Third Cinema is a cinema committed to social and cultural emancipation. In this book, Mike Wayne argues that Third Cinema is absolutely central to key debates concerning contemporary film practices and cultures. As a body of films, Third Cinema expands our horizons of the medium and its possibilities. Wayne develops Third Cinema theory by exploring its dialectical relations with First Cinema (dominant,commercial) and Second Cinema (arthouse,auteur). Discussing an eclectic range of films, from Evita to Dollar Mambo, The Big Lebowski to The Journey, Amistad to Camp de Thiaroye, Political Film explores the affinities and crucial political differences between First and Third Cinema. Third Cinema's relationship with Second Cinema is explored via the cinematic figure of the bandit (Bandit Queen, The General, Eskiya). The continuities and differences with European precursors such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Lukacs, Brecht and Walter Benjamin are also assessed. The book is a polemical call for a film criticism that is politically engaged with the life of the masses. "Importantly Mike Wayne reopens debate about Third Cinema, clarifies what it means, and insists on the importance of film theory and practice that is politically engaged with the life of the masses." -- New Political Science" Though most readers of this interesting book will find much with which to disagree, Wayne's tendency to range widely and to offer succinct and challenging summaries of traditional critical positions, and his particular commitment to an activist, revolutionary tradition in cinema that reaches from the Soviet silents to Cuban cinema of the 1990s will challenge and stimulate students of alternative cinematic practice. This book will be of interest in academic collections supporting study of radical film traditions, particularly those from Latin America, at all levels." -- CHOICE Mike Wayne lectures at Brunel University and is the editor of Dissident Voices, also available from Pluto Press. Political Film The Dialectics of Third Cinema By Mike Wayne Pluto Press Copyright © 2001 Mike Wayne All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-7453-1669-7 Contents Introduction, 1 Third Cinema as Critical Practice: A Case Study of The Battle of Algiers, 2 Precursors, 3 Dialectics of First and Third Cinema, 4 Dialectics of Second Cinema: The Bandit, 5 Dialectics of Third Cinema, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 Third Cinema as Critical Practice: A Case Study of The Battle of Algiers What is Third Cinema? Above all the term designates a body of theory and filmmaking practice committed to social and cultural emancipation. This body of filmmaking is small, indeed tiny in terms of world cinema output. Yet Third Cinema films are amongst the most exciting and challenging films ever to be made, their political and cultural significance amplified by their proximity and intervention into the major historical processes of the epoch. Third Cinema can work with different forms of documentary and across the range of fictional genres. It challenges both the way cinema is conventionally made (for example, it has pioneered collective and democratic production methods) and the way it is consumed. It refuses to be mere entertainment, yet banish from your mind a cinema that is worthy but dull or a cinema of simplistic polemics. Third Cinema is passionate, angry, often satirical, always complex. Yet at the level of theory, Third Cinema is a concept in need of development in the face of its underdevelopment; a concept in need of clarification in the face of confusion and misunderstanding; a concept in need of defence in the face of contesting and indeed hostile theories and politics. Although it has precursors, particularly in the Soviet cinema of the 1920s, it emerged in the decade after and was influenced by the 1959 Cuban Revolution. From the beginning, Third Cinema, like revolutionary praxis generally, sought to integrate theory and practice – key filmmakers, particularly, but not exclusively the Latin Americans, also wrote manifestos and considered theoretical reflections on the cultural and political implications of filmmaking. The Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, founder member of that country's Cinema Novo in the 1960s, spoke of a 'cinema of hunger', one desperate for social and cultural justice (Rocha, 1997:59–61). Julio Garciá Espinosa, the Cuban filmmaker and one-time director of the Cuban Film Institute, rejected the technical and aesthetic criteria of dominant cinema, advocating instead an 'imperfect cinema' (Espinosa, 1997:71–82). Fernando Birri, the Argentinian filmmaker who revolutionised documentary filmmaking in that country, called for a cinema that awakens/clarifies and strengthens a revolutionary consciousness; a cinema that disturbs, shocks and weakens reactionary ideas; a cinema that is anti-bourgeois at a national level and anti-imperialist at an international level; and a cinema that intervenes in the process of creating