Third Cinema

The term Third Cinema was coined in a long and much-read 1969 article by Argentinean political activist filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino that focused mostly on documentary film, albeit in numerous formats. It emerged from the continuing political and economic convulsions in Argentina and more widely through Latin America and across the planet in that decade and the one that followed.

Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha's brief “Esthetic of hunger” manifesto preceded the article. It based its title on a famous 1952 book, The Geography of Hunger, by Josué de Castro, the Brazilian director of the Food and Agriculture Organization, who argued that the fundamental causes of global starvation and malnutrition were political, not a lack of resources. Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa's 1969 essay “For an imperfect cinema” also fed that debate, and much of the debate about the term since drew in one way or another on these three Latin American contributions.

The call for a Third Cinema was a revolutionary response by filmmakers to global poverty and oppressive structures. It was a call for guerrilla filmmaking, with “the camera as our rifle … a gun that can shoot 24 frames a second.” There was a real urban guerrilla movement in Argentina at the time, and indeed armed guerrilla politics was then widespread in Latin America, with Cuba and Vietnam as models. Repressive U.S.-backed and-trained military regimes were common. To many, even if not involved directly, guerrilla action seemed the only option remaining to achieve constructive change. The filmmakers' battle, in their words, was against “the enemy's ideas and models to be found inside each one of us” and “for what each one of us has the possibility of becoming.”

The term guerrilla video as used by the Top Value Television (aka TVTV) collective and similar U.S. movements in the 1970s was somewhat different, referring as much to using cheap portable video and low-to-no budgets as it did to rebellious politics.

Solanas and Getino used the adjective Third to distinguish the type of filmmaking that they argued was urgently needed from both Hollywood (First Cinema) and art films, stamped by a particular movie director's personal vision (Second Cinema). The fundamental mission of this Third Cinema was to decolonize culture, strip out U.S. and Western cultural dominance and consumerist ideology in the third world, and replace it with films [Page 523]conveying “a throbbing, living reality which recaptures truth in any of its expressions.” As García Espinosa also argued, such films would boldly use the minimal resources available and would feel no need to apologize for not matching up to the affluent West's technical standards.

Beyond content, the production, distribution, and exhibition of Third Cinema films was also defined differently. Solanas and Getino stressed the need to be able to work collectively, to operate underground, to embrace very small screening locations, and to organize screenings to include pauses for audience discussion (along the lines of Brecht's theater). They exemplified this approach in their epic 4.5-hour documentary on Argentina's history and politics, La Hora de los Hornos (Hour of the Furnaces, 1969).

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