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Next to the avant-garde, the debates surrounding Third Cinema have produced more manifestos than any other area of the cinema. This chapter begins with a collection of the major Third Cinema manifestos and their precursors in Latin America, which trace the developing sense of urgency in Latin America to produce a local cinema that addresses the needs and aspirations of both Latin American filmmakers and audiences. Mexico, often left out of the debates about the need for a Third Cinema—a key term coined in one of the manifestos contained herein—was particularly fertile ground for the development of an indigenous cinema, as Mexican films often lived in the shadow of Luis Buñuel. This chapter also includes the key manifestos of the Third Cinema movement, including texts by Fernando Birri, Julio García Espinosa, Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, and Jorge Sanjinés. All these filmmakers call for a new kind of cinema, one that disavows the escapism and ideology of Hollywood and forgoes the celebration of the director as auteur. These manifestos argue, instead, for a collective, politically engaged cinema.
The goal of decolonization also inspired groups outside of Latin America. The manifesto of the Palestinian Cinema Group, for instance, addresses the dire need for an independent and revolutionary form of cinema practice to work hand in hand with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in the creation of an independent Palestine. The influence of Third Cinema and the discourses of decolonization are also taken up in the first world. For instance, the independence movement in Québec was greatly influenced by writers such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi. In “The Cinema: Another Face of Colonised Québec,” the Association professionnelle des cinéastes du Québec argues that the dominance of American cinema and international capitalism marginalized the possibility of Québec’s producing films that reflect the lives of Québécois filmmakers and audiences, where a great deal of local production simply amounted to soft-core pornography (and part of a larger subset of 1970s Canadian production that has retrospectively been dubbed Maple Syrup Porn).
African-born French filmmaker Med Hondo argues for a new form of cinema that reflects the lived experiences of Africans and the African diaspora. The “Niamey Manifesto of African Filmmakers” codifies many of these problems and outlines the goals and need for a pan-African cinema. In a similar vein John Akomfrah’s “Black Independent Filmmaking: A Statement by the Black Audio Film Collective” addresses the need for a black-British filmmaking practice and outlines the ways in which the Black Audio Film Collective will undertake such a program. The “FeCAViP Manifesto” outlines similar goals for pan-Caribbean filmmakers. The chapter ends with a manifesto of protest from the first world, released by writers and filmmakers protesting TIFF’s (Toronto International Film Festival) programming of a series of films celebrating Tel Aviv at a time when Israel was taking aggressive actions against Palestine. All these manifestos point to the global nature of the cinema. While these global tendencies are often celebrated, most notably just before the emergence of sound, they nevertheless work in an ideological fashion, to marginalize and disavow voices from developing countries, especially when these voices are engaged in radical dissent.
El grupo nuevo cine: José de la Colina, Rafael Cordiki, Salvador Elizondo, J.M. García Ascot, Emilia García Riera, J.L. González de León, Heriberto Lafranchi, Carlos Monsiváis, Julio Pliego, Gabriel Ramírez, José María Sbert, and Luis Vicens. Subsequently signed by José Baez Esponda, Armando Bartra, Nancy Cárdenas, Leopoldo Chagoya, Ismael García Llaca, Alberto Isaac, Paul Leduc, Eduardo Lizalde, Fernando Macotela, and Francisco Pina
[First published in Spanish as “Manifiesto del Grupo nuevo cine,” Nuevo cine (Mexico) 1 (1961). Trans. Fabiola Caraza.]
It is often forgotten that along with Cuba, Mexico was at the forefront of arguing for new forms of Latin American cinema. This manifesto from 1961 not only argues for the cinema as a means of personal and national expression, but also for the need for Mexican audiences to see the emerging world cinemas so as to be in dialogue with developments taking place in the cinema globally. If later Latin American manifestos argue for the need of an expressly political cinema, this manifesto lays the groundwork for the ways in which Mexican cinema can take its place beside other national film “waves”—what will soon come to be known as “Second Cinema”—that reimagined the cinema at the beginning of the 1960s.
Hereby the undersigned the New Cinema group, filmmakers, aspiring filmmakers, critics and cinema club owners; we declare that our objectives are the following:
Improving the depressing state of Mexican Cinema. In order to accomplish that we feel it is imperative to open the doors to new filmmakers. In our opinion, nothing justifies the obstacles presented to those (directors, screenwriters, photographers, etc.) capable of making new cinema in Mexico, which without a doubt will be a far superior cinema than the one today. Any plan for renewal of the national cinema that does not take into account this problem is deemed to fail.
We state that filmmakers have as much right as the writer, painter or musician to express themselves freely. We will fight so that there is not only one type of cinema but that there is a free endeavor for creation, with the diversity in aesthetics, morals and political points of view that that implies. Therefore we oppose all censure that curtails freedom of expression in cinema.
We promote the production and freedom of exhibition of an independent cinema produced in the margins of conventions and limitations imposed by those who monopolize film production. In the same manner, we will argue so that the short film and documentary films should have the support and encouragement they deserve and will be able to be screened to the greater audiences in fair conditions.
We promote the development of the filmmaking culture in Mexico through the following statements:
Achieve the establishment of a reputable institution for cinematography that will be specifically dedicated to the training of new filmmakers.
Achieve support and encouragement of the creation of film clubs, whether it be within or outside of the Distrito Federal (the Capital).
Achieve the establishment of a cinematheque that has the necessary resources and which will be in the charge of competent and responsible people.
Create specialized publications that guide the public, analyzing in depth the problems of cinema. In achieving the latter, the undersigned propose to publish the monthly magazine Nuevo cine.
Endeavor to study and research all aspects of Mexican Cinema.
Endeavor to gain the support of experimental cinema groups.
We promote to overcome the clumsiness that rules the collective criteria of the exhibitors of foreign films in Mexico, which has prevented us from knowing many great works of filmmakers such as Chaplin, Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni, Mizoguchi, etc. Works that have even been of great benefit to those who exhibit them in other countries.
To defend the Reseña de Festivales (Festivals in Review) in favor of the communication through films and actors within the best of world cinema. And to attack the flaws that have prevented the accomplished Reviews from reaching their goals.
These objectives circumscribe and complement each other. In order to accomplish these objectives, the New Cinema group hopes to enlist the support of film audiences, and of the growing spectator masses who see the cinema not only as a form of entertainment, but as one of the most formidable medium[s] of expression of our century.
Fernando Birri
[First published in Spanish as “Cine y subdesarrollo,” in Cine cubano 64 (1967). First published in English in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI, 1983), 9–12. Trans. Malcolm Coad.]
Founder of the Santa Fe Documentary School, Fernando Birri wrote “Cinema and Underdevelopment” shortly after one of the most violent juntas in Argentina. Birri argues for a cinema of the working classes and foreshadows Fernando Solas and Octavio Getino’s call for a cinema that is counter-Hollywood. He argues that film pedagogy is central to the cultivation of a new, independent Argentine cinema and argues against Western models of “modernization” that feed into colonial attitudes toward “development,” taking, in particular, Argentine director Torre Nilsson to task.
The following answers should all be understood, and very concretely so, as concerned with a sub-cinematography, that of Argentina and the region of underdeveloped Latin America of which it is a part. Furthermore, they reflect the point of view of a film director from a capitalist and neocolonialist country, the opposite pole from the situation in Cuba.
WHAT KIND OF CINEMA DOES ARGENTINA NEED? WHAT KIND OF CINEMA DO THE UNDERDEVELOPED PEOPLES OF LATIN AMERICA NEED?
A cinema which develops them.
A cinema which brings them consciousness, which awakens consciousness; which clarifies matters; which strengthens the revolutionary consciousness of those among them who already possess this; which fires them; which disturbs, worries, shocks and weakens those who have a “bad conscience,” a reactionary consciousness; which defines profiles of national, Latin American identity; which is authentic; which is anti-oligarchic and anti-bourgeois at the national level, and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist at the international level; which is pro-people, and anti-anti-people; which helps the passage from underdevelopment to development, from sub-stomach to stomach, from sub-culture to culture, from sub-happiness to happiness, from sub-life to life.
Our purpose is to create a new person, a new society, a new history and therefore a new art and a new cinema. Urgently.
And with the raw material of a reality which is little and badly understood: that of the underdeveloped countries of Latin America (or, if you prefer the euphemism favoured by the Organisation of American States, the developing countries of Latin America). Understanding—or, rather, misunderstanding—of these countries has always come about by applying analytical schemes imposed by foreign colonialists or their local henchmen (whose particular mentality has deformed such ideas even further).
WHAT KIND OF CINEMA DOES ARGENTINA HAVE AT THE MOMENT?
One with a solid industrial tradition whose Golden Age was in the 30s and 40s (Lucas Demare’s La Guerra Gaucha, for example). It conquered the markets of Latin America, then prostituted itself under Peronism, before recovering once again, culturally speaking, under the guidance of Torre Nilsson, during the so-called “revolution of liberation” (actually a military dictatorship). It then evolved into an independent movement in which the left began to play a role. This development coincided with Frondizi’s rise to power in 1961–2, when more than fifteen new feature directors and many more directors of shorts took their places in the national cinema. After the 1962 frondizazo, however, and during the provisional presidency of Guido, such independent efforts turned in on themselves, and “dependent” production became dominant once again. Only one independent film was made, Manuel Antín’s Los venerables todos, the very epitome of alienation.
The problem is that cinema is a cultural product, a product of the superstructure. So it is subject to all the superstructure’s distortions. In the case of cinema these are exacerbated further than in the other arts due to its nature as an industrial art. In countries like ours, which are in the throes of incipient industrialisation, political shocks make this condition chronic.
Furthermore, cinema is a language. A language, like others, which enables communication and expression at both the mass and personal levels. Here as well things get out of balance as bourgeois attitudes—which are either reactionary or, at best, liberal and always sub-cultural—typically give most attention to the “cinema of expression.” This cinema (typified by Torre Nilsson) is set in opposition to “commercial” cinema (such as that of Amadori, Demare or Tynaire). At its height, in 1955, this opposition became a veritable battle within the structures of bourgeois culture. “Expression” won—and now where are we? What and who is to benefit from such “expression” (à la Torre Nilsson, Kohon, Kuhn, Antín)? The navel of Buddha? “Commercial” cinema has won its audience by any method going; or more precisely, the worst methods going. We cannot support it. The “cinema of expression” uses the best methods, and scorns the mass audience. We cannot support it either. Once again, the contradiction between art and industry is resolved very badly, except for the “select” minority which makes up the audience of the “cinema of expression,” for whom such a solution is perfectly satisfactory.
We have already pointed out that cinema manifests the cultural and economic values of a society’s superstructure. Neither its generic lack of culture nor its economic precariousness precludes it from these categories. Argentina, Latin America, 1963: a bourgeois superstructure, semi-colonial and underdeveloped. Its cinema, therefore, expresses these conditions, consciously or unconsciously if it favours them, always consciously if it is against.
This is the fact of the matter, and there is no way round it, like it or not, and whether or not we care to recognise it. It is true wherever you look, from Lucas Demare and Torre Nilsson, as representatives of those in favour, to the short filmmakers Oliva and Fisherman, new directors who have declared themselves against.
For the first group, those who are consciously or unconsciously in favour of the existing order of things, no problem arises. The superstructure keeps them, pampers them, and gives them official credits, prizes, national exhibition, “Argentinian Film Weeks” abroad, international festivals, travel as representatives of national culture, and press coverage of their triumphs and supposed triumphs (in its local newspapers an anxious but finally negative European criticism transforms a failure into “a polemical and very worthy film,” as happened with Antín’s Los venerables todos in Cannes in 1963, or Nilsson’s Homenaje a la hora de la siesta in Venice in 1962). The superstructure serves them, when all is said and done, as a pedestal. A fragile enough pedestal for eternal glory, you may admonish us. Certainly, but meanwhile, down here, in the here-and-now, it keeps them able to produce films.
The only problems these directors have ever had to face have come from personal rivalry or, at worst, from the irrational infraction of some ultramontane moral taboo (as in the case of Beatriz Guido, for example) to do with sex or violence, never from any “political” offence. Such sins were rapidly forgiven, like those of prodigal children, when from 1957 onwards new and independent currents began to appear in our national cinema, pursuing not expression but ideas. Among those representing these currents were Murua, Feldman, Martinez Suarez, Alventosa, the Institute of Cinematography at the National University of the Litoral, sectors of the Association of Short Film Directors, Cinema Workshops, the Association of Experimental Cinema, the Nucleus Cinema Club, Cinecritica magazine, the writer of this article.
GIVEN THIS SITUATION, HOW AND WHY WAS THE INSTITUTE OF CINEMATOGRAPHY AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF THE LITORAL FORMED?
Today the Institute of Cinematography is a material fact. But in 1956 it was only an idea.
This idea was born at a time when Argentinian cinematography was disintegrating, both culturally and industrially. It affirmed a goal and a method. The goal was realism. The method was training based in theory and practice.
To locate this goal historically, remember that the dominant characteristic of Argentinian cinema at that time was precisely its “unrealism.” This was true of both its extremes. The opportunism of the numerous box-office hits (such as those of the main studio Argentina Sono Films, or the Demare-Pondal Rios Después del silencio, or chanchada comedies) and the evasiveness of the few “intellectualised” films (Torre Nilsson’s La casa del angel, Ayala’s El jefe) made the cinematographic images of the country they presented to audiences equally unreal and alien. Popular and art cinema were falsely made out to be irreconcilable opposites, when what were actually being discussed were “commercial” and “elitist” cinema.
Our objective was a realism which would transcend this tendentious duality. In it we were joined by other non-cinematic groups all of whom shared the aspiration towards an art which would be simultaneously popular and of high quality.
To locate our method historically, remember that the national cinema industry had always been founded on the purest empiricism, usually manifest in a frustrating degree of improvisation.
Remember also that at this time there was not even a plan for a National Film School, despite the inclusion of the idea in the 1957 Decree Law 62 (it was not carried through). The teaching facilities which did exist made no impact on the industry itself, much less on public opinion.
We should be wary of schematic generalisation, for there were exceptions which proved the rule and we must give credit to the significant positive moments on the curve of the old national cinema (such as Mario Soffici’s Prisioneros de la tierra, or Hugo del Carril’s Las aguas bajan turbias). But any objective analysis must finally lead to the general negative conclusion recorded here.
The goal and method I have described, those of a realist cinematography and a theoretico-practical training, came together polemically in the Documentary School at Santa Fe. They did so as a simultaneously critical and constructive contribution—or constructively critical, if you prefer—to national cinema, and as a response to a need for national transformation which we believe exists throughout Latin America, given the continent’s common condition of underdevelopment. It was these artistic principles which inspired our work from Tire Die, the Institute’s first film of social inquiry, to Los inundados, our first fictional feature, which synthesised our experience. On the way we also made Los 40 cuartos, a documentary which was banned and whose prints and negative were confiscated under the 1959 Decree 4965, which was passed by provisional President Guido to suppress “insurrectionary activities.” This banning and confiscation remain in force to the present day. Los inundados synthesises the experience of the Institute, enlarging its scope and giving it its fullest expression both professionally and as entertainment, in the best senses of these terms. For these reasons, and because it answers to the founding intentions of the Santa Fe Documentary School, both experimental and academic, this film bears the responsibility of being our movement’s manifesto, carried forth under the banner of a national cinematography which is “realist, critical and popular.”
WHAT ARE THE FUTURE PERSPECTIVES FOR LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA?
Seen from the general perspective of developments in cinema, and given that this is an Argentinian film, a Latin American film, the most important thing right now if we are to ensure such a future is that the film should be seen. In other words, the most important thing is exhibition and distribution.
The starting point for this statement is the fact that our films are not seen by the public, or are only seen with extreme difficulty. This happens—and we denounce the fact—not because of the films themselves or our public, but because the films are systematically boycotted by both national and international distributors and exhibitors, who are linked to the anti-national and colonial interests of foreign producers, above all those of North American cinema and the monopoly it has imposed on us. Of about 500 films shown in 1962, 300 were in English, and most of them North American, while some 30 were Argentinian.
An additional fact: Latin America has a potential market of 200 million spectators, more than enough to provide a natural market for our films. It would save us the effort of sporadic entry into other markets, and the outlay of hard currency which is being drained away in importing mediocre foreign films.
The urgent need, and only firm solution, must therefore be to guarantee the distribution and exhibition of nationally produced films in each of our countries individually, and in Latin America as a whole. This must come about through government action. The procedures may be different, but in the same way that a government can cancel an oil contract so, for the same reasons of the social good and with the same authority, that same government can and should regulate the prejudicial cultural and economic exploitation that comes with the uncontrolled flow of foreign films into its territory. Exhibitors and distributors justify their permanent blocking of nationally produced films by appealing to the spectator’s right to choose what films he or she wishes to see. But this free-market sophism omits one small detail: that for an audience to choose a film, it must first be exhibited, which generally does not happen with national films, or does so only in appalling conditions. State aid, bank credits, and prizes are also means of stimulating the development of Latin American cinema, so long as inflation is avoided by making ticket-receipts the basis of the system. Film must be funded by its audience. As well as maintaining financial health, the fact that the audience pays for its tickets confirms its interest in the film, and keeps film-makers committed to their audience.
Such a solution must be complemented by a reduction in non-essential industrial costs. We must have low-cost production. This may not provide an overall or permanent solution but it is at the very least the beginning of a solution in current circumstances. If it is valid for independent production in developed countries, it is even more so in underdeveloped countries. Such a formula would protect the independent producer from the fluctuations of recovering capital in a market where income from nationally produced films is uncertain. Furthermore, a more rapid recovery of production costs would allow the possibility of continuous investment in new productions. Low costs would also allow participation by non-state capital, which would free the film-maker of all, or almost all, dependence on official credits, which restrict freedom, and always bring with them censorship and self-censorship. This kind of production also renews expressive creativity, because it requires the replacement of the traditional crew by a more functional method of operation, adapted to the actual conditions of filming. Such a conception and practice of making films not with the resources one would like but with those which are possible, will determine a new kind of language, hopefully even a new style, the fruit of convergent economic and cultural necessity. We Latin American film-makers must transform ail such technical limitations into new expressive possibilities, if we are not to remain paralysed by them.
In the same way, the moment has come not only to oblige the “commercial” circuits to carry national films, but also to set up “independent” circuits in trade unions, schools, neighbourhood associations, sports centres and in the countryside through mobile projection units. A circuit based in existing grass-roots organisations, where films can be shown which, because they are openly didactic (or documentary) or ideologically progressive, come up against the greatest resistance from “commercial” distributors and exhibitors.
FOR WHAT AUDIENCE DO YOU YOURSELF MAKE FILMS?
Having set aside any residual notions of “art for art’s sake,” and committed ourselves to “useful” creation, we find our intention of the last few years, that of making films not for ourselves but for the audience, is no longer enough. Following our most recent experience, which was our first with a fictional feature shown to a so-called “ordinary” or “commercial” audience, we can no longer put off defining the audience—or, more precisely, the class of audience, in the economic and historical sense of the term—for whom we are making our films.
We’ll not delay the answer. We are making our films for a working-class audience, both urban and rural. This is our most fundamental purpose. Let us spell it out very clearly. We are interested in making our future films only if they reach a working-class and peasant audience, an audience made up of workers from the existing industrial belts of our great cities, the urban and suburban proletariat in areas of newer industrialisation, and peasants, small farmers and herdsmen on both small immigrant farms and large estates belonging to the oligarchy (where film, if it speaks the people’s own language, can be a means of culture of unequalled impact, given existing rates of literacy). Then, having made this clear, let us add that we also wish to reach sections of the petty bourgeoisie and even of the bourgeoisie proper (the so-called “national bourgeoisie”), including them in the audience for this new cinema which seeks to awaken consciousness, and which is directed towards spectators who are open to being enlightened and also to working out matters for themselves in a new light.
But I am talking about Argentina as it is now, where there is no such cinema and no national cinema to stimulate the gathering together of such an audience, and where even if such a cinema did exist there would be nowhere to show it.
As for the rest of Latin America, we would say from what we know of it that the audience which interests us—I should say, which preoccupies us—will be made up of the same sections of the population everywhere, depending on variations in the degree of backwardness or development in each country, or whether it is dominated by an agricultural and rural economy, or is in the process of industrialisation. To conjure away any fetishes which may make this proposal seem utopian, we would recall that the audience which already sees our “national films”—which are so scorned by the bourgeoisie and only accepted with reservations by the petty-bourgeoisie—is in its great majority already made up of the kinds of people we have described. But there is an urgent need here for large-scale market research, complete with tables and social statistics. Even in our country we still lack such research. It must be one of the priority tasks of the CLAC (Latin American Cinematography Centre) as it documents, analyses and plans film production.
WHAT IS THE REVOLUTIONARY FUNCTION OF CINEMA IN LATIN AMERICA?
Underdevelopment is a hard fact in Latin America. It is an economic and statistical fact. No invention of the left, the term is used as a matter of course by “official” international organisations, such as the UN, or Latin American bodies, such as the OAS or the ECLA, in their plans and reports. They have no alternative.
The cause of underdevelopment is also well known: colonialism, both external and internal.
The cinema of our countries shares the same general characteristics of this superstructure, of this kind of society, and presents us with a false image of both society and our people. Indeed, it presents no real image of our people at all, but conceals them. So, the first positive step is to provide such an image. This is the first function of documentary.
How can documentary provide this image? By showing how reality is, and in no other way. This is the revolutionary function of social documentary and realist, critical and popular cinema in Latin America. By testifying, critically, to this reality—to this sub-reality, this misery—cinema refuses it. It rejects it. It denounces, judges, criticises and deconstructs it. Because it shows matters as they irrefutably are, and not as we would like them to be (or as, in good or bad faith, others would like to make us believe them to be).
As the other side of the coin of this “negation,” realist cinema also affirms the positive values in our societies: the people’s values. Their reserves of strength, their labours, their joys, their struggle, their dreams.
The result—and motivation—of social documentary and realist cinema? Knowledge and consciousness; we repeat: the awakening of the consciousness of reality. The posing of problems. Change: from sub-life to life.
Conclusion: to confront reality with a camera and to document it, filming realistically, filming critically, filming underdevelopment with the optic of the people. For the alternative, a cinema which makes itself the accomplice of underdevelopment, is sub-cinema.
Glauber Rocha
[First presented at Latin American Cinema conference, Genoa, Italy, 1965. First published in Portuguese as “A estética de fome,” in Revista civilização brasileira 3 (1965). First published in English as “The Aesthetics of Violence,” in Afterimage 1 (UK) (1970). Published in English as “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI, 1983), 13–14. Trans. Burnes Hollyman and Randal Johnson.]
Glauber Rocha—director of such films as Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, Brazil, 1964)—articulates in “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” his statement of principles for Brazil’s cinema novo. Here he speaks to underdevelopment, hunger, and violence as the engines behind a politically engaged cinema. Influenced by Frantz Fanon, Rocha argues that the colonizers will recognize the colonized only though acts of violence, both in the realm of the real and in the realm of representation.
Dispensing with the informative introduction that has become so characteristic of discussions about Latin America, I prefer to discuss the relationship between our culture and “civilised” culture in less limiting terms than those which characterise the analysis of the European observer. Thus, while Latin America laments its general misery, the foreign observer cultivates a taste for that misery, not as a tragic symptom, but merely as a formal element in his field of interest. The Latin American neither communicates his real misery to the “civilised” man, nor does the “civilised” man truly comprehend the misery of the Latin American.
