Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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First Cinema was the cinema of Hollywood — corporate-produced movies, designed above all to entertain (and thereby make a profit). Think Golden Age Hollywood musicals or Marvel movies. Though First Cinema demonstrated the potential of film as a medium to reach mass audiences, it had no radical intent.
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Second Cinema, on the other hand, is more often auteur-driven and experimental, concerned primarily with artistic expression. In many ways, Second Cinema marks a political step forward from First, pushing the boundaries of the medium in pursuit of loftier goals than mere spectacle. But according to Getino and Solanas, its political potential nevertheless remained limited by the commercial imperative. At worst, Second Cinema could become navel-gazing and individualist. At best, it testified to the existence of injustice and the suffering of the working class, but it remained divorced from a sophisticated critique of the material relations that produce such suffering, and their alternatives.
✏️ xref what I was thinking about in the Barbie article by Liu (I think) and having art that merely points out an injustice vs one that actively tries to solve or deal with injustice. 🔗 View Highlight
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proposed a Third Cinema, explicitly concerned with using the power of film to educate and agitate the masses toward class struggle and national liberation.
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Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognises in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point — in a word, the decolonisation of culture.
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four key elements by which Third Cinema seeks to achieve these goals: historicity — the film situates itself in history, understood as “process, change, contradiction, and conflict”; politicization — the film explores “the process whereby people who have been oppressed and exploited become conscious of that condition and determine to do something about it”; critical commitment — while no artistic work is detached from ideology, Third Cinema embraces its critical perspective; and cultural specificity — the film grounds itself in its audience’s particular cultural context.
✏️ Detailed key elements of a third cinema film.
- Situating itself in history
- exploring the oppression process, becoming conscious of it and determined to deal with it
- committing to the critical perspective
- grounding in the cultural context 🔗 View Highlight
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Where some films tap into righteous anger to exploit and assuage it, Third Cinema channels it. Moving beyond superficial lamentations on the state of the world, Third Cinema articulates a substantive critique of the capitalist, imperialist system. Rather than existing merely for profits, Third Cinema’s entire raison d’être is to develop class consciousness and contribute culturally to material anti-imperialist struggle.