Third Cinema after the turn of the millennium: Reification of the sign and the possibility of transformation (original) (raw)

2020, E. Mazierska & L. Kristensen (Eds.). Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism (pp. 140–162). New York,: Bloomsbury Academic

Third Cinema cannot be reduced to a specific set of films, to certain modes of production or distribution, to the audiences it targets nor to its contemporaneous modes of reception and not even to the ideological programme it follows. ‘Third Cinema’, understood as the name given to a particular – yet dynamic – constellation of all of the above in the 1960s and 1970s, is a pre-eminently political project. It refers to films consciously produced in resistance to the Hollywood hegemony in Asia, Africa and, especially, Latin America during that period. Third Cinema is, perhaps more than any other, a context-specific political, aesthetic and ideological device. With historical contextuality at the very core of the Third Cinema project, the question of its existence, uses and misuses today becomes urgent. Revisiting past and present instances of films within the Third Cinema tradition, in this chapter we set out to investigate to what degree and in what ways the critical potential of the 1960s and 1970s persists today or to what degree and in what ways it has been depoliticized, its critical edge converted into reified signs of emancipation. We will concentrate on a comparison between two films made by Chilean film director Patricio Guzmán. One of them is his 1975 film La insurrección de la burguesía (The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie, first in the trilogy La batalla de Chile [The Battle of Chile]). The film documents Chilean political history in the making during Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government and up until the coup d’état, orchestrated by national and international private interest, the Chilean military and the CIA.