Basically, this is the situation of the arts in Brazil. Until now, only lies elaborated from truth (the formal exoticism that vulgarises social problems) have been communicated in quantitative terms, provoking a series of misunderstandings which are not confined to the area of art but rather continue far beyond into the political domain. For the European observer, the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only in so far as it satisfies his nostalgia for primitivism. This primitivism is generally presented as a hybrid form, disguised under the belated heritage of the “civilised” world and poorly understood since it is imposed by colonial conditioning. Undeniably, Latin America remains a colony. What distinguishes yesterday’s colonialism from today’s is merely the more refined forms employed by the contemporary coloniser. Meanwhile, those who are preparing future domination try to replace these with even more subtle forms. The problem facing Latin America in international terms is still that of merely exchanging colonisers. Thus, our possible liberation is always a function of a new dependency.
This economic and political conditioning has led us to philosophical undernourishment and to impotence—sometimes conscious, other times not. The first engenders sterility; the second, hysteria. It is for this reason that hunger in Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom; it is the essence of our society. Herein lies the tragic originality of Cinema Novo in relation to world cinema. Our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood.
We understand the hunger that Europeans and the majority of Brazilians have failed to understand. For the European, it is a strange tropical surrealism. For the Brazilian, it is a national shame. He does not eat, but is ashamed to say so; and yet, he does not know where this hunger comes from. We know—since we made those ugly, sad films, those screaming, desperate films in which reason has not always prevailed—that this hunger will not be assuaged by moderate government reforms and that the cloak of technicolor cannot hide, but rather only aggravates, its tumours. Therefore, only a culture of hunger can qualitatively surpass its own structures by undermining and destroying them. The most noble cultural manifestation of hunger is violence.
Cinema Novo reveals that violence is normal behaviour for the starving. The violence of a starving man is not a sign of a primitive mentality. Is Fabiano primitive? Is Antão primitive? Is Corisco primitive? Is the woman in Porto das Caixas primitive?
Cinema Novo teaches that the aesthetics of violence are revolutionary rather than primitive. The moment of violence is the moment when the coloniser becomes aware of the existence of the colonised. Only when he is confronted with violence can the coloniser understand, through horror, the strength of the culture he exploits. As long as he does not take up arms, the colonised man remains a slave. The first policeman had to die before the French became aware of the Algerians.
In moral terms, this violence is not filled with hatred; nor is it linked to the old, colonising humanism. The love that this violence encompasses is as brutal as violence itself, because it is not the kind of love which derives from complacency or contemplation, but rather a love of action and transformation.
The time when Cinema Novo had to explain itself in order to exist has passed. Cinema Novo is an ongoing process of exploration that is making our thinking clearer, freeing us from the debilitating delirium of hunger. Cinema Novo cannot develop effectively while it remains marginal to the economic and cultural processes of the Latin American continent. Because the New Cinema is a phenomenon belonging to new peoples everywhere and not a privileged entity of Brazil. Wherever there is a film-maker prepared to film the truth and to oppose the hypocrisy and repression of intellectual censorship, there will be the living spirit of Cinema Novo. Wherever there is a film-maker prepared to stand up against commercialism, exploitation, pornography and the tyranny of technique, there is to be found the living spirit of Cinema Novo. Wherever there is a film-maker, of any age or background, ready to place his cinema and his profession at the service of the great causes of his time, there will be the living which sets Cinema Novo apart from the commercial industry because the commitment of industrial cinema is to untruth and exploitation.
Cinema Novo’s ability to integrate itself economically and industrially depends on freedom for Latin America. Cinema Novo makes every effort toward achieving this freedom, both in its own name and in that of its nearest and more far-flung participants—from the most ignorant to the most talented, from the weakest to the strongest. It is a moral question that will be reflected in our films, whether we’re filming a man nor a single film but an evolving complex of films that will ultimately make the public aware of its own misery.
For this reason, we do not have broader points of contact with the rest of world cinema, except for shared technical and artistic origins.
Cinema Novo is a project that has grown out of the politics of hunger and suffers, for that very reason, all the consequent weaknesses which are a product of its particular situation.
Julio García Espinosa
[First published in Spanish as “Por un cine imperfecto,” in Cine cubano 66/67 (1969). First unabridged translation into English in Jump Cut 20 (1979): 24–26. Trans. Julianne Burton-Carvajal.]
Because of the Movimiento 26 de Julio leading to the eventual Cuban revolution of 1959, Cuba plays a pivotal role in the development of radical Latin American cinema. Like many of the other Latin American manifestos of the 1960s, Espinosa’s argues against the aesthetics of mainstream cinema in order to break down the relationship between filmmaker and spectator, leading to the democratization of the cinema. Harking back to the writings of Eisenstein, “For an Imperfect Cinema” foregrounds the dialectical relationship between the film and the viewer as a means to create a new, revolutionary consciousness. Espinosa argues for a politically committed “imperfect cinema” that foregrounds process over analysis, which he claims leads only to judgment and closure.
Nowadays, perfect cinema—technically and artistically masterful—is almost always reactionary cinema. The major temptation facing Cuban cinema at this time—when it is achieving its objective of becoming a cinema of quality, one which is culturally meaningful within the revolutionary process—is precisely that of transforming itself into a perfect cinema.
The “boom” of Latin American cinema—with Brazil and Cuba in the forefront, according to the applause and approval of the European intelligentsia—is similar, in the present moment, to the one of which the Latin American novel had previously been the exclusive benefactor. Why do they applaud us? There is no doubt that a certain standard of quality has been reached. Doubtless, there is a certain political opportunism, a certain mutual instrumentality. But without doubt there is also something more. Why should we worry about their accolades? Isn’t the goal of public recognition a part of the rules of the artistic game? When it comes to artistic culture, isn’t European recognition equivalent to worldwide recognition? Doesn’t it serve art and our peoples as well when works produced by underdeveloped nations obtain such recognition?
Although it may seem curious, it is necessary to clarify the fact that this disquiet is not solely motivated by ethical concerns. As a matter of fact, the motivation is for the most part aesthetic, if indeed it is possible to draw such an arbitrary dividing line between both terms. When we ask ourselves why it is we who are the film directors and not the others, that is to say, the spectators, the question does not stem from an exclusively ethical concern. We know that we are filmmakers because we have been part of a minority which has had the time and the circumstances needed to develop, within itself, an artistic culture; and because the material resources of film technology are limited and therefore available to some, not to all. But what happens if the future holds the universalization of college level instruction, if economic and social development reduce the hours in the work day, if the evolution of film technology (there are already signs in evidence) makes it possible that this technology ceases being the privilege of a small few? What happens if the development of videotape solves the problem of inevitably limited laboratory capacity, if television systems with their potential for “projecting” independently of the central studio renders the ad infinitum construction of movie theaters suddenly superfluous?
What happens then is not only an act of social justice—the possibility for everyone to make films—but also a fact of extreme importance for artistic culture: the possibility of recovering, without any kinds of complexes or guilt feelings, the true meaning of artistic activity. Then we will be able to understand that art is one of mankind’s “impartial” or “uncommitted” activities [via actividad desinteresada]. That art is not work, and that the artist is not in the strict sense a worker. The feeling that this is so, and the impossibility of translating it into practice, constitutes the agony and at the same time the “pharisee-ism” of all contemporary art.
In fact, the two tendencies exist: those who pretend to produce cinema as an “uncommitted activity” and those who pretend to justify it as a “committed” activity. Both find themselves in a blind alley.
Anyone engaged in an artistic activity asks himself at a given moment what the meaning is of whatever he is doing. The simple fact that this anxiety arises demonstrates that factors exist to motivate it—factors which, in turn, indicate that art does not develop freely. Those who persist in denying art a specific meaning feel the moral weight of their egoism. Those who, on the other hand, pretend to attribute one to it, buy off their bad conscience with social generosity. It makes no difference that the mediators (critics, theoreticians, etc.) try to justify certain cases. For the contemporary artist, the mediator is like an aspirin, a tranquilizer. As with a pill, the artist only temporarily gets rid of the headache. The sure thing, however, is that art, like a capricious little devil, continues to show its face sporadically in no matter which tendency.
No doubt it is easier to define art by what it is not than by what it is, assuming that one can talk about closed definitions not just for art but for any of life’s activities. The spirit of contradiction permeates everything now. Nothing, and nobody lets himself be imprisoned in a picture frame, no matter how gilded. It is possible that art gives us a vision of society or of human nature and that, at the same time, it cannot be defined as a vision of society or of human nature. It is possible that a certain narcissism of consciousness—in recognizing in oneself a little historical, sociological, psychological, philosophical consciousness—is implicit in aesthetic pleasure, and at the same time that this sensation is not sufficient in itself to explain aesthetic pleasure.
Is it not much closer to the nature of art to conceive of it as having its own cognitive power? In other words, by saying that art is not the “illustration” of ideas, which can also be expressed through philosophy, sociology, psychology. Every artist’s desire to express the inexpressible is nothing more than the desire to express the vision of a theme in terms that are inexpressible through other than artistic means. Perhaps the cognitive power of art is like the power of a game for a child. Perhaps aesthetic pleasure lies in sensing the functionality (without a specific goal) of our intelligence and our own sensitivity. Art can stimulate, in general, the creative function of man. It can function as constant stimulus toward adopting an attitude of change with regard to life. But, as opposed to science, it enriches us in such a way that its results are not specific and cannot be applied to anything in particular. It is for this reason that we can call it an “impartial” or “uncommitted” activity, and can say that art is not strictly speaking a “job,” and that the artist is perhaps the least intellectual of all intellectuals.
Why then does the artist feel the need to justify himself as a “worker,” as an “intellectual,” as a “professional,” as a disciplined and organized man, like any other individual who performs a productive task? Why does he feel the need to exaggerate the importance of his activity? Why does he feel the need to have critics (mediators) to justify him, to defend him, to interpret him? Why does he speak proudly of “my critics”? Why does he find it necessary to make transcendental declarations, as if he were the true interpreter of society and of mankind? Why does he pretend to consider himself critic and conscience of society when (although these objectives can be implicit or even explicit in certain circumstances) in a truly revolutionary society all of us—that is to say, the people as a whole—should exercise those functions? And why, on the other hand, does the artist see himself forced to limit these objectives, these attitudes, these characteristics? Why does he at the same time set up these limitations as necessary to prevent his work from being transformed into a tract or a sociological essay? What is behind such pharisee-ism? Why protect oneself and seek recognition as a (revolutionary, it must be understood) political and scientific worker, yet not be prepared to run the same risks?
The problem is a complex one. Basically, it is neither a matter of opportunism nor cowardice. A true artist is prepared to run any risk as long as he is certain that his work will not cease to be an artistic expression. The only risk which he will not accept is that of endangering the artistic quality of his work.
There are also those who accept and defend the “impartial” function of art. These people claim to be more consistent. They opt for the bitterness of a closed world in the hope that tomorrow history will justify them. But the fact is that even today not everyone can enjoy the Mona Lisa. These people should have fewer contradictions; they should be less alienated. But in fact it is not so, even though such an attitude gives them the possibility of an alibi which is more productive on a personal level. In general they sense the sterility of their “purity” or they dedicate themselves to waging corrosive battles, but always on the defensive. They can even, in a reverse operation, reject their interest in finding tranquility, harmony, and a certain compensation in the work of art, expressing instead disequilibrium, chaos, and uncertainty, which also becomes the objective of “impartial” art.
What is it, then, which makes it impossible to practice art as an “impartial” activity? Why is this particular situation today more sensitive than ever? From the beginning of the world as we know it, that is to say, since the world was divided into classes, this situation has been latent. If it has grown sharper today it is precisely because today the possibility of transcending it is coming into view. Not through a prise de conscience, not through the expressed determination of any particular artist, but because reality itself has begun to reveal symptoms (not at all utopian) which indicate that “in the future there will no longer be painters, but rather men who, among other things, dedicate themselves to painting” (Marx).
There can be no “impartial” or “uncommitted” art, there can be no new and genuine qualitative jump in art, unless the concept and the reality of the “elite” is done away with once and for all. Three factors incline us toward optimism: the development of science, the social presence of the masses, and the revolutionary potential in the contemporary world. All three are without hierarchical order, all three are interrelated.
Why is science feared? Why are people afraid that art might be crushed under obvious productivity and utility of science? Why this inferiority complex? It is true that today we read a good essay with much greater pleasure than a novel. Why do we keep repeating then, horrified, that the world is becoming more mercenary, more utilitarian, more materialistic? Is it not really marvelous that the development of science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology is contributing to the “purification” of art? The appearance, thanks to science, of expressive media like photography and film made a greater “purification” of painting and theatre possible (without invalidating them artistically in the least). Doesn’t modern day science render anachronistic so much “artistic” analysis of the human soul? Doesn’t contemporary science allow us to free ourselves from so many fraudulent films, concealed behind what has been called the world of poetry? With the advance of science, art has nothing to lose; on the contrary, it has a whole world to gain. What, then, are we so afraid of? Science strips art bare, and it seems that it is not easy to go naked through the streets.
The real tragedy of the contemporary artist lies in the impossibility of practicing art as a minority activity. It is said—and correctly—that art cannot exercise its attraction without the cooperation of the subject. But what can be done so that the audience stops being an object and transforms itself into the subject?
The development of science, of technology, and of the most advanced social theory and practice has made possible as never before the active presence in the masses in social life. In the realm of artistic life, there are more spectators now than at any other moment in history. This is the first stage in the abolition of “elites.” The task currently at hand is to find out if the conditions which will enable spectators to transform themselves into agents—not merely more active spectators, but genuine co-authors—are beginning to exist. The task at hand is to ask ourselves whether art is really an activity restricted to specialists, whether it is, through extra-human design, the option of a chosen few or a possibility for everyone.
How can we trust the perspectives and possibilities of art simply to the education of the people as a mass of spectators? Taste as defined by high culture, once it is “overdone,” is normally passed on to the rest of society as leftovers to be devoured and ruminated over by those who were not invited to the feast. This eternal spiral has today become a vicious circle as well. “Camp” and its attitude toward everything outdated is an attempt to rescue these leftovers and to lessen the distance between high culture and the people. But the difference lies in the fact that camp rescues it as an aesthetic value, while for the people the values involved continue to be ethical ones.
Must the revolutionary present and the revolutionary future inevitably have “its” artists and “its” intellectuals, just as the bourgeoisie had “theirs”? Surely the truly revolutionary position, from now on, is to contribute to overcoming these elitist concepts and practices, rather than pursuing ad eternum the “artistic quality” of the work. The new outlook for artistic culture is no longer that everyone must share the taste of a few, but that all can be creators of that culture. Art has always been a universal necessity; what it has not been is an option for all under equal conditions. Parallel to refined art, popular art has had a simultaneous but independent existence.
Popular art has absolutely nothing to do with what is called mass art. Popular art needs and consequently tends to develop the personal, individual taste of a people. On the other hand, mass art (or art for the masses) requires the people to have no taste. It will only be genuine when it is actually the masses who create it, since at present it is art produced by a few for the masses. Grotowski says that today’s theater should be a minority art form because mass art can be achieved through cinema. This is not true. Perhaps film is the most elitist of all the contemporary arts. Film today, no matter where, is made by a small minority for the masses. Perhaps film will be the art form which takes the longest time to reach the hands of the masses, when we understand mass art as popular art, art created by the masses. Currently, as Hauser points out, mass art is art produced by a minority in order to satisfy the demand of a public reduced to the sole role of spectator and consumer.
Popular art has always been created by the least learned sector of society, yet this “uncultured” sector has managed to conserve profoundly cultured characteristics of art. One of the most important of these is the fact that the creators are at the same time the spectators and vice versa. Between those who produce and those who consume, no sharp line of demarcation exists. Cultivated art, in our era, has also attained this situation. Modern art’s great dose of freedom is nothing more than the conquest of a new interlocutor: the artist himself. For this reason, it is useless to strain oneself struggling for the substitution of the masses as a new and potential spectator for the bourgeoisie. This situation, maintained by popular art, adopted by cultivated art, must be dissolved and become the heritage of all. This and no other must be the great objective of an authentically revolutionary artistic culture.
Popular art preserved another even more important cultural characteristic: It is carried out as but another life activity. With cultivated art, the reverse is true. It is pursued as a unique, specific activity, as a personal achievement. This is the cruel price of having had to maintain artistic activity at the expense of its inexistence among the people. Hasn’t the attempt to realize himself on the edge of society proved to be too painful a restriction for the artist and for art itself? To posit art as a sect, as a society within society, as the promised land where we can fleetingly fulfill ourselves for a brief instant—doesn’t this create the illusion that self-realization on the level of consciousness also implies self-realization on the level of existence? Isn’t this patently obvious in contemporary circumstances? The essential lesson of popular art is that it is carried out as a life activity: man must not fulfill himself as an artist but fully; the artist must not seek fulfillment as an artist but as a human being.
In the modern world, principally in developed capitalist nations and in those countries engaged in a revolutionary process, there are alarming symptoms, obvious signs of an imminent change. The possibilities for overcoming this traditional disassociation are beginning to arise. These symptoms are not a product of consciousness but of reality itself. A large part of the struggle waged in modern art has been, in fact, to “democratize” art. What other goal is entailed in combating the limitations of taste, museum art, and the demarcation lines between the creator and the public? What is considered beauty today, and where is it found? On Campbell’s soup labels, in a garbage can lid, in gadgets? Even the eternal value of a work of art is today being questioned. What else could be the meaning of those sculptures, seen in recent exhibitions, made of blocks of ice, which melt away while the public looks at them? Isn’t this—more than the disappearance of art—the attempt to make the spectator disappear? Don’t those painters who entrust a portion of the execution of their work to just anyone, rather than to their disciples, exhibit an eagerness to jump over the barricade of “elitist” art? Doesn’t the same attitude exist among composers whose works allow their performers ample liberty?
There’s a widespread tendency in modern art to make the spectator participate ever more fully. If he participates to a greater and greater degree, where will the process end up? Isn’t the logical outcome—or shouldn’t it in fact be—that he will cease being a spectator altogether? This simultaneously represents a tendency toward collectivism and toward individualism. Once we admit the possibility of universal participation, aren’t we also admitting the individual creative potential which we all have? Isn’t Grotowski mistaken when he asserts that today’s theater should be dedicated to an elite? Isn’t it rather the reverse: that the theater of poverty in fact requires the highest refinement? It is the theater which has no need for secondary values: costumes, scenery, make-up, even a stage. Isn’t this an indication that material conditions are reduced to a minimum and that, from this point of view, the possibility of making theater is within everyone’s reach? And doesn’t the fact that the theater has an increasingly smaller public mean that conditions are beginning to ripen for it to transform itself into a true mass theater? Perhaps the tragedy of the theater lies in the fact that it has reached this point in its evolution too soon.
When we look toward Europe, we wring our hands. We see that the old culture is totally incapable of providing answers to the problems of art. The fact is that Europe can no longer respond in a traditional manner but at the same time finds it equally difficult to respond in a manner that is radically new. Europe is no longer capable of giving the world a new “ism”; neither is it in a position to put an end to “isms” once and for all. So we think that our moment has come, that at last the underdeveloped can deck themselves out as “men of culture.” Here lies our greatest danger and our greatest temptation. This accounts for the opportunism of some on our continent. For, given our technical and scientific backwardness and given the scanty presence of the masses in social life, our continent is still capable of responding in a traditional manner, by reaffirming the concept and the practice of elite art. Perhaps in this case the real motive for the European applause which some of our literary and cinematic works have won is none other than a certain nostalgia which we inspire. After all, the European has no other Europe to which to turn.
The third factor, the revolution—which is the most important of all—is perhaps present in our country as nowhere else. This is our only true chance. The revolution is what provides all other alternatives, what can supply an entirely new response, what enables us to do away once and for all with elitist concepts and practices in art. The revolution and the ongoing revolutionary process are the only factors which make the total and free presence of the masses possible. And this will mean the definitive disappearance of the rigid division of labor and of a society divided into sectors and classes. For us, then, the revolution is the highest expression of culture because it will abolish artistic culture as a fragmentary human activity.
Current responses to this inevitable future, this uncontestable prospect, can be as numerous as the countries on our continent. Because characteristics and achieved levels are not the same, each art form, every artistic manifestation, must find its own expression. What should be the response of the Cuban cinema in particular? Paradoxically, we think it will be a new poetics, not a new cultural policy. A poetics whose true goal will be to commit suicide, to disappear as such. We know, however, that in fact other artistic conceptions will continue to exist among us, just like small rural landholdings and religion continue to exist.
On the level of cultural policy we are faced with a serious problem: the film school. Is it right to continue developing a handful of film specialists? It seems inevitable for the present, but what will be the eternal quarry that we continue to mine: the students in Arts and Letters at the University? But shouldn’t we begin to consider right now whether that school should have a limited lifespan? What end do we pursue there—a reserve corps of future artists? Or a specialized future public? We should be asking ourselves whether we can do something now to abolish this division between artistic and scientific culture.
What constitutes in fact the true prestige of artistic culture, and how did it come about that this prestige was allowed to appropriate the whole concept of culture? Perhaps it is based on the enormous prestige which the spirit has always enjoyed at the expense of the body. Hasn’t artistic culture always been seen as the spiritual part of society while scientific culture is seen as its body? The traditional rejection of the body, of material life, is due in part to the concept that things of the spirit are more elevated, more elegant, serious and profound. Can’t we, here and now, begin doing something to put an end to this artificial distinction? We should understand from here on in that the body and the things of the body are also elegant, and that material life is beautiful as well. We should understand that, in fact, the soul is contained in the body just as the spirit is contained in material life, just as—to speak in strictly artistic terms—the essence is contained in the surface and the content in the form.
We should endeavor to see that our future students, and therefore our future filmmakers, will themselves be scientists, sociologists, physicians, economists, agricultural engineers, etc., without of course ceasing to be filmmakers. And, at the same time, we should have the same aim for our most outstanding workers, the workers who achieve the best results in terms of political and intellectual formation. We cannot develop the taste of the masses as long as the division between the two cultures continues to exist, nor as long as the masses are not the real masters of the means of artistic production. The revolution has liberated us as an artistic sector. It is only logical that we contribute to the liberation of the private means of artistic production.
A new poetics for the cinema will, above all, be a “partisan” and “committed” poetics, a “committed” art, a consciously and resolutely “committed” cinema—that is to say, an “imperfect” cinema. An “impartial” or “uncommitted” (cinema), as a complete aesthetic activity, will only be possible when it is the people who make art. But today art must assimilate its quota of work so that work can assimilate its quota of art.
The motto of this imperfect cinema (which there’s no need to invent, since it already exists) is, as Glauber Rocha would say, “We are not interested in the problems of neurosis; we are interested in the problems of lucidity.” Art no longer has use for the neurotic and his problems, although the neurotic continues to need art—as a concerned object, a relief, an alibi or, as Freud would say, as a sublimation of his problems. A neurotic can produce art, but art has no reason to produce neurotics. It has been traditionally believed that the concerns of art were not to be found in the sane but in the sick, not in the normal but in the abnormal, not in those who struggle but in those who weep, not in lucid minds but in neurotic ones. Imperfect cinema is changing this way of seeing the question. We have more faith in the sick man than in the healthy one because his truth is purged by suffering. However, there is no need for suffering to be synonymous with artistic elegance. There is still a trend in modern art—undoubtedly related to Christian tradition—which identifies seriousness with suffering. The specter of Marguerite Gautier still haunts artistic endeavor in our day. Only in the person who suffers do we perceive elegance, gravity, even beauty; only in him do we recognize the possibility of authenticity, seriousness, sincerity. Imperfect cinema must put an end to this tradition.
