Abstract All English translations to date of ‘Hacia un tercer cine’ (‘Toward a Third Cinema’), by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, are based on the original publication in Spanish of the article in the October 1969 issue of Tricontinental (Havana). However, Solanas and Getino published a revised version in 1970, with the same title, which reflected the development of their thinking following the experience of the Cine Liberación group’s extensive, and often clandestine, screenings of The Hour of the Furnaces. This article translates and discusses some of the most pertinent changes in the previously untranslated (and unacknowledged) revision; in particular, their evolving thought on Third Cinema, militant cinema and the ‘instrumentalisation’ of cinema in the rapidly changing political environment in Argentina at the time.
Abstract The manifesto ‘Toward a Third Cinema’ is the best known document of the group Cine Liberación; in it Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino introduced their concept of three types of cinema and of ‘cine‐acción’ (film event). However, because of its early appearance in October 1969, this manifesto did not fully take into account the experience of the screening of political cinema. A later document, ‘Militant Cinema: An Internal Category of Third Cinema’, written for circulation in March 1971, develops the concept of militant cinema. In this document, for the first time, Cine Liberación expanded on the practical experience of the screening of The Hour of the Furnaces and other materials, and clarified its ideas. This article introduces their discussion of ‘militant cinema’ and shows the links between the theoretical manifestos and the practical experience of the screening of the films for political purposes during the first years of Cine Liberación’s work.
Abstract ‘Militant Cinema: An Internal Category of Third Cinema’ and ‘The Cinema as Political Fact’, translated here into English for the first time, were written by Octavio Getino to further elaborate the concept of Third Cinema first defined in the article ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ that Getino wrote with Fernando Solanas in 1969. The text is thus a theoretical reflection on the film‐making practice of Cine Liberación and other groups, particularly in relation to the Peronist movement in Argentina. Leaving the question of what aesthetic forms were appropriate for militant cinema radically open, Getino defines militant cinema as practices of film‐making, distribution and exhibition that operate as an instrument of specific political organisations. In this form of political practice, the screening becomes a ‘cine‐acción’ – a ‘cinema event’ that transforms spectators into political actors participating in a process of liberation.
Abstract Forgotten in contemporary histories of cinema, Edouard de Laurot was a true fighter who spent his life participating in armed resistance in three European countries during the Second World War and later propagating revolutionary ideas across two continents. In 1964 he founded the group ‘Cinema Engagé’ in New York, providing a model for later political cinema collectives. He created two masterpieces of engaged art: Black Liberation (1967), inspired by the texts of Malcolm X, and Listen, America! (1970). Author of many articles, interviews, manifestos and scripts, de Laurot contributed to early issues of Film Culture and Cinéaste, which in 1971 published his series of articles devoted to establishing practical relations between cinema and revolution.
Abstract Edouard de Laurot’s essay ‘Composing as the Praxis of Revolution: The Third World and the USA’ was one of five theoretical texts published in the film journal Cinéaste between 1970 and 1971 under the name of Yves de Laurot. The essay is a key statement of Cinema Engagé, focusing on the artistic methodology of prolepsis as a political discourse. For de Laurot, prolepsis is to be understood as the ‘power to perceive futurity within the present’. For cinema to project the power of the ‘imaginary desirable’, which can only emerge through conflict with what exists, cinema must be understood relationally as a ‘rapprochement’ between film production and revolutionary praxis.
Abstract In March 1967 Chris Marker attended a screening of Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam) in support of the long strike at the Rhodiaceta factory that year. From 1967 to 1977 Marker worked with the SLON collective, workers and other film‐makers both on militant films during the events of May 1968 and, equally importantly, on counter‐information films in solidarity with the struggle of the Third World revolutionary movements. These films, which do not separate political content from aesthetic enquiry, demonstrate Marker's aesthetic in which editing represents a political stake. By pushing back the limits of the language of film, rejecting a classical aesthetic and bringing about an encounter between the film‐maker and the filmed through the gaze, Chris Marker makes his work political.
Abstract This article discusses the unique significance of the film Torre Bela (1977), by the German director Thomas Harlan, in the history of cinema produced during the ongoing revolutionary process (known as the PREC – which stands for ‘processo revolucionário em curso’) that succeeded the military coup in 1974 in Portugal. The film follows a group of peasants occupying a large estate in the centre of Portugal. Harlan and his crew played a crucial role in the flow of the events captured on camera, despite being invisible in the film. In this context, cinema is understood not as a mere passive observer that records events, but as a driving force of the revolution, creating a new social reality that emerges from provoked encounters between protagonists acting as political agents for the first time. In Torre Bela to be an actor or agent of revolution and to shoot a film are two sides of the same coin.
Abstract The First Pan‐African Cultural Festival took place in Algiers in July 1969 and gave rise to a collective film directed by William Klein. This film, The Pan‐African Festival of Algiers (1969), takes the form of an essay which gives coherence to a huge range of visual materials: posters, photographs, drawings, archive footage of African anti‐colonial struggles as well as sequences taken from the 1969 festival, such as interviews, rehearsals, concerts and speeches. The making of The Pan‐African Festival of Algiers coincided with the emergence of films from the Third World at a global level, often circulating alongside the films of the new waves that emerged from the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s onwards. Another trend found its second wind at this time: militant cinema with revolutionary aims of social intervention entered a golden age around the second half of the 1960s and into the 1970s. For most of the personalities who appeared in The Pan‐African Festival of Algiers it was necessary to go beyond the model of Negritude proposed by Senghor and create a new link between culture and national and continental liberation.
Abstract These texts by Margaret Dickinson consist of a short article written in 1979 for the journal of the UK film trade union, the ACTT, and explanatory notes written in 2010. While the main article is about the author's experiences of teaching film editing to absolute beginners in newly independent Mozambique, the notes provide background information about both Mozambique and ACTT. In the early 1970s elements within the ACTT proposed nationalisation as a solution to problems of the British film industry; the union commissioned a detailed report, which was hotly debated but then shelved. In Mozambique after independence in 1975 the government decided to develop cinema on the basis of partial nationalisation and established a national film institute, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC), for the purpose. There was also a personal connection between ACTT and Mozambican cinema through the film‐maker and radical thinker, Simon Hartog, who wrote the ACTT report and was subsequently employed in Mozambique to work for the INC there.
Abstract These texts by Margaret Dickinson consist of a short article written in 1979 for the journal of the UK film trade union, the ACTT, and explanatory notes written in 2010. While the main article is about the author's experiences of teaching film editing to absolute beginners in newly independent Mozambique, the notes provide background information about both Mozambique and ACTT. In the early 1970s elements within the ACTT proposed nationalisation as a solution to problems of the British film industry; the union commissioned a detailed report, which was hotly debated but then shelved. In Mozambique after independence in 1975 the government decided to develop cinema on the basis of partial nationalisation and established a national film institute, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC), for the purpose. There was also a personal connection between ACTT and Mozambican cinema through the film‐maker and radical thinker, Simon Hartog, who wrote the ACTT report and was subsequently employed in Mozambique to work for the INC there.
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