Third Cinema

A National Cinema

“While guerrilla cinema didn’t yet have enough experience to lay down general standards, ‘what experience there is has shown, above all, the ability to make use of the concrete situation in each country’. For this ‘concrete situation’ necessarily includes the individual susceptibilities of different national cultures, which in turn implies that even an oppositional cinema is likely to want to cultivate national cultural traditions” (Chanan, 1997 pp376). As Third Cinema became established through the strengths of its critical argument, and the quality of the filmmakers involved, Solanas and Getino further developed their concept of a Third Cinema. Their original manifesto became the starting point for further debate, based upon the practical constraints of filmmaking for a Third Cinema, and upon interactive development with audiences – one of the key foundations of an approach to Third Cinema. Reviewing their original manifesto in Some notes on the concept of a Third Cinema, Octavio Getino reflected at length upon the importance of a National Cinema within Third Cinema “Any attempt to consider an ideological product universal would be erroneous without consideration of the national context at its root” (Getino, 1984 pp102). The importance of a national root within Third Cinema was later cemented by Solanas in his comments that “Third cinema is also aligned with national culture” and “By national culture we mean that of the ensemble of the popular classes” (Solanas & Getino, 1991 pp66). We can see therefore that the inclusion of concepts of a cinema of the nation is now fundamental to the principles of a Third Cinema and that these concepts inform and define key areas.

It is in this area that the work of Humphrey Jennings is further established as that of a Third Cinema practitioner. His unmistakably nationalist view on concepts of England mark his films as so local as to be part of the culture itself – the culture feeding into the films, the films feeding into the culture – as Barnouw puts it “Jennings was credited with catching the mood of the British in crisis, but he may have done more: perhaps he helped set a pattern for crisis behaviour” (Barnouw, 1974 pp146). If this claim is perhaps a little strong, it is perhaps more believable that Jennings has shaped our opinion of how the British were during the Blitz in retrospect. If not directly affecting people’s views of themselves at the time, then vividly placing them in our collective memory of the collective Englishness defined for history. Jennings’ films show a clear desire to not only protect sectors of the culture that he sees as fundamental, but to establish them as essential to the survival of the nation. Jennings was a socialist, but a strongly patriotic one. Not patriotic for the political country, but for the cultural one. He has been often linked to George Orwell in this way, the intellectual left-wing with a love, rather than contempt, for England and Englishness.

In Jennings films this manifests itself in the proliferation of song, literature and art images, a strong use of defining landmarks and a constant use of both colloquial and formal English language in his dialogue. He works with both high culture and popular culture iconography, often blending the two. For example in Listen to Britain, he cuts on a chord of Flanagan and Allen to Myra Hess performing in the National Gallery. He moves between the readily popular, to the somewhat elitist performance as a way of blending the social difference, creating a unity of culture through the art form. His shot choice gives equal status to the audience in the Flanagan and Allen concert, as it does to the Queen in the audience watching Dame Myra Hess. In almost mixing the music, Jennings shows the two contrasting perceived layers of the British class system as one in deference to music. He is portraying a united England in its appreciation of a variety of performance.