Rethinking Third Cinema

Wimal Dissanayake, Anthony Guneratne, Wimal Dissanayake, Anthony Guneratne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134613236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This important anthology addresses established notions about Third Cinema theory, and the cinema practice of developing and postcolonial nations. The 'Third Cinema' movement called for a politicised film-making practice in Africa, Asia and Latin America, one which would take on board issues of race, class, religion, and national integrity. The films which resulted from the movement, from directors such as Ousmane Sembene, Satyajit Ray and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, are among the most culturally signficant, politically sophisticated and frequently studied films of the 1960s and 1970s. However, despite the contemporary popularity and critical attention enjoyed by films from Asia and Latin America in particular, Third Cinema and Third Cinema theory appears to have lost its momentum.
Rethinking Third Cinema seeks to bring Third Cinema and Third Cinema theory back into the critical spotlight. The contributors address the most difficult and challenging questions Third Cinema poses, suggesting new methodologies and redirections of existing ones. Crucially, they also re-examine the entire phenomenon of film-making in a fast-vanishing 'Third World', with case studies of the cinemas of India, Iran and Hong Kong, among others.

Part I
Third Cinema theory and beyond

In Unthinking Eurocentrism Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have made what is perhaps the most important recent contribution to Third Cinema theory. A comprehensive, yet measured critique of the very forces Third Cinema filmmakers opposed in their practices, it is clearly the result of many years of work in the often embattled terrain of alternative media practices. It is also an eloquent rebuttal, replete with detailed examples, that serves as an historical refutation of the emerging schools of thought that find themselves in denial about the effects of media imperialism and neocolonial exploitation.

Stam’s present essay is many things at once. It is a major contribution to a prosaics of cinema inflected by the theories of the Russian classicist and philosopher of language, Mikhail Bakhtin – but this is only to be expected of the author of Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). It is also one which shows that filmmakers in the Third World or those operating in the cultural framework of exile/diaspora anticipated the diffusion of Bakhtin’s arguments about pluri-spatiality and heterochronicity and used the medium to forge a radical aesthetics that offered direct challenges to the monological aesthetics of First Cinema. At the root of these cinemas, Stam argues, was a genuine heterophony that reflected and celebrated the garbage heaps that, as both metaphor and synecdoche, inspired them.

Perhaps most crucially in the context of this project, Stam’s work is also a re-history, a rewriting of the early phase of alternative filmmaking in the Latin American bedrock of Third Cinema; eloquent proof, indeed, that the more sophisticated indigenous critics of Third Cinema never regarded the latter as a universal nostrum or the “ultimate answer” or cure for all Third World ills. Rather than resort to the abjection and what Stam terms “miserabilism” characteristic of early Third Cinema products, these cultural theorists and filmmakers turned their eyes with witty, satiric contempt on the consumerist ethos which underwrote and continues to underwrite First Cinema.

1 Beyond Third Cinema
The aesthetics of hybridity

Robert Stam

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnamese victory over the French, the Cuban revolution, and Algerian Independence, third world intellectuals called for a “tricontinental revolution” (with Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Frantz Fanon as talismanic figures). In film, this third-worldist film ideology was crystallized in a wave of militant manifesto essays – Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetic of Hunger” (1965), Fernando Solanas and Otavio Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969), and Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969) – and in declarations and manifestoes from Third World Film Festivals calling for a tricontinental revolution in politics and an aesthetic and narrative revolution in film form. Rocha called for a “hungry” cinema of “sad, ugly films,” Solanas and Getino called for militant guerilla documentaries, and Espinosa called for an “imperfect” cinema energized by the “low” forms of popular culture, where the process of communication was more important than the product, where political values were more important than “production values.”

The work of Frantz Fanon was a pervasive influence in these theories, and in the films influenced by them. The Solanas and Getino film La Hora de Los Hornos (Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), not only quotes Fanon’s adage that “Every Spectator is a Coward or a Traitor,” but also orchestrates a constellation of Fanonian themes – the psychic stigmata of colonialism, the therapeutic value of anti-colonial violence, and the urgent necessity of a new culture and a new human being. The third-worldist film manifestoes also stress anti-colonial militancy and violence, literal/political in the case of Solanas-Getino, and metaphoric/aesthetic in the case of Rocha. “Only through the dialectic of violence,” Rocha wrote, “will we reach lyricism.”

