Political Film

Mike Wayne

Description

Third Cinema is a cinema committed to social and cultural emancipation. In this book, Mike Wayne argues that Third Cinema is absolutely central to key debates concerning contemporary film practices and cultures.



As a body of films, Third Cinema expands our horizons of the medium and its possibilities. Wayne develops Third Cinema theory by exploring its dialectical relations with First Cinema (dominant,commercial) and Second Cinema (arthouse, auteur). Discussing an eclectic range of films, from Evita to Dollar Mambo, The Big Lebowski to The Journey, Amistad to Camp de Thiaroye, Political Film explores the affinities and crucial political differences between First and Third Cinema.



Third Cinema’s relationship with Second Cinema is explored via the cinematic figure of the bandit (Bandit Queen, The General, Eskiya). The continuities and differences with European precursors such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Lukacs, Brecht and Walter Benjamin are also assessed. The book is a polemical call for a film criticism that is politically engaged with the life of the masses.
Introduction

1. Third Cinema as Critical Practice: A Case Study of The Battle Of Algiers

2. Precursors

3. Dialectics Of First and Third Cinema

4. Dialectics Of Second Cinema: The Bandit

5. Dialectics of Third Cinema

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783716210
• Langue: English

Extrait

Political Film
Political Film
The Dialectics of Third Cinema
Mike Wayne
First published 2001 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Mike Wayne 2001
The right of Mike Wayne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 0 7453 1669 7 paperback ISBN 978 0 7453 1670 3 hardback ISBN 978 1 7837 1621 0 ePub ISBN 978 1 7837 1622 7 Mobi 10  09  08  07  06  05  04  03  02  01  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 

