History of mankind is wrought with the struggle for power over the other’s gender, race, land, water, energy and resources (natural or man-made). The word power has a greek origin and is defined as “the ability to act in a particular way”. This ability to do what one wants as one likes manifests in human relations in the form of hierarchy and is often accompanied with violence. A child born in a certain part of the world at a certain time is acted upon by the forces of human societies that makes him subject to power acting at different levels in the family, institutions, market, state, geography which are all linked to history. Blood has been shed, battles have been fought and statues fallen over the control of mind, body, space and time. The tool for wielding this power has historically been swords, guns, votebank. For the creative ones, the pen and in the modern times, the camera. The powerful comprise those people in society with easy access to resources, those who can exercise power without considering their actions. For the powerful, their culture seems obvious; for the powerless, on the other hand, it remains out of reach, élite and expensive.
Vision, space and power are often related. Development of new media and screen culture has been as drastic as the invention of the wheel and with the democratization of media tools, anyone has the right to express his or her worldview and discontent to an imaginary public. Unequal access to and distribution of material and cultural resources, and the hierarchies of legitimacies and status accorded to those differentials is what constitutes the political in media. In terms of audiovisual media where screens infiltrate modern human existence on such massive scale, politics of the moving image becomes all more important. How an image is composed, who and what is represented, what is the ideology of the filmmaker and in what time and context it was made all comment on its politics.
All films are political, but films are not all political in the same way. The photographic gesture is the search for viewpoints, for ideologies. The cinematic apparatus with its choice of lighting, camera angle, placement, movement, set design, acting, montage, point of view all add to the film’s politics. Not only the scene that is depicted, but also the camera’s design and the audience that watch gives the director immense power and control of filmic spacetime.
Third Cinema
The idea of Third Cinema was raised in the 1960s as a set of radical manifestos and low-budget experimental movies by a group of Latin American filmmakers — Fernando Solanas and Ocatavio Getino, who defined a cinema in opposition to Hollywood and European models. This new form of expression was coming largely from three different areas of the world: Asia, Africa and Latin America. At that time (during the cold war) these three zones were labelled ‘Third World’ (and in some places they sometimes still are).
According to Teshome Gabriel, the principle characteristic of third cinema is really not so much where it is made or even who makes it, but, rather the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays. In the present times, it is the cinema of the third world which stands opposed to imperialism and class oppression in all their ramifications and manifestations, challenging ivory towered paradigms within film studies, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies and postmodernism usually associated with American mainstream and European auteur cinema. Power, direction and meaning of ideas depends on the social forces with which they are articulated. Defined by its socialist politics, third cinema may be seen as something of a holding operation in the dark times of neoliberalism’s hegemony.
It may relevantly result as the ‘third space’ which displaces the histories and needs that constitute it and sets up new structures of identity and political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through the current mainstream channels of production and distribution. Due to the changing multiracial and multicultural world reality, Third Cinema must reinvent itself in terms of gender, class and geographical identity and consequently in terms of narrative structure and aesthetics. It is not just about making films, it also experiments with altering the conditions of production and consumption; that is within the social microcosm that is cinema, breaking down the hierarchical divisions of labour which cinema inherited from the capitalist society.
Production values and content
Cinema has its material ecologies, which span the entire production cycle, from ecosystems and factories where minerals and plastics, silicon chips, and other resources are extracted, processed and manufactured, to locations and sets and disposal of waste products associated with film production and also its social ecologies — social relations by which films and their meanings are made, the representations of social life which they carry, and the social and cultural uptake and transformation of those meanings in contexts ranging from film festivals and cineplexes to living rooms, blogs, bodies (gestures, expressions, etc) and interpersonal relationships. By politics of production it means to locate the subject-position of the filmmaker, which is constituted by a specific colonial history.
In the case of third cinema, the first question arises is how does the filmmaker depict the ‘other’ and how does the audience perceive it as. The second question is what is the purpose behind making a film and who the audience is and what sort of reaction is expected from them.
Stuart Hall (1992) asserts, “what is ‘out there’ is, in part, constituted by how it is represented.” What happens when we confront ‘the ethnic other’ on the screen? Film makes you cognizant of the existence of the other, the other human being who you identify or disidentify with. The ‘gaze’ of the camera tells us what we are seeing and how we are seeing it. The filmic space-time is also a telling factor of the time and context it was made. While western films manipulate time more than space, third cinema emphasizes space over time. It’s very important for filmmakers to explore spaces and temporalities that are free from the colonial influence. Linguist Mikhail Bakhtin describes chronotypes as time-space articulations characteristic of a particular, historically determined conceptions of the relations between, the human, the social and the natural world i.e. ways of conceptualizing social existence
“They have always smelled history in the wind.” Third cinema as guardian of popular memory, is an account and record of their visual poetics; the contemporary folklore and mythology, and above all in their testimony of existence and struggle, it serves not only to rescue memories, but rather and more significantly to give history a push and popular memory a future.
