What is Third Cinema?

Third Cinema is an aesthetic and political project whose principles have guided
filmmakers throughout the regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While its
principles were originally defined and used to rally filmmakers in the 1960s and
1970s, Third Cinema still influences filmmaking strategies and projects today.
Third Cinema continues to evolve as political, social, and cultural climates change
throughout the world; the tone of a Third Cinema film can reflect a revolutionary
atmosphere and deliver its message with confidence, convey the disillusionment
of failed or coopted revolutions, or express frustration with class, racial, or gender
oppression continued colonial impulses from First World nations. For this reason,
Third Cinema's importance in filmmaking history and its power to deliver social
commentary with the aim of inspiring change cannot be understated.
The term “Third Cinema” reflects its origins in the so-called Third World, which
generally refers to those nations located in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where
historical encounters with colonial and imperial forces have shaped their
economic and political power structures. The term also illustrates a response to the
dominant cinematic forms of First World nations and commercial national film
industries. Where First Cinema conjures images of Hollywood movies,
consumption, and bourgeois values, and Second Cinema refers to European art
house films demonstrating aesthetic, but not always political, innovation, Third
Cinema takes a different approach to filmmaking, by subverting cinematic codes,
embracing revolutionary ideals, and combating the passive film-watching
experience of commerical cinema.
In its earliest stages, as articulated by the classic manifestoes and theories of the
1960s and 1970s, Third Cinema was a militant practice parallel with revolutionary
struggles of this period, produced with the intention of provoking discussion with
and amongst its viewers and proposing alternative visions of the past, present, and
future. While some of this militancy has faded as revolutionary struggles have
changed or failed and new issues have arisen, Third Cinema has evolved to
address problems in nation-building projects, to express disillusionment and
impotence, to respond to new forms of cultural oppression. In general, Third
Cinema's aesthetic innovations involve the mixing of different genres and visual
styles to situate both cultural and political critiques, rather than aiming solely for
artistic excellence and expression. In this way, the filmmakers of Third Cinema
select their visual elements and compositional structures to suit their message,
which is why the films of Third Cinema are so diverse in their styles and forms.
Though they range from newsreel shorts, to realist epics, to pseudo-
documentaries, to avant-gardist pieces, Third Cinema films maintain their
connection to the principles of questioning and challenging the structures of
power and oppression and educating those who live under and must struggle
against its domination.
What are the goals of Third Cinema? What does it address?
While the content and message of Third Cinema films vary depending on the
filmmaker, the country of origin, the resources available, and the political and
social climate, these films are part of the Third Cinema project because they
address certain topics and adhere to particular guiding principles. Third Cinema
films generally engage the following issues and address the following questions:
 ▪ Above all, Third Cinema questions structures of power, particularly colonialism
and its legacies.
▪ Third Cinema aims for liberation of the oppressed, whether this oppression is
based on gender, class, race, religion, or ethnicity.
▪ Third Cinema engages questions of identity and community within nations and
diaspora populations who have left their home countries because of exile,
persecution, or economic migration.
▪ Third Cinema opens a dialogue with history to challenge previously held
conceptions of the past, to demonstrate their legacies on the present, and to reveal
the “hidden” struggles of women, impoverished classes, indigenous groups, and
minorities.
▪ Third Cinema challenges viewers to reflect on by the experience of poverty and
subordination by showing how it is lived, not how it is imagined.
▪ Third Cinema facilitates interaction among intellectuals and the masses by using
film for education and dialogue.
▪ Third Cinema strives to recover and rearticulate the nation, using politics of
inclusion and the ideas of the people to imagine new models and new
possibilities.

