Third Cinema vs. John Waters

I have been thinking about two things in particular Philip Rosen said during Wednesday’s lecture. The first is his description of the “politically charged” environment surrounding the screening of subversive films. He used the example of watching La Hora de Los Hornos in Argentina and knowing that the police could enter at any moment and arrest everyone involved. There are similar descriptions of John Waters screenings around the same time “Toward a Third Cinema” was written. Rosen commented indirectly upon such a connection when he suggested, in response to a question about punk cinema, that while both third cinema and punk cinema stood in opposition to something, third cinema opposed a political colonial or neo-colonial system, whereas punk cinema is more about self-expression and non-conformity against a far more doubtfully and ambiguously oppressive main stream culture. John Waters seems to me to fall into this second school.

The aims of third cinema and John Waters are of course different, but the means employed to achieve them are almost exactly the same. Herein lies the curiosity of third cinema as a political movement. Solanas and Getino write on page 59, “THIRD CINEMA IS, IN OUR OPINION, THE CINEMA THAT RECOGNIZES IN THAT STRUGGLE THE MOST GIGANTIC CULTURAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND ARTISTIC MANIFESATION OF OUR TIME, THE GREAT POSSIBILITY OF CONSTRUCTING A LIBERATED PERSONALITY WITH EACH PEOPLE AS THE STARTING POINT—IN A WORD, THE DECOLONIZATION OF CULTURE.” And if all they are after is expressing a personality free of censorship, then the camera seems like a logical rifle with which to struggle, as Isabel pointed out. But, they are also interested on the very same page in health care and city planning, to name two examples, and it is not at all clear to me if cinema as an effective or plausible means to struggle for concrete political change, as Keenan’s Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television) article explores. The same “limited set of presuppositions about the link between knowledge and action, between public information or opinion and response” Keenan discusses on page 106 seems to hold true for third cinema. Only unlike television which has a mass audience, the potential fear of emotional impulses dictating foreign policy does not seem to be at issue here given third cinema’s much smaller audience. Instead it is the great indifference evidenced to Keenan by Sarajevo, for one could made to feel political watching Pink Flamingoes or La Hora de Los Hornos. The latter, however, demanded more. Therefore, my question is whether or not the cinema imagined in “Towards a Third Cinema” is plausible in terms of effective political change, both in a theoretical and historical sense. Rosen touched on the issue at the end of lecture, but I am interested in specifics. Were political changes made that could be attributed to third cinema, and if not, does it matter?

“Towards a Third Cinema” is a highly dramatic piece of writing for a highly dramatic cause—a manifesto written entirely in capital letters that claims to be dealing not only with all areas of human achievement but their most “giant…manifestations” could hardly fail to be—but without political action to back it up, the distinction between third cinema and John Waters would amount to little more than rhetoric and whether or not one likes their subversion crude and rude, or with a revolutionary spin.