Third Cinema

Narrative Deconstruction

Third Cinema is more than just a confrontation to the ideological concepts of dominant cultures on a ‘message’ level. The films of Third Cinema challenge the films of First and Second Cinema on a multitude of layers. The films of the dominant cultures are seen as transmitting the dominant ideologies through their content, but also through their production, their distribution, their exhibition and their secondary life in the response media – news, film magazines and reviews. In challenging the control over the spectator by the First and Second Cinemas, Third Cinema looks to review the structure of the films themselves, in a visual, aural and most defiantly, in a narrative sense.

Third Cinema looks beyond both the conventional primary narratives that dominate First Cinema and the natural controlled responses of the Second Cinema, to constructing narratives that deconstruct the notion of the passive audience. “We realised that the most important thing was not the film and the information in it so much as the way this information was debated. One of the aims of such films is to provide the occasion for people to find themselves and speak about their own problems. The projection becomes a place where people can talk out and develop their awareness. We learnt the importance of this space: cinema here becomes humanly useful” (Solanas & Getino 1973). I believe that Solanas and Getino are here defining a key ideology in Third Cinema and an often overlooked aspect of it; the need for a new approach to not only film production, but to film projection. This is not to say that Third Cinema aims to create a “non-narrative” form, instead, it acknowledges the desire of the audience to construct its own narrative and utilises this to form a two-way discussion between the film and the audience. The film asks the audience to question itself, but also asks the audience to question the order, form, and content of the film.