By incorporating cultural and political critiques and challenging viewers with new
compositional structures and genre juxtaposition, Third Cinema harnesses the
power of film to increase social consciousness about issues of power, nationhood,
identity, and oppression around the world. For audiences within these regions,
particularly those facing cultural and political subordination, Third Cinema aims
to illustrate the historical and social processes that have brought about their
oppression and to indicate where transformation is required. For viewers outside
these regions, Third Cinema presents the realities of Third World nations as they
are, avoiding sensationalism or romanticism, in order to educate the viewing
public and to encourage dialogue about alternative visions of the past, present, and
future. As Third Cinema principles continue to guide filmmakers from the Third
World or Third World diaspora with access to media and film resources in the
First World, these messages will hopefully become more prevalent and make
social change more possible.
Finally, it is important to note the distinction between Third Cinema and Third
World Cinema. As indicated above, Third Cinema is an aesthetic and political
project which is guided by certain principles in order to challenge power
structures. Third Cinema films are generally produced by filmmakers located
within the Third World regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and intended
for audiences in these regions. However, Third Cinema can also include films
made by filmmakers located in the so-called First or Second Worlds as long as
they adhere to the guiding principles and are made in support of the Third World
perspective. (The Battle of Algiers by the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo is a classic
example.) This project is sometimes referred to by other names, including Third
World Cinema, but Third World Cinema, or world cinema, is a much broader
category which generally includes commercial or arthouse films produced in
Third World countries as well as films with social and political commentary made
before (or after) the advent of the Third Cinema movement. Though some view
Third Cinema as a project of a particular revolutionary period which has now
ended, its legacy is visible in films being produced today in the Third World as
well as by Third World diaspora populations now located within the First World
 and in organizations using the power of media for social justice. In short, Third
Cinema is still alive—and just as powerful.
Third Cinema, also called Third World Cinema, aesthetic and political cinematic movement in Third World countries (mainly in Latin
America and Africa) meant as an alternative to Hollywood (First Cinema) and aesthetically oriented European films (Second Cinema).
Third Cinema films aspire to be socially realistic portrayals of life and emphasize topics and issues such as poverty, national and personal
identity, tyranny and revolution, colonialism, class, and cultural practices). The term 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, in their manifesto “Hacia un tercer cine” (1969; “Toward a Third Cinema”).

Third Cinema was rooted in Marxist aesthetics generally and was influenced by the socialist sensibility of German dramatist Bertolt
Brecht, the British social documentary developed by producer John Grierson, and post-World War II Italian Neorealism. Third Cinema
filmmakers went beyond those predecessors to call 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. (Third cinema was not intended as a mere
educational tool, rather it was conceived as new mass culture which entertains people )

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.
Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968; “The Money Order”), about a traditional man confronting modern ways, and
Burkinabé director Gaston Kaboré’s Wend Kuuni (1983; “God’s Gift”), about a mute boy who regains his speech after viewing a tragedy,
characterize the second phase. 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.

Despite their geographical and historical specificity, Third Cinema films do not conform to any one aesthetic strategy but instead employ
whatever formal techniques—mainstream or avant-garde—that suit the subject at hand. Often, directors and actors are not full-time
professionals. Craftsmanship 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.

Third Cinema began in Latin America in 1967 with the strong anticolonial emphasis at the
Festival of Latin American Cinema in Viña del Mar, Chile, and the release of The Hour of the
Furnaces, a radical and controversial rendering of Argentine history and politics in the 1960s,
with its accompanying manifesto, “Towards a Third Cinema.” That anticolonial approach then
became less doctrinaire in feature films such as Chilean Raúl Ruiz’s Tres tristes tigres (1968;
Three Sad Tigers), which provided a variety of options for social change in its examination of
the Santiago underworld through a single handheld camera, emphasizing the city’s
atmosphere of entrapment. The Third Cinema approach spread worldwide through
international exposure, especially in Europe, overcoming the obstacles of dictators and state
sponsorship in the 1970s.

In Africa the Third Cinema was illustrated notably in the films of Sembène, such as Xala (1975) and Moolaadé (2004), with their mixture
of African and Western elements and their critical approach to local culture. Another example of Third Cinema was Algerian filmmaker
Abderrahmane Bouguermouh’s La Colline oubliée (1997; The Forgotten Hillside), which was shot in the Berber language and treated the
traditional ways of its mountain-dwelling characters with ambivalence.

Third Cinema films do not have to be located in the Third World. In the British films of the Black Audio Film Collective (and related
groups such as Sankofa), such as John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986), both the style and the substance of the traditional British
documentary approach to race relations were challenged.

Guerrilla filmmaking refers to a form of independent filmmaking characterized by low budgets, skeleton crews, and simple props using whatever is available. Often scenes are shot
quickly in real locations without any warning, and without obtaining filming permits.
Guerrilla filmmaking is usually done by independent filmmakers because they don't have the budget or time to obtain permits, rent out locations, or build expensive sets. Larger and
more "mainstream" film studios tend to avoid guerrilla filmmaking tactics because of the risk of being sued, fined or having their reputation damaged due to negative PR publicity.
According to Yukon Film Commission Manager Mark Hill, "Guerrilla filmmaking is driven by passion with whatever means at hand". [1]