Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema / Edition 1

by Mike Wayne

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745316697
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	08/20/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Mike Wayne is professor of film and television studies at Brunel University. He is the author of Marxism and Media Studies (2003) and Political Film (2001), and the editor of Understanding Film (2005) and Dissident Voices (1998), all published by Pluto Press.

Read an Excerpt

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 new people, new societies, new histories, new art and new cinemas (Birri, 1997a:86–7). But it was the Argentinian filmmakers Solanas and Getino (1997:33–58) who coined the term 'Third Cinema' in their theoretical reflections on their ground-breaking documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (1968).

However, although theory was always a key component of Third Cinema, as a body of theoretical work, it remains significantly under-developed in terms of its grasp of First Cinema and Second Cinema. Understandably, the main concern, not only in the 1960s/early 1970s, but in the 'second wave' of interest in Third Cinema during the 1980s (see Gabriel, 1982 and Pines and Willemen, 1989), has been to develop theory in a way that is immediately and directly relevant to Third Cinema filmmaking. First and Second Cinema was sketched by Getino and Solanas as, respectively, dominant commercial cinema and art cinema (1997:33–4). And that has remained pretty much that within Third Cinema theory. There are four reasons why this is no longer satisfactory and why Third Cinema, if it is to develop theoretically, that is as a critical practice, must develop its understanding of First and Second Cinema.

1) We need more nuanced and complex accounts of First and Second Cinema in order to rescue Third Cinema from the common conflation that is made between Third Cinema and Third World Cinema. Third Cinema is not to be restricted to the so-called Third World. First, Second and Third Cinemas do not designate geographical areas, but institutional structures/working practices, associated aesthetic strategies and their attendant cultural politics. Thus, if we understand First and Second Cinema in more complexity, we will be more ready to understand that we can have First and Second Cinema in the Third World and Third Cinema in the First World.

2) Since First, Second and Third Cinemas denote institutional practices and sets of aesthetic strategies, it follows that all three cinemas take up their own distinctive positionings in relation to a shared referent: i.e. the historical, social world around them. Thus each cinema also has relations of dialogue, interchange and transformation between them as each works over and on the same cultural/political material (e.g. anticolonial struggle), but pulls and shapes the material into different, often radically different, meanings and possibilities. From the beginning, Third Cinema was understood, by Birri for example, as a dialectical transformation of First and Second Cinema, not a simple rejection of them.

'Commercial' cinema has won its audience by any method going. We cannot support it. The 'cinema of expression' uses the best methods, and scorns the mass audience. We cannot support it either. Once again, the contradiction between art and industry is resolved very badly, except for the 'select' minority who make up the audience of the 'cinema of expression', for whom such a solution is perfectly satisfactory. (Birri, 1997a:88)

But we cannot understand this dialectical transformation – what Third Cinema is/could be, what it has to offer that the other cinemas do not, why it is so urgently needed and the complex relations of interchange and difference between First, Second and Third Cinema – if we have only a rudimentary grasp of Cinemas One and Two.

3) Extending Third Cinema into the analysis of First and Second Cinema should also be seen as a counter-hegemonic move aimed at challenging some of the more ivory-towered paradigms within film studies, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies and postmodernism. Surveying these theoretical currents, one is reminded of the opening pages of The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels ridicule German academics and intellectuals who imagine that the 'general chaos' and 'universal ferment' of ideas generated by the demise of Hegelian philosophy has produced a 'revolution beside which the French Revolution was child's play' (1989:39). Their location within the social division of labour makes intellectuals peculiarly prone to over-estimating the power of ideas and underestimating the importance of the social forces which make or break ideas. Postmodernism, for example, advocates a liberal multiculturalism or hybridity at the expense of understanding the material divisions that can exist irrespective of cultural exchanges, or how the struggle for resources which have been made scarce due to the social relations of production unleashes (as it did in formerly cosmopolitian Sarajevo) the fundamentalist cultural politics (nationalism and ethnic tribalism) against which advocacy of liberal hybridity is a mere straw in the wind. It would be peculiar, in a book about cinema, to dismiss the importance of ideas, but the power, direction and meaning of ideas depends on the social forces with which they are articulated. A Third Cinema analysis of Cinemas One, Two and Three helps lay the basis for a genuinely socialist, indeed, Marxist engagement with the medium and broaden the concerns of film studies beyond the rather narrow middle-class constituency which currently limits it.

