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Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema
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.
- GenresFilmNonfiction
176 pages, Paperback
First published June 20, 2001
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About the author
Mike Wayne
21 books2 followersMike Wayne is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Brunel University, London. He is the author of England's Discontents: History, Politics, Culture and Identities (Pluto, 2018), Understanding Film (Pluto, 2005) and Marxism and Media Studies (Pluto, 2003).
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May 29, 2011
Having finished Julianne Burton's Cinema and Social Change in Latin America (a recommendation from the footnotes in Luis Camnitzer's book, Conceptualism in Latin American Art), I decided to read this book for an overview of the Third Cinema movement. As Wayne explains, Third Cinema is distinguished from First Cinema (Hollywood) and Second Cinema (Auteur or art-house cinema) in several key ways. The first is "historicity" or, the notion that the conditions for radical change in the future exist in the past. Thus, history is not a closed fact or a resolved matter. History is a process, contradictory and internally conflicted. Second, Third Cinema films represent processes of politicization not as subjective epiphanies but as social processes. In other words, subjects come into political consciousness not as a result of personal subjective breaks, neither as a result of private meditations on "the human condition" or the great truths of the universe. Rather, consciousness emerges out of encounters with others, participation in historical events, and involvement in social action. Third, Third Cinema is not impartial, neutral or "balanced." Rather, it clearly arises out of a critical commitment. That is to say, the political commitment of the filmmaker has clear affinities with the struggle of peoples against capital, imperialism, racism, etc. But more than just a kind of propaganda or romance of struggles, that commitment necessitates a critical relationship to struggles. Therefore, struggles are not represented as monolithic but containing their own contradictions and internal conflicts, such as those around gender, racism, nationalism, etc. And finally, filmmakers of Third Cinema possess an awareness that as producers of culture they exist within culture as do their viewers. Thus, the text of the film draws upon and critically reflects upon the cultural specificity of viewers, situations and processes.
These four key ideas help to clarify how Third Cinema is not only distinct from the corporate world of Hollywood but also from individualistic auteur cinema. But Wayne is also careful to explain how Third Cinema exists in a dialectical relationship to those other modes of filmmaking. In fact, the methodology of dialectics is central to both Wayne's argument and Third Cinema itself. He then proceeds to illustrate the way this works in extensive comparisons between films that fall into the different kinds of cinema. This proves to be hugely useful because it gives a vary practical basis to how ideas work and how ideas emerge from practices. Likewise, while the above four key ideas could easily be reduced to merely one aspect of filmmaking -- narrative and representation -- he describes very convincingly how those propositions determine differences in the ways films are make, the aesthetic choices in films and the very modes of reception and distribution.
As Wayne describes in his introduction, this book grew out of a series of courses he taught on the subject of Third Cinema. Because of this pedagogical context, the book has an accessibility and patient deliberation that makes it tremendously useful. It very much feels like attending a series of super exciting lectures and discussions on a series of films.
This is not to say that the book is perfect. In that classic British Marxist way, Wayne all too often lapses in the most undialectical claims about specific bete noires. Anyone who has read Marxist analyses of popular culture will be familiar with the usual list of intellectual complaints. The entire fields of postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism are reduced to absurd characterizations so that they might be dismissed wholesale. One would think an interest in dialectics would take a more intellectually honest approach to these sets of ideas, none of which are entirely self-same or monolithic as Wayne would have us believe. Anyone who has an allergic reaction to that sort of polemicism may find it difficult to get through the book.
However, it's still worth the read. Wayne provides an incredibly helpful survey of key Third Cinema films, filmmakers, problematics and theoretical literature. He is also not dogmatic in his readings of the films; retaining their complex aesthetics, playfullness and sheer nuttiness alongside their passionate commitment to revolutionary struggle. In this sense, the entire Third Cinema movement comes across as simply one of the most important cultural movements in radical aesthetics in the last fifty years. Anyone who sees herself as a student of art and cultural would do well to immerse herself in this literature and artistic objects. I guarantee, you'll learn far more about radical aesthetics in practice than any de jure French philosopher or art critic.
One final note; for all its usefulness, the author still seems incapable to avoiding that trap that inflicts nearly every film critic. Nearly the entire analysis and theorizing of film occurs within the field of vision. Cinema is reduced to an image permitting no specific consideration of the use of sound in the medium. Obviously, this complaint arises out of my own partisanship as a sound artist. But it just frustrates me when film critics foreclose any kind of concentrated reflection on film as a sound art (in Chion's terms). As a result, most of what comes to serve as examples of radical aesthetics in Third Cinema occur only in the area of the moving image and not in field of listening. Imagine what we might learn about the radical aesthetics of sound from particular analysis of acoustic strategies in Third Cinema? Unfortunately, that work will have to wait for another book (and for an altogether different conception of film as cultural practice).
These four key ideas help to clarify how Third Cinema is not only distinct from the corporate world of Hollywood but also from individualistic auteur cinema. But Wayne is also careful to explain how Third Cinema exists in a dialectical relationship to those other modes of filmmaking. In fact, the methodology of dialectics is central to both Wayne's argument and Third Cinema itself. He then proceeds to illustrate the way this works in extensive comparisons between films that fall into the different kinds of cinema. This proves to be hugely useful because it gives a vary practical basis to how ideas work and how ideas emerge from practices. Likewise, while the above four key ideas could easily be reduced to merely one aspect of filmmaking -- narrative and representation -- he describes very convincingly how those propositions determine differences in the ways films are make, the aesthetic choices in films and the very modes of reception and distribution.
As Wayne describes in his introduction, this book grew out of a series of courses he taught on the subject of Third Cinema. Because of this pedagogical context, the book has an accessibility and patient deliberation that makes it tremendously useful. It very much feels like attending a series of super exciting lectures and discussions on a series of films.
This is not to say that the book is perfect. In that classic British Marxist way, Wayne all too often lapses in the most undialectical claims about specific bete noires. Anyone who has read Marxist analyses of popular culture will be familiar with the usual list of intellectual complaints. The entire fields of postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism are reduced to absurd characterizations so that they might be dismissed wholesale. One would think an interest in dialectics would take a more intellectually honest approach to these sets of ideas, none of which are entirely self-same or monolithic as Wayne would have us believe. Anyone who has an allergic reaction to that sort of polemicism may find it difficult to get through the book.
However, it's still worth the read. Wayne provides an incredibly helpful survey of key Third Cinema films, filmmakers, problematics and theoretical literature. He is also not dogmatic in his readings of the films; retaining their complex aesthetics, playfullness and sheer nuttiness alongside their passionate commitment to revolutionary struggle. In this sense, the entire Third Cinema movement comes across as simply one of the most important cultural movements in radical aesthetics in the last fifty years. Anyone who sees herself as a student of art and cultural would do well to immerse herself in this literature and artistic objects. I guarantee, you'll learn far more about radical aesthetics in practice than any de jure French philosopher or art critic.
One final note; for all its usefulness, the author still seems incapable to avoiding that trap that inflicts nearly every film critic. Nearly the entire analysis and theorizing of film occurs within the field of vision. Cinema is reduced to an image permitting no specific consideration of the use of sound in the medium. Obviously, this complaint arises out of my own partisanship as a sound artist. But it just frustrates me when film critics foreclose any kind of concentrated reflection on film as a sound art (in Chion's terms). As a result, most of what comes to serve as examples of radical aesthetics in Third Cinema occur only in the area of the moving image and not in field of listening. Imagine what we might learn about the radical aesthetics of sound from particular analysis of acoustic strategies in Third Cinema? Unfortunately, that work will have to wait for another book (and for an altogether different conception of film as cultural practice).
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