Third Cinema

Oppositional Cinema

“Fires Were Started directly and explicitly set[s] out to fight the system” (Solanas & Getino, 1969 pp21). It is, in my opinion, a vivid example of Third Cinema. It challenges the concepts and ideals that were being claimed by politicians and reinforced by his contemporary filmmakers in not just documentary, but often more overtly in fiction film. Fires Were Started disputes the concept of “so few, doing so much, for so many”, and instead looks at the single loss (Jacko’s death) as of equal importance as any munitions ship, so starkly portrayed in the above mentioned scene. Jennings film fulfils the criteria of the Third Cinema that “there can be nothing in political terms which is tentative or hypothetical about the content or signification of the images concerned” (Chanan, 1997 pp374); Jennings explicitly lays out Fires Were Started’s denouement to counter the established message that the individual is sacrificial to the whole. From the moment of Jacko’s death to the final shots of the film, Jennings constructs each moment around the loss of an individual. Jacko’s death becomes more powerful than the fire even. Having displayed the fire-fighting in a realist manner, at the point of Jacko’s fall, and death, Jennings shifts style to more abstract shots, and cuts. Close-ups on the rope slipping through Jacko’s fingers, Jacko’s silhouetted form falling into flames and the building, the fire-hose breaking free and flipping around, cutaways of dark claustrophobic smoke, close-up on Johnny, the imposingness of the fire suddenly placed spatially with a long shot from across the river, blackness. Jennings is in complete control here; he has dissected each element of the fire, the fall and the death and created a separation between each image which adds to their collected potency. Jennings constructs this sequence as the inevitability, the necessity, of death in war, in battle. This battle is against the fire, yet it can only develop after the loss of life. Once we see that Jacko will die, Jennings gives us two images that define the sequence; Jacko’s silhouetted body and the long shot from across the river of the building ablaze. With Jacko’s fall into the flames, Jennings emphasises the facelessness of those that die in wartime. Jacko has become another body, another who dies for ‘the cause’. Following this Jennings then develops the idea that life must be lost before battle can progress, he cuts back across the river to a long shot of the fire, relegating it in size in frame, to a less significant presence. The battle is moving on, as Jacko has died, so the fire becomes less powerful. Jennings then pushes this concept of the devalued individual death in the aftermath. As Jacko’s fellow firemen move into the morning, Jennings denies us association with them, favouring close-ups of hands, legs, hoses and other objects instead of faces. He depersonalises them, robbing them of their individuality as Jacko has been robbed of his in death. Jennings uses this to mask the collective depression, and guilt. He is here exemplifying Saul Bellow’s Herzog’s view that “The more political our society becomes, the more individuality is lost” (Bellow, 1964 pp162). In this key sequence Jennings is irrefutably disputing the official party line of individual life being less worthy than collective victory. Fires Were Started shifts into pure Third Cinema with an opposition of not only First Cinema politics, but First Cinema techniques in delivering them.