4) Finally, developing the theory of Third Cinema may be seen as something of a 'holding operation' in the dark times of neoliberalism's hegemony. Revolutionary conjunctures are the womb from which Third Cinema emerges, and while Third Cinema can be made in conditions which are temporally and spatially distant from revolutionary conjunctures (examples of Third Cinema are still being made today), inspiration, political tradition and memory are the umbilical cord that nourishes Third Cinema in a time of reaction and barbarism. When the time comes, as it surely must (the very survival of the human race depends upon it), for new revolutionary upheavals, then any interim developments in the theory of Third Cinema may make a small contribution to subsequent practical interventions.

ONCE AGAIN, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS

If we can find a single film that straddles First, Second and Third Cinemas, while nevertheless operating largely within the gravitational pull of First and Second Cinema, then we are in a better position to understand the complex cultural interactions designated by these numerical categories, as well as the theoretical and political issues at stake in making distinctions between these cinemas. Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers, much written about, and enjoying the status of a 'classic', will serve as one such text. As an Italian communist and anti-fascist, Pontecorvo had fought against Italian fascism and the subsequent German occupation of Italy during the Second World War. The Battle of Algiers was made in Algeria with the blessing and help of the Algerian government in 1965, three years after independence had been won from France. So, clearly the film was made in conditions that allowed it proximity to the social, historical and cultural specificities of the Algerian people, while the film's key cultural worker, the director, had some first-hand knowledge and experience of the kind of guerrilla warfare that the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) deployed. Although Robert Stam and Louise Spence describe The Battle of Algiers as a 'Third World' film (1985), the key creative positions in the production of the film were occupied by Italians. Pontecorvo also co-wrote the script with Franco Solinas and collaborated with Ennio Morricone on the music track. It makes more sense then to locate The Battle of Algiers as a European film about the Third World. This does not of course determine its location within our three categories of cinema. Conversely, if the film were more authentically Algerian, it would not automatically qualify as Third Cinema, since (it is worth restating) Third Cinema and Third World Cinema are not the same thing. Is geography irrelevant then? Not quite. Locating The Battle of Algiers geographically as European does give us some indication of the cultural influences on the film. From the perspective of Third Cinema, the task of the filmmaker is to be adequately cognisant of the politics of those cultural influences and be ready, if necessary, to rework them.

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS: THE CRITICAL RECEPTION

The critical reception of the film has always in fact been mixed. At the time of its release it won a number of prestigious awards on the international film festival circuit, but it was also criticised by writers and filmmakers on the left for being too similar to dominant cinema and not sufficiently reworking the language of the medium. Peter Sainsbury for example complained that the film mobilised the thriller format in its depiction of a 'suspenseful battle of tactics between hunters and hunted, action and counter-action' which blocked exploration of the political complexities and processes of the Algerian revolution (1971:6). As we shall see, this critique is made with some justification. Nevertheless, one can also sympathise with Pontecorvo when he rejects what he calls the bourgeois 'rich kids' who, in advocating radical avant-garde aesthetic strategies, dismiss his film (and it is a great film in many ways) as hopelessly compromised by its attachment to dramatic action, narrative, character identification and so on. From this avant-garde position, articulated for example by the French journal Cahiers du cinéma, Pontecorvo's film exists wholly 'within the system'.