Imperfect cinema finds a new audience in those who struggle, and it finds its themes in their problems. For imperfect cinema, “lucid” people are the ones who think and feel and exist in a world which they can change. In spite of all the problems and difficulties, they are convinced that they can transform it in a revolutionary way. Imperfect cinema therefore has no need to struggle to create an “audience.” On the contrary, it can be said that at present a greater audience exists for this kind of cinema than there are filmmakers able to supply that audience.
What does this new interlocutor require of us—an art full of moral examples worthy of imitation? No. Man is more of a creator than an innovator. Besides, he should be the one to give us moral examples. He might ask us for a fuller, more complete work, aimed—in a separate or coordinated fashion—at the intelligence, the emotions, the powers of intuition.
Should he ask us for a cinema of denunciation? Yes and no. No, if the denunciation is directed toward the others, if it is conceived that those who are not struggling might sympathize with us and increase their awareness. Yes, if the denunciation acts as information, as testimony, as another combat weapon for those engaged in the struggle. Why denounce imperialism to show one more time that it is evil? What’s the use if those now fighting are fighting primarily against imperialism? We can denounce imperialism but should strive to do it as a way of proposing concrete battles. A film which denounces those who struggle against the evil deeds of an official who must be executed would be an excellent example of this kind of film-denunciation.
We maintain that imperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self-sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which “beautifully illustrates” ideas or concepts which we already possess. (The narcissistic posture has nothing to do with those who struggle.) To show a process is not exactly equivalent to analyzing it. To analyze, in the traditional sense of the word, always implies a closed prior judgment. To analyze a problem is to show the problem (not the process) permeated with judgments which the analysis itself generates a priori. To analyze is to block off from the outset any possibility for analysis on the part of the interlocutor.
To show the process of a problem, on the other hand, is to submit it to judgment without pronouncing the verdict. There is a style of news reporting which puts more emphasis on the commentary than on the news item. There is another kind of reporting which presents the news and evaluates it through the arrangement of the item on the page or by its position in the paper. To show the process of a problem is like showing the very development of the news item, without commentary; it is like showing the multi-faceted evolution of a piece of information without evaluating it. The subjective element is the selection of the problem, conditioned as it is by the interest of the audience—which is the subject. The objective element is showing the process which is the object.
Imperfect cinema is an answer, but it is also a question which will discover its own answers in the course of its development. Imperfect cinema can make use of the documentary or the fictional mode, or both. It can use whatever genre, or all genres. It can use cinema as a pluralistic art form or as a specialized form of expression. These questions are indifferent to it, since they do not represent its real alternatives or problems, and much less its real goals. These are not the battles or polemics it is interested in sparking.
Imperfect cinema can also be enjoyable, both for the maker and for its new audience. Those who struggle do not struggle on the edge of life, but in the midst of it. Struggle is life and vice versa. One does not struggle in order to live “later on.” The struggle requires organization—the organization of life. Even in the most extreme phase, that of total and direct war, the organization of life is equivalent to the organization of the struggle. And in life, as in the struggle, there is everything, including enjoyment. Imperfect cinema can enjoy itself despite everything that conspires to negate enjoyment.
Imperfect cinema rejects exhibitionism in both (literal) senses of the word, the narcissistic and the commercial (getting shown in established theaters and circuits). It should be remembered that the death of the star-system turned out to be a positive thing for art. There is no reason to doubt that the disappearance of the director as star will fail to offer similar prospects. Imperfect cinema must start work now, in cooperation with sociologists, revolutionary leaders, psychologists, economists, etc. Furthermore, imperfect cinema rejects whatever services criticism has to offer and considers the function of mediators and intermediaries anachronistic.
Imperfect cinema is no longer interested in quality or technique. It can be created equally well with a Mitchell or with an 8mm camera, in a studio or in a guerrilla camp in the middle of the jungle. Imperfect cinema is no longer interested in predetermined taste, and much less in “good taste.” It is not quality which it seeks in an artist’s work. The only thing it is interested in is how an artist responds to the following question: What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the “cultured” elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?
The filmmaker who subscribes to this new poetics should not have personal self-realization as his object. From now on he should also have another activity. He should place his role as revolutionary or aspiring revolutionary above all else. In a word, he should try to fulfill himself as a man and not just as an artist, that its essential goal as a new poetics is to disappear. It is no longer a matter of replacing one school with another, one “ism” with another, poetry with anti-poetry, but of truly letting a thousand different flowers bloom. The future lies with folk art. But let us no longer display folk art with demagogic pride, with a celebrative air. Let us exhibit it instead as a cruel denunciation, as a painful testimony to the level at which the peoples of the world have been forced to limit their artistic creativity. The future, without doubt, will be with folk art, but then there will be no need to call it that, because nobody and nothing will any longer be able to again paralyze the creative spirit of the people.
Art will not disappear into nothingness; it will disappear into everything.
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino
[First published in Spanish as “Hacia un tercer cine,” in Tricontinental (Cuba) 13 (1969). First translated into English in Afterimage (UK) 3 (1971): 16–35. This translation from Cineaste revised by Julianne Burton and Michael Chanan and published in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI, 1983), 17–27.]
This profoundly influential manifesto, which coins the term Third Cinema, lays out Solanas and Getino’s strategy in making their groundbreaking La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, Argentina, 1968). They position Third Cinema in contradistinction to Hollywood film (First Cinema) and European “waves” and art cinema, including cinema novo (Second Cinema). They give priority to the documentary as a form of cinema that allows for social and political analysis and transformation, calling it the main basis of revolutionary filmmaking. They set out to transform not only what kinds of images appear on the screen but also the ways in which moving images are distributed and screened in Latin America, arguing for exhibition practices that lie outside the dominant, capitalist modes of spectatorship. As Jonathan Buchsbaum has demonstrated, Solanas and Getino did not mean for this manifesto to be static; as such they revised it over the years, adapting it to political changes and to what they discovered through their collective Cine Liberación and through screenings of Hour of the Furnaces throughout Latin America.
. . . we must discuss, we must invent . . .
—FRANTZ FANON
Just a short time ago it would have seemed like a Quixotic adventure in the colonised, neocolonised, or even the imperialist nations themselves to make any attempt to create films of decolonisation that turned their back on or actively opposed the System. Until recently, film had been synonymous with spectacle or entertainment: in a word, it was one more consumer good. At best, films succeeded in bearing witness to the decay of bourgeois values and testifying to social injustice. As a rule, films only dealt with effect, never with cause; it was cinema of mystification or anti-historicism. It was surplus value cinema. Caught up in these conditions, films, the most valuable tool of communication of our times, were destined to satisfy only the ideological and economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the lords of the world film market, the great majority of whom were from the United States.
Was it possible to overcome this situation? How could the problem of turning out liberating films be approached when costs came to several thousand dollars and the distribution and exhibition channels were in the hands of the enemy? How could the continuity of work be guaranteed? How could the public be reached? How could system-imposed repression and censorship be vanquished? These questions, which could be multiplied in all directions, led and still lead many people to scepticism or rationalisation: “revolutionary cinema cannot exist before the revolution”; “revolutionary films have been possible only in the liberated countries”; “without the support of revolutionary political power, revolutionary cinema or art is impossible.” The mistake was due to taking the same approach to reality and films as did the bourgeoisie. The models of production, distribution, and exhibition continued to be those of Hollywood precisely because, in ideology and politics, films had not yet become the vehicle for a clearly drawn differentiation between bourgeois ideology and politics. A reformist policy, as manifested in dialogue with the adversary, in coexistence, and in the relegation of national contradictions to those between two supposedly unique blocs—the USSR and the USA—was and is unable to produce anything but a cinema within the System itself. At best, it can be the “progressive” wing of Establishment cinema. When all is said and done, such cinema was doomed to wait until the world conflict was resolved peacefully in favour of socialism in order to change qualitatively. The most daring attempts of those filmmakers who strove to conquer the fortress of official cinema ended, as Jean-Luc Godard eloquently put it, with the filmmakers themselves “trapped inside the fortress.”
But the questions that were recently raised appeared promising; they arose from a new historical situation to which the filmmaker, as is often the case with the educated strata of our countries, was rather a latecomer: ten years of the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese struggle, and the development of a worldwide liberation movement whose moving force is to be found in the Third World countries. The existence of masses on the worldwide revolutionary plane was the substantial fact without which those questions could not have been posed. A new historical situation and a new man born in the process of the anti-imperialist struggle demanded a new, revolutionary attitude from the filmmakers of the world. The question of whether or not militant cinema was possible before the revolution began to be replaced, at least within small groups, by the question of whether or not such a cinema was necessary to contribute to the possibility of revolution. An affirmative answer was the starting point for the first attempts to channel the process of seeking possibilities in numerous countries. Examples are Newsreel, a US New Left film group, the cinegiornali of the Italian student movement, the films made by the Etats Généraux du cinéma français, and those of the British and Japanese student movements, all a continuation and deepening of the work of a Joris Ivens or a Chris Marker. Let it suffice to observe the films of a Santiago Alvarez in Cuba, or the cinema being developed by different filmmakers in “the homeland of all,” as Bolivar would say, as they seek a revolutionary Latin American cinema.
A profound debate on the role of intellectuals and artists before liberation is today enriching the perspectives of intellectual work all over the world. However, this debate oscillates between two poles: one which proposes to relegate all intellectual work capacity to a specifically political or political-military function, denying perspectives to all artistic activity with the idea that such activity must ineluctably be absorbed by the System, and the other which maintains an inner duality of the intellectual: on the one hand, the “work of art,” the “privilege of beauty,” an art and a beauty which are not necessarily bound to the needs of the revolutionary political process, and, on the other, a political commitment which generally consists in signing certain anti-imperialist manifestos. In practice, this point of view means the separation of politics and art.
This polarity rests, as we see it, on two omissions: first, the conception of culture, science, art, and cinema as univocal and universal terms, and, second, an insufficiently clear idea of the fact that the revolution does not begin with the taking of political power from imperialism and the bourgeoisie, but rather begins at the moment when the masses sense the need for change and their intellectual vanguards begin to study and carry out this change through activities on different fronts.
Culture, art, science, and cinema always respond to conflicting class interests. In the neocolonial situation two concepts of culture, art, science, and cinema compete: that of the rulers and that of the nation. And this situation will continue, as long as the national concept is not identified with that of the rulers, as long as the status of colony or semi-colony continues in force. Moreover, the duality will be overcome and will reach a single and universal category only when the best values of man emerge from proscription to achieve hegemony, when the liberation of man is universal. In the meantime, there exist our culture and their culture, our cinema and their cinema. Because our culture is an impulse towards emancipation, it will remain in existence until emancipation is a reality: a culture of subversion which will carry with it an art, a science, and a cinema of subversion.
The lack of awareness in regard to these dualities generally leads the intellectual to deal with artistic and scientific expressions as they were “universally conceived” by the classes that rule the world, at best introducing some correction into these expressions. We have not gone deeply enough into developing a revolutionary theatre, architecture, medicine, psychology, and cinema; into developing a culture by and for us. The intellectual takes each of these forms of expression as a unit to be corrected from within the expression itself, and not from without, with its own new methods and models.
An astronaut or a Ranger mobilises all the scientific resources of imperialism. Psychologists, doctors, politicians, sociologists, mathematicians, and even artists are thrown into the study of everything that serves, from the vantage point of different specialities, the preparation of an orbital flight or the massacre of Vietnamese; in the long run, all of these specialities are equally employed to satisfy the needs of imperialism. In Buenos Aires the army eradicates villas miseria (urban shanty towns) and in their place puts up “strategic hamlets” with town planning aimed at facilitating military intervention when the time comes. The revolutionary organisations lack specialised fronts not only in their medicine, engineering, psychology, and art—but also in our own revolutionary engineering, psychology, art, and cinema. In order to be effective, all these fields must recognise the priorities of each stage; those required by the struggle for power or those demanded by the already victorious revolution. Examples: creating a political sensitivity to the need to undertake a political-military struggle in order to take power; developing a medicine to serve the needs of combat in rural or urban zones; co-ordinating energies to achieve a 10 million ton sugar harvest as they attempted in Cuba; or elaborating an architecture, a city planning, that will be able to withstand the massive air raids that imperialism can launch at any time. The specific strengthening of each speciality and field subordinate to collective priorities can fill the empty spaces caused by the struggle for liberation and can delineate with greatest efficacy the role of the intellectual in our time. It is evident that revolutionary mass-level culture and awareness can only be achieved after the taking of political power, but it is no less true that the use of scientific and artistic means, together with political-military means, prepares the terrain for the revolution to become reality and facilitates the solution of the problems that will arise with the taking of power.
The intellectual must find through his action the field in which he can rationally perform the most efficient work. Once the front has been determined, his next task is to find out within that front exactly what is the enemy’s stronghold and where and how he must deploy his forces. It is in this harsh and dramatic daily search that a culture of the revolution will be able to emerge, the basis which will nurture, beginning right now, the new man exemplified by Che—not man in the abstract, not the “liberation of man,” but another man, capable of arising from the ashes of the old, alienated man that we are and which the new man will destroy by starting to stoke the fire today.
The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. 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.
The culture, including the cinema, of a neocolonialised country is just the expression of an overall dependence that generates models and values born from the needs of imperialist expansion.
In order to impose itself, neocolonialism needs to convince the people of a dependent country of their own inferiority. Sooner or later, the inferior man recognises Man with a capital M; this recognition means the destruction of his defences. If you want to be a man, says the oppressor, you have to be like me, speak my language, deny your own being, transform yourself into me. As early as the 17th century the Jesuit missionaries proclaimed the aptitude of the [South American] native for copying European works of art. Copyist, translator, interpreter, at best a spectator, the neocolonialised intellectual will always be encouraged to refuse to assume his creative possibilities. Inhibitions, uprootedness, escapism, cultural cosmopolitanism, artistic imitation, metaphysical exhaustion, betrayal of country—all find fertile soil in which to grow.
Culture becomes bilingual
. . . not due to the use of two languages but because of the conjuncture of two cultural patterns of thinking. One is national, that of the people, and the other is estranging, that of the classes subordinated to outside forces. The admiration that the upper classes express for the US or Europe is the highest expression of their subjection. With the colonialisation of the upper classes the culture of imperialism indirectly introduces among the masses knowledge which cannot be supervised.
Just as they are not masters of the land upon which they walk, the neocolonialised people are not masters of the ideas that envelop them. A knowledge of national reality presupposes going into the web of lies and confusion that arise from dependence. The intellectual is obliged to refrain from spontaneous thought; if he does think, he generally runs the risk of doing so in French or English—never in the language of a culture of his own which, like the process of national and social liberation, is still hazy and incipient. Every piece of data, every concept that floats around us, is part of a framework of mirages that is difficult to take apart.
The native bourgeoisie of the port cities such as Buenos Aires, and their respective intellectual elites, constituted, from the very origins of our history, the transmission belt of neocolonial penetration. Behind such watchwords as “Civilisation or barbarism,” manufactured in Argentina by Europeanising liberalism, was the attempt to impose a civilisation fully in keeping with the needs of imperialist expansion and the desire to destroy the resistance of the national masses, which were successively called the “rabble,” a “bunch of blacks,” and “zoological detritus” in our country and the “unwashed hordes” in Bolivia. In this way the ideologists of the semi-countries, past masters in “the play of big words, with an implacable, detailed, and rustic universalism,” served as spokesmen of those followers of Disraeli who intelligently proclaimed: “I prefer the rights of the English to the rights of man.”
The middle sectors were and are the best recipients of cultural neocolonialism. Their ambivalent class condition, their buffer position between social polarities, and their broader possibilities of access to civilisation offer imperialism a base of social support which has attained considerable importance in some Latin American countries.
If in an openly colonial situation cultural penetration is the complement of a foreign army of occupation, during certain stages this penetration assumes major priority.
It serves to institutionalise and give a normal appearance to dependence. The main objective of this cultural deformation is to keep the people from realising their neocolonialised position and aspiring to change it. In this way educational colonisation is an effective substitute for the colonial police.
Mass communications tend to complete the destruction of a national awareness and of a collective subjectivity on the way to enlightenment, a destruction which begins as soon as the child has access to these media, the education and culture of the ruling classes. In Argentina, 26 television channels; one million television sets; more than 50 radio stations; hundreds of newspapers, periodicals, and magazines; and thousands of records, films, etc., join their acculturating role of the colonialisation of taste and consciousness to the process of neocolonial education which begins in the university. “Mass communications are more effective for neocolonialism than napalm. What is real, true, and rational is to be found on the margin of the law, just as are the people. Violence, crime, and destruction come to be Peace, Order, and Normality.” Truth, then, amounts to subversion. Any form of expression or communication that tries to show national reality is subversion.
Cultural penetration, educational colonisation, and mass communications all join forces today in a desperate attempt to absorb, neutralise, or eliminate any expression that responds to an attempt at decolonisation. Neocolonialism makes a serious attempt to castrate, to digest, the cultural forms that arise beyond the bounds of its own aims. Attempts are made to remove from them precisely what makes them effective and dangerous; in short, it tries to depoliticise them. Or, to put it another way, to separate the cultural manifestation from the fight for national independence.
Ideas such as “Beauty in itself is revolutionary” and “All new cinema is revolutionary” are idealistic aspirations that do not touch the neocolonial condition, since they continue to conceive of cinema, art, and beauty as universal abstractions and not as an integral part of the national processes of decolonisation.
Any attempt, no matter how virulent, which does not serve to mobilise, agitate, and politicise sectors of the people, to arm them rationally and perceptibly, in one way or another, for the struggle—is received with indifference or even with pleasure. Virulence, nonconformism, plain rebelliousness, and discontent are just so many more products on the capitalist market; they are consumer goods. This is especially true in a situation where the bourgeoisie is in need of a daily dose of shock and exciting elements of controlled violence—that is, violence which absorption by the System turns into pure stridency. Examples are the works of a socialist-tinged painting and sculpture which are greedily sought after by the new bourgeoisie to decorate their apartments and mansions; plays full of anger and avant-gardism which are noisily applauded by the ruling classes; the literature of “progressive” writers concerned with semantics and man on the margin of time and space, which gives an air of democratic broadmindedness to the System’s publishing houses and magazines; and the cinema of “challenge,” of “argument,” promoted by the distribution monopolies and launched by the big commercial outlets.
In reality the area of permitted protest of the System is much greater than the System is willing to admit. This gives the artists the illusion that they are acting “against the system” by going beyond certain narrow limits; they do not realise that even anti-System art can be absorbed and utilised by the System, as both a brake and a necessary self-correction.
Lacking an awareness of how to utilise what is ours for our true liberation—in a word, lacking politicisation—all of these “progressive” alternatives come to form the leftist wing of the System, the improvement of its cultural products. They will be doomed to carry out the best work on the left that the right is able to accept today and will thus only serve the survival of the latter. “Restore words, dramatic actions, and images to the places where they can carry out a revolutionary role, where they will be useful, where they will become weapons in the struggle.” Insert the work as an original fact in the process of liberation, place it first at the service of life itself, ahead of art; dissolve aesthetics in the life of society: only in this way, as Fanon said, can decolonisation become possible and culture, cinema, and beauty—at least, what is of greatest importance to us—become our culture, our films, and our sense of beauty.
The historical perspectives of Latin America and of the majority of the countries under imperialist domination are headed not towards a lessening of repression but towards an increase. We are heading not for bourgeois-democratic regimes but for dictatorial forms of government. The struggles for democratic freedoms, instead of seizing concessions from the System, move it to cut down on them, given its narrow margin for manoeuvring.
The bourgeois-democratic facade caved in some time ago. The cycle opened during the last century in Latin America with the first attempts at self-affirmation of a national bourgeoisie differentiated from the metropolis (examples are Rosas’ federalism in Argentina, the Lopez and Francia regimes in Paraguay, and those of Bengido and Balmaceda in Chile) with a tradition that has continued well into our century: national-bourgeois, national-popular, and democratic-bourgeois attempts were made by Cardenas, Yrigoyen, Haya de la Torre, Vargas, Aguirre Cerda, Perón, and Arbenz. But as far as revolutionary prospects are concerned, the cycle has definitely been completed. The lines allowing for the deepening of the historical attempt of each of those experiences today pass through the sectors that understand the continent’s situation as one of war and that are preparing, under the force of circumstances, to make that region the Vietnam of the coming decade. A war in which national liberation can only succeed when it is simultaneously postulated as social liberation—socialism as the only valid perspective of any national liberation process.
At this time in Latin America there is room for neither passivity nor innocence. The intellectual’s commitment is measured in terms of risks as well as words and ideas; what he does to further the cause of liberation is what counts. The worker who goes on strike and thus risks losing his job or even his life, the student who jeopardises his career, the militant who keeps silent under torture: each by his or her action commits us to something much more important than a vague gesture of solidarity.
In a situation in which the “state of law” is replaced by the “state of facts,” the intellectual, who is one more worker, functioning on a cultural front, must become increasingly radicalised to avoid denial of self and to carry out what is expected of him in our times. The impotence of all reformist concepts has already been exposed sufficiently, not only in politics but also in culture and films—and especially in the latter, whose history is that of imperialist domination—mainly Yankee.
While, during the early history (or the prehistory) of the cinema, it was possible to speak of a German, an Italian, or a Swedish cinema clearly differentiated and corresponding to specific national characteristics, today such differences have disappeared. The borders were wiped out along with the expansion of US imperialism and the film model that is imposed: Hollywood movies. In our times it is hard to find a film within the field of commercial cinema, including what is known as “author’s cinema,” in both the capitalist and socialist countries, that manages to avoid the models of Hollywood pictures. The latter have such a fast hold that monumental works such as Bondarchuk’s War and Peace from the USSR are also monumental examples of the submission to all propositions imposed by the US movie industry (structure, language, etc.) and, consequently, to its concepts.
The placing of the cinema within US models, even in the formal aspect, in language, leads to the adoption of the ideological forms that gave rise to precisely that language and no other. Even the appropriation of models which appear to be only technical, industrial, scientific, etc., leads to a conceptual dependency, due to the fact that the cinema is an industry, but differs from other industries in that it has been created and organised in order to generate certain ideologies. The 35mm camera, 24 frames per second, arc lights, and a commercial place of exhibition for audiences were conceived not to gratuitously transmit any ideology, but to satisfy, in the first place, the cultural and surplus value needs of a specific ideology, of a specific world-view: that of US finance capital.
The mechanistic takeover of a cinema conceived as a show to be exhibited in large theatres with a standard duration, hermetic structures that are born and die on the screen, satisfies, to be sure, the commercial interests of the production groups, but it also leads to the absorption of forms of the bourgeois world-view which are the continuation of 19th century art, of bourgeois art: man is accepted only as a passive and consuming object; rather than having his ability to make history recognised, he is only permitted to read history, contemplate it, listen to it, and undergo it. The cinema as a spectacle aimed at a digesting object is the highest point that can be reached by bourgeois filmmaking. The world, experience, and the historic process are enclosed within the frame of a painting, the stage of a theatre, and the movie screen; man is viewed as a consumer of ideology, and not as the creator of ideology. This notion is the starting point for the wonderful interplay of bourgeois philosophy and the obtaining of surplus value. The result is a cinema studied by motivational analysts, sociologists and psychologists, by the endless researchers of the dreams and frustrations of the masses, all aimed at selling movie-life, reality as it is conceived by the ruling classes.