The narrative structure, style and form of the films are also different like how western cinema is shaped by “the gauges and instruments of scientific-technological thinking” and third cinema might be enamored with ‘magic’ described as an ‘allusive, imagistic’ and ‘poetic’ style featuring “metaphors and allegories” that valorize, among other things, the “elemental terms” of “water, fire, wind, and earth,” as well as the neglected senses of “touch, smell, and taste.” Solanas and Getino developed the notion of film as a ‘detonator’ of ideas, as a pretext for gathering together in dangerous conditions. Hence the dividing of the film into discrete chapters could facilitate the film being stopped at any point and issues raised could be debated.
The narrative of the films is usually passionate, angry, satirical, always complex. For eg. -Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay depicts the world of slumdwellers in Bombay, India but it doesn’t show the reasons behind it and the complex network that causes it. Third cinema would want to point the finger, it would want, in Espinosa’s words, “to show the process which generates the problems”. But to do that requires taking a position, making a commitment. It has a different epistemological foundation to Second cinema and its aim is to seek to bring cognitive and intellectual powers of the spectator into play.
Often these films are known to deal with poverty as a subject. Poverty is a point at which we see the critical links first and foremost between society and economy but also between politics, religion and the law and aesthetics is an appropriate way to think about poverty since it is about the critical juncture of space, experience and ideas. The speech, environment, experience, culture and behavior of workers and peasants themselves become one resource; a second resource lies in the hidden history of a country — in struggles, massacres, and victories of the past either not recorded or distorted in the schools and in history books. And a third resource lies in the aesthetic of imperfection, that is, in the idea of film still in process, reflecting a society still in formation, opposed to the complete, complacent, perfected society and form of dominant cinema. Some films end with an appeal to the audience to add further stories, letters, and ideas to the unfinished film, which is an instrument of the unfinished struggle.
Gunuine revolution can never be about the seizure of political power and the control of state apparatus. The socialist revolution, and the revolution which third cinema aligns itself to, calls for an extension of the political revolution into a social revolution. This means that every aspect of life must be transformed and democratized. Every microcosm of society — every organization, institution, structure — must begin the hard work of organizing its internal dynamics and practices and external relations with others on an entirely different basis than hitherto the history of humankind: on the basis that is of control being vested in the majority. The tension between militancy and entertainment, between engaging with popular culture and therefore mass audiences, while also seeking some transformation in consciousness and social reality, remain a central issue and problem for third cinema.
One strand is Guerrila Cinema — Solanos, Getino (1997) — indicates the conditions of production in which the filmmaking was undertaken. When filmmakers are working in conditions of political danger and state authoritarianism, when their work may be seized, censored or when they themselves might be imprisoned, the only way they can work is by using secrecy and subterfuge.
Full of emotions of anger, outrage, passion, desire to change the world, third cinema seeks to achieve a new synthesis between spectator’s emotional and intellectual capacities. Some of the precursors of realism maybe — Eisenenstein, Vertov, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin.
According to Brecht, realistic means — discovering the causal complexes of the society/ unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power/ writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which the human society is caught up/ emphasizing the element of development/ making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it. Brecht’s epic theatre eliminated the Aristotelian catharsis, the purging of emotions through empathy with the stirring fate of the hero, it reduces astonishment rather than empathy, so that the spectator asks: Is this how things really are? How can things be so absurd or unjust? Epic theatre places an emphasis on the discovery of the conditions of life.
Third cinema also offers a critique of the individualistic conception of the artist and an alternative to the historiography premised on the individual. An account of historical change which starts from and ends with the individual is problematic because it is unable to show how the individual is formed within a broader set of social relationships and how they develop in conjunction with those relationships. Ideas, values and beliefs are internally contradictory, providing their own response or mediation of the conflicts between capital and labour. This way of thinking about history requires us to locate the actions and beliefs of individuals in their wider socio-economic context and to understand change as something that is brought about not by individuals realizing the “timeless principle” but by individuals and collectives operating within conflictual and contradictory relationships that shape what can be thought and what can be done at any particular point in time and space.