Pontecorvo's critics wanted filmmakers to engage much more radically with questions of form, with the language of cinema, its aesthetic strategies, its signifying practices and interrogate the politics of those formal operations (Harvey, 1980:62). These are all perfectly legitimate and indeed urgent questions, and a vital component of Third Cinema. However, the persistent failure of the western avant-garde is its tendency to move from a self-conscious exploration of form for the purpose of 'social intelligibility' to a celebration of form for its own sake. (The phrase 'social intelligibility' refers to the ambition to make the social world intelligible or explicable. It yokes the question of artistic form to cognition and knowledge. The phrase comes from Paul Willemen's excellent essay on Third Cinema (1989).) The celebration of form for its own sake (known as formalism) eclipses the substantive 'content' of a cultural artifact, while aesthetic matters generally are severed from the political, social and economic circumstances in which the cultural artifact circulates. The tension between a necessary attention to form and the dangerous lure of formalism can be traced back to Trotsky's debate with the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s, and it drove much radical film theory and practice in the 1970s into something of an élitist cul-de-sac (Harvey, 1980:108–10).

The great advantage of Third Cinema is that while it is politically oppositional to dominant cinema (and Second Cinema), it does not seek, at the level of form and cinematic language, to reinvent cinema from scratch (it is too interested in history for that); nor does it adopt a position of pure opposition on the question of form (it is too interested in communication for that); instead, its relation to First and Second Cinema is dialectical: i.e. it seeks to transform rather than simply reject these cinemas; it seeks to bring out their stifled potentialities, those aspects of the social world they repress or only obliquely acknowledge; Third Cinema seeks to detach what is positive, life-affirming and critical from Cinemas One and Two and give them a more expanded, socially connected articulation.

Pontecorvo's response to his critics correctly identified two blind spots within formalism. Firstly, he argued that 'the system', capitalism, is contradictory, something that is evident to any cultural theory and practice which has not withdrawn from a wider world of political and social conflict.

I believe that a producer will make a political film, even if it is against his class sense, as long as he thinks he can make money with it. I think he would even make a film which shows that his father is a thief and his mother a whore if he is sure to make money. So it depends on the situation at the moment. (Georgakas and Rubenstein, 1983:95)

Here Pontecorvo identifies a contradiction between the short-term interests of capitalism (to make money) and its long-term interests (not to produce ideas that may challenge its legitimacy). This contradiction opens an important institutional and cultural space 'within the system' for progressive filmmaking such as Pontecorvo's and, even closer to dominant cinema, films like Costa Gavras's Missing (1981) and John Boorman's The Emerald Forest (1985). However, Pontecorvo's point notwithstanding, it is still legitimate to ask what the limits of such films are: what meanings can they not articulate? what ambitions can they not countenance? It is a crucial component of Third Cinema to expand our political and cultural horizons, to imagine alternatives to what is and refuse to accept what is as coterminous with what can be. This expansion of our horizons is as much about what cinema can and cannot do as it is about calling for change in the wider social world. So while there are contradictions within capitalism, while there is some latitude for progressive cultural workers, we must not block up our capacity to imagine radically different cinemas and visions of radically different social and political relations. In this sense Third Cinema is a utopian cinema, anticipating radical change, harbouring its potential in the present and remembering where it has flowered in the past.

Pontecorvo's second argument in defence of his film also has its merits but, again, there are caveats which have to be entered. Pontecorvo points out that for those people actively involved in revolutionary politics (the Cubans, the Black Panthers, etc.) the film has been received more positively. Pontecorvo's claims for his film are modest. It may not be 'a great help but a help' (Georgakas and Rubenstein, 1983:95) to such groups involved in struggles against racism and imperialism. Certainly Pontecorvo is right to point to the role of the audience, that they are social beings located in particular times and places, potentially very active in engaging with the cinematic text. It is precisely this question of the role of the audience and the nature of their engagement with the text that is central to Third Cinema. Indeed Third Cinema has appropriated the theme of the active spectator from the avant-garde. As Espinosa noted in an early Third Cinema manifesto:

(Continues…)

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Table of 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