from the lethargy they were in. To show the reality and make the revolution happen.
WATCH: Hour of the Furnaces (first hour)
The film conducts a comprehensive analysis of the history, geography, economy, sociology, ideology, culture, religion, and daily life of Latin America. Each dimension and source of oppression is documented and pondered, as is each link between determinations and their consequences.
Artisanship is discouraged, and more emphasis is placed on the viewers’ role in creating the film, inviting them to explore the spaces between representation and reality and become producers rather than consumers of culture.
**The film was made clandestinely under a dictatorship and signed by the Cine Liberación Group. Each screening was a risk and created a “liberated space, a decolonized territory” (in Getino’s words), within which the film could be stopped for as long as necessary to allow discussions and debates (hence the compartmentalized structure).
Argentinian scholar Mariano Mestman recalls that several screenings lead to military confrontations. To attend a screening was in itself a political act, transforming spectators into responsible historical subjects, not because they did or did not agree with the content of the film, but by virtue of the very decision to attend, despite the threat.