Sometimes, film contain representational field of conflicting voices and views that are self-reflexive — where it draws attention to its own conditions of making meanings within the medium of film. They also use rhetorical strategies of allegory and satire: An allegorical narrative is one which shrinks a larger social totality, a larger historical narrative, into a smaller story. Satire reveals the absurdity of existing shibboleths and orthodoxies and pretensions of the powerful. The spectacle must be open in the sense that it encourages the spectator to understand the world as complex and to understand that only though their participation in the world after the cinematic spectacle has finished can the inequalities and injustices of this complex world be addressed.
Distribution
The means of disseminating cultural products and of gaining access to audiences lies in the domination of distribution and exhibition by monopoly capital. The problem is that while monopoly capital tries to bury it by ignoring it, the state may take an unwelcome interest in an oppositional cinema. The direct or indirect influence of state on film industries is common across the world. The situation is still colonial in the sense that there is an unequal concentration of power located elsewhere: in the headquarters of financial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the Wall Street stock market; in the boardrooms of the multinational companies operating within the third world and the political capitals of the West like Washington.
The difficulty of radical filmmakers in getting their films to their audience is an enduring, structural and persistent problem. Filmmakers who accept this responsibility have two possible audiences: the middle and upper classes from which they might themselves originate, the principal consumers of film entertainment; and the workers and peasants who make up the vast majority of most of these countries. The first audience is largely urban, accustomed to foreign culture, and upwardly mobile within the local elite power structure. The second audience is more difficult to reach. It often has a firmer grasp of native culture and tradition and thus is more resistant to normal film fare and other colonizing culture. And it also has a key stake in social, economic, and political change. Both audiences are composed of spectators, and in the “continent of hunger” spectators are “cowards and traitors.” Therefore with both audiences, the filmmaker’s purpose is not to create “understanding spectators,” in Miguel Littin’s phrase, liberals who despite themselves are collaborators with the enemy, but to transform spectators into actors, or participants in the revolution. In order to bring about this transformation, filmmakers seek an original and an empowering use of language.
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Examples
Third cinema in the context of India is first about self-representation, the articulation of the colonized individual, the absent subject, into history. Free from colonization of time and space — tamed temporality where past has been emptied of meaning and weight and future has been made perfect, and colonial appropriation of conceptions of geography and land, history and time, and language and hence consciousness, Indian cinema has come a long way. It exists in historical, linguistic, political situatedness — among nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, sub national groupings and movements.
Two extreme examples of third or even fourth cinema are given below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYYrPEa8ppA
https://vimeo.com/157416877
These are very stark visuals of the violence happening in the Naxal affected areas of Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Orissa. Some of the questions that arise are “What does it mean to see figures of death and violence on screen invoking pathos” “Does everyone on this planet have an equal chance to live? And Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the subaltern speak?” In global resource wars, the environmentalism of the poor is frequently triggered when an official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one. Adivasis, Dalits and people who do not belong to the civilized society heed to riverbanks, floodplains, river dependent forests, and catchment areas that have sustained them for millennia. Such people may belong to the land but according to the Lockeian logic of private property, the land doesn’t belong to them because they are considered culturally inferior or in Annu Jalais’s terms “dispensable citizens” according to the myth of social Darwinism.
They respond to oppression, exploitation and exoticization. Engaging in strategies of resistance, opposition, these films are made by a filmmaker representing the oppressed community and hence deinstitutionalizing the “looking relationship” between first-world viewers and fourth-world subjects. The underlying politics of imperialism insisted that colonization was beneficial to the people being colonized. Classic colonial — post colonial discourse is repeated — territorial, economic and symbolic rape of a civilization, fixity in a deformed otherness — the pained and self conscious process of reclaiming one’s own history and traditions.
Exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions across the globe surging the high rate of neoliberalism has resulted largely from a lash of temporal perspectives between developers — dispossessors who arrive from different time zones to impose on habitable environments unsustainable calculations about what constitutes the human gain. Change is a cultural constant but the pace of change is not. Temporal contests over how to sustain, regenerate, exhaust or obliterate the landscape as resource discount spiritual values serving webs of accumulated cultural meanings. These are the socioenvironmental fallouts of development agendas whose primary beneficiaries live elsewhere: women’s rights, minority rights, tribal rights, property rights, the right to freedom of speech and assembly and the right to enhanced economic self-sufficiency are something these people are fighting for and therefore need a voice of their own.
These films were screened at film festivals like Kochi Biennale, informal popular gatherings as well as in student milieu and in radical institutions.
One of the principles of third cinema is — insistent address to a unitary spectator who is at once disingenuous (requiring lessons in class consciousness and postcolonial development) and sophisticated (capable of appreciating an otherwise rarified oppositional aesthetics) Thus, third cinema’s critical reception and reception at film festivals should seldom be mapped onto the same experiential terrain as those of audiences at popular venues.
