ADDAMMS MUTUTA

Debates about Third Cinema are protracted and divergent among scholars of anticolonial and postcolonial cinemas. These range from utility, to varieties, aesthetics, and nuances. It is thus challenging to offer new insights in such a mature field. Yet this is what Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen do in their edited volume, Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism. This book offers a rich mix of critical essays, spanning from the political to the aesthetic and poetic. Its diverse contributors discuss Third Cinema in particularized insights which ground the field more concretely in its past, and also its future. The regional breadth covered in the book – Peru, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, China, Romania, Kenya, South Africa, Slovenia, Mali, Mexico, and Colombia – is also commendable. The most outstanding aspect of the book is however its seamless integration of Third Cinema, World Cinema, and Marxist criticism through localized nuances. Broadly, the book angles towards a two-in-one simultaneous discussion: how to theorize Third Cinema in the age of World Cinema – ‘a Western-designated category that was allegedly enriched after the collapse of socialism in 1989 by the addition of the former Second World to the postcolonial project’. Thus, while both cinemas may be considered as agreeable to old (colonial/anti-colonial) and new (post-colonial/neo-colonial) paradigms respectively, in the context of global superstructures of dominance and exploitation, their concerns overlay. This novel approach offers more latitude in rethinking Third Cinema beyond theory and practice or strictly as a product of colonial/postcolonial political history, to its position as a tool for discussing global questions beyond their ideological add-ons.

The introductory part, Defining Third Cinema and World Cinema introduces the book’s thematic and structural coverage, proposing two aims: 1) to present “neglected or underplayed” aspects of the Third Cinema, such as manifestations within the Second Cinema and relationship with queer and Fourth Cinema; and 2) to elicit the relevance of the Third Cinema concept in theorizing contemporary political struggles in cinema and globally. These aims are approached through Third Cinema’s main characteristics: the primacy of public interaction over the “wholeness of films”, localized experiences of the characters, and imperfection and openness to emergent histories. It also juxtaposes Third Cinema with global political histories, achieving two prospects: 1) specifying capitalism and neoliberalism as key aspects which motivated the origins and early concerns of the Third Cinema enterprise, and critiquing identity politics and multiculturalism in relation to World Cinema; and 2) debating the lapse of Third Cinema’s “novelty, power and confidence” attributed to its preoccupation with past historical struggles rather than those of the present, and its elitist proprietors detached from absolute struggles. The debates on the emergence of transnational and world cinema as a significant threat to the existence and autonomy of Third Cinema inform the book’s Marxist discussions.

Part 1 Revisiting films feature four chapters.

In Chapter 1 – Exporting cinemarxism in the 1960s: The Case of Soy Cuba, Andrei Rogatchevski discusses socialist human-interest stories about the 1959 Cuban revolution, aggregated in Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) (1964). This four-novella film story is split into two thematic focuses: 1) abuse – explicated through a Havana prostitute, and a displaced tenant; and 2) protest against abuse – covering the experiences of a student, and peasant freedom fighters. There is also significant coverage of the film’s style, structure, production, and transnational distribution and screening in both Cuba and Russia. Using the ‘accelerated cultural development’ theory, the author attends to two key aspects of the film: its contentious reception and its role as the basis of Cuba’s ‘imperfect cinema’. He offers his discussion through five frames: 1) the film’s high production expenses, 2) its emphasis on aesthetics (Socialist Realist cinematography and episodic structure) rather than revolutionary characterization and neorealism, 3) the ‘oversimplified, melodramatic, superficial, and patronizing’ rendering of Lenin-Marxist ideology; and seductive presentation of Americans’ leisure in Cuba, 4) its ambivalent evocation of re-colonial / appropriation depiction of Cuba through Soviet filmmakers, also theorized as decolonization, and 5) the paradoxical recasting of ‘internal incongruities’ alongside socialist transnational co-production traditions and its heterotopic trappings including ideology. The extent to which these aspects rendered the film ‘insufficiently Cuban’ is, however, unsettled.