“Third Cinema” offered a Fanon-inflected version of Brechtian aesthetics, along with a dash of “national culture.” At the same time, it offered a practical production strategy which turned scarcity, as Ismail Xavier put it, “into a signifier.”¹ While “Third Cinema” represented a valid alternative to the dominant Hollywood model in an early period, it is important to remember that it represents only one model of alternative filmmaking. Rather than measure all alternative models against “Third Cinema” as an ideal type, it is more useful, I think, to envision a wide spectrum of alternative practices. Indeed, cultural discourse in the Third World, and especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, has been fecund in neologistic aesthetics, both literary and cinematic: “lo real maravilloso americano” (Carpentier), the “aesthetics of hunger” (Glauber Rocha), “megotage” or “cigarette-butt” cinema (Ousmane Sembène), “Cine imperfecto” (Julio García Espinosa), the “aesthetics of garbage” (Rogerio Sganzerla), the “salamander” (as opposed to the Hollywood dinosaur) aesthetic (Paul Leduc), “termite terrorism” (Gilhermo del Toro), “anthropophagy” (the Brazilian Modernists), “Tropicalia” (Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso), “rasquachismo” (Tomas-Ibarra Frausto), “signifying-monkey aesthetics” (Henry Louis Gates), “nomadic aesthetics” (Teshome Gabriel), “diaspora aesthetics” (Kobena Mercer), “neo-hoodoo aesthetics” (Ishmael Reed), and “santeria” aesthetics (Arturo Lindsay). Most of these alternative aesthetics revalorize by inversion what had formerly been seen as negative, especially within colonialist discourse. Thus ritual cannibalism, for centuries the very name of the savage, abject other, becomes with the Brazilian modernistas an anti-colonialist trope and a term of value. (Recall that even the triumphant literary movement “magic realism” inverts the colonial view of magic as irrational superstition.) At the same time, these aesthetics share the jujitsu trait of turning strategic weakness into tactical strength. By appropriating an existing discourse for their own ends, they deploy the force of the dominant against domination.²

Here I would like to focus on three related aspects of these aesthetics, specifically: (1) their constitutive hybridity; (2) their chronotopic multiplicity; and (3) their common motif of the redemption of detritus. After arguing the special qualifications of the cinema for realizing such a hybrid, multitemporal aesthetic, I will conclude with the case of the Brazilian “aesthetics of garbage” as the point of convergence of all our themes, specifically examining three films literally and figuratively “about” garbage.

Hybridity

Although hybridity has been a perennial feature of art and cultural discourse in Latin America – highlighted in such terms as mestizaje, indianismo, diversalite, creolite, raza cosmica – it has recently been recoded as a symptom of the postmodern, postcolonial and post-nationalist moment.³ The valorization of hybridity, it should be noted, is itself a form of jujitsu, since within colonial discourse the question of hybridity was linked to the prejudice against race-mixing, the “degeneration of blood,” and the conjectured infertility of mulattoes.⁴ But if the nationalist discourse of the 1960s drew sharp lines between First World and Third World, oppressor and oppressed, post-nationalist discourse replaces such binarisms with a more nuanced spectrum of subtle differentiations, in a new global regime where First World and Third World are mutually imbricated.⁵ Notions of ontologically referential identity metamorphose into a conjunctural play of identifications. Purity gives way to “contamination.” Rigid paradigms collapse into sliding metonymies. Erect, militant postures give way to an orgy of “positionalities.” Once secure boundaries become more porous; an iconography of barbed-wire frontiers mutates into images of fluidity and crossing. A rhetoric of unsullied integrity gives way to miscegenated grammars and scrambled metaphors. A discourse of “media imperialism” gives way to reciprocity and “indigenization.” Colonial tropes of irreconcilable dualism give way to postcolonial tropes drawing on the diverse modalities of mixedness: religious (syncretism); botanical (hybridity); linguistic (creolization); and genetic (mestizaje).

Although hybridity has existed wherever civilizations conflict, combine and synthesize, it reached a kind of violent paroxysm with the European colonization of the Americas. The conquista shaped a new world of practices and ideologies of mixing, making the Americas the scene of unprecedented combinations of indigenous peoples, Africans, and Europeans, and later of immigrant diasporas from all over the world. But hybridity has never been a peaceful encounter, a tension-free theme park; it has always been deeply entangled with colonial violence. While for some hybridity is lived as just another metaphor within a Derridean free play, for others it is alive as painful, visceral memory. Indeed, as a descriptive catch-all term, “hybridity” fails to discriminate between the diverse modalities of hybridity, such as colonial imposition (for example, the Catholic Church constructed on top of a destroyed Inca temple), or other interactions such as obligatory assimilation, political cooptation, cultural mimicry, commercial exploitation, top-down appropriation, or bottom-up subversion. Hybridity, in other words, is power-laden and asymmetrical. Hybridity is also cooptable. In Latin America, national identity has often been officially articulated as hybrid, through hypocritically integrationist ideologies that have glossed over and concealed subtle racial hegemonies.

