Third Cinema

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Third Cinema is a kind of cinema that is anti-colonialism, anti-racialism and so on. It was originally made by third world film makers but now is found more in the first world. It is a kind of film of political issues, not mere entertainment.

Third Cinema is a form of cinema which decries neocolonialism, the capitalist system, and the Hollywood model of cinema as mere entertainment to make money. The term was coined in the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema, written in the late 1960s by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino.

Solanas and Getino's manifesto considers 'First Cinema' to be the Hollywood production model that promulgates bourgeois values to a passive audience through escapist spectacle and individual characters. 'Second Cinema' is the European art film, which rejects Hollywood conventions but is centred on the individual expression of the auteur director. Third Cinema rejects the view of cinema as a vehicle for personal expression, seeing the director instead as part of a collective; it appeals to the masses by presenting the truth and inspiring aggressive activity. Solanas and Getino argue that traditional exhibition models also need to be avoided: the films should be screened clandestinely, so that the viewer must take a risk to see them.^[1]

[edit] References

^ David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction, 2nd edtn. (McGraw-Hill, 2003), 545.

[edit] Further reading

Wayne, Mike Political Film:The Dialectics of Third Cinema. Pluto Press, 2001.
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, "Towards a Third Cinema" in: Movies and Methods. An Anthology, edited by Bill Nichols, Berkeley: University of California Press 1976, pp 44-64