A Cinema of Decolonization ✊
Coined by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in the late 1960s, the concept of Third Cinema proposed a radical alternative to the dominant modes of filmmaking:
- First Cinema: Hollywood. A commercial industry focused on entertainment and capitalist values.
- Second Cinema: European Art Cinema. Focused on the individual expression of an auteur director, often for a bourgeois audience.
- Third Cinema: A revolutionary cinema of the people. Its goal is not to entertain or express, but to liberate. It is a tool for political consciousness, social change, and the decolonization of the mind and the screen.
The African Vanguard
Nowhere was the spirit of Third Cinema more powerfully embodied than in the work of the first generation of post-independence African filmmakers. Ousmane Sembène of Senegal, often called the ‘Father of African Cinema,’ is the movement’s most iconic figure. His films were a direct challenge to the colonial narratives that had dominated screens across the continent.
Key characteristics of Third Cinema in Africa include:
- Political Engagement: Films directly confront the legacy of colonialism, neocolonialism, political corruption, and the clash between tradition and modernity.
- Collective Protagonist: The hero is often not an individual, but an entire community—a village, a group of workers—struggling collectively against oppression.
- Use of Indigenous Languages: A deliberate political act to reject the languages of the colonizers and affirm local culture.
- Alternative Distribution: The ideal was to screen these films outside of commercial theaters, in community gatherings where they could be discussed and debated, turning the screening into a political event.
Films like Sembène’s Xala (1975), a sharp satire on the new African bourgeoisie, and Moolaadé (2004), a powerful indictment of female genital mutilation, are landmark examples of Third Cinema’s enduring power and influence.