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FOR DEE
On the political significance of film...At no point in time, no matter how utopian, will anyone win the masses over to a higher art; they can be won over only to one that is nearer to them. And the difficulty consists precisely in finding a form for art such that, with the best conscience in the world, one could hold that it is a higher art. This will never happen with most of what is propagated by the avant-garde of the bourgeoisie.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Now, political education means opening...minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence; as Cesaire said, it is ‘to invent souls’. To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Contents Introduction 1    Third Cinema as Critical Practice: A Case Study of The Battle of Algiers 2 Precursors 3 Dialectics of First and Third Cinema 4 Dialectics of Second Cinema: The Bandit 5 Dialectics of Third Cinema
  Bibliography Index
Acknowledgements
The seed for this book was planted back in the early 1990s when I co-taught Third Cinema with Bob Barker at the University of North London. It was his module that was structured around a passage through First, Second and Third Cinema, a structure which got me thinking along the lines which eventually ended up with the writing of this book. I have been teaching Third Cinema at the West London Institute of Higher Education, subsequently integrated into Brunel University, for a number of years. During that time I learned a lot about Third Cinema, teaching and being taught by some very good students. This book was easy to write as a result and whatever merits it may have derive largely from that classroom experience.
Introduction
All films are political, but films are not all political in the same way. If the first half of this aphorism is true, then the definition of a political film extends all the way from Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1924) to Kevin and Perry Go Large (2000). The second half of the aphorism, that films are political in different ways, returns us to a more specific sense of what constitutes a political film. All the films discussed in this book are political in the sense that they in one way or another address unequal access to and distribution of material and cultural resources, and the hierarchies of legitimacy and status accorded to those differentials. This book is about developing a film practice and criticism which is best suited to addressing those inequalities and differentials. The most advanced and sophisticated body of political films which the medium has produced to date is Third Cinema. This cinema, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, moved onto the film studies curriculum in the 1980s, placed there largely by Teshome Gabriel’s groundbreaking book Third Cinema in the Third World . The title is significant because Third Cinema emerged primarily in the Third World and has since been frequently conflated with Third World Cinema (another category in its own right). For Third Cinema, as Gabriel insisted, is not a cinema defined by geography; it is a cinema primarily defined by its socialist politics.
What counts as political is indeed a political question of course. The bourgeois separation of politics and economics, representation and commerce, is far from innocent, while the spread of the political into the personal and the cultural was a major aim and achievement of feminism. Third Cinema is a political cinema about much more than politics in the narrow sense. It is a cinema of social and cultural emancipation and one of the arguments of this book is that such emancipations cannot be achieved merely in the political realm of the state. Social and cultural emancipation needs a much more fundamental and pervasive transformation, and if cinema is to make its own, relatively modest contribution, it too must feel the heat of such transformations, not only as films, but in its modes of production and reception. Third Cinema is such a cinema, or at least it is as close as we can get to such a cinema this side of such profound transformations.
Yet in 1996, at a BFI-sponsored conference on African cinema, the British filmmaker John Akomfrah declared Third Cinema to be dead. There was no dissent from the audience. This book aims to refute that claim. In order to do that however, Third Cinema has to be developed as a theory, as a critical practice which is inspired by and tries to be adequate to Third Cinema films. But not only them. One of the curious deficiencies of Third Cinema theory has been its underdevelopment vis-à-vis First Cinema (dominant, mainstream) and Second Cinema (art, authorial). To develop Third Cinema theory is to try and illuminate its relations with and what is at stake in the differences between First, Second and Third Cinema. So terms need to be clarified and their relations and differences with each other explored.
Chapter One works as an introduction to defining Third Cinema while also developing Third Cinema as a critical practice. I focus here on Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic film of national liberation, The Battle of Algiers (1965). I argue that the film lies at the intersection of Cinemas One, Two and Three, affording us the opportunity to discuss all three categories. Developing Third Cinema as a critical practice means pinpointing quite precisely at the level of textual analysis the interactions of First, Second and Third Cinema strategies within the film. Exploring its critical reception and its selective appropriation of ideas from Fanon, I will argue that the film ultimately fails to transform its First and Second cinema components into the service of Third Cinema. In this way we can assess what is at stake, politically, in such a judgement.
In Chapter Two I look at the important European precursors to Third Cinema, indicating the relevance of the work of Eisenstein, Vertov, Lukács, Brecht and Benjamin and tracing the continuities and differences between them and Third Cinema. Just as Third Cinema emerged in the context of revolutionary struggles, the work of these critics and cultural producers was crucially informed by the revolutionary turbulence between 1917 and the late 1930s. Unsurprisingly, their work prefigures key issues for the Third Cineastes: questions around realism, around cultural transformations and their relationship to social change, around the avant-garde and its relationship to the masses and around the political implications of using cinematic strategies in a particular way, were all to return once more, in new contexts and with new inflections, in the 1960s.
Chapter Three juxtaposes First and Third Cinema to further define the latter through a critique of the former at both the level of production practices and textual strategies. As a mode of production, Third Cinema has pioneered collective and democratic working practices. In particular, it has sought to foster the participation of the people who constitute the subject matter of the films. The chapter also explores the constraints within which Third Cinema works, squeezed as it is between monopoly capital which dominates production, distribution and exhibition, and/or state interference. In extreme instances of danger or crisis, Third Cinema, as we shall see, has pioneered ‘guerrilla filmmaking’.
At the textual level, I explore the importance of being able to represent history as an open-ended site of conflict and change and compare Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) with Alea’s The Last Supper (1976) and Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1987). This chapter also explores the importance of political commitment for Third Cinema, which rejects any aspiration to be ‘objective’, that is, neutral. Because Third Cinema is politically committed, it is also a cinema crucially interested in the processes by which people become politicised. The two go hand in hand. Here I compare Costa Gavras’s Missing (1981) with Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile (1973–6). The dialectics of First and Third Cinema are such that while they often converge on similar material (history, the coup in Chile) they diverge in their treatments of that material. There is also a dialectic going on at the level of aesthetic strategies. We shall see many instances in this book of Third Cinema appropriating First Cinema strategies for its own use. But the dialectics work both ways. I explore how a First Cinema film, Indochine (1991), appropriates the crucial concept of popular memory for its own purposes.
Chapter Four explores the dialectics between Second Cinema and Third Cinema via the cinematic figure of the bandit. Drawing on the work of Eric Hobsbawm on banditry, I suggest that the significance of the bandit resides in what he, or (occasionally) she, tells us about the social structure being depicted. Herein lies the secret of the bandit as popular hero, both histori