The first alternative to this type of cinema, which we could call the first cinema, arose with the so-called “author’s cinema,” “expression cinema,” “nouvelle vague,” “cinema novo,” or, conventionally, the second cinema. This alternative signified a step forward inasmuch as it demanded that the filmmaker be free to express himself in non-standard language and inasmuch as it was an attempt at cultural decolonisation. But such attempts have already reached, or are about to reach, the outer limits of what the system permits. The second cinema filmmaker has remained “trapped inside the fortress” as Godard put it, or is on his way to becoming trapped. The search for a market of 200,000 moviegoers in Argentina, a figure that is supposed to cover the costs of an independent local production, the proposal of developing a mechanism of industrial production parallel to that of the System but which would be distributed by the System according to its own norms, the struggle to better the laws protecting the cinema and replacing “bad officials” by “less bad,” etc., is a search lacking in viable prospects, unless you consider viable the prospect of becoming institutionalised as “the youthful, angry wing of society”—that is, of neocolonialised or capitalist society.
Real alternatives differing from those offered by the System are only possible if one of two requirements is fulfilled: making films that the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs, or making films that directly and explicitly set out to fight the System. Neither of these requirements fits within the alternatives that are still offered by the second cinema, but they can be found in the revolutionary opening towards a cinema outside and against the System, in a cinema of liberation: the third cinema.
One of the most effective jobs done by neocolonialism is its cutting off of intellectual sectors, especially artists, from national reality by lining them up behind “universal art and models.” It has been very common for intellectuals and artists to be found at the tail end of popular struggle, when they have not actually taken up positions against it. The social layers which have made the greatest contribution to the building of a national culture (understood as an impulse towards decolonisation) have not been precisely the enlightened elites but rather the most exploited and uncivilised sectors. Popular organisations have very rightly distrusted the “intellectual” and the “artist.” When they have not been openly used by the bourgeoisie or imperialism, they have certainly been their indirect tools; most of them did not go beyond spouting a policy in favour of “peace and democracy,” fearful of anything that had a national ring to it, afraid of contaminating art with politics and the artists with the revolutionary militant. They thus tended to obscure the inner causes determining neocolonialised society and placed in the foreground the outer causes, which, while “they are the condition for change, can never be the basis for change”; in Argentina they replaced the struggle against imperialism and the native oligarchy with the struggle of democracy against fascism, suppressing the fundamental contradiction of a neocolonialised country and replacing it with “a contradiction that was a copy of the world-wide contradiction.”
This cutting off of the intellectual and artistic sectors from the processes of national liberation—which, among other things, helps us to understand the limitations in which these processes have been unfolding—today tends to disappear to the extent that artists and intellectuals are beginning to discover the impossibility of destroying the enemy without first joining in a battle for their common interests. The artist is beginning to feel the insufficiency of his nonconformism and individual rebellion. And the revolutionary organisations, in turn, are discovering the vacuums that the struggle for power creates in the cultural sphere. The problems of filmmaking, the ideological limitations of a filmmaker in a neocolonialised country, etc., have thus far constituted objective factors in the lack of attention paid to the cinema by the people’s organisations. Newspapers and other printed matter, posters and wall propaganda, speeches and other verbal forms of information, enlightenment, and politicisation are still the main means of communication between the organisations and the vanguard layers of the masses. But the new political positions of some filmmakers and the subsequent appearance of films useful for liberation have permitted certain political vanguards to discover the importance of movies. This importance is to be found in the specific meaning of films as a form of communication and because of their particular characteristics, characteristics that allow them to draw audiences of different origins, many of them people who might not respond favourably to the announcement of a political speech. Films offer an effective pretext for gathering an audience, in addition to the ideological message they contain.
The capacity for synthesis and the penetration of the film image, the possibilities offered by the living document, and naked reality, and the power of enlightenment of audiovisual means make the film far more effective than any other tool of communication. It is hardly necessary to point out that those films which achieve an intelligent use of the possibilities of the image, adequate dosage of concepts, language and structure that flow naturally from each theme, and counterpoints of audiovisual narration achieve effective results in the politicisation and mobilisation of cadres and even in work with the masses, where this is possible.
The students who raised barricades on the Avenida 18 de Julio in Montevideo after the showing of La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), the growing demand for films such as those made by Santiago Alvarez and the Cuban documentary film movement, and the debates and meetings that take place after the underground or semipublic showings of third cinema films are the beginning of a twisting and difficult road being travelled in the consumer societies by the mass organisations (Cinegiornali liberi in Italy, Zengakuren documentaries in Japan, etc.). For the first time in Latin America, organisations are ready and willing to employ films for political-cultural ends: the Chilean Partido Socialista provides its cadres with revolutionary film material, while Argentine revolutionary Peronist and non-Peronist groups are taking an interest in doing likewise. Moreover, OSPAAAL (Organisation of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America) is participating in the production and distribution of films that contribute to the anti-imperialist struggle. The revolutionary organisations are discovering the need for cadres who, among other things, know how to handle a film camera, tape recorders, and projectors in the most effective way possible. The struggle to seize power from the enemy is the meeting ground of the political and artistic vanguards engaged in a common task which is enriching to both.
Some of the circumstances that delayed the use of films as a revolutionary tool until a short time ago were lack of equipment, technical difficulties, the compulsory specialisation of each phase of work, and high costs. The advances that have taken place within each specialisation; the simplification of movie cameras and tape recorders; improvements in the medium itself, such as rapid film that can be shot in normal light; automatic light meters; improved audiovisual synchronisation; and the spread of know-how by means of specialised magazines with large circulations and even through nonspecialised media, have helped to demystify filmmaking and divest it of that almost magic aura that made it seem that films were only within the reach of “artists,” “geniuses,” and “the privileged.” Filmmaking is increasingly within the reach of larger social layers. Chris Marker experimented in France with groups of workers whom he provided with 8mm equipment and some basic instruction in its handling. The goal was to have the worker film his way of looking at the world, just as if he were writing it. This has opened up unheard-of prospects for the cinema; above all, a new conception of filmmaking and the significance of art in our times.
Imperialism and capitalism, whether in the consumer society or in the neocolonialised country, veil everything behind a screen of images and appearances. The image of reality is more important than reality itself. It is a world peopled with fantasies and phantoms in which what is hideous is clothed in beauty, while beauty is disguised as the hideous. On the one hand, fantasy, the imaginary bourgeois universe replete with comfort, equilibrium, sweet reason, order, efficiency, and the possibility to “be someone.” And, on the other, the phantoms, we the lazy, we the indolent and underdeveloped, we who cause disorder. When a neocolonialised person accepts his situation, he becomes a Gungha Din, a traitor at the service of the colonialist, an Uncle Tom, a class and racial renegade, or a fool, the easy-going servant and bumpkin; but, when he refuses to accept his situation of oppression, then he turns into a resentful savage, a cannibal. Those who lose sleep from fear of the hungry, those who comprise the System, see the revolutionary as a bandit, robber, and rapist; the first battle waged against them is thus not on a political plane, but rather in the police context of law, arrests, etc. The more exploited a man is, the more he is placed on a plane of insignificance. The more he resists, the more he is viewed as a beast. This can be seen in Africa Addio, made by the fascist Jacopetti: the African savages, killer animals, wallow in abject anarchy once they escape from white protection. Tarzan died, and in his place were born Lumumbas and Lobegulas, Nkomos, and the Madzimbamutos, and this is something that neocolonialism cannot forgive. Fantasy has been replaced by phantoms and man is turned into an extra who dies so Jacopetti can comfortably film his execution.
I make the revolution; therefore I exist. This is the starting point for the disappearance of fantasy and phantom to make way for living human beings. The cinema of the revolution is at the same time one of destruction and construction: destruction of the image that neocolonialism has created of itself and of us, and construction of a throbbing, living reality which recaptures truth in any of its expressions.
The restitution of things to their real place and meaning is an eminently subversive fact both in the neocolonial situation and in the consumer societies. In the former, the seeming ambiguity or pseudo-objectivity in newspapers, literature, etc., and the relative freedom of the people’s organisations to provide their own information cease to exist, giving way to overt restriction, when it is a question of television and radio, the two most important System-controlled or monopolised communications media. Last year’s May events in France are quite explicit on this point.
In a world where the unreal rules, artistic expression is shoved along the channels of fantasy, fiction, language in code, sign language, and messages whispered between the lines. Art is cut off from the concrete facts—which, from the neocolonialist standpoint, are accusatory testimonies—to turn back on itself, strutting about in a world of abstractions and phantoms, where it becomes “timeless” and history-less. Vietnam can be mentioned, but only far from Vietnam; Latin America can be mentioned, but only far enough away from the continent to be effective, in places where it is depoliticised and where it does not lead to action.
The cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the concept has today, from educational films to the reconstruction of a fact or a historical event, is perhaps the main basis of revolutionary filmmaking. Every image that documents, bears witness to, refutes or deepens the truth of a situation is something more than a film image or purely artistic fact; it becomes something which the System finds indigestible.
Testimony about a national reality is also an inestimable means of dialogue and knowledge on the world plane. No internationalist form of struggle can be carried out successfully if there is not a mutual exchange of experiences among the people, if the people do not succeed in breaking out of the Balkanisation on the international, continental, and national planes which imperialism is striving to maintain.
There is no knowledge of a reality as long as that reality is not acted upon, as long as its transformation is not begun on all fronts of struggle. The well-known quote from Marx deserves constant repetition: it is not sufficient to interpret the world; it is now a question of transforming it.
With such an attitude as his starting point, it remains to the filmmaker to discover his own language, a language which will arise from a militant and transforming world-view and from the theme being dealt with. Here it may well be pointed out that certain political cadres still maintain old dogmatic positions, which ask the artist or filmmaker to provide an apologetic view of reality, one which is more in line with wishful thinking than with what actually is. Such positions, which at bottom mask a lack of confidence in the possibilities of reality itself, have in certain cases led to the use of film language as a mere idealised illustration of a fact, to the desire to remove reality’s deep contradictions, its dialectic richness, which is precisely the kind of depth which can give a film beauty and effectiveness. The reality of the revolutionary processes all over the world, in spite of their confused and negative aspects, possesses a dominant line, a synthesis which is so rich and stimulating that it does not need to be schematised with partial or sectarian views.
Pamphlet films, didactic films, report films, essay films, witness-bearing films—any militant form of expression is valid, and it would be absurd to lay down a set of aesthetic work norms. Be receptive to all that the people have to offer, and offer them the best; or, as Che put it, respect the people by giving them quality. This is a good thing to keep in mind in view of those tendencies which are always latent in the revolutionary artist to lower the level of investigation and the language of a theme, in a kind of neopopulism, down to levels which, while they may be those upon which the masses move, do not help them to get rid of the stumbling blocks left by imperialism. The effectiveness of the best films of militant cinema show that social layers considered backward are able to capture the exact meaning of an association of images, an effect of staging, and any linguistic experimentation placed within the context of a given idea. Furthermore, revolutionary cinema is not fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or passively establishes a situation: rather, it attempts to intervene in the situation as an element providing thrust or rectification. To put it another way, it provides discovery through transformation.
The differences that exist between one and another liberation process make it impossible to lay down supposedly universal norms. A cinema which in the consumer society does not attain the level of the reality in which it moves can play a stimulating role in an underdeveloped country, just as a revolutionary cinema in the neocolonial situation will not necessarily be revolutionary if it is mechanically taken to the metropolitan country.
Teaching the handling of guns can be revolutionary where there are potentially or explicitly viable leaders ready to throw themselves into the struggle to take power, but ceases to be revolutionary where the masses still lack sufficient awareness of their situation or where they have already learned to handle guns. Thus, a cinema which insists upon the denunciation of the effects of neocolonial policy is caught up in a reformist game if the consciousness of the masses has already assimilated such knowledge; then the revolutionary thing is to examine the causes, to investigate the ways of organising and arming for the change. That is, imperialism can sponsor films that fight illiteracy, and such pictures will only be inscribed within the contemporary need of imperialist policy, but, in contrast, the making of such films in Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution was clearly revolutionary. Although their starting point was just the fact of teaching, reading and writing, they had a goal which was radically different from that of imperialism: the training of people for liberation, not for subjection.
The model of the perfect work of art, the fully rounded film structured according to the metrics imposed by bourgeois culture, its theoreticians and critics, has served to inhibit the filmmaker in the dependent countries, especially when he has attempted to erect similar models in a reality which offered him neither the culture, the techniques, nor the most primary elements for success. The culture of the metropolis kept the age-old secrets that had given life to its models; the transposition of the latter to the neocolonial reality was always a mechanism of alienation, since it was not possible for the artist of the dependent country to absorb, in a few years, the secrets of a culture and society elaborated through the centuries in completely different historical circumstances. The attempt in the sphere of filmmaking to match the pictures of the ruling countries generally ends in failure, given the existence of two disparate historical realities. And such unsuccessful attempts lead to feelings of frustration and inferiority. Both these feelings arise in the first place from the fear of taking risks along completely new roads which are almost a total denial of “their cinema.” A fear of recognising the particularities and limitations of dependency in order to discover the possibilities inherent in that situation by finding ways of overcoming it which would of necessity be original.
The existence of a revolutionary cinema is inconceivable without the constant and methodical exercise of practice, search, and experimentation. It even means committing the new filmmaker to take chances on the unknown, to leap into space at times, exposing himself to failure as does the guerrilla who travels along paths that he himself opens up with machete blows. The possibility of discovering and inventing film forms and structures that serve a more profound vision of our reality resides in the ability to place oneself on the outside limits of the familiar, to make one’s way amid constant dangers.
Our time is one of hypothesis rather than of thesis, a time of works in progress—unfinished, unordered, violent works made with the camera in one hand and a rock in the other. Such works cannot be assessed according to the traditional theoretical and critical canons. The ideas for our film theory and criticism will come to life through inhibition-removing practice and experimentation. “Knowledge begins with practice. After acquiring theoretical knowledge through practice, it is necessary to return to practice.” Once he has embarked upon this practice, the revolutionary filmmaker will have to overcome countless obstacles; he will experience the loneliness of those who aspire to the praise of the System’s promotion media only to find that those media are closed to him. As Godard would say, he will cease to be a bicycle champion to become an anonymous bicycle rider, Vietnamese-style, submerged in a cruel and prolonged war. But he will also discover that there is a receptive audience that looks upon his work as something of its own existence, and that is ready to defend him in a way that it would never do with any world bicycle champion.
In this long war, with the camera as our rifle, we do in fact move into a guerrilla activity. This is why the work of a film-guerrilla group is governed by strict disciplinary norms as to both work methods and security. A revolutionary film group is in the same situation as a guerrilla unit: it cannot grow strong without military structures and command concepts. The group exists as a network of complementary responsibilities, as the sum and synthesis of abilities, inasmuch as it operates harmonically with a leadership that centralises planning work and maintains its continuity. Experience shows that it is not easy to maintain the cohesion of a group when it is bombarded by the System and its chain of accomplices frequently disguised as “progressives,” when there are no immediate and spectacular outer incentives and the members must undergo the discomforts and tensions of work that is done underground and distributed clandestinely. Many abandon their responsibilities because they underestimate them or because they measure them with values appropriate to System cinema and not underground cinema. The birth of internal conflicts is a reality present in any group, whether or not it possesses ideological maturity. The lack of awareness of such an inner conflict on the psychological or personality plane, etc., the lack of maturity in dealing with problems of relationships, at times leads to ill feeling and rivalries that in turn cause real clashes going beyond ideological or objective differences. All of this means that a basic condition is an awareness of the problems of interpersonal relationships, leadership and areas of competence. What is needed is to speak clearly, mark off work areas, assign responsibilities and take on the job as a rigorous militancy.
Guerrilla filmmaking proletarianises the film worker and breaks down the intellectual aristocracy that the bourgeoisie grants to its followers. In a word, it democratises. The filmmaker’s tie with reality makes him more a part of his people. Vanguard layers and even masses participate collectively in the work when they realise that it is the continuity of their daily struggle. La hora de los hornos shows how a film can be made in hostile circumstances when it has the support and collaboration of militants and cadres from the people.
The revolutionary filmmaker acts with a radically new vision of the role of the producer, team-work, tools, details, etc. Above all, he supplies himself at all levels in order to produce his films, he equips himself at all levels, he learns how to handle the manifold techniques of his craft. His most valuable possessions are the tools of his trade, which form part and parcel of his need to communicate. The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.
Each member of the group should be familiar, at least in a general way, with the equipment being used: he must be prepared to replace another in any of the phases of production. The myth of irreplaceable technicians must be exploded.
The whole group must grant great importance to the minor details of the production and the security measures needed to protect it. A lack of foresight which in conventional filmmaking would go unnoticed can render virtually useless weeks or months of work. And a failure in guerrilla cinema, just as in the guerrilla struggle itself, can mean the loss of a work or a complete change of plans. “In a guerrilla struggle the concept of failure is present a thousand times over, and victory a myth that only a revolutionary can dream.” Every member of the group must have an ability to take care of details, discipline, speed, and, above all, the willingness to overcome the weaknesses of comfort, old habits, and the whole climate of pseudonormality behind which the warfare of everyday life is hidden. Each film is a different operation, a different job requiring variation in methods in order to confuse or refrain from alerting the enemy, especially since the processing laboratories are still in his hands.
The success of the work depends to a great extent on the group’s ability to remain silent, on its permanent wariness, a condition that is difficult to achieve in a situation in which apparently nothing is happening and the filmmaker has been accustomed to telling all and sundry about everything that he’s doing because the bourgeoisie has trained him precisely on such a basis of prestige and promotion. The watchwords “constant vigilance, constant wariness, constant mobility” have profound validity for guerrilla cinema. You have to give the appearance of working on various projects, split up the material, put it together, take it apart, confuse, neutralise, and throw off the track. All of this is necessary as long as the group doesn’t have its own processing equipment, no matter how rudimentary, and there remain certain possibilities in the traditional laboratories.
Group-level co-operation between different countries can serve to assure the completion of a film or the execution of certain phases of work that may not be possible in the country of origin. To this should be added the need for a filing centre for materials to be used by the different groups and the perspective of coordination, on a continent-wide or even worldwide scale, of the continuity of work in each country: periodic regional or international gatherings to exchange experience, contributions, joint planning of work, etc.
At least in the earliest stages the revolutionary filmmaker and the work groups will be the sole producers of their films. They must bear the responsibility of finding ways to facilitate the continuity of work. Guerrilla cinema still doesn’t have enough experience to set down standards in this area; what experience there is has shown, above all, the ability to make use of the concrete situation of each country. But, regardless of what these situations may be, the preparation of a film cannot be undertaken without a parallel study of its future audience and, consequently, a plan to recover the financial investment. Here, once again, the need arises for closer ties between political and artistic vanguards, since this also serves for the joint study of forms of production, exhibition, and continuity.
A guerrilla film can be aimed only at the distribution mechanisms provided by the revolutionary organisations, including those invented or discovered by the filmmaker themselves. Production, distribution, and economic possibilities for survival must form part of a single strategy. The solution of the problems faced in each of these areas will encourage other people to join in the work of guerrilla filmmaking, which will enlarge its ranks and thus make it less vulnerable.
The distribution of guerrilla films in Latin America is still in swaddling clothes while System reprisals are already a legalised fact. Suffice it to note in Argentina the raids that have occurred during some showings and the recent film suppression law of a clearly fascist character; in Brazil the ever-increasing restrictions placed upon the most militant comrades of Cinema Novo; and in Venezuela the banning of La hora de los hornos; over almost all the continent censorship prevents any possibility of public distribution.
Without revolutionary films and a public that asks for them, any attempt to open up new ways of distribution would be doomed to failure. But both of these already exist in Latin America. The appearance of the films opened up a road which in some countries, such as Argentina, occurs through showings in apartments and houses to audiences of never more than 25 people; in other countries, such as Chile, films are shown in parishes, universities, or cultural centres (of which there are fewer every day); and, in the case of Uruguay, showings were given in Montevideo’s biggest movie theatre to an audience of 2,500 people, who filled the theatre and made every showing an impassioned anti-imperialist event. But the prospects on the continental plane indicate that the possibility for the continuity of a revolutionary cinema rests upon the strengthening of rigorously underground base structures.
Practice implies mistakes and failures. Some comrades will let themselves be carried away by the success and impunity with which they present the first showings and will tend to relax security measures, while others will go in the opposite direction of excessive precautions or fearfulness, to such an extent that distribution remains circumscribed, limited to a few groups of friends. Only concrete experience in each country will demonstrate which are the best methods there, which do not always lend themselves to application in other situations.
In some places it will be possible to build infrastructures connected to political, student, worker, and other organisations, while in others it will be more suitable to sell prints to organisations which will take charge of obtaining the funds necessary to pay for each print (the cost of the print plus a small margin). This method, wherever possible, would appear to be the most viable, because it permits the decentralisation of distribution; makes possible a more profound political use of the film; and permits the recovery, through the sale of more prints, of the funds invested in the production. It is true that in many countries the organisations still are not fully aware of the importance of this work, or, if they are, may lack the means to undertake it. In such cases other methods can be used: the delivery of prints to encourage distribution and a box-office cut to the organisers of each showing, etc. The ideal goal to be achieved would be producing and distributing guerrilla films with funds obtained from expropriations from the bourgeoisie—that is, the bourgeoisie would be financing guerrilla cinema with a bit of the surplus value that it gets from the people. But, as long as the goal is no more than a middle- or long-range aspiration, the alternatives open to revolutionary cinema to recover production and distribution costs are to some extent similar to those obtained for conventional cinema: every spectator should pay the same amount as he pays to see System cinema. Financing, subsidising, equipping, and supporting revolutionary cinema are political responsibilities for revolutionary organisations and militants. A film can be made, but if its distribution does not allow for the recovery of the costs, it will be difficult or impossible to make a second film.
The 16mm film circuits in Europe (20,000 exhibition centres in Sweden, 30,000 in France, etc.) are not the best example for the neocolonialised countries, but they are nevertheless a complementary source for fund raising, especially in a situation in which such circuits can play an important role in publicising the struggles in the Third World, increasingly related as they are to those unfolding in the metropolitan countries. A film on the Venezuelan guerrillas will say more to a European public than twenty explanatory pamphlets, and the same is true for us with a film on the May events in France or the Berkeley, USA, student struggle.
A Guerrilla Films International? And why not? Isn’t it true that a kind of new International is arising through the Third World struggles; through OSPAAAL and the revolutionary vanguards of the consumer societies?
A guerrilla cinema, at this stage still within the reach of limited layers of the population, is, nevertheless, the only cinema of the masses possible today, since it is the only one involved with the interests, aspirations, and prospects of the vast majority of the people. Every important film produced by a revolutionary cinema will be, explicitly, or not, a national event of the masses.
This cinema of the masses, which is prevented from reaching beyond the sectors representing the masses, provokes with each showing, as in a revolutionary military incursion, a liberated space, a decolonised territory. The showing can be turned into a kind of political event, which, according to Fanon, could be “a liturgical act, a privileged occasion for human beings to hear and be heard.”
Militant cinema must be able to extract the infinity of new possibilities that open up for it from the conditions of proscription imposed by the System. The attempt to overcome neocolonial oppression calls for the invention of forms of communication; it opens up the possibility.
Before and during the making of La hora de los hornos we tried out various methods for the distribution of revolutionary cinema—the little that we had made up to then. Each showing for militants, middle-level cadres, activists, workers, and university students became—without our having set ourselves this aim beforehand—a kind of enlarged cell meeting of which the films were a part but not the most important factor. We thus discovered a new facet of cinema: the participation of people who, until then, were considered spectators.
