Rethinking Third Cinema

This innovative and timely anthology addresses established notions about Third Cinema theory and its impact on the cinematic practices of developing and postcolonial nations. Emerging from the activism of Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, the Third Cinema movement called for a politicized, tri-continental approach to film-making in Africa, Asia, and Latin America which would foreground issues of social justice, class division, ethnicity, and national identity. The films that best represented the movement, including those of such internationally respected directors as Ousmane Sembene, Satyajit Ray, Fernando Solanas, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, are among the most culturally significant and politically sophisticated texts of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet despite the popularity and critical attention enjoyed by its acknowledged masterpieces, Third Cinema and its critical framework -- notably the only major body of film theory that did not originate in a specifically Euro-American context -- appear to have lost their momentum. Rethinking Third Cinema returns Third Cinema and its theory to the critical spotlight. The contributors address the most difficult questions Third Cinema posed and continues to pose in the age of globalization, suggesting new methodologies and redirections of existing ones, while also rereading the phenomenon of film-making in a fast-vanishing "Third World". Ranging over a terrain that encompasses the majority of the world's cinemas, they offer case studies within and beyond the national cinemas of Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Argentina, China, Iran, Ghana, and India. Book jacket.