Brazilian composer-singer Gilberto Gil calls attention to the power-laden nature of syncretism in his 1989 song “From Bob Dylan to Bob Marley: A Provocation Samba.” The lyrics inform us that Bob Dylan, after converting to Christianity, made a reggae album, thus returning to the house of Israel by way of the Caribbean. The lyrics set into play a number of broad cultural parallels, between Jewish symbiology and Jamaican Rastafarianism, between the Inquisition’s persecution of Jews (and Muslims) and the European suppression of African religions (“When the Africans arrived on these shores/ there was no freedom of religion”), ultimately contrasting the progressive syncretism of a Bob Marley (who died “because besides being Black he was also Jewish”) with the alienation of a Michael Jackson, who “besides turning white … is becoming sad.” Gil celebrates hybridity and syncretism, then, but articulates them in relation to the asymmetrical power relations engendered by colonialism. For oppressed people, artistic syncretism is not a game but an arduous negotiation, an exercise, as the song’s lyrics put it, both of “resistance” and “surrender.”⁶

Chronotopic multiplicity

Current theoretical literature betrays a fascination with the notion of simultaneous, superimposed spatio-temporalities. The widely disseminated trope of the palimpsest, the parchment on which are inscribed the layered traces of diverse moments of past writing, contains within it this idea of multiple temporalities. The postmodern moment, similarly, is seen as chaotically plural and contradictory, while its aesthetic is seen as an aggregate of historically dated styles randomly reassembled in the present. But this oxymoronic space-time is not found only in recent theoretical literature. It was anticipated in Benjamin’s “revolutionary nostalgia,” in Ernst Bloch’s conjugation of the now and the “not yet,” in Braudel’s multiple-speed view of history, in Althusser’s “overdetermination” and “uneven development,” in Raymond Williams’s “residual and emergent” discourses, in Jameson’s “nostalgia for the present,” and in David Harvey’s “time-space compression.” Bakhtinian dialogism, in the same vein, alludes to the temporally layered matrix of communicative utterances that “reach” the text not only through recognizable citations but also through a subtle process of dissemination. In a very suggestive formulation, Bakhtin evokes the multiple epochs intertextually “buried” in the work of Shakespeare. The “semantic treasures Shakespeare embedded in his works,” Bakhtin writes:

were created and collected through the centuries and even millennia: they lay hidden in the language, and not only in the literary language, but also in those strata of the popular language that before Shakespeare’s time had not entered literature, in the diverse genres and forms of speech communication, in the forms of a mighty national culture (primarily carnival forms) that were shaped through millennia, in theatre-spectacle genres (mystery plays, farces, and so forth), in plots whose roots go back to prehistoric antiquity.⁷

(Bakhtin, 1986: 5)

Bakhtin thus points to the temporally palimpsestic nature of all artistic texts, seen within a millennial, longue durée.⁸ Nor is this aesthetic the special preserve of canonical writers, since dialogism operates within all cultural production, whether literate or non-literate, highbrow or lowbrow. Rap music’s aesthetic of sampling and cut ‘n’ mix, for example, can be seen as a street-smart, low-budget embodiment of Bakhtin’s theories of temporally embedded intertextuality, since rap’s multiple strands derive from sources as diverse as African call-and-response patterns, disco, funk, the Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, Muhammed Ali, doo-wop groups, skip rope rhymes, prison and army songs, signifying and “the dozens,” all the way back to the storytelling folk historians, the griots, of Nigeria and Gambia.⁹ Rap bears the stamp and rhythm of multiple times and meters; as in artistic collage or literary quotation, the sampled texts carry with them the time-connoted memory of their previous existences.

The redemption of detritus

The third shared feature of these hybrid bricolage aesthetics is their common leitmotif of the strategic redemption of the low, the despised, the imperfect, and the “trashy” as part of a social overturning. This strategic redemption of the marginal also has echoes in the realms of high theory and cultural studies. One thinks, for example, of Derrida’s recuperation of the marginalia of the classical philosophical text, of Bakhtin’s exaltation of “redeeming filth” and of low “carnivalized” genres, of Benjamin’s “trash of history” and his view of the work of art as constituting itself out of apparently insignificant fragments, of Deleuze and Guattari’s recuperation of stigmatized psychic states such as schizophrenia, of Camp’s ironic reappropriation of kitsch, of Cultural Studies’ recuperation of sub-literary forms and “subcultural styles,” and of James Scott’s “weapons of the weak.”

In the plastic arts, the “garbage girls” (Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Christy Rupp, Betty Beaumont) deploy waste disposal as a trampoline for art. Ukeles, for example, choreographed a “street ballet” of garbage trucks. (One is reminded of the “dance of the garbage can lids” in the Donen-Kelly musical It’s Always Fair Weather.) Betty Beaumont makes installation art on toxic waste-dumps using government surplus materials.¹⁰ Joseph Cornell, similarly, turned the flotsam of daily life – broken doll...