By:
Anshuman Tripathy
4MAIS
Post World War II, when most colonial powers fell short of their powers and had to give off colonies their independence globally, a new cultural movement arose worldwide: Third Cinema. The idea of the Third Cinema urges filmmakers to resist imperialism and colonialism/neocolonialism by telling stories of struggle from their own perspective.
In the 1960s, two Argentinian filmmakers, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, wrote a manifesto called “Toward a Third Cinema.” This inspired filmmakers in the Latin American region, Asia, and Africa. Third cinema aimed to get more stories of struggles out from the Third World. The concept of Third Cinema was Marxist: anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist. It even developed its foundations from Antonio Gramsci’s theory of Cultural Hegemony.
The reason Third Cinema was called Third was also due to Solanas and Gettino’s critique of American Hollywood and European cinema. They pointed out how the Hollywood industry assumed its audiences to be passive consumers and was heavily driven by profit motives which dumbed down the audiences and undermined the power of the masses and their ability to change the status quo. The Second Cinema, according to them, was a response to the Golden Age of Hollywood, but it also seemed far from reality and heavily focused on aesthetics.
Third Cinema became a way of resistance in terms of entertainment and culture. The voice of people from the Third World. Third Cinema was heavily political. Hence, it was frowned upon by elite filmmakers of the West. The idea that Cinema is considered a tool for social change or revolution started becoming more prominent.
The spread of these ideas into Africa continued: in December 1895, the Cinema was invented by the Lumiere brothers in Paris, France. It also got carried to its African colonies. It became a tool for the French to develop narratives in the context of Africans and represent them as savages in their films. This gave them stronger support back home to rule over the African continent. Hence, a sense of cultural superiority of the Europeans was built over the Africans through narrative building. In the later years, the French prime minister 1935 introduced a law controlling the content of motion pictures filmed in French African colonies called the Laval Decree. It was used to prevent African filmmakers from filming in Africa.
Such was a movie called The Battle of Algiers (1966). This focused on The Algerian resistance spanning from 1954 to 1962, with a focal point on the activities of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria. The film frames FLN's actions as part of a larger campaign to destabilize colonial rule, capturing the complexities and moral ambiguities inherent in the struggle for independence.
Another movie under the African Third Cinema was Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo’s 1967 movie Soleil O, which dealt with the problems of Africans working in France (racism and inferiority complex). Djibril Mambety’s 1973 Touki Bouki movie is based on the story of two people who plan an escape to France from Senegal. Ousmane Sembene, the father of African Cinema, directed the most famous La Noire de… (1966), which literally translates to Black Girl. It delves around the story of a teenage Senegalese girl who goes to France to work.
The African regional governments have made active efforts to support the idea of growing cinema and popularizing the minds of the masses as a part of decolonizing the minds. The Carthage cinema days are an example of this. It was a film festival started in the north of Tunisia to promote African-made movies. The continuous efforts led to a pan-African identity and united African countries against colonial countries by making them aware of the generational damage left behind. It also helped liberate African cinema politically, economically, and culturally, mainly through the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers. Filmmakers were encouraged to make documentaries exposing colonialism and, in the process, develop their own aesthetics in the cinema industry.
To the end, with a quote, Sembene, in a lecture on his views on Cinema as Activism, said, “Cinema is like an ongoing political rally with the audience. In a movie theater, you have Catholics, Muslims, Gaullists, and communists if the film is good. Each sees what they want. I was driven to [use] films as a more effective tool for my activism. To summarise history using our oral tradition, cinema is an important tool for us. Of all the arts, it’s the form of expression that's most accessible and appealing to a large audience. Unfortunately, it requires a costly investment of money and human effort.”
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