At times, security reasons obliged us to try to dissolve the group of participants as soon as the showing was over, and we realised that the distribution of that kind of film had little meaning if it was not complemented by the participation of the comrades, if a debate was not opened on the themes suggested by the films.
We also discovered that every comrade who attended such showings did so with full awareness that he was infringing the System’s laws and exposing his personal security to eventual repression. This person was no longer a spectator; on the contrary, from the moment he decided to attend the showing, from the moment he lined himself up on this side by taking risks and contributing his living experience to the meeting, he became an actor, a more important protagonist than those who appeared in the films. Such a person was seeking other committed people like himself, while he, in turn, became committed to them. The spectator made way for the actor, who sought himself in others.
Outside this space which the films momentarily helped to liberate, there was nothing but solitude, noncommunication, distrust, and fear; within the freed space the situation turned everyone into accomplices of the act that was unfolding. The debates arose spontaneously. As we gained inexperience, we incorporated into the showing various elements (a mise en scène) to reinforce the themes of the films, the climate of the showing, the “disinhibiting” of the participants, and the dialogue: recorded music or poems, sculpture and paintings, posters, a programme director who chaired the debate and presented the film and the comrades who were speaking, a glass of wine, a few mates, etc. We realised that we had at hand three very valuable factors: 1) The participant comrade, the man-actor-accomplice who responded to the summons; 2) The free space where that man expressed his concerns and ideas, became politicised, and started to free himself; and 3) The film, important only as a detonator or pretext.
We concluded from these data that a film could be much more effective if it were fully aware of these factors and took on the task of subordinating its own form, structure, language, and propositions to that act and to those actors—to put it another way, if it sought its own liberation in its subordination to and insertion in others, the principal protagonists of life. With the correct utilisation of the time that that group of actor-personages offered us with their diverse histories, the use of the space offered by certain comrades, and of the films themselves, it was necessary to try to transform time, energy, and work into freedom-giving energy. In this way the idea began to grow of structuring what we decided to call the film act, the film action, one of the forms which we believe assumes great importance in affirming the line of a third cinema. A cinema whose first experiment is to be found, perhaps on a rather shaky level, in the second and third parts of La hora de los hornos (“Acto para la liberación”; above all, starting with “La resistencia” and “Violencia y la liberación”).
Comrades [we said at the start of “Acto para la liberación”], this is not just a film showing, nor is it a show; rather, it is, above all a meeting—an act of anti-imperialist unity; this is a place only for those who feel identified with this struggle, because here there is no room for spectators or for accomplices of the enemy; here there is room only for the authors and protagonists of the process which the film attempts to bear witness to and to deepen. The film is the pretext for dialogue, for the seeking and finding of wills. It is a report that we place before you for your consideration, to be debated after the showing.
The conclusions [we said at another point in the second part] at which you may arrive as the real authors and protagonists of this history are important. The experiences and conclusions that we have assembled have a relative worth; they are of use to the extent that they are useful to you, who are the present and future of liberation. But most important of all is the action that may arise from these conclusions, the unity on the basis of the facts. [This is why the film stops here; it opens out to you so that you can continue it.]
The film act means an open-ended film; it is essentially a way of learning.
The first step in the process of knowledge is the first contact with the things of the outside world, the stage of sensations [in a film the living fresco of image and sound]. The second step is the synthesising of the data provided by the sensations; their ordering and elaboration; the stage of concepts, judgements, opinions, and deductions [in the film the announcer, the reportings, the didactics, or the narrator who leads the projection act]. And then comes the third stage, that of knowledge. The active role of knowledge is expressed not only in the active leap from sensory to rational knowledge, but, and what is even more important, in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice . . . the practice of the transformation of the world. . . . This, in general terms, is the dialectical materialist theory of the unity of knowledge and action [in the projection of the film act, the participation of the comrades, the action proposals that arise, and the actions themselves that will take place later].
Moreover, each projection of a film act presupposes a different setting, since the space where it takes place, the materials that go to make it up (actors-participants), and the historic time in which it takes place are never the same. This means that the result of each projection act will depend on those who organise it, on those who participate in it, and on the time and place; the possibility of introducing variations, additions, and changes is unlimited. The screening of a film act will always express in one way or another the historical situation in which it takes place; its perspectives are not exhausted in the struggle for power but will instead continue after the taking of power to strengthen the revolution.
The man of the third cinema, be it guerrilla cinema or a film act, with the infinite categories that they contain (film letter, film poem, film essay, film pamphlet, film report, etc.), above all counters the film industry of a cinema of characters with one of themes, that of individuals with that of masses, that of the author with that of the operative group, one of neocolonial misinformation with one of information, one of escape with one that recaptures the truth, that of passivity with that of aggressions. To an institutionalised cinema, it counterposes a guerrilla cinema; to movies as shows, it opposes a film act or action; to a cinema of destruction, one that is both destructive and constructive; to a cinema made for the old kind of human being, for them, it opposes a cinema fit for a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of becoming.
The decolonisation of the filmmaker and of films will be simultaneous acts to the extent that each contributes to collective decolonisation. The battle begins without, against the enemy who attacks us, but also within, against the ideas and models of the enemy to be found inside each one of us. Destruction and construction. Decolonising action rescues with its practice the purest and most vital impulses. It opposes to the colonialisation of minds the revolution of consciousness. The world is scrutinised, unravelled, rediscovered. People are witness to a constant astonishment, a kind of second birth. They recover their early simplicity, their capacity for adventure; their lethargic capacity for indignation comes to life.
Freeing a forbidden truth means setting free the possibility of indignation and subversion. Our truth, that of the new man who builds himself by getting rid of all the defects that still weigh him down, is a bomb of inexhaustible power and, at the same time, the only real possibility of life. Within this attempt, the revolutionary filmmaker ventures with his subversive observation, sensibility, imagination, and realisation. The great themes—the history of the country, love and unlove between combatants, the efforts of a people who are awakening—all this is reborn before the lens of the decolonised camera. The filmmaker feels for the first time. He discovers that, within the System, nothing fits, while outside of and against the System, everything fits, because everything remains to be done. What appeared yesterday as a preposterous adventure, as we said at the beginning, is posed today as an inescapable need and possibility.
Thus far, we have offered ideas and working propositions, which are the sketch of a hypothesis arising from our personal experience and which will have achieved something positive even if they do no more than serve to open a heated dialogue on the new revolutionary film prospects. The vacuums existing in the artistic and scientific fronts of the revolution are sufficiently well known so that the adversary will not try to appropriate them, while we are still unable to do so.
Why films and not some other form of artistic communication? If we choose films as the centre of our propositions and debate, it is because that is our work front and because the birth of a third cinema means, at least for us, the most important revolutionary artistic event of our times.
Comité de cine de la unidad popular
[First published in Spanish as “Manifiesto de los cineastas de la unidad popular.” First published in English in Michael Chanan, ed., Chilean Cinema (London: BFI, 1976), 83–84. Trans. Michael Chanan.]
Written in the wake of the 1970 election of Salvador Allende of the Socialist Party of Chile, who became leader of the Unidad popular (Popular Unity), this manifesto draws on the utopian Marxist spirit of the times, calling for a new cinema by and for the people of Chile, one that is not dominated by the ideologies of the dominant classes. This call is especially important because of the monopoly held by US interests on Chilean screens at the time.
Chilean film makers, it is time for us all to undertake, together with our people, the great task of national liberation and the construction of socialism.
It is time for us to begin to redeem our own values in order to affirm our cultural and political identity.
Let us no longer allow the dominant classes to uproot the symbols which the people have produced in the course of their long struggle for liberation.
Let us no longer permit national values to be used to uphold the capitalist regime.
Let us start from the class instinct of the people and with this contribute to the making of a class consciousness.
Let us not limit ourselves from going beyond our contradictions; let us develop them and open for ourselves the way which leads to the construction of a lucid and liberating culture.
The long struggle of our people for their emancipation has laid down for us the way to be followed. Let us recover the traces of those great popular struggles falsified by official history, and give back to the people the true version of these struggles as a legitimate and necessary heritage for confronting the present and envisaging the future.
Let us recover the tremendous figure of Balmaceda, anti-oligarchist and anti-imperialist.
Let us reaffirm that Récabarren belongs to the people, that Carrera, O’Higgins, Manuel Rodriguez, Bilbao, as well as the anonymous miner who fell one morning, or the peasant who died without ever having understood the meaning of his life or of his death, constitute the essential foundations from which we emerged.
That the Chilean flag is a flag of struggle and liberation, it is the patrimony of the people and their heritage.
Against an anaemic and neo-colonised culture, a pasture for the consumption of an elite, decadent and sterile petit-bourgeoisie, let us devote our collective will, immersed within the people, to the construction of an authentically national and therefore revolutionary culture.
Consequently we declare:
1. That before being film makers we are men engaged within the political and social phenomenon of our people, and in their great task: the construction of socialism.
2. That the cinema is an art.
3. That the Chilean cinema, because of an historical imperative, must be a revolutionary art.
4. That we mean by revolutionary that which is realised in conjunction between the artist and his people, united in a common objective: liberation. The people are the generators of action and finally the true creators; the film maker is their instrument of communication.
5. That the revolutionary cinema will not assert itself through decrees. Consequently we will not grant privilege to one particular way of making film; it must be that the course of the struggle determines this.
6. That, meanwhile, we shall regard a cinema removed from the great masses to have become inevitably a product for the consumption of an elite petit bourgeoisie which is incapable of constituting the motor of history. In this case the film maker will see his work politically nullified.
7. That we refuse all sectarianism aimed at the mechanical application of the principles stated above, in the same way that we oppose the imposition of official criteria on the practice of film making.
8. That we maintain that traditional forms of production are a veritable rampart enclosing young film makers. They imply, finally, a clear cultural dependency, for these techniques are derived from aesthetic conceptions foreign to the culture of our peoples.
Against these techniques we contrast research into an original language born from the participation of the film maker in class struggle; this struggle will give rise to its own cultural forms.
9. That we maintain that a film maker with these objectives necessarily implies a different kind of critical evaluation; we assert that the best critic of a revolutionary film is the people to whom it is addressed; who have no need of “mediators who defend and interpret it.”
10. That there exists no such thing as a film that is revolutionary in itself. That it becomes such through the contact that it establishes with its public and principally through its influence as a mobilising agent for revolutionary action.
11. That the cinema is a right of the people, and that it is necessary to research those forms which are most appropriate for reaching all Chileans.
12. That the means of production must be available to all workers in the cinema and that, in this sense, there exist no acquired rights; on the contrary, under the Popular Government, expression will not be the privilege of some, but the inalienable right of a people marching towards their final independence.
13. That a people with a culture are a people who struggle, who resist and who free themselves.
CHILEAN FILM MAKERS, WE SHALL OVERCOME!
Mario Handler
[First published in Cine cubano 68. First published in English in Zuzana M. Pick, ed., Latin American Filmmakers and the Third Cinema (Ottawa: Carleton University Film Studies Program, 1978): 243–248. Trans. Leandro Urbano and Christine Shantz.]
Mario Handler was one of the two cofounders of the Cinemateca del tercer mundo in Montevideo in 1969, which functioned as a distribution center for political and militant documentaries that the American conglomerates would not show on their screens. This manifesto, which began as a letter to the left-wing paper Marcha, argues that the birth of political cinema can only be tied to the birth of a certain kind of consciousness by Uruguayan intellectuals. Unlike many of the other Latin American film manifestos, Handler’s addresses a specific problem facing Uruguay: unlike other countries developing indigenous Third Cinema practices, it lacked a cinema of any real sort.
Look here, Marcha: In Uruguay the cinema has always found itself in an exceptionally difficult situation. Now—even more so. At the same time, cinema is needed more than ever, and we have a greater consciousness of this need.
In terms of economic and technical resources today, we are still five years behind Bolivia, ten years behind Chile and Venezuela, then years behind Litorial University, behind Cuba before the revolution; we are behind everyone. It is possible that we have more resources than Paraguay, a country that I do not know much about. What has changed in the past year and a half, since the foundation of Marcha’s cinema club, and then that of the Third World Film Library, is fundamentally, the people. We now have a reasonable number of people—fifteen—who believe in a national political cinema and who have the necessary faith, vocation and capacity for organization.
There is still no guarantee of the existence of Uruguayan cinema, and the problem is like an obsession which colours everything we say. In one interview Cosme Alves was amazed that I should say that we would be very content if during the next year we could produce two hours of film. (Naturally, when I say film I don’t mean just any film but something of a political and national nature.) This is astonishing for the Brazilians, who produce fifty or sixty full-length films a year, all within the “cinema nôvo”; it is equally astonishing for the Argentinians, Mexicans, and even the Venezuelans and Bolivians, but for us this would be a great ambition. We know that they would not be two wasted hours, that there is a tremendous need for those hours.
The impossibility of showing our films in commercial theatres, the closing down of the I.C.U.B. as a productive institution, which eliminates the courses that did exist, the attacks from the petty people who steal film from us; all this and more can never force us to change. On the contrary, collectively they have helped us to search, for the first time in the history of Uruguay, for another public, the militant public made up of students, workers and all those who work with culture in a militant sense. We are doing this in Uruguay for the first time just as others are doing it for the first time in other parts of Latin America.
This has been a year for paying off debts generated by previous struggles, for training the group at the personal, individual and collective levels, for establishing contacts with the rest of Latin America and the world, and above all for discussing and deepening our understanding of cinematographic creation as being at the service of the struggle for liberation. That is why we are astonished at times when we show political films from the developed world and our public finds them unacceptable. This discontent of our public is the most persistent incentive for producing our own films, to really express what that militant public is feeling, to discuss and inform about all that which really matters—in my opinion, this is the most salient symptom of the search for independence, on an intellectual level as well as others.
The national and international support we are receiving from political cinema groups (from outside the country) is really impressive. But it is too bad we entered this phase of acceptance and support through the militants, without having gone through a previous phase which we could call industrial or commercial, or at least a phase of purely cultural cinema of a national character; this makes ours a heavy burden. We entered this terrain totally naked, totally lacking in money and equipment, without formally trained people. And that, Marcha, is something to be happy about too. It is a difficult situation, but we can be glad of it, because it has meant that our cinema, this Uruguayan cinema which hardly even existed until now, has had to come into the world and be directly political, functional and liberating, for our own struggle to create a worthwhile cinema coincides exactly with the struggle of the people of Uruguay.
So our cinema will never be a cinema of rebellion against the old masters as in almost all other countries, because we have no old masters. It is not the adolescent rebellion of someone fighting against the domination of others in the field of cinema. We skipped that and we fight directly against those who dominate the life of the nation. Luckily all our efforts of times gone by to pass laws which would be protective of cinema, and to achieve a favourable environment for our cinema, have failed. So it is absolutely impossible to make corrupt cinema, not because we are pure, but for objective reasons. Our temptations help us because they are not tempting enough.
Another big irritation is the incredible smallness of Uruguay, and on top of that, its economic structure, which means that since we lack any great industry, we lack something else which has always been there in other places—that is, people who support those who create, even though that support may be indiscriminate, as we see in the developed countries, where they give as much assistance to a painter corrupted by the system as to a film maker who makes an anti-capitalist film, or to a fashion designer who invents a dress made of feathers. We do not have a single Maecenas (patron of the artist), no support at all from the middle class, not even the support of the market; apparently the Uruguayan market cannot support internal production.
As so we have to turn to outside the country and acquire a foreign public. For reasons of our own conscience, the public we are addressing is the Latin American public; they are the ones who matter to us. After the Latin Americans, the people of the Third World in general and, after that, any militant public of the developed countries. Naturally we know that any economic aid we can obtain from leftist groups in the developed countries has to be in a very limited form. We ask for it, we get it, and in no way do we look down on its political aspects, but the battlefield which concerns us right now is Latin America, and of course the inner workings of imperialism.
In this respect we have progressed enormously. We know that we can count on our Latin American fellows for the same support that we give them. We know that they are working under difficult conditions—sometimes more difficult than our own, sometimes much better than our own, but we also know that we are relying on them, and they on us, and that in this way we are making great progress. If you consider that the first Latin American film festival was held as recently as 1967, Viña del Mer, you can get an idea of the progress we have made. For example, we have a number of agreements now on distribution, with Venezuela. We have agreements with our colleagues in Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico.
Our role within this Latin American framework changes, not every year, but every three months, along with the political conditions of Uruguay. Ten years ago, for example, it would have been conceivable to think of Uruguay as the ideal country for film making in purely intellectual terms. Now, however, the same urgency and originality of revolutionary political struggles in Uruguay are applied to the cinema, making this kind of intellectual exercise unthinkable.
This kind of statement is risky, because in the cultural field Uruguay participates in the European tradition absolutely. It participates in an imitative, admiring, approximate and above all isolated way. Our ignorance with regard to cinema is fortunately not an ignorance in the sense of not having read many books and seen many films, but in the sense that we have not yet made any films; hopefully, this kind of ignorance will allow us to shake off all cultural prejudices and bring a new freshness to the field of expression. New means of expression, directly subordinated to the needs of liberation. We are sure of one thing—as far as choice of theme, exploration of content, and expression of that content, we are sure that we will continue for a long time to concern ourselves with the basic themes in a directly combative way, knowing well that what we have to do is to refer directly to imperialism, to native oligarchy, to corrupt governments and, some day, to those who are fighting. I am in total agreement with the reflections of García Espinosa on this: what we need is to refer directly to the leftists, to the revolutionaries and to make films about them, stating their problems in a vital way and trying to help. We cannot contribute too much in the way of ideology, but we can contribute towards methods of expression which may help to clarify things.
I should add that we have resisted this report, and other offers to express ourselves publicly, because we are obsessed with our organizational, creative and economic needs. At this time we need equipment; our bond campaign has not gone very well. We need people; this aspect, however, is going well. We need to produce and this is being done with personal sacrifice. Several of our companions are producing at an extremely modest level on their own, without any aid at all. I have resisted this interview, as I have resisted others and even writing about us because I do not really believe in it, in the face of the undeniable fact that it has been a year since we have been able to make a film. The last film was of a militant nature and so turned out rather unsubstantial, an ideology in the void, without concrete content. But this has been a period of preparation and transition; great things are going to come out of it. That is why talking in this case becomes simple speculation, or at most, reporting. If that is not clear, one could say that this interview was purely public relations, and that there is a need for this kind of thing.
Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas
[First published in Spanish in Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, Cine, cultura y descolonización (Siglo XXI: Mexico City, 1973). First published in English in Third Text 25, no. 1 (2011): 52–53. Trans. Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman.]
This text is one of Getino and Solanas’s theoretical reflections on Third Cinema after having screened Hour of the Furnaces many times throughout Latin America and having done further work with the Cine liberación collective. Here, they examine what they contend is the most evolved form of Third Cinema: militant cinema.
In a previous article, we defined three types of cinema: the first cinema or overtly commercial cinema based on the American model; the second cinema, or “auteur cinema,” a variant of first cinema, and similarly subject to the “owners of cinema” or to surplus value cinema; and the third cinema, the cinema of liberation.
These notes are meant to develop that work, specifically one of the categories of third cinema, its most advanced category: militant cinema.
The third cinema,
. . . that which recognizes in the anti-imperialist struggles of the people of the Third World and of its equivalents in the heart of the metropolis, the most gigantic cultural, scientific and artistic manifestation of our time,
is an event sufficiently new that it still lacks a rigorous level of analysis and criticism; nonetheless, a fine-tuning of certain definitions is becoming necessary. For example, when the third cinema plays a role as militant cinema, what circumstances in unliberated countries delimit the field of militant cinema from the rest of third cinema? What defines the militant nature of a film? What is the role of the militant cinema group?
These and other questions are being addressed, at least provisionally, from the different spheres of third cinema. Nonetheless, the quality of the responses does not deal adequately with the effectiveness of the completed work. This has been sufficiently important to demand a reasoning that accords with its development: the nine films produced in Chile between 1969 and 1970 for the Popular Unity, the Communist Party, the MIR, the CUTCH; the new channels of political diffusion open in Venezuela with the “Distributor of the Third World”; the construction in Uruguay of the “Third World Cinematheque” and its intensive work in production and exhibition; the creation of small groups of militant cinema like “Popular Colombian Cinema” or “Realizadores de Mayo” (Film-makers of May, Argentina, 1969); the development at the national level of Groups of Liberation Cinema (Argentina); the 25,000 participants at projections of The Hours of the Furnaces in only eight months during 1970 in our country, tightly linked to work of the political organisations that are forming with hundreds of small actions; the gestation of a current within militant cinema at the continental level of support groups in Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina. Does all this activity not seem a bit unusual, inasmuch as it is the product of a project with only two or three years of elaboration?
To define, or try out certain definitions of a provisional nature, useful for deeper thinking about this path, is today becoming an essential task, now that the initial stage of mutual exchange has ended. This is because the responsibility that falls to those who are developing the militant cinema is much greater than that which corresponded to the directors of third cinema. And it is greater precisely because the animators of a cinema of militants do not seek only to work on cultural decolonisation, or the recuperation of a national culture, but are proposing a revolutionary politics through their militant activity (and here they see their work above all as political-cinematic) that leads to the destruction of neo-colonialism, to the national liberation of our countries and the national construction of Socialism. The responsibility is greater because what is intended is specifically the construction of a militant revolutionary cinema (both strategically and tactically), and this task is sufficiently ambitious that the problems and risks that confront it will have to be studied with the greatest possible rigour. But could we establish perhaps hermetic definitions or theses? If we did that, would we not be undermining exactly the greatest virtue and quality of this effort: its characteristic of hypothesis and inconclusiveness? That is, the same quality that characterises the revolutionary projects of our continent.
For these reasons, and even though at times the notes on the topic may sound perhaps excessively definitive, we do not pretend with these comments anything other than to stimulate an investigation, to provoke a deeper problematisation of the path taken. Practice in itself will not be enough in this process. The process requires already, and with a certain urgency, a critical examination that may well be possible only with practice, but requires a certain distance from it to think through and affirm its development at deeper levels.
Carlos Alvarez
[First published in Cine cubano 66–67. First published in English in Zuzana M. Pick, ed., Latin American Filmmakers and the Third Cinema (Ottawa: Carleton University Film Studies Program, 1978): 180–190. Trans. Leandro Urbina and Christine Shantz.]
Like Mario Handler’s Uruguayan manifesto, Carlos Alvarez’s was written for a country, Colombia, that did not really have a film industry of which to speak. Alvarez argues for a radical Colombian documentary cinema that cannot be recuperated by the bourgeoisie through recourse to aesthetics or obfuscated through the invocations of auteurs. Instead, he argues for an emergent cinema that closely aligns the filmmakers with farmers, workers, and the people—one that eschews “art” for politics. To achieve these ends, he argues for the greater use of 8 mm film as a militant tool.
In Latin America today, the act of taking up a camera to make a film is dangerous. And this is a good thing.
Social events and their development demand, and themselves give rise to, categorical definitions.
The vacillating men on the fence, on good terms with both God and the Devil, are reminders of more agreeable, less defining historical moments.
The presence of the class struggle within film culture which has always existed but which people have not wanted to recognise up until now, has heightened in the last decade with an increasing violence. The Cuban Revolution was the key event on putting pressure on Latin America to stop talking about the need for a revolution and to begin to act. This pressure was directed more toward the theorizing left—presumably subversive to the bourgeois system—than towards the right, the holder of economic strength. It was an event that disturbed the whole world and divided into two camps the conceptions of the left which implied the possibility and the necessity of a revolutionary change in the structure of neo-colonial dependence on the continent.
