TOWARDS A THIRD CINEMA
(Africa- Morocco )

“The Hour of the Furnaces”, Towards a Third Cinema, O. Getino and F. Solanas, excerpt from Cine, Cultura y descolonizacion, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, Buenos Aires, 1973

“Just a short time ago it would have seemed like a Quixotic adventure in the colonized, neocolonialized, or even in the imperialist nations themselves to make any attempt to create films of decolonization that turned their backs on or actively opposed the System. Until recently, film had been synonymous with show or amusement: in a word, it was one more consumer good. At best, films succeeded in bearing witness to the decay of bourgeois values and testifying to social injustice. As a rule, films only dealt with effect, never with cause; it was cinema of mystification or anti-historicism. It was surplus value cinema. Caught up in these conditions, films, the most valuable tool of communication of our times, were destined to satisfy only the ideological and economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the lords of the world film market, the great majority of whom were from the United States. Was it possible to overcome this situation?”

“We can hope, however, that with the emergence of Third World countries, new kinds of cinema will appear and, like what the Vietnamese and Algerians have done and what the Palestinians are beginning to do, without forgetting a number of independent Latin American filmmakers, will nurture the production of films promoting an essential “decolonisation” of minds in the field of cinema. The contribution of political cinema from Western Europe and North America is also important.”

“A. a first world is made up of two superpowers who compete to extend their hegemony: the United States and the Soviet Union.

B. A second world is made up essentially of what have become secondary imperialisms: the countries of eastern Europe, Canada, Japan.

C. Finally, a third world, which is the Third World, made up of nations that have been pillaged and devastated by Western and Japanese imperialism, accompanied by social-imperialist Russia, which uses new tactics to infiltrate itself and extend its branches in all directions.”

“The fundamental difference between the theory of third cinema and interventionist cinema as practised in Africa and the Arab world undoubtedly lies in the disparity of contexts: the Latin American continent has certainly been colonized and neo-colonized economically and politically, but it has never experienced a brutal breakdown of identity as suffered by Africans and Arabs, subjected to total colonization: as far as we know, the intellectual and artistic elites in Latin America do not express themselves in American! As a result, many African and Arab films are devoted to an affirmation of cultural identity, a concern that could seem folkloric to a foreign gaze, or to an exacerbated nationalism that could seem concerning elsewhere.”

“From a population of 22 million inhabitants, in 1981, three and a half million were unemployed and piled into slums. After the relative democratisation that accompanied the period of reconquest of the formerly Spanish Sahara, oppression grew considerably worse, culminating in the Casablanca massacres of 1981. In September of the same year, the leader of the UFSP (Socialist Union of Popular Forces) was imprisoned, joining the political detainees that the regime had been keeping in its jails for years.”