Bruce Williams’ Chapter 2 – Brazil’s open cities: Mimicry, sexuality and class dynamics in the urban landscape of 1960s Cinema, critiques alter Hugo Khouri’s Noite vazia (Night Games) (1964) and Paulo César Saraceni’s O desafio (The Dare) (1965). Khouri’s film narrates the ‘class and sexual dynamics of Brazil’s urban underbelly’, specifically class hierarchies and sexual life in São Paulo nightlife. It is discussed as a ‘mimicry of European cinematic codes.’ César’s film narrates political transformation and ‘urban intelligentsia’ in Rio de Janeiro. It is contextualized within cinéma d’auteur and cinema novo aesthetic, and noted for overtly textualizing Brazil’s ‘crisis of the left’ – also labelled ‘national angst’ –  in the backdrop of the 1964 military coup and its ‘historicized and contextualized work’. Williams further examines the confluence of Cinema Novo, urban Marxian culture, and geopolitics of the time. The chapter’s thrust is built around mimicry and anthropophagy. The former derives from Homi Bhabha’s phenomenology and subversion, and ‘implies at once resemblance and menace’. Here, the author critiques ‘deceptive whiteness, both with regard to the physical attributes of their protagonists and the European visual processes they choose to employ.’ These are collocated with characterization, themes, and style. The latter is based on Oswald de Andrade’s ‘O manifesto antropófago’/‘The Cannibal Manifesto’ and the Tupinambã Amerindians’ anthropophagical rites of ingesting enemies to receive their strength; and draws from Dadaist and Surrealist cultural conceptions. Here, Anthropophagy is compared to Julia Kristeva’s ‘intertextuality’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ and ‘carnivalization’. The key debates raised anchor the films’ embrace of the 1960s Tropicalist movement’s ‘aesthetic of garbage’, also materialized in Pittsburgh’s 2016 Carnegie Museum of Art’s re-enactment of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s works which contrasted Brasilia’s modernity with favela’s indignation; and London’s 2017 Tropicalia film screenings at the Tate Museum. In both cases, the favelas emerge as a key motif in this discussion.

Chapter 3  – ‘Unreal city’: The aesthetics of commitment in Pratidwandi and Interview by Koel Banerjee originates from debates about realism and S. Sukhdev’s India ’67 which ‘documents the inherent contradictions of the Nehruvian vision of the postcolonial nation.’ But it is the realist aesthetic debate juxtaposing the verity of caméra-stylo with the idea of commitment as both ‘an aesthetic strategy’ and political practice which inform much of the chapter’s discussions on ‘filmic idiom’. The paradox of art as both ‘real and an indictment of reality’ and whether to relegate ‘all intellectual and artistic production to a political agenda’ or separate ‘politics and art’ spurs a healthy discussion of film aesthetics and politics. The subject of this debate is Satyajit Ray’s films, The Adversary and Interview (1970). Discussions range from alternative aesthetics to represent the 1960s Calcutta and failed intergenerational dialogue against the backdrop of failed job interviews in both The Adversary where stylistic experimentation alienates its protagonist; and Interview, where cinema verité confers upon him the embodiment of everyone. The films demand a dialectical introspection from the audiences – to ‘rethink the relationship between art and political engagement and also query if there is a measure of adequate political commitment that art can or should demonstrate without losing its status as art.’ It is a task which Banerjee attends tactfully.

Isabel Seguí’s Chapter 4 – The Peruvian Kuntur group: A Marxist-Indigenist filmmaking practice, examines the contribution of Federico García and Pilar Roca’s peasant cinema’ (cine campesino) to filmmaking in Peru and Latin America. It critiques their trilogy: Kuntur Wachana (Quechua for Where the Condors Are Born (1977), Laulico (1980) and El caso Huayanay: Testimonio de parte (The Huayanay Case: Part Testimony, 1981). It discusses the incorporation of ‘indigenous subjects and narratives’ into their filmmaking, under the aegis of ‘Marxist-Indigenist filmmaking’, and also the role of gate-keeping in limiting the scope of the films. These films are described as ‘heavily staged political docu-fictions with the participation of different indigenous communities and peasant union leaders.’ The discussions follow a feminist production studies perspective. Starting with the history and significance of Kuntur Wachana, Seguí ties indigenous material practices to the Marxian process and cinema representations, highlighting the 1950s – 1960s ‘revolutionary peasant unions’, mid-1960s violent land invasion, and the 1969 agrarian reforms. The clash between indigenous and professional actors – ‘nonfiction and the purely fictional’ characterization – and anthropological and documentary aesthetics, confers upon the film both ‘formal eclecticism and narrative weakness’ and overwhelming peasant support.

Laulico is discussed as a Marxist-Indigenist film, focused on an indigenous rustler-hero. The author tactfully syncs the indigenous traditional practice of cattle rustling with popular cultural iconicity, which the film exploits as the basis for its collaborative foreigner-native approach to production, and genre mixing comprised of Western and local action styles. Here also arises its colonial-postcolonial cultural flux.