Formerly, the intellectual in good faith could wish for socialist change for the backward and humiliated Latin American republics. Theoretically, it was easy to perceive. The difficult part was to achieve it, to realize it. So one could go on making empty speeches.
After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and once it had been secured along with the preponderance and precision it gave to the cultural sector, they were left dazzled and either they pined romantically for such a revolution, or they took a little trip to the golden island to see for themselves what a revolution looks like.
Meanwhile the revolutions of each country, which had to be carried out in each country, were never initiated. And, of course, those who did begin it were professionally non-intellectual groups.
In the cinema particularly the initial bedazzlement came through the medium of the French New Wave, with “daring” amorous relationships, subtle formal constructions and an intensified idealism that even the most “revolutionary” were not capable of seeing.
At least five years in the best cases, and eight in the case of Colombia, were spent with this cloudiness of vision.
Now that this experience has settled, it is possible to see more clearly and delimit more exactly the factions in conflict: cinema for alienation and exploitation, of cinema for liberation together with the liberation movements of Latin America.
This is why fence sitters—those who remain neutral—no longer exist, nor have they ever existed. Silence grants consent; he who remains silent thus sides with the powerful, “them,” the reaction.
This is the trap of commercial feature films: to entice the masses either through films “with a message,” as their proponents maintain, but very diluted for the system is not a foolish fifteen-year-old to let itself be easily taken in; or with apparently innocuous and inoffensive stories on which the system is based, and which treat their directors like submissive collaborators, like useful idiots. Others have straightforwardly commercial interests likely coloured with a leftist or tropicalist tint very much in vogue today and very much valued on the European markets for Latin American cinema.
This frightening process is a necessary beginning within the trial and error experiences a revolution must go through in order to achieve greater clarity; in this case, in the cultural process which was a harsh experience in Colombia.
The men who went to study abroad and returned to make publicity-oriented documentaries were simply reactionaries, common merchants to whom making films was equivalent to selling mattresses or working as accountants. Norden, Pinto, Luzardo, Angulo, Gonzáles Moreno, Durán, were just that; situated within that subterranean class struggle they tried to hide, a part of the militant reaction, by default or by direct action.
As of 1968, a new generation appears, muted by great internal struggles. These struggles thwart the proliferation of films, but they are necessary insofar as they elucidate the diverse tendencies of the left within a culture; a left not very clearly defined, a left that tolerates extremely feeble lines and dilatory distortions of the straightest path towards the revolution or of the honest and correct ways verified by past experiences in Latin America.
One has to respect that group for in its various hues, in its caustic discussions, it tries at least to place itself in a leftist perspective; at the best of times, though not always, elucidating the factions with a bourgeoisie attesting to and admiring of rebellion.
Not a single feature-length commercial film was produced in Colombia in 1970. One longish film came out, Y se llamaría Colombia, a documentary an hour and a half in length with a great display of colour, directed by Francisco Norden by order of the government of Lleras Restrepo. It presents the poor, dependent beggar—Colombia—as the paradise of terrestrial goodness. It is a base one-minute commercial multiplied by ninety, boring and poorly made, a servile lackey effusively praising private enterprise, private property, private exploitation, made by the bipartite regime to support its fallacies.
In the field of shorts, however, Alberto Mejia’s 28 de Febrero de 1970 about a massive demonstration by university students in Bogota was made and caused the fall of the Minister of Education, an active member of the Opus Dei; Carlos Alvarez’s Colombia 70, about the inhumane life of a beggar in Bogota, Gabriela Samper’s El hombre de la sal, about an old salt processor in Nemocón and his primitive methods, displaced by present mechanization; Julia de Alvarez’s Un dia yo pregunte . . ., about religious alienation in Colombia, and Entrevistas sobre planas by Father Gustavo Perea, Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, showing three interviews with indigenous people of the plateau region of Planas, to the east of the country, where the army tortured them for refusing to inform on and disclose the whereabouts of a group of guerrillas.
Five different works that barely make up an hour of film all put together, but they present old analyses no longer commercialized, no longer diluted; still full of mistakes, but representative of the most honest political and cinematographic tendencies that Colombian cinema has to offer today.
The 1970 experience, richer than any other of these years of struggle, partial successes and petty bourgeois errors, leads to more results than we could have guessed at an earlier date:
1. The definitive affirmation of the documentary as instrumental in effectively speaking out about our reality, and the almost definitive elimination of the feature-length film.
2. The necessary experience for the full utilization of 16mm as the format most accessible to our economic and distributing capabilities.
3. The realization that the union, romantically pined for by some film makers, could materialize, not through theoretical postulations but through actual works, once they have been filtered through the political leaning to which the film maker ascribes.
4. The necessary step towards a cinema of social observation and criticism, towards a militant political cinema, actively introduced into the development of revolutionary articulation.
5. The necessity for militant cinema to come from active—not theoretically militant—film makers. A militancy that will affect everything from the organization of the system of film distribution and showings to the everyday political tasks of a revolutionary organization.
6. The studies concerning the growing use of 8mm as an ideal format for the maximal development of the film maker’s revolutionary work that will weaken the individual personality of the film maker and reduce it to the status of merely one more cog in that formidable piece of machinery we must start up, or accelerate, or culminate—the revolution.
And so that there are no more doubts, in this country where the National Front invents confusing tags like “the great change” or “the pacific revolution” for that of which we speak, that is not what it is. It is a socialist, Marxist, Leninist revolution.
With every day that passes, the orientation of Colombian cinema affirms itself with greater clarity and urgency; where Colombian cinema must go, is going, and will go: to the people.
That is why cinema is currently being mobilized towards that objective. Perhaps it is still very little, a beginning, but it is already being done. And the ones who learn the most from that contact are not the people when one tries to speak of their oppressed and vilified realities, but the directors in contact with them, the people, that contemptuous word in the mouths of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is the class of origin of all the film makers who have gone to the people and who have had to learn painfully that it is this social class that is the source of all real knowledge: a fountain of learning, and the only one that can be changed and restored to its humanity.
This is why the intent is to make popular cinema. For now, only by a few for a few, hopefully many more, but always with a political perspective in mind.
The most advanced Colombian cinema is realized with a political aim and not an artistic one. This does not mean that one should not try to make it in the best possible way. Until now, it has not been possible to prove that the films of this cinema in its most advanced manifestations are beautiful or artistically perfect; what can be assured, however, is that they are politically effective, and that is what matters.
The same reality has already shown that to be Marxist is not to know Marxist theory from top to bottom and left to right. It is to do something, to do things, revolutionary actions, to destroy bourgeois society and substitute for it a socialist society. That is, to carry out the Revolution.
And this formidable project must be the framework for all cinema that endeavours to integrate itself into the most active mechanisms of change, that endeavours to be new in the truest sense of the word, that endeavours to reflect present Colombian reality.
Thus the most honest phases of Colombian cinema have been: first, testimonial cinema (Giraldo’s Camilo Torres); a cinema which investigated social reality (Arzuaga’s Pasado el meridiano); the cinema of denunciation (Alvarez’s Asalto); of the discovery of all the flaws of bourgeois society (Mejia’s Carvalho), of all present reality. A disquieting cinema (Alvarez’s Colombia 70), to testify to and critically demystify the hidden social structure, distorted and ignored by official newsmen and official film makers.
And today, a militant cinema, which, depending on how well the film makers are integrated into the physical action of revolutionary change, will be able to verify not only the social decomposition of the bourgeoisie, but also the way to banish it definitively, how it must be done and the direction in which the revolutionary process must be guided (Un dia yo pregunte . . ., by Julia de Alvarez).
The affirmation of the documentary film and the elimination of the feature-length film no longer pose a problem, no longer give rise to any conflict, but the way must be explored further.
The choice is between the revolutionary and the reactionary and the way is not easy.
Now it is not even enough to make an effective, politically clearly defined, and revolutionary film. We must participate right through until the last stage: the showing, where the film is seen. As a political film, it is actualized only once it is shown to a potentially revolutionary audience, once it has incited the people and motivated them to act in a revolutionary manner.
With the clearer articulation of the goal to be attained, we are arriving at a point in our evolution where only films for the social base, urban or rural, are being prepared.
In the early stages of Latin American and Colombian cinema, due to the immediacy of the audience and to the limitations of the director’s political militancy, the only films made were directed towards a university audience. This resulted in a certain intellectual euphemism, in games of spirit. When the people became involved, it was realized that these intellectual gymnastics, though very well intentioned at times, were of no use to those who were in theory recognized to be the ones to carry out the revolution.
The next step, then, is to reach the point of making films about the problems of the people, their doubts, their struggles, their triumphs, the road to their liberation, of making films as close to their social perspective and as political as possible. Once this step is taken, Colombian cinema will begin to express the pulse of Colombian reality. The people, they are Colombian reality, not the buildings they build with their hands, not the art at the service of foreign interests, not the international loans that lend to debts of national sovereignty, not the deceit of national democratic parliamentary representation.
It is not an easy task to carry a 16mm projector on your back for ten blocks because there are no buses in that neighbourhood, especially if it is muddy and rainy. But this is only a very small part of the tasks of the Colombian film director. It creates discipline and develops the shoulders that the “intellectuals” have become accustomed to use for carrying books. It is not an obligatory step in the process, but it must be done; if not, who will do it?
Nor will it be easy if the police and the forces of repression discover that this cinema is not agreeable to them. It is not practical to have to run weighted down with a heavy projector. This will be an everyday part of film making, and it must be taken into account starting now. And solutions must be found.
The next step within this rise in militancy and imagination can be tactical. How can we say what we have to say in the most effective way? The biggest problem until now has been the quality of sound in the screenings. The old projectors do not reproduce sound very well; large parts of the films with live interviews are therefore lost, important nuances of sound lose their strength, the sound is too low or disappears altogether, and then—it is not at all unusual—the worst can happen: the sound bulb burns out and the film must be narrated and synchronized with the picture.
Much of the future work, though not all, is being planned in silent 16mm, following the good example set by Mario Handler’s LíberArce liberarse which, in spite of everything, still accords enough importance to the projector.
Or in 8mm, with or without sound, with cassette tapes and inaccurate synchronization leaving margins, but these films are effective insofar as their content and our search are concerned. The smaller weight of the projector now permits greater and more rapid mobility and an 8mm film fits into a shirt pocket. Four-minute films give us the key time to speak out, though only briefly, about our reality and provoke discussion about it.
In another area, our meetings are small but extremely effective. Films should not be shown without providing for subsequent discussion, for the latter is the true motivation for the screening. Never should the aim of the showing be visual alone; it is essential to give the participants the chance to confront the situation and its possible solutions.
Thus the film is hardly determinant in revolutionary political discussions. Revolutionary discussions for large groups cannot be organized under present conditions in Latin America. In large groups, the participant becomes “massified” and what we are looking for is precisely the opposite, that each one be individualized, radicalized, that he become a potential soldier or active participant in the revolution.
Within this program where some of those aims have been fulfilled and some hardly planned, Colombian cinema should finally discover its true cultural and political content. And the directors, they constitute the true road to the revolution, which today is this way and tomorrow could be another, more advanced way.
The alternative will only be resolved with an intensification of the fight and perhaps only then will the best Colombian cinema possible be made: The Revolution.
Association professionnelle des cinéastes du Québec
[First posted on the doors of Famous Players movie theaters in Québec in April and May 1971. First published as “Manifeste de l’Association professionnelle des cinéastes du Québec: Une autre visage du Québec colonisé,” Champ libre 1 (1971): 77–87. First published in English in Cineaste 5, no .3 (1972): 21–26.]
On its surface, the APCQ manifesto, written on behalf of the organization by Raymond-Marie Léger, arose in response to the seizing of two Québécois soft-core porn films—Pile ou face (Roger Fournier, 1970) and Après ski (Roger Cardinal, 1971), both examples of the briefly successful sub-genre dubbed “Maple Syrup porn” by Variety—after the films were denounced by members of the Catholic clergy, even though the films had been certified for public screening. Yet the manifesto also addresses the way in which Québécois cinema was historically colonized by English Canada, the clergy, and the United States, arguing that cultural expression should take supremacy over solely capitalist considerations.
Once again the issue of film censorship is occupying the front pages of the newspapers. The debate is taking place in an atmosphere of total confusion: a steady stream of declarations and counter-declarations, press conferences and telegrams-supporting, answering, contradicting each other assaults the public from all sides. Political leaders and cult leaders, movie merchants and movie-makers, hurl insults back and forth. The critics for their part seem completely baffled by it all and are content to publish the telegrams and declarations (Le Devoir, Montreal Star, Québec Presse, Montréal Latin) or at best to summarize the situation superficially (La Presse).1 All in all, they show themselves quite incapable of analyzing what is going on.
What then is really at issue, and who are the principals in the debate? There are five distinct groups involved: 1) the “Sexploiters,” 2) the Church, 3) the government of Québec, 4) the federal government, and 5) the film-making profession.
1. The “Sexploiters.” These include those who are directly tied to the production of the type of films in question in the debate: producers, directors, actors (in most cases), and above all, the production and distribution companies which invest in and guarantee the distribution of these films with the sole aim of reaping large profits.
The situation is actually quite complex, and this is recognized by everyone. But in no way is it a question of “talented and respected actors” under attack for creating works of art, as the director of Pile ou face would have us believe; nor, as its producer has written, is it a matter of recognizing the socially redeeming value of such films. What we have here is simply a cast of characters interested in making big money, and quickly. The recent confessions of the man known as the “father” of Après ski bear this out.
To talk of art and “personal expression,” not to mention “public taste,” is irrelevant to the real issues here.
2. The Church. Those speaking out include, in particular, one specimen of declining ecclesiastical authority (Father Des Marais), one character who is already part of folklore (Brother Bonneville), and one spiritual leader of the working class community (Monseigneur Lavoie). The last named is taking advantage of his parishioners’ indignation to reaffirm his authority and amass some political capital, without really taking into account the various questions involved, and with perhaps a certain taste for the sheer spectacle of it all. He is thus giving the police powers a chance to show their stuff and helping the “sexploiters” to make even more money.
The clergy, whether it be aristocratic (Des Marais and Bonneville) or working class (Lavoie), is reacting mechanically to the erotic film scandal in an effort to shore up its eroded position and failing strength against the gains of new financial interests in Québec. It therefore does not represent any consensus of the people and does not care about the political and social consequences which might result from its jeremiads. The clergy is simply defending its interests which are threatened by a petty bourgeoisie which has now detached itself from the Church in order to consolidate its domination of Québec.
3. The Québec Government. Those involved include Minister of Justice Jérôme Choquette and Minister of Cultural Affairs François Cloutier. The former is a man of the Right (so they say) and directs a powerful ministry; the latter is a liberal (so he says) and in this controversy he seems to be following closely the initiatives of the Minister of Justice.
Choquette, a “law and order” man, is allied with the clergy because this gives him a fresh opportunity to reaffirm his authority, and more generally to defend the capitalist “hard line.”
Cloutier, the “open” personality and man of good taste (he’s kept himself from going to see the two films which have caused the commotion), pleads the cause of the French-Canadian film industry, to which he promises his support in fighting for legislative protection. He thus places the debate in a larger context, but at the same time he avoids having to defend concretely the actions of the Bureau of Film Supervision, the autonomous body which he represents in the National Assembly, and thus tends to sanction the mysterious positions and plans of his colleague in the Justice Ministry.
4. The Federal Government. The organism involved in this question is the Société de développement de l’industrie cinématographique canadienne, or SDICC, which is the co-producer and primary beneficiary of the distribution of Pile ou face. The SDICC is a kind of specialized bank, created by Federal law in 1967, which lends money to Canadian producers in order to promote the development of a Canadian feature film industry.
Because of the incoherence of its policies as well as its desire to see profits made quickly, which is to be expected in a state capitalist organism of this type, the SDICC has participated directly in the intensive development of “erotic” productions in Québec. It has invested in all of the films produced by Cinépix, one of the largest producers of such films with the exception of only one entitled Valérie.2 By favouring this kind of production, and allowing itself a monopoly over distribution, the SDICC once again is helping to hold back the birth of an authentic French-Canadian cinema, and one which Québec could afford financially.
For the governments of Québec and Ottawa, more than for any of the other groups involved in this debate, the important issues go well beyond the question of the present or future course of French-Canadian cinema. The issue here is properly a political one, and it may even become an election issue, if we are to believe La Presse.
5. The Profession. Professional film-makers have been represented in this debate by the Federation québécoise de l’industrie du cinéma. This Federation is made up of the presidents of the main professional organizations of Québec cinema: Association professionnelles des cinéastes du Québec, Association des producteurs de films du Québec, Association des distributeurs indépendants de films de langue française, Syndicat général du cinéma et de la télévision, Syndicat national du cinéma, Society of Film Makers (Québec), Association des propriétaires de cinémas du Québec, Union des artistes. The federation meets only when specially convened—mainly in times of crisis—and supposedly expresses a consensus in its public statements.
In the current circumstances, the Federation has above all chosen to defend the economic interests of French-Canadian cinema—it is most revealing that it is on this occasion that the Association des Propriétaires de Cinémas has decided to join the Federation after many years of hesitation. The statements issued by the Federation thus have had the tendency to reduce the debate about cinema in Québec to questions of its economic survival. They are silent on the question of its cultural meaning, which is of course as important and problematic.
Although the Federation claims to speak in the name of the people of Québec in the debate, the fact that it places only commercial questions in the foreground makes it objectively the ally of the “Sexploiters.”
Yet something seems to be missing. It seems that we have not yet heard from those in whose name everybody seems to be speaking—the people of Québec, the “population” which all sides invoke.
This population, whom the Minister of Justice seems so solicitous of when lending an attentive ear to the complaints of Mgr. Lavoie, and which the men of the movie industry pretend to defend when they warn the government against “grave threats to the entire film industry of Québec and injustice toward an entire population,” (as if they really served the people of Québec), this population is nevertheless totally absent from the debate. After insulting it by refusing to produce films which spring from its reality and speak to its needs, they offer it films which are false and alienating, and then demand that the population engage in the debate about such films.
But the population is nobody’s fool. Several letters to the editor in the Québec papers testify to the uneasiness with which many citizens view the incoherence of the debate.
In sum, the problem goes way beyond the events of the last few weeks: it is the total situation of French-Canadian cinema which we must try to clarify.
The two films which have caused the scandal, Pile ou face and Après ski, are part of a larger question: the economic and cultural domination of the people of Québec by outside interests.
In contrast to what the loudest voices would have us believe, it is neither artistic interests (freedom of expression) nor the interests of morality (pornography as a mortal sin) which are at stake. At least, not in the main.
Cinema in Québec is controlled by two Anglo-American monopolies—Famous Players–Paramount (producer and holder of the rights to Après ski) and Cinépix (producer, distributor and holder of the rights to Pile ou face)—once again evidence that Québec is a colony under foreign domination. And it must be understood that these companies participate daily in the economic, social, cultural, and political exploitation of the French-Canadian people.
Economic exploitation:
Famous Players belongs to a powerful American cartel, Gulf Oil, the same company which maintains the workers of Shawinigan and Montréal-Est under its yoke, and which netted 300 million dollars profit in 1968.
And for its part Cinépix has become the largest distributor of films in Québec and the largest local producer of feature-length films, thanks to financial help from the Société de Développement de l’industrie du Cinéma d’Ottawa. Cinépix’s Québec box-office receipts have enabled the SDICC to increase its production of films in English-speaking Canada (by promoting agreements with Warner-Esso and 20th Century Fox–Shell) while the number of feature-length films made in Québec has scarcely increased since 1967, the year in which the SDICC was established.
Social exploitation:
The stock-holders of these companies are among the 1.6% of the American people who possess 80% of the capital stock of all American companies throughout the world. One entire “gang” owns not only the cinema but the entire world economy. Cinépix is a recent acquisition by an American holding company and its saleability resulted directly from the profits of “sexploitation” both on the level of production in Québec and in the distribution foreign grade-B movies.
Cultural exploitation:
The means of film production here as elsewhere belong to a class of people who use film as one means by which to show that the kind of life it leads is actually the life everyone leads. They impose their ideas, their obsessions (sexual and otherwise) on us and portray people as imbeciles like Saint-Henri’s woman in Pile ou face.
Film management for the population of Québec is programmed from the top down by the directors of Famous Players and Cinépix; the latter effectively directs and manipulates the program of showings for a large majority of French-Canadian movie theatres and Famous Players owns most of the theatres in the biggest cities (Montréal, Québec, Sherbrooke, Rouyn, Val d’Or, Saint-Hyacinthe). Cinépix, where it isn’t actually a stock-holder in a theatre (Sorel, Beauharnois, Montréal), has established exclusive distribution agreements in all regions of Québec, especially in rural areas, with such offerings as Maquerdeau, Variations amoureuses and Labyrinthe du sexe.
Political exploitation:
These companies obviously wield enough influence in the local governments to assure that this state of affairs continues. One need only look at the long-time collusion between the traditional parties, both local and national, and the film companies. For example, Louis St. Laurent, former “Canadian” Prime Minister, and Gerry Martineau, the éminence grise of the National Union both sit on the board of directors of Famous Players. Then there is the public treasury, from which the SDICC draws funds to support these exploiters of the public.
As in all such closed systems, we as film-makers must play the ideological and economic game of the monopolies in order to have a place in the sun. Otherwise we must be satisfied with a marginal, impotent role. We cannot participate in the creation of a true French-Canadian cinema, one which would be a dynamic expression of our community at all levels. We too are obliged to create a cinema of evasion and sell our labour and creative power to the “big boss.”
The choices open to us are now becoming clear: either to play by the exploiter’s rules, or to look for active solutions in order to escape from the game entirely.
It is time to take our situation into our own hands, just as the workers of Cabano, Maniwaki, Gaspesie and Abitibi have done.
It is time to disturb the peace of all the exploitive interests in Québec—all the cartels like Famous-Players-Gulf, all the Cinépixes, all the KC Irvings and the Noranda Mines.
There is no need to give a complete history of French-Canadian cinema. The facts are well known, and many good analyses have been made. Here are the highlights:
April 30, 1931:
Peter White, a commissioner of the Canadian Ministry of Labor, delivers a report entitled “Investigation Into an Alleged Combine in the Motion Picture Industry in Canada,” and offers the following conclusions:
a) “A combine exists in the Motion Picture Industry in Canada, within the meaning of the Combines Investigation Act.”
b) “This combine exists and has existed at least since the year 1926.”
c) “The combine has operated to the detriment or against the interests of the public.”
The report cites as participants in the “combine” Famous Players Canadian Corp. Ltd., United Amusement Corp. Ltd., and Paramount Public Corp. Ltd.
March 18, 1932:
Supreme Court Judge Garrow in Ontario finds the accused companies not guilty and dismisses the case.
November 1, 1963:
The voluminous Report of the Council on Economic Orientation of Québec is issued. It is composed of four sections: 1) Cinema and Culture, 2) Critical and Statistical Study of Film-making Worldwide, 3) The Motion Picture Industry in Québec and Canada, and 4) Report on the Classification Project.
