Third Cinema

The Listener

Yet Listen To Britain is not merely an early popular music compilation. Jennings asks the audience to take the sounds so familiar to them and to reflect upon their overall value within the world around them. He does this with a consistent blending and emphasising of the sounds of war time Britain. The audience, through its familiarity with the sounds and images of the film are given the time (in terms of narrative demands) to turn the questions raised by the films juxtapositions back into questions about the individual. The audience is the shaper of the narrative; the films dynamism comes from the familiarity of the soundscape. It is in this subconscious comprehension of what is in the film, that the audience can begin to question why it’s in the film, and what relevance it has to the audience member watching. The belief behind this ethos of Third Cinema is that the audience, rather than incapable of moving towards these concepts, are denied them by the restrictive narratives and the closed screen-audience relationship of the First and Second Cinema. “The effectiveness of the best films of militant cinema show that social sectors regarded as backward [in terms of the dominant ideology] are perfectly capable of grasping the precise meaning of a visual metaphor, a montage effect, or some linguistic experiment as long as it relates to a determinate idea” (Solanas & Getino, 1973 pp10). The audience are given the space and time, both of which are restricted and controlled in dominant cultures, to imbue the film with their own meaning. This action then extends the openness of Listen To Britain; it is no longer a film with a single reading, it has become a film dependent on its audience for its specific meaning.