Seguí’s discussions of El caso Huayanay: Testimonio de parte, a Marxian dialectic film pitting local peasant community against landowners, takes competing ideas of justice and collective crime to comment on incompatible ‘cosmogonies’ – ‘the law system of Western origin … used to beneficiate the local oligarchy’ and ‘the rural communal justice … considered brutal and unlawful.’ Her greatest contribution here is however canonizing García and Roca’s effort within Latin America’s cultural history, and offering film critics and Marxian theorists a new entry point into the region’s postcolonial cinema dialectics.

Part 2 Comparative Readings, has three chapters.

In Chapter 5 – The Legacy of the Furnaces: The twenty-first-century documentaries of Fernando Solanas, Mariano Paz explores the works of renowned Argentinian filmmaker and Third Cinema theorist, Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas. Initial collocation of his 1968 film, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) and the 1969 manifesto co-authored with Octavio Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, is the basis of this chapter which 1) considers the film a legacy to his subsequent documentaries, and 2) explores ‘continuities and departures between the Marxist-informed, radical opus and the political ideology conveyed in the new films.’ From discussions of Solana’s 21^st-century film profile, particularly his 2004-2018 documentaries collectively labelled nonology, to his fusion of art and politics, the chapter infers the Marxian angst of his works. The most notable highlight is his aesthetic strategy using voice-over narration, interviews, the use of real-time tropes, and the diegetic participation of the director as a cinematic character. Paz profiles the films within the ideological and political discourse of ‘left-wing avant-garde’ highlighting their correspondence with key national political happenstances. These range from macropolitics of the 2001 Argentine socio-economic crisis, social activists on the margins, ‘celebration of Argentinean scientific and technological achievements’, ‘the vicissitudes of the Argentinean rail network’, the crisis of Argentine extractive economy, destruction of natural ecologies for agroindustry activities, and Peronism.

Theorization of Solana’s films proposes the ideology of Peronism, Marxism, and dependency theory. Paz’s decoding of Marxian inflationary and deflationary concepts into eutopia (‘positive utopia: the imagination of a social alternative that is empirically better than the society in which it has been conceived’) and dystopia (‘an imagined society that is significantly worse than the actual one’) is notable as it opens up Solana’s films to empirical enquiry on Argentine’s lived conditions. These are summed up thus: ‘the dramatic effects that unrestricted neoliberal policies produced on Argentina’s population and territory’ and feed into subsequent readings of nationalism and Marxism in Solanas’ films, here criticized for retrogressive tendencies such as selfish nationalism and selfish politicking. The extent to which these leanings reverberate among critics of Solana’s cinema, and their inflexion on its ‘spirit of third cinema’ is a task beneficial to the reader.

Paulina Aroch Fugellie and André Dorcé’s Chapter 6 – Third Cinema after the Turn of the Millennium: Reification of the Sign and the Possibility of Transformation offers a provocative debate on the characteristics, scope, and relevance of Third Cinema today. It uses Chilean film director Patricio Guzmán’s La insurrección de la burguesía (The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie) (1975) and Salvador Allende (2004) to examine the extent and modalities for the persistence of the 1960s and 1970s ‘critical potential’ and their depoliticization and reification as ‘signs of emancipation.’  The former narrates Chile’s troubled politics and 1973 coup d’état and the latter Chileans’ collective memories in the aftermath of this political epoch. The films closely-related subject matter and style, the authors intimate, offer ‘a ground from which to explore Third Cinema before and after the full implementation of neoliberalism around the globe.’ This exploration broadly covers: ‘the relationality between the films, their modes of production and reception and their participation in a wider discursive network, co-constitutive of broader economic, social and cultural circuits around the globe.’ Discussions of the transformative (‘activates a series of potentially emancipatory readings’) and conservative (‘obfuscates such forms of decoding by means of a merely rhetorical mobilization of nostalgia’) modalities of melodrama, etch the chapter’s hypothesis: that ‘modalities can be read as articulating affective frameworks that display particular forms of melodrama that work differently in each (con)textual instance.’ A critique of the two modalities is based on the reading of La insurrección de la burguesía  and Salvador Allende  – respectively.

In the former, the authors note the ‘deployment of time as a grammatical and diegetic variable’, and the film as a dialectic tool offering ‘a modality to read the events it registered that differs from that by which it has been read and overwritten for three decades.’ The film’s proximity to its subject matter – being real-life filming terminated on the day of the coup –  informs the authors’ rationale that it is neither Direct Cinema or cinema vérité, but rather a ‘glimpse of a subjective encounter in and with history as it unfolds, an attempt at a dialectical deployment of different sides of the events from a very grounded and recognized place’. The ‘derivative pathos’ of its resolution, it is argued, is simultaneously indexical of its transformative melodramatic modality. Discussions of the latter use a political performativity frame, prioritizing memory ‘as the main labour that the film exerts’ and ‘this labour as the place of the political ‘real’.’ The recurrent allusion to Karl Marx and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is significant in enabling discussion of subalternity – specifically the films’ narrative thrust of ‘victimhood as a legitimate transitional position towards moral superiority’.

What kind of conversation is possible between socialist realism and Third Cinema? This is the question attended by Lucian Tion in Chapter 7 – We have never been transnational: The female condition in socialist realism, postsocialism and Third Cinema who critiques China’s Bai Mao Nu (The White-Haired Girl) (1950) by Bin Wang and Choui Khoua, and Hong Gaoliang (Red Sorghum) (1988) by Zhang Yimou; Cuba’s Lucia (1968) by Humberto Solas, and Romanian’s 4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) (2007) by Cristian Mungiu. These films exemplify socialist realism, Third Cinema, socialist-western fusion, or new-wave European cinema – respectively. The author examines the ‘connections between postcolonial and socialist cultures’ and the ‘aesthetic borrowings’  – ‘themes, style and goals of socialist realism’ – across cinemas of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the postcolonial world. These discussions are based on an analysis of how postcolonial, socialist and postsocialist cineastes represent women’s empowerment. On the Westernization of Chinese cinema, Tion starts by highlighting theoretical polemics on feminism in Chinese films, particularly their failure to connect ‘the progressive programme of Mao’s Chinese cinema and its postsocialist aftermath.’

Discussions of Bai Mao Nu and Hong Gaoliang speak to this argument, in what appears as a response to Gina Marchetti’s discussions of Yimou’s films. On socialist–Third Cinema connection, Tion suggests a connection between ‘the mission of socialist filmmakers’ and ‘that of South American auteurs’ – to recommend egalitarianism over imperialism. Thus, Maoist ‘worker-peasant-soldier’ cinema is not only thematically congruent to Third Cinema but it is also seen as its precursor. Here, feminist archetypes in Lucia are considered congruent to Bai Mao Nu, in an allusion to Teshome Gabriel’s concept of Third Cinema as a spatially disconnected, yet ideologically unified occurrence. Relating socialism to transnationalism, Tiao uses Mungiu’s Romanian film to assert ‘the dramatic underpinnings of the condition of the subaltern in a postcolonial, postsocialist world’. The film recasts the antipathies of socialist Romania using the garbage metaphor to simultaneously comment on Maoist configurations of social lives.

Part 3 Third Cinema versus World Cinema features five chapters.

Chapter 8 – Dialogical encounters on the cinema of revolution: Save the Children Fund Film and Metalepsis in Black takes the format of interview-transcription style in which the two authors – David Archibald and Finn Daniels-Yeomans – dialogize Ken Loach’s Save the Children Fund Film (STCFF) (1971) and Kaganof’s Metalepsis in Black (Metalepsis) (2016). Their goal is ‘to bring aspects of Marxism into dialogue with some of Third Cinema’s thematic concerns and practices.’ Proposing a conceptual shift of Third Cinema from a ‘historical movement whose time has passed’ to incompletion, they analyse the affordances of dialoguing between Third Cinema, Marxism, and cinema. Some of the key propositions include class and positionality in discussing and practising Third Cinema, intersectionality in post-USSR Marxism and Third Cinema, Third Cinema and decolonization of film studies and the academy, interrupted screenings for enhanced pedagogical experience, and Third Cinema for ‘emancipatory pedagogical practice.’ In Save the Children Fund Film, the authors note: ‘the film’s socialist politics are evident in the polemical narration which heavily critiques charity as a concept and in a series of interviews with prominent African revolutionary figures.’ Its heritage of ‘British social realism’ is addressed in the context of European emancipatory history, particularly in Ireland and Spain. Its focus on Africa however underscores ‘the socialist dimension of international conflicts and amplifies the voices resisting capitalism and imperialism.’ These voices are interviewed in the film: socialist politician Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, decolonial and postcolonial scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and the academic Ben Kantai – all who decry aid/loans as tools for enforcing postcolonial dependency and economic colonialism. Metalepsis in Black is labelled a ‘conference film’ originating from symposium chronicles of ‘conference delegates discussing the ideology, methods and significance of the student protests.’ It is also ‘an aesthetically discordant film that is challenging both in terms of the intellectual content of the conference presentations and in Kaganof’s highly stylized treatment of them.’ Juxtaposing protests against universities’ fees policies with national debates on decolonization of education in post-apartheid South Africa, a key takeaway from the film concerns ‘a false decolonization of sorts’ which accompanied the protests, blinding in-racial hierarchies with cross-racial focus. Here, the authors ask: ‘Could we see it representing a desire not simply to afford education but to escape the shackles of debt, which capitalism seeks to secure?’

The focus of Chapter 9 – Newsreel Front: A revived vision of Third Cinema in Slovenia by Andrej Šprah is Newsreel Front, a Slovenian independent film collective of ‘filmmakers, artists and theoreticians.’ It examines ‘the creativity of the Newsreel Front and …show how, with the new forms of drawing on the original ideas of Third Cinema, its liberatory tendencies can be realized anywhere in the world.’ Šprah references numerous films, including Jurij Meden’s 1717 km poletja (1717 Km of Summer) (2009) and Karl Marx med nami (Karl Marx Among Us) (2013), Nika Autor’s Solidarnost (Solidarity) (2011), Nika Autor’s General (2012), Jurij Meden’s Normalen film (A Normal Film) (2012) and Viharni vrh: Ljubezenska pesem (A Love Poem: Wuthering Heights Redux) (2012). The discussions hinge on audience strategies focused on ‘distribution, projection and presentation’; experimentation with visual and narrative techniques, including syntax and parataxis, abstraction and symbolism; declarative, textual, and content determinations. On techniques, the author draws from Nika Autor, Marko Bratina, Ciril Oberstar and Jurij Meden’s Filmski Obzornik 55 (Newsreel 55) (2013) and Meden’s Filmski obzornik 57: Vprašajmo se (Newsreel 57: We Should Ask Ourselves) (2014) – among others – to examine aspects of temporality, visuals, and counter-discourse. These are keenly intercepted by critiquing cinematic and the theoretic spectrums of the film. The former analyses representations of social conditions through 1) ‘direct critique of the anomalies of the socialist reality in its various segments’, 2) formal critique of ‘the political, social or personal quandaries in the present or the recent past’, and 3) its militant / guerrilla endeavours. The latter questions the ‘memorial potential of images’ and ‘their possibility of representing recent history’s traumatic episodes. The phrase ‘(in)tolerability of the images of turbulent changes and emergency situations’ which the author uses aptly synopsise these spectrums. Inferences to Julio García Espinosa’s Third Cinema manifesto and Hito Steyerl’s ‘poor image’ – clearly within the domain of Third Cinema in the sense advised by its forerunners, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino – sum up the author’s enriching dialogue on Newsreel Front’s role in activating Slovenia’s variant of Third Cinema.

Mauritania-born Malian filmmaker, Abderrahmane Sissako, is the focus of William Brown’s Chapter 10 – Listening to the Future: The film-philosophy of Abderrahmane Sissako. Brown’s discussion frames Sissako’s films as unique ‘modern political cinema’, 1) demonstrating an ‘ethical form of filmmaking absent from much ‘classical’ Third Cinema’, and 2) envisioning ‘the future of the whole of humanity through universal metaphors of planetary habitability. The initial overview of Sissako’s cinema history highlights his cinema efforts, noting the significance of his auteur aesthetic. Sissako’s films defy popular narrative forms: prioritizing ‘collage of fragments from the lives of many different people in the places where his films take place’; using ‘diffuse and ambiguous’ themes, and focusing on ‘postcolonial than anti-colonial’ narration. This multifaceted contrast of African, postcolonial and Third cinema models is modulated by adopting normative aesthetics: ‘plenty of long takes, cross-cutting, close-ups, panning shots and silence’. This, and the attendant inferencing of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conjectures on the primacy of ‘intolerable’ in modern political cinema is the basis for Brown’s discussion of Sissako’s films. Thus, while colonial cinema relies on the absentia of people or the claim thereof – ‘that the people in Africa have not been recognized as people by the colonial masters, instead being relegated to a subpersonal/inhuman condition’ – is the core premise of modern political cinema. It recognizes people’s presence ‘to demonstrate the personhood/humanity of its subjects.’ Modern political cinema is ‘not about collecting difference under the umbrella of a singular identity but about showing a plurality of minorities.’ The phrase griauteur – derived from ‘collective sensibility of the griot with the singular vision of the auteur’ – which Brown uses to describe Sissako’s filmmaking, is foundational to understanding the author’s appropriation of ethics, listening,  and theorizing Africa’s paradoxical position as both the future of the world and the world of the future. These, it is theorized, largely enunciate Sissako’s film philosophy. As an afterthought, one may ask: in what ways does Sissako’s interception of humanism in the broad spectrum of Achille Mbembe’s philosophy of global habitability shape his film philosophy?