This report savagely denounces the monopolistic practices of Famous Players–United Amusement, calls attention to the urgency of the situation, and offers several recommendations:
a) Abrogation of the “Loi des vues animées” (The Motion Picture Law) and adoption of general film legislation to regulate production, distribution, classification and financial return.
b) Adoption of a policy favoring the production of feature films in Québec by 1) direct subsidies, 2) production loans, and 3) limits on financial return.
c) Assignment of tax monies received from the motion picture industry (in particular the Amusement Tax) to projects which establish and sustain a feature film industry, following the example of those European countries which have a national motion picture industry.
d) Adoption of a policy of aiding institutions of learning (and the creation of new ones as necessary) which promote the development of film art.
e) Establishment of a General Directorate of Film Art (or a Film Center for Québec) which would group together the existing organizations (Film Office of Québec, Film Censorship Bureau), to which could be added the new services which are necessary for the regulation of the different sectors of the film industry: production, distribution, revenue.
The Québec government chooses to retain only the recommendations contained in the fourth part by bestowing upon the region a Bureau de surveillance du cinéma (Bureau of Film Supervision). In so doing they acknowledge their inability to negotiate with the foreign interests (Famous Players), leaving the population in the clutches of economic and cultural domination and abandoning the indigenous film-makers in their struggle to cope with the problems of production, distribution and control of box-office.
February, 1964:
A memorandum is presented to the Canadian Secretary of State by the Professional Association of Film-makers. It is presented in the name of 104 Association members, or almost all the French-language film-makers in Canada. Article 19 reads: “. . . In effect, the economic interests which control most of the large movie theatres in Canada are subsidiaries of one American production and distribution company—Paramount.” While it is illegal in the United States proper for a major producer to control the box-office circuit, American law does not forbid these same interests to control these circuits in foreign countries—in Canada for example. And for its part the Canadian government does nothing to stop them.
March, 1964:
A memorandum is presented to the Prime Minister of Québec (Jean Lesage by the Association of Professional Film-makers). It contains measures which the Association recommends to the government of Québec for promoting the development of a feature film industry in conformity with the economic and cultural needs of the population. Page 9 contains the following.
However, because of the lack of a good distribution system and the insolvency of the State, many films of high quality are shown only in marginal theatres where they reach a very limited public.
This distribution system is the result of the control of French Canadian cinema by Paramount and its Canadian subsidiary, Famous Players Canadian Corporation Limited, which in turn is tied to United Amusement Corporation Limited and Consolidated Theatres Limited . . .
Quebec’s film culture is controlled and guided by the program director of Famous Players–United Amusement.
June 23, 1970:
A memorandum from the “Fédération québécoise de l’industrie du cinéma” is given to Prime Minister Robert Bourassa.
January 19, 1971:
The Minister of Cultural Affairs receives a study entitled “The Québec Film Industry and the State,” by Arthur Lamothe.
To conclude this brief history, it is worth noting that all of the election platforms of the different political parties since 1962 have contained promises of the following kind: “The government should establish a National Film Center whose specialists are trained in collaboration with organizations which engage in the production and distribution of films.”
The problem of film-making in French-speaking Canada is thus not solely an economic problem, as the Fédération Québécoise de l’industrie du Cinéma would have us believe: it is definitely a political problem. The government of Québec (no matter who is in power) has never accepted its responsibility to oppose the invasion by American interests, despite its many promises in this vein. The facade of democracy is becoming more and more transparent, for a small group of reactionaries obviously has more power in government circles than the many organizations which have railed against the situation for the past eight years.
As a consequence, we demand that the Minister of Cultural Affairs move to rectify the situation before the public by taking the following steps:
1. Denounce the foreign enterprises (Famous Players–Gulf, Cinépix) which dominate and exploit the people of Québec economically and culturally and take sweeping measures to break the production, distribution and box-office monopolies in French-speaking Canada.
2. Propose comprehensive legislation for film production, including provisions for the nationalization of foreign monopolies.
3. Recognize publicly the urgency of such legislation and establish immediately a commission composed of the different professional associations and representatives of popular movements.
4. Affirm the complete and entire responsibility of the government of Québec for film production within its borders by negotiating with Ottawa for repayment of that percentage of federal revenue which accrues from films produced in French Canada.
5. Set a date for the execution of the proposed comprehensive film legislation. Only in this way can we stop the systematic flight of film profits from Québec, and begin to counter the growing alienation of our people resulting in particular from the flood of American films in which English is the only language. Only by these measures can we increase investment in French-Canadian films, and above all provide the people of Québec with the opportunity to see films which relate to them directly.
we claim the right of the people of quebec to find in films a reflection of themselves which is fair, dynamic, and thought-provoking.
Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, Felipe Cazals, Rafael Castanedo, Eduardo Maldonado, Gustavo Alatriste, Emilio García Riera, David Ramón, Tomás Pérez Turrent, and Fernando Gou
[First published in English in Wide Angle 21, no. 3 (1999): 36–41.]
A forerunner to the Cine pobre movement in Cuba (see Solás’s “Poor Cinema Manifesto” later in this chapter), this manifesto eschews high production costs and instead celebrates and promotes small, Super 8 and other low-budget cinemas as offering the possibility of a richer, more diverse cinema that is not restrained by the censorship that inevitably follows capital.
We hereby declare before the public that the following people: Felipe Cazals, Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, Rafael Castanedo, Eduardo Maldonado, Gustavo Alatriste, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and the spokesmen Emilio García Riera, David Ramón, Tomás Pérez Turrent and Fernando Gou, are taking advantage of the word “independent” for their commercial and promotional aims and are all going to the most remote region of Mexico to hold a meeting which will be a dialogue with the voices of silence amplified by their official spokesmen.
To this manoeuvre we reply with this declaration of principles:
1) That he who produces a film of over ten thousand pesos cannot be called an independent filmmaker, as this implies subordination to all the norms of censorship existing and to come, and total acceptance of the systems which we have criticised through cinema.
2) For anyone with an honest mental lucidity, a Super-8 film represents the values, the true criticism that can be made of a system, which has virtues and defects; that is, that the economic cost of the film does not correspond to its quality, because with the twelve million used for the production of Zapata, for example, we could have made 10,000 super-8 films which would represent all our historical, social and artistic context.
3) We wish to set forth once and for all that the movement of new Mexican cinema was conceived on May 15, 1970, with the first National Independent Cinema Competition “Luis Buñuel,” and that those who preserve or are working in the same spirit can validly represent the spirit of independence of criteria, despite the ideological divisions which the Cooperatives and other groups of independent cinema have to face.
4) We also wish to establish that we will continue to work through the exhibition channels from the humblest to those with the latest technologies, but always with the very clear idea that the language of cinema must be at the service of the community and that we will continue to criticise the faults and errors of the system, likewise, we will make known the existing achievements.
5) To conclude, we are aware that the movement which is emerging here in Mexico, a means of expression through the language of independent cinema, is the most dynamic and has national characteristics so far unrivalled abroad in the world panorama of cinema.
Palestinian Cinema Group
[First published in French as “Manifeste des cinéastes palestiniens,” Écran 73 18 (1973). First published in English in Cineaste 9, no. 3 (1979): 35.]
In the aftermath of the Six Day War of June 1967, there was an increasing sense that radical, pro-Palestinian cinema needed to develop as both an educational and propagandistic tool. The Palestinian Cinema Group, early on in the manifesto paraphrasing Marx and comparing contemporary Arab cinema to Marx’s oft-quoted “religion is the opiate of the masses” from Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), foregrounds the need to radically redefine Arab cinema so that films are made by and for the people, and their liberation from oppression becomes paramount.
The Arab cinema has for too long delighted in dealing with subjects having no connection to reality or dealing with it in a superficial manner. Based on stereotypes, this approach has created detestable habits among the Arab viewers for whom the cinema has become a kind of opium. It has led the public away from the real problems, dimming its lucidity and conscience.
At times throughout the history of Arab cinema, of course, there have been serious attempts to express the reality of our world and its problematic, but they have been rapidly smothered by the supporters of reaction who fought ferociously against any emergence of a new cinema.
While recognizing the concern of those attempts, it should nevertheless be made clear that in terms of content they were usually poorly developed and on a formal level were always inadequate. It seems one could never escape the cumbersome heritage of the conventional cinema.
The defeat of June ’67, however, was a jarring experience and it raised some fundamental questions. There also appeared, at long last, young talents committed to creating a completely new cinema in the Arab world, film-makers convinced that a complete change must affect the form as well as the content.
These new films raise questions about the reasons for our defeat and take courageous stands in favor of the resistance. It is important, in fact, to develop a Palestinian cinema capable of supporting with dignity the struggle of our people, revealing the actual facts of our situation and describing the stages of our Arab and Palestinian struggle to liberate our land. The cinema to which we aspire will have to devote itself to expressing the present as well as the past and the future. Its unified vigor will entail regrouping of individual efforts: indeed, personal initiatives—whatever their value may be—are doomed to remain inadequate and ineffective.
It’s towards this end that we, men of the cinema and literature, distribute this Manifesto and call for the creation of a Palestinian Cinema Association. We assign to it six tasks:
1) Produce films directed by Palestinians on the Palestinian cause and its objectives, films which originate from within an Arab context and which are inspired by a democratic and progressive content.
2) Work for the emergence of a new aesthetic to replace the old, one able to coherently express a new content.
3) Put the entire cinema at the service of the Palestinian revolution and the Arab cause.
4) Conceive films designed to present the Palestinian cause to the whole world.
5) Create a film archive which will gather film and still photograph material on the struggle of the Palestinian people in order to retrace its stages.
6) Strengthen relations with revolutionary and progressive cinema groups throughout the world, participate in film festivals in the name of Palestine and facilitate work of all friendly groups working toward the realization of the objectives of the Palestinian revolution.
The Palestinian Cinema Association considers itself an integral part of the institutions of the Palestinian revolution. Its financing will be assured by the Arab and Palestinian organizations which share its orientation. Its office will be at the Research Center of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Fernando Birri, Ousmane Sembène, Jorge Silva, Santiago Alvarez, Med Hondo, Jorge Cedron, Moussa Diakite, Flora Gomes, Mohamed Abdelwahad, El Hachmi Cherif, Lamine Merbah, Mache Khaled, Meziani Abdelhakim, Mamadou Sidibe, Mostefa Bouali, and more than twenty other filmmakers
[First published in English in Cineaste Pamphlet, no. 1 (New York: Cineaste, 1973).]
Introduction from Cineaste Pamphlet, no. 1:
The Third World Filmmakers Meeting, sponsored by the National Office for Cinematographic Commerce and Industry (ONCIC) and the cultural information center, was held in Algiers from December 5 to 14, 1973. The meeting brought together filmmakers from all areas of the third world for the purpose of discussing common problems and goals to lay the ground-work for an organization of third world filmmakers. The filmmakers attending the conference organized themselves into separate committees to discuss the specific areas of production and distribution as well as how the filmmaker fits into the political struggle of the third world. The resolutions of the various committees are published here as they were released in Algiers, with only slight modifications in grammar and spelling.
The Committee on People’s Cinema—the role of cinema and filmmakers in the third world against imperialism and neocolonialism—consisted of the following filmmakers and observers: Fernando Birri (Argentina); Humberto Rios (Bolivia); Manuel Perez (Cuba); Jorge Silva (Columbia); Jorge Cedron (Argentina); Moussa Diakite (Republic of Guinea); Flora Gomes (Guinea-Bissou); Mohamed Abdelwahad (Morocco); El Hachmi Cherif (Algeria); Lamine Merbah (Algeria); Mache Khaled (Algeria); Fettar Sid Ali (Algeria); Bensalah Mohamed (Algeria); Meziani Abdelhakim (Algeria). Observers: Jan Lindquist (Sweden); Josephine (Guinea-Bissau); and Salvatore Piscicelli (Italy).
The committee met on December 11, 12, and 13, 1973, in Algiers, under the chairmanship of Lamine Merbah. At the close of its deliberations, the committee adopted the following analysis.
So-called underdevelopment is first of all an economic phenomenon which has direct repercussions on the social and cultural sectors. To analyze such a phenomenon we must refer to the dialectics of the development of capitalism on a world scale.
At a historically determined moment in its development, capitalism extended itself beyond the framework of the national European boundaries and spread—a necessary condition for its growth—to other regions of the world in which the forces of production, being only slightly developed, provided favorable ground for the expansion of capitalism through the existence of immense, virgin material resources and available, cheap man-power reserves which constituted a new, potential market for the products of capitalist industry.
Its expansion manifested itself in different regions, given the power relationships, and in different ways:
▶ Through direct and total colonization implying violent invasion and the setting up of an economic and social infrastructure which does not correspond to the real needs of the people but serves more, or exclusively, the interests of the metropolitan countries;
▶ In a more or less disguised manner leaving to the countries in question a pretense of autonomy;
▶ Finally, through a system of domination of a new type—neocolonialism.
The result has been that these countries have undergone, on the one hand, varying degrees of development and, on the other hand, extremely varied levels of dependency with respect to imperialism: domination, influence, and pressures.
The different forms of exploitation and systematic plundering of the natural resources have had grave consequences on the economic, social, and cultural levels for the so-called underdeveloped countries, so that even though these countries are undergoing extremely diversified degrees of development, they face in their struggle for independence and social progress a common enemy—imperialism—which forms the principal obstacle to their development.
Its consequences can be seen in:
▶ The articulation of the economic sectors: imbalance of development on the national level with the creation of poles of economic attraction incompatible with the development of a proportionally planned national economy and with the interests of the popular masses, thereby giving rise to zones of artificial prosperity.
▶ Imbalance on the regional and continental levels, thereby revealing the determination of imperialism to create zones of attraction favorable for its own expansion and which are presented as models of development in order to retard the people’s struggle for real political and economic independence.
The repercussions on the social plane are as serious as they are numerous: they lead to characteristic impoverishment of the majority for the benefit in the first instance of the dominating forces and the national bourgeoisie of which one sector is objectively interested in independent national development, while the other sector is parasitic and comprador, with interests bound to those of the dominating forces.
The differentiations and social inequities have seriously affected the living standard of the people, mainly in the rural areas where the expropriated or impoverished peasants find it impossible to reinvest on the spot in order to subsist. With most of the people reduced to self-consumption, unemployment, and rural exodus, these factors lead to an intensification of unemployment and increased underemployment in the urban centers. In order to legitimize and strengthen its hold over the economies of the colonized and neocolonized countries, imperialism has recourse to a systemic enterprise of deculturation and acculturation of the people of the third world.
Deculturation consists of depersonalizing the people, of discrediting their culture by presenting it as inferior and inoperative, of blocking their specific development, and of disfiguring their history—in other words, creating an actual cultural vacuum favorable to a simultaneous process of acculturation through which the dominator endeavors to make his domination legitimate by introducing his own moral values, his life and thought patterns, his explanation of history: in a word, his culture.
Imperialism, being obliged to take into account that colonized or dominated people have their own culture and defend it, infiltrates the culture of the colonized, entertains relationships with it, and takes over those elements which it believes it can turn to its favor. This is done by using the social forces which they make their own, the retrograde elements of this culture. In this way, the language of the colonized, which is the carrier of culture, becomes inferior or foreign; it is used only in the family circle or in restricted social circles. It is no longer, therefore, a vehicle for education, culture, and science, because in the schools the language of the colonizer is taught, it being indispensable in order to work, to subsist, and to assert oneself. Gradually, it infiltrates the social and even the family relationships of the colonized. Language itself becomes a means of alienation, in that the colonized has a tendency to practice the language of the colonizer, while his own language, as well as his personality, his culture, and his moral values, become foreign to him.
In the same vein, the social sciences, such as sociology, archaeology, and ethnology, for the most part serve the colonizer and the dominant class so as to perfect the work of alienating the people through a pseudoscientific process which has in fact consisted of a retrospective justification for the presence of the colonizer and therefore of the new established order.
This is how sociological studies have attempted to explain social phenomena by fatalistic determinism, foreign to the conscience and the will of man. In the ethnological field, the enterprise has consisted of rooting in the minds of the colonized prejudices of racial and original inferiority and complexes of inadequacy for the mastering of the various acquisitions of knowledge and man’s production. Among the colonized people, imperialism has endeavored to play on the pseudoracial and community differences, assigning privilege to one or another ethnic grouping.
As for archaeology, its role in cultural alienation has contributed to distorting history by putting emphasis on the interests and efforts of research and the excavations of historical vestiges which justify the definite paternity of European civilization, sublimated and presented as being eternally superior to other civilizations whose slightest traces have been buried.
Whereas, in certain countries, the national culture has continued to develop while at the same time being retarded by the dominant forces, in other countries, given the long period of direct domination, it has been marked by discontinuity which has blocked it in its specific development, so that all that remains are traces of it which are scarcely capable of serving as a basis for a real cultural renaissance, unless it is raised to the present level of development of national and international productive forces.
It should be stated, however, that the culture of the colonizer, while alienating the colonized peoples, does the same to the people of the colonizing countries who are themselves exploited by the capitalist system. Cultural alienation presents, therefore, a dual character—national against the totality of the colonized people, and social against the working classes in the colonizing countries as well as the colonized countries.
Imperialist economic, political and social domination in order to subsist and to reinforce itself, takes root in an ideological system articulated through various channels and mainly through cinema which is in a position to influence the majority of the popular masses because its essential importance is at one and the same time artistic, esthetic, economic, and sociological, affecting to a major degree the training of the mind. Cinema, also being an industry, is subjected to the same development as material production within the capitalist system and through the very fact that the North American economy is preponderant with respect to world capitalist production, its cinema becomes preponderant as well and succeeds in invading the screens of the capitalist world and consequently those of the third world where it contributes to hiding inequalities and referring them to that ideology which governs the world imperialist system dominated by the United States of America.
With the birth of the national liberation movement, the struggle for independence takes on a certain depth implying, on one hand, the revalorization of national cultural heritage in marking it with a dynamism made necessary by the development of contradictions. On the other hand, it implies the contribution of progressive cultural factors borrowed from the field of universal culture.
The role of cinema in this process consists of manufacturing films reflecting the objective conditions in which the struggling peoples are developing, that is, films which bring about disalienation of the colonized peoples at the same time as they contribute sound and objective information for the people of the entire world, including the oppressed classes of the colonizing countries, and place the struggle of their people back in the general context of the struggle of the countries and people of the third world. This requires from the militant filmmaker a dialectical analysis of the sociohistoric phenomenon of colonization.
Reciprocally, cinema in the already liberated countries and in the progressive countries must accomplish, as their own national tasks, active solidarity with the people and filmmakers of countries still under colonial and neocolonial domination, which are struggling for their genuine national sovereignty. The countries enjoying political independence and struggling for varied development are aware that the struggle against imperialism on the political, economic, and social levels is inseparable from its ideological content and that, consequently, action must be taken to seize from imperialism the means for ideological influence and forge new methods adapted in content and form to the interests of the struggle of their peoples. This implies control by the people’s state of all the cultural activities and, in respect to cinema, nationalization in the interest of the masses of people: production, distribution, and commercialization. To make such a policy operative, it has been seen that the best path requires quantitative and qualitative development of national production capable, with the acquisition of films from third world and progressive countries, of swinging the balance of the power relationship in favor of using cinema in the interest of the masses. While influencing the general environment, conditions must be created for a greater awareness on the part of the masses for the development of their critical senses and varied participation in the cultural life of their countries.
A firm policy based on principle must be introduced in this field to eliminate once and for all the films which the foreign monopolies continue to impose upon us either directly or indirectly and which generate reactionary culture and, as a result, thought patterns in contradiction with the basic choices of our people.
The question, however, is not one of separating cinema from the overall cultural context which prevails in our countries, for we must consider that, on the one hand, the action of cinema is accompanied by that of other informational and cultural media, and, on the other hand, cinema operates with materials that are drawn from reality and already existing cultural forms of expression in order to function and operate. It is also necessary to be vigilant and to eliminate nefarious actions of the information media, to purify the forms of popular expression (folklore, music, theater, etc.), and to modernize them.
The cinema language being thereby linked to other cultural forms, the development of cinema, while demanding the raising of the general cultural level, contributes to this task in an efficient way and can even become an excellent means for the polarization of the various action fields as well as cultural tradition.
Films being a social act within a historical reality, it follows that the task of the third world filmmaker is no longer limited to the making of films but is extended to other fields of action, such as articulating, fostering, and making the new films understandable to the masses of people by associating himself with the promoters of people’s cinemas, clubs, and itinerant film groups in their dynamic action aimed at disalienation and sensitization in favor of a cinema which satisfies the interests of the masses, for at the same time that the struggle against imperialism and for progress develops on the economic, social, and political levels, a greater and greater awareness of the masses develops, associating cinema in a more concrete way in this struggle.
In other words, the question of knowing how cinema will develop is linked in a decisive way to the solutions which must be provided to all the problems with which our peoples are confronted and which cinema must face and contribute to resolving. The task of the third world filmmaker thereby becomes even more important and implies that the struggle waged by cinema for independence, freedom, and progress must go, and already goes, hand in hand with the struggle within and without the field of cinema, but always in alliance with the popular masses for the triumph of the ideas of freedom and progress.
In these conditions, it becomes obvious that freedom of expression and movement, the right to practice cinema and research, are essential demands of filmmakers of the third world—freedoms and rights which they have already committed to invest in the service of the working masses against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism for the general emancipation of their people.
United and in solidarity against American imperialism, at the head of world imperialism, and direct or indirect aggressor in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Palestine, in Africa through the intermediary of NATO, SEATO and CENTO, and in Latin America, hiding itself behind the fascist coup d’état of the Chilean military junta and the other oligarchies in power, the filmmakers present here in Algiers, certain that they express the opinion of their film-maker comrades in the third world, condemn the interventions, aggressions, and pressures of imperialism, condemn the persecutions to which the film-makers of certain third world countries are subjected, and demand the immediate liberation of the filmmakers detained and imprisoned and the cessation of measures restricting their freedom.
The Committee on Production and Coproduction, appointed by the General Assembly of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algeria, met on December 11, 12, and 13, 1973, under the chairmanship of Ousmane Sembène. The committee, which devoted itself to the problems of film production and coproduction in third world countries, included the following filmmakers and observers: Ousmane Sembène (Senegal); Sergio Castilla (Chile); Santiago Alvarez (Cuba); Sebastien Kainba (Congo); Mamadou Sidibe (Mali); Benamar Bakhti (Algeria); Nourredine Touazi (Algeria); Hedi Ben Hkelifa (Tunisia); Mostefa Bouali (Palestine); Med Hondo (Mauritania). Observers: Simon Hartog (Great Britain), representing the British filmmakers’ union, and Theo Robichet (France). Humberto Rios (Argentina) presented an information report to the committee.
The delegates present, after reporting on the natural production and coproduction conditions and the organization of the cinema industries in their countries, noted that the role of cinema in the third world is to promote culture through films, which are a weapon as well as a means of expression for the development of the awareness of the people, and that the cinema falls within the framework of the class struggle.
Considering:
▶ that the problems of cinema production in the countries of the third world are closely linked to the economic, political, and social realities of each of them; and
▶ that, consequently, cinema activity does not develop in a similar fashion:
◆ in those countries which are waging a liberation struggle,
◆ in those countries which have conquered their political independence and which have founded states,
◆ in those countries which, while being sovereign, are struggling to seize their economic and cultural independence;
◆ that those countries which are waging wars of liberation lack a film infrastructure and specialized cadres and, as a result, their production is limited, achieved in difficult circumstances, and very often is supported by or is dependent upon sporadic initiatives;
▶ that in those countries struggling for their economic and cultural independence, the principal characteristic is a private infrastructure which enables them to realize only a portion of their production within the national territory, the remainder being handled in the capitalist countries.
