Third Cinema

A Fresh Framework

Third Cinema is a term commonly credited to two Argentine filmmakers, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. Following completion of their film La Hora de los Hornos (Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), they wrote the manifesto hacia un tercer cine (towards a third cinema). The manifesto lays out three categories of cinema, explained as:
First Cinema – The Hollywood model of production (the same large-scale production values in other countries also applies i.e. Bollywood). Importantly for Solanas and Getino, this mode of production corresponds to an ideology which “posits a particular relationship between film and spectator, where cinema is conceived as pure spectacle” (Chanan, 1997 pp375). First Cinema conveys the messages of the dominant ideology through its iconography, its content and its mode of production and exhibition. This is, to me, the clearest definition of First Cinema, and is as such, the primary status opposed by Third Cinema.

Second Cinema – There is much theoretical writing that simply equates second cinema with cinema d’auteur, but it is vital in understanding the oppositional stance of Third Cinema to look at the political essence of what the manifesto defines as Second Cinema, as it was after all intended as a manifesto of political instigation. Second Cinema can include not only the cinema d’auteur but also art cinema, independent American cinema, and the various new wave cinemas. Second Cinema started to produce its own structures (of both filmmaking practice and of narrative), it’s own distribution and exhibition structures, and its own political structures – to Solanas and Getino, it became a bourgeois institution in it’s own right; “a misplaced ambition to develop a film industry to compete with First Cinema, and this could only lead to its own institutionalisation within the system, which was more than ready to use Second Cinema to demonstrate the democratic plurality of its cultural milieu. These groups were politically reformist – for example in opposing censorship – but incapable of achieving any profound change. They were especially impotent in the face of the kind of repression unleashed by the victory of reactionary, proto-fascist forces.” (Chanan, 1997 pp375-376). This illustrates that Third Cinema is not only opposing First Cinema, but that it is directly oppositional to Second Cinema as well. Indeed, Second Cinema, in both content and production, can be looked at as subservient to First Cinema.

Third Cinema – “What determines third cinema is the conception of the world, and not the genre or any explicitly political approach. Any story, any subject can be taken up by third cinema. In the dependent countries, third cinema is a cinema of decolonisation, which expresses the will to national liberation, anti-mythic, anti-racist, anti-bourgeois, and popular.” (Solanas & Getino, 1969 pp23). Third Cinema is a direct alternative to First and Second Cinemas. It counters the common production and reception of First and Second cinemas on an ideological platform; the films of Third Cinema are both political in content and practice. Third cinema is not Third World cinema, although it is commonly attributed as such. Despite being subtitled ‘Notes and experiences on the development of a cinema of liberation in the third world’, Solanas and Getino’s instigating essay sets Third Cinema as a reaction to the First and Second Cinemas and not as a reaction to First and Second Worlds. First Cinema includes Bollywood cinema – made in a Third World country – and Third Cinema can include films made in First World countries (as I aim to substantiate); “Newsreel, a US New Left film group, the cinegiornali of the Italian student movement, the films of the Etats Generaux du cinema Francais, and those of the British and Japanese student movements” (Solanas and Getino, 1969 quoted in Chanan, 1983 pp17). To place Third Cinema within a more contemporary environment I would suggest films by Alan Clarke and Michael Haneke as examples of Third Cinema over the past 20 years. In particular I believe that Clarke”s film Elephant, and Haneke’s Funny Games are the two finest examples of a Third Cinema response to screen violence. Both films challenge the viewer to look beyond First Cinema’s formal cinematic structures and question oneself, and both films challenge society itself; Elephant the culture of killing in Northern Ireland, Funny Games the audience’s acceptance of violence on screen.

I will be looking at what I consider three of the key elements in defining Third Cinema, and using them as more productive ways of discussing Jennings’ work. The areas I will be analysing are; Political Opposition, using Fires Were Started; National cinema in his wartime films; and Narrative opposition, questions of the audience and interaction utilising Listen to Britain.