Chapter 11 – Class, gender and Ethnicity in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma by Ewa Mazierska discusses Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018). Its point is that the film is ‘antithetical to Third Cinema whose goal is the emancipation of the oppressed by colonialism and capitalism… it promotes the preservation of the status quo.’ The discussions are attentive to the film’s ‘characters, story, and the visual and aural style’, and also the protagonist’s aloofness to ‘her position as a servant in the house of an affluent family.’ An overview of the director’s history and the production and distribution context orients us to his cinema works and the industry, while characters and story outline key aspects of the story including themes and motifs, and the characters’ private turmoil. The author uses omissions, the film’s mystic and anti-historical stance, and its normalization of exploitative relations as dominant prisms of her arguments on visual and aural aspects of the film. The visual is implicit in 1) the film’s black-white visuals – is read as a pastiche of early epochs and the director’s inability to access it, or even ‘refusal to fully own the version displayed on screen’; and 2) combined long takes and long shots and depth of field – touted for enhancing realism and ease of decoding. The aural, described as ‘dense and multi-layered, encompassing house and street noises, a dog barking, as well as dialogues and music, often coming from the radio’ seems to augment the verisimilitude cited above.

In Chapter 12 – ‘After’ or back to Third Cinema? Plebeian film, the national popular, fingernails and the resilient Behemoth, Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed and Toby Miller challenge the tenets of Third Cinema’s production as decentralized, marginal, and improvisational; proposing its intrinsic ‘industrial aspects’. Starting with a provocative declaration that cinema and Third Cinema are under erasure from new economic and technological models, the authors note the significance of the 1980s disconnect between Third Cinema ideology and its audiences’ actions and its usurpation by postcolonial cinema. Its existence as a ‘hortatory marker’ indicates all the more the its plebeian propensity. Plebeian cinema concerns the undesignated, decentralized, underrated and deregulated film industries, such as those in Ghana and Nigeria. The authors propose these as exemplary of new imaginaries of Third Cinema. The chapter’s main point concerns the skewed industrial relations between Hollywood and Third World labour – currently neglected by media,  scholars and government – and how tweaking these in favour of plebeian cinema and local labour could promote a homegrown Third Cinema industry in Colombia.

Conclusion

This book raises very important questions about Third Cinema and World Cinema. An early realization is the use of Marxism as a dialectical tool to interrogate not just its variances, but also its prospects in theorizing 1) Third World Cinema in the era of World Cinema, 2) Third Cinema as a kind of World Cinema, 3) new world ideologies which entangle both Third Cinema and World Cinema in a peculiar dialectic. These possibilities are actuated through, among others, engagement with cinema’s representations of the complexity of ideology, theory and everyday life, politics and historical obliquity, and so on. Furthermore, Marxism and cinema, which takes centre stage in the book, enables new framings of the Third Cinema in new ways. Some of the memorable frames accorded Third Cinema include: 1) social and artistic commitment, 2) ‘Third Cinema as a semiotic, aesthetic and socio-political object’ which ‘withholds or liberates the possibility of transformation of the world around it’, 3) ‘subjectivity and affect, as collective, social phenomena … in fact, the proper starting point of ‘the political’, 4) ‘Third Cinema (as)… not a thing but a function of and in history’, and 5) its hortatory label – to name just a few. These open ends must be applauded for inviting further engagement with Third Cinema going forward.

A curious observation about the book is, however, worth mentioning. While its discussions cover broad regions, African authors are noticeably missing from its contributors. For a text on Marxian practices and Third Cinema, to which African postcolonial cinema is an example par excellence, this absence is particularly paradoxical.

Ewa Mazierska, Lars Kristensen (Eds). Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020; 292 pp. 978-1-5013-4828-0 (eBook).