This leads to an appreciable loss of foreign currency and considerable delays which impede the development of an authentic national production.
Further considering,
▶ that in those countries in which the state assumes the responsibility for production and incorporates it into its cultural activity, there is, nevertheless, in a majority of cases, a lack of technical and industrial development in the cinema field and, as a consequence, production remains limited and does not manage to cover the needs for films in those countries. The national screens, therefore, are submerged with foreign productions coming, for the most part, from the capitalist countries.
▶ that, if we add as well the fact that world production is economically and ideologically controlled by these countries and, in addition, is of very mediocre quality, our screens bring in an ideological product which serves the interests of the colonizers, creating moreover the habit of seeing films in which lies and social prejudice are the choice subjects and in which these manufacturers of individualistic ideology constantly encourage the habits of an arbitrary and wasteful consumer society;
▶ that coproductions must, first and foremost, be for the countries of the third world, a manifestation of anti-imperialist solidarity, although their characteristics may vary and cover different aspects. We do not believe in coproductions in which an imperialist country participates, given the following risks:
◆ the imperialist country can shed influence through production methods which are foreign to the realities of our countries, and
◆ the examples of coproductions have given rise to cases of profit and the cultural and economic exploitation of our countries.
The participants in the committee therefore concluded that it is necessary to seek jointly concrete means to foster the production and coproduction of national films within the third world countries.
In line with this, a certain number of recommendations were unanimously adopted:
▶ to provide the revolutionary filmmakers of the third world with national cinema infrastructures;
▶ to put aside the conceptions and film production means of capitalist countries and to seek new forms, taking into account the authenticity and the realities of the economic means and possibilities of the third world countries;
▶ to develop national cinema and television agreements for the benefit of the production and distribution of third world films and to seek such agreements where they do not exist and to exchange regular programs;
▶ to organize and develop the teaching of film techniques, to welcome the nationals of countries in which the training is not ensured;
▶ to use all the audiovisual means available for the political, economic, and cultural development of the countries of the third world;
▶ to promote coproductions with independent, revolutionary filmmakers, while leaving to each country the task of determining the characteristics of these productions;
▶ to include in the governmental agreements between countries of the third world those measures likely to facilitate coproductions and film exchanges;
▶ to influence the establishment of coproductions between national organizations of the third world in endeavoring to have them accepted by the governmental and professional institutions of their respective countries (through the influence, in particular, of the acting president of the nonaligned countries, Mr. Houari Boumediene);
▶ to propose the need for the creation of an organization of third world filmmakers, the permanent secretariat of which should be set up in Cuba. While awaiting the creation of this organization, the Union of Audio-Visual Arts of Algeria (UAAV) will provide a temporary secretariat.
The filmmakers will henceforth keep each other informed of their respective approaches undertaken within the framework of the Pan-African Federation of Cineastes (FEPACI).
The Committee in charge of the distribution of third world films, after consideration of the different remarks of the members present, proposes the creation of an office to be called the Third World Cinema Office. It will be composed of four members including a resident coordinator and one representative per continent. The committee, in reply to the offer made by Algeria, proposed that the permanent headquarters of the office be established in Algiers.
The goals of the office will be:
▶ To coordinate efforts for the production and distribution of third world films,
▶ To establish and strengthen existing relations between third world filmmakers and cinema industries by:
◆ the editing of a permanent information bulletin (filmography, technical data sheets, etc.) in four languages: Arabic, English, French, and Spanish,
◆ making a census of existing documentation on third world cinema for the elaboration and distribution of a catalogue on the cinema production of the countries of the third world,
◆ fostering other festivals, film markets, and film days on the third-world level, alongside the other existing events,
◆ the editing of a general compilation of official cinema legislation in the third world countries (problems of censorship, distribution of film copies, copyright, customs, etc.).
▶ To take those measures required for the creation of regional and continental organization leading to the creation of a tricontinental organization for film distribution.
▶ To prospect the foreign markets in order to secure other outlets for the productions of the third world countries (commercial and noncommercial rights, television, and videocassettes).
The office will approach the authorities of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Arab League, and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in order to obtain from these organizations financial assistance for its functioning. It will also approach the authorities of those countries having effective control of their cinema industries, that is, Algeria, Guinea, Upper Volta, Mali, Uganda, Syria, and Cuba, as well as other countries which manifest a real desire to struggle against the imperialist monopoly. In addition to the above-mentioned assistance, the operating budget of the office will be composed of donations, grants, and commissions on all transactions of third world films entrusted to the office.
Carlos Diegues, Glauber Rocha, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Leon Hirszman, Miguel Faria, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Walter Lima Jr.
[Published in Portuguese in Arte em Revista: anos 60 (São Paulo: Centro de Estudos de Arte Contemporânea, 1979), 5–9. First published in English in Randal Johnson and Robert Stam, eds., Brazilian Cinema, exp. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 91–92. Trans. Randal Johnson and Robert Stam.]
The “Luz e Ação” (Light and action) manifesto, written by key figures of Cinema novo, decries cheap populism and State repression, foregrounding the success of then-recent Brazilian films such as Nelson Pereira des Santos’s Como era gostoso o meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, Brazil, 1971) as examples of progressive, politically engaged cinema that appealed to mass audiences. Along with anticolonialism, the manifesto also decries sexism and racism in Brazilian cinema.
Since 1968/69, our films have been victims of the cultural exorcism that has swept the country. New tendencies and emergent standards—official or not—have stifled us, but at the same time have permitted us time for reflection. And we have been silent.
The silence has animated old rancors and has permitted the “vengeance” that has lasted now for four years. In the cultural desert in which Brazil has been transformed, solitary megalomaniac cangaceiros ride the beats of their neuroses, firing wildly at whatever shows signs of life.
We’ve had enough.
We’re no longer willing to peacefully exist with the slothful silence and suspect aggression that have conspired against our films. We are no longer willing to tolerate the mental leukemia that is threatening Brazilian culture.
Mental leukemia: white corpuscles have swallowed red corpuscles. Blood no longer warms the body. Leukemic intelligence is manifested through complacency, laziness, and mechanical imitation.
We reject the bureaucratic cinema of statistics and pseudo-industrial myths. Films like Macunaíma and How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman have broken box-office records. Nothing can justify low-level commercialism.
We reject “the public at any price” blackmail. It has led Brazilian cinema to the most abhorrent deformations: easy laughs at the expense of the weak, racism, sexuality as merchandise, scorn for artistic expression as a scientific and poetic form of knowledge. And we affirm this rejection with the authority of those who have worked consistently and constantly toward a dialectical relationship between spectacle and spectator.
Our most recent films show our desire for a vast and just redistribution of the cultural wealth of the nation. We are opposed to its concentration in the hands of aseptic experimentalism, the self-serving vanguard, and socialite clowns.
For us cinema only has meaning as a permanent invention, on all levels of creation—the search for new modes of production, new thematic areas, new techniques, and linguistic experimentation.
Permanent invention is what distinguishes a good film from a bad one. The pleasure of form, the great utopias, the “sentiment of the world,” are rights and duties of the artist. Because one thing, as Drummond says, is always two: the thing itself and its image.
In the name of this permanent invention our cinema formulated the most radical theses to emerge from Brazilian culture during the sixties. A general political and ethical position produced an original and revolutionary esthetic that gained international prestige and influenced modern cinema.
We want to generate new ideas for new situations, and thus keep Brazilian cinema from transforming itself into the newest “old” industry, or the youngest decadent culture, in the world.
We refuse to justify silence or impotence with hypocrisy. Progressively expanding these limits through the exercise of freedom, we will further deepen our work, making it rain in the desert.
As Brazilians, this is our fundamental situation: if we do not put Brazil in our films, they will have failed.
We therefore convoke the cultural producers of our country, particularly those of cinema, to an open dialogue. We repeat: we want to generate new ideas for new situations. This is not a group manifesto, but a collective text of provocation, intended to ignite debate.
Brazilian culture should not have to choose between complaints and conformism, cynicism and vulgarity. The new is beyond these alternatives.
Jorge Sanjinés
[First published as “Problemas de la forma y del contenido en el cine revolucionario,” in Ojo al cine (Cuba) (1976). First published in English in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI, 1983), 34–38. Trans. Malcolm Coad.]
Jorge Sanjinés’s manifesto, like many of the Third Cinema manifestos, disavows the bourgeois notion of the auteur and instead foregrounds the dialectic between collective filmmaking, the film, and the spectator. Using his own Sangre de cóndor (Blood of the Condor, Bolivia, 1969) as an example, Sanjinés argues for a new kind of politically engaged cinema that offers an alternative to Western modernization. Like Espinosa (see Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” earlier in this chapter), he foregrounds process over product and offers a salient critical analysis of the ideological dialectic between form and content.
Revolutionary cinema must seek beauty not as an end but as a means. This implies a dialectical relationship between beauty and subject matter. For a work to be effective, this relationship must be correct. If it is not, the result will be nothing more than a pamphlet, perfect in what it says but schematic and gross in its form. The lack of coherent creative form will limit the film’s effectiveness, destroy the ideological dynamics of its content, and give us nothing more than an outline and superficiality, without real substance, humanity or love. These qualities can only appear when expression is based in sensibility, and is capable of penetrating through to truth.
We must distinguish between routes so as not to miss our destination. Among pseudo-revolutionary works it is quite common to come across beauty worshipped for its own sake but with some revolutionary theme as its pretext. Such works may seem to exhibit the correct relationship between subject matter and beauty. But the most direct test of such an apparent balance comes when the result is shown to its presumed audience, the people, who are usually touted as the objects of such work. These presumed addressees are often the first to discover the work’s lack of any real intention of conveying anything other than the overblown expression of an individual talent, which at the end of the day neither interests them nor has anything to say to them.
The formal choices made by an artist will be governed by his or her ideological inclinations. If the self-proclaimed revolutionary artist continues to believe in his or her right to create without reference to anyone else, and to think that what counts is the release of his/her own “private demons,” with no concern for intelligibility, then s/he is locating her/himself clearly within the key ideological postulates of bourgeois art. Opportunism begins by lying to yourself.
Nor are appropriate forms for expressing revolutionary content, which by definition must be widely communicable, to be found in the formal models used to convey other kinds of content. It would be seriously incongruous to use the sensational language of advertising in a work about colonialism. Such language must inevitably obstruct content which is so alien to it. When a sixty-second advertising spot combines zooms into and away from a product with carefully synchronised music, while a song on the soundtrack repeats the name or brand of the product eight or nine times, it probably achieves its objective. The operation is intended to be carried out endless times on the defenceless viewer, who cannot be expected to switch off the television every time the ad is shown. Form and content have thus achieved perfect ideological unity.
But to try to apply such formal principles to other kinds of theme is absurd. The forms and techniques of advertising are based on close study of the viewer’s degree of resistance, or defencelessness, when faced with the aggressive image. What is possible in one minute is impossible to sustain for thirty minutes, when time is available to react and saturation begins to be counterproductive. We cannot attack the ideology of imperialism by using its own formal tricks and dishonest techniques, whose raison d’être is to stupefy and deceive. Not only do such methods violate revolutionary morality; they also correspond structurally to the ideology and content of imperialism.
For revolutionary art communication must be pursued through the stimulation of reflection, whereas the entire formal machinery of the imperialist media is intended to smother thought and bring the will into submission.
But communicability must not give way to facile simplicity. The profoundest resources of sensibility are required to communicate ideas in all their depth and substance, and to align the finest artistic resources with the audience’s own cultural reference points, in order to capture the internal rhythms of the people’s own mental life, sensibility and vision of reality. We ask of art and beauty, then, that they become means, without this implying any cheapening of them, as bourgeois thought maintains it must. Such art is as rich as any other, dignified, indeed, by its social nature.
Revolutionary cinema is in the process of taking shape. It is not an easy or rapid matter to transform conceptions of art which bourgeois ideology has interposed very deeply in artists, particularly in those who have been formed within western culture. However, we believe that such a transformation will be achieved, through contact with the people, their involvement in artistic creation, greater clarity about the goals of popular art, and the abandonment of individualism. Numerous group works and collectively made films already exist, as, very importantly, do examples of popular participation, where the people themselves play roles, make suggestions and become directly involved in the creative act. In such cases, the people are already determining methods of work. Closed scripts begin to disappear and dialogue is born from the people’s own prodigiously fertile talent, during the very act of representation. Life itself speaks, in all its force and truth.
As we argued once before in an article on this subject, revolutionary cinema, as it reaches maturity, can only be collective, just as the revolution itself is collective. Popular cinema, whose central protagonist will be the people, will tell individual stories when these have collective meaning. Such stories must help the people’s understanding and not that of an isolated individual, and must be an integral part of the collective story. The individual hero must give way to the popular hero, the multiple hero, who in the process of making will not only be the film’s internal raison d’être but also the dynamic behind its quality, both participant and artist.
A film about the people made by an author is not the same as a film made by the people through an author. As the interpreter and translator of the people, such an author becomes their vehicle. When the relations of creation change, so does content and, in a parallel process, form.
In revolutionary cinema the final work will always be the result of individual talents organised in function of the same end, so long as this end captures and transmits the spirit and vigour of a whole people and not the small scale problems of a single person. In bourgeois society such individual problems are blown up out of all proportion. In revolutionary society, however, they are resolved by being set against the shared problems of all. This reduces them to a manageable dimension, where solutions can be found through the problems being embraced within those of all. The neuroses and loneliness which give rise to psychiatric disorders disappear forever.
The artist’s fond or apathetic regard for people and objects emerges inevitably in his or her works, escaping his/her control. His/her ideas and feelings are quite unconsciously manifest in the expressive resources s/he uses. His/her attitudes are translated into the forms of languages s/he uses, with the result that a work speaks to us not only of a theme but also of its author.
When we filmed Blood of the Condor with the peasants of the remote Kaata community, we certainly intended that the film should be a political contribution, denouncing the gringos and presenting a picture of Bolivian social reality. But our fundamental objective was to explore our own aptitudes. We cannot deny this, just as we cannot deny that our relations with the peasant actors were at that time still vertical. We still chose shots according to our own personal taste, without taking into account their communicability or cultural overtones. The script had to be learned by heart and repeated exactly. In certain scenes we put the emphasis entirely on sound, without paying attention to the needs of the spectators, for whom we claimed we were making the film. They needed images, and complained later when the film was shown to them.
Thanks to the encounter between our work and the people, thanks to the latter’s criticisms, suggestions, instruction and complaints, and their confusions due to our ideological errors in relating together form and content, we were able steadily to clarify the language of our films and to incorporate into them the creativity of the people themselves, whose remarkable expressive and interpretative abilities demonstrated a pure sensibility, free of stereotypes and alienation.
During the filming of Courage of the People, many scenes were worked out on the actual sites of the historical events we were reconstructing, through discussion with those who had taken part in them and who had a good deal more right than us to decide how things should be done. Furthermore, these protagonists interpreted the events with a force and conviction which professional actors would have found difficult. These compañeros not only wanted to convey their experiences with the same intensity with which they had lived them, but also fully understood the political objectives of the film, which made their participation in it an act of militancy. They were perfectly clear about the usefulness of the film as a means of declaring throughout the country the truth of what had happened. So they decided to make use of it as they would a weapon. We, the members of the crew, became instruments of the people’s struggle, as they expressed themselves through us!
The script was left open to the people’s own very precise memories of events. As happened later during the filming of The Principal Enemy, this method stimulated the people to express their own ideas. The peasants used the filming to break the silence of oppression and speak openly, saying to the judge and the boss in the film what they wanted to say to their counterparts in reality. At such moments cinema and reality came together. They were the same thing. In the evident external differences artificiality was clearly present. But the cinematic fact was fused with reality through the people’s act of revelation and creation.
Our decision to use long single shots in our recent films was determined by the content itself. We had to film in such a way as to produce involvement and participation by the spectator. It would have been no use in The Principal Enemy, for example, to have jumped sharply into close-ups of the murderer as he is being tried by the people in the square, because the surprise which the sudden introduction of a closeup always causes would have undercut the development of the sequence as a whole, whose power comes from within the fact of collective participation in the trial and the participation by the audience of the film which that evokes. The camera movements do no more than mediate the point of view and dramatic needs of the spectator, so that s/he may become a participant. Sometimes the single shot itself includes close-ups, but these never get closer to the subject than would be widened between people and heads so that by getting closer we can see and hear the prosecutor. But to have intercut a tight close-up would have been brutally to interpose the director’s point of view, imposing meanings which should arise from the events themselves. But a close-up which is arrived at from amongst the other people present, as it were, and together with them, carries a different meaning and expresses an attitude more consistent with what is taking place within the frame, and within the substance of the film itself.
During the shooting of The Principal Enemy, however, we were often forced to break with our methods for technical reasons. Sound problems due to an inadequate blimp (the covering which dampens the noise of the camera) interrupted the single shot, and meant we had to break up the takes. The high degree of improvisation which results from popular participation made it difficult to control the continuity for cutting purposes. We can justify ourselves to some extent by explaining that, for us at least, the process of filming was continually paralleled by that of discovering new possibilities. It was quite different from the kind of shooting we had learned as our abc, and more than a few times we were taken by surprise by what was happening.
We could speak of two ways of treating a subject. One is subjective, and fits the needs and attitudes of an individualist, auteur cinema. The other is objective, non-psychologistic and sensory, facilitating participation and taking account of the needs of a popular cinema.
Such objective treatment also meets the need to stimulate reflection through our films. For example, a formal consequence of using lengthy shots aimed at integration and participation is the creation of distance which aids calm and objective reflection. Such distance means freedom to think, not only for the audience but also for the collective protagonist, who cannot be submitted to the close-up either physically, because it will not fit into it, or in principle, because it denies freedom of action, which is the freedom to invent. As far as the spectator is concerned, there is no pressure from within the image itself, and none of the tensions of the exaggerated close-up or of the accelerating rhythms which normally mark the resolution of a sequence. Instead, tensions arise from within the people’s own drama, while emotional power, which we believe must be achieved if reflection is to be grounded in commitment, affects the spectator through the content itself, with its particular quality, its social intensity and its human significance.
On the other hand, such sequences are not intended to fall into the immobility of theatre, with the spectator confined to a single vantage point. Rather, they contain multiple possibilities for interpreting both internal and external drama, responding to the needs of both the participating spectator and the people as protagonist.
It was not only our search for ideological coherence that helped convince us of the need to do away with the individual protagonist—the hero who is so central to every story in our culture—but also what we had learned of the essential and primordial characteristics of indigenous American culture. The social traditions of our continent’s Indians teach them to understand themselves primarily as a group rather than as isolated individuals. Their way of life is not individualistic. They understand reality through their integration with others, and practice such ideas naturally, as an inseparable part of their vision of the world. Initially it is disconcerting to think of yourself in this way, for it is part of a quite different mode of thought based on a dialectic which is the opposite of individualism. The individualist is set against others, while the Indian only exists through his integration with others. When this equilibrium is upset, the Indian tends to disintegrate and lose his senses. Mariátegui, the great Peruvian political thinker, said when discussing concepts of liberty that the Indian is never less free than when he is alone. I remember that when we filmed an interview recently, a peasant whom we had asked to speak in front of the camera asked for his comrades from his community to be present so that he could speak confidently and naturally. Exactly the reverse of what a town-dweller would have wanted. He would probably have felt more comfortable alone!
Revolutionary art will always be distinguished by what it shows of a people’s way of being, and of the spirit of popular cultures which embraces whole communities of people, with their own particular ways of thinking, of conceiving reality and of loving life. The purpose of such art is truth achieved through beauty, while bourgeois art pursues beauty even at the cost of lies. By observing and incorporating popular culture we will be able to develop fully the language of liberating art.
The diffusion of revolutionary films is a major problem, and poses questions requiring urgent solutions. Militant, anti-imperialist films suffer particular persecution and censorship in most of the countries where they can best fulfil their purpose. This situation has created a good deal of demoralisation among those who do not understand that the work of a revolutionary film-maker docs not end when his or her film is finished. The problems of distribution are the problems of film-making. The latter cannot come to a halt because of immediate problems, most of which can be solved. A film must not cease to exist because at that precise political moment it cannot be distributed. As long as the problems of one oppressed country are shared by other oppressed countries, this pretext is invalid.
We should take into account that the politics of our countries, or most of them, at any rate, are intensely changeable. Amidst the ebb and flow of contradictions within each country, there are always opportune moments for distribution. What we are talking about is struggle! And in a struggle one must know when and where to shoot, and when to duck down into your trench.
To start censoring ourselves, or to disguise the content of our work by turning into symbols, is to fall into procedures which are both negative and dangerously useful to the enemy, who knows perfectly well how to turn to his advantage material which does not confront him head on.
A fully revolutionary film has the right to exist, and its need for diffusion is implicit in its very nature. Nowadays revolutionaries fight the same enemy everywhere he is to be found. Of course they can do so more satisfactorily in their own medium, but when this is impossible they should look for new positions in the broad battlefield which is the world plundered by imperialism. What cannot be justified is to hang around vegetating in Paris. The revolution takes no holidays, and nor can revolutionaries.
Nowadays revolutionary films can be seen in many European countries, usually on a handful of television channels or in specialist cinemas. This kind of diffusion, like that in the many festivals, creates two rough categories of audience in these countries: the passive consumers of culture and entertainment, who are the majority, and those who watch these films with an attitude consistent with their progressive ideas and who take from them formative information. We believe that the numbers of the latter spectators are growing all the time, and that this justifies distributing our films in Europe. Sometimes, such distribution can also be justified by the income produced by selling copies to television or to distributors, though the film-maker almost always ends up with nothing more than crumbs from such operations.
Revolutionary cinema is also distributed in the United States, in the very entrails of the imperialist enemy. Numerous films are shown in universities and progressive organisations, throwing light on our peoples’ problems and exposing within the system itself the atrocities which it brings about in the world it keeps in subjugation. Such showings generate solidarity and strengthen the anti-imperialist struggle of North American progressives, who understand very well that exploitation, dehumanisation and discrimination in the US are just as much the products of capitalist ideology.
But we Latin American film-makers are concerned most of all that our films should be distributed in our countries, whether in our own or sister countries. I have already said that this is difficult and dangerous. Carlos Alvarez, director of What Is Democracy?, was imprisoned by the Colombian military, together with his compañera, accused of subversion because of his film work. Walter Achugar was detained and tortured in Uruguay. Felix Gomez, of the Ukamau Group in Bolivia, spent eighteen months in a concentration camp because a box was found on him containing props used in our film, Courage of the People. Antonio Eguino, director of photography on the same film, was detained for a fortnight, amidst widespread protests in the universities and by many progressive sectors, for the crime of possessing a print of the film. Left-wing film-makers and actors have been imprisoned by Pinochet, and until this day we still have no news of many of them. A substantial number of the most committed Latin American film-makers are forbidden to enter their own countries. But despite persecution and repression, Latin American cinema is still being produced, and in some countries there is a genuine effervescence, which will soon bear fruits in new values and experiences. The circulation of Latin American films may be restricted, but it has never been stopped altogether, and is now growing where conditions allow. In Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Peru, Ecuador and Mexico, festivals have been organised and Latin American films are in permanent circulation. In Venezuela and Panama there have even been festivals of Cuban cinema. What is lacking in most of these countries where such diffusion is possible is a properly systematic and organised effort to take this cinema to the people on a really substantial scale. In this connection what is being done now in Ecuador has much to tell us, and we shall return to it in greater detail.
In Bolivia, before the appalling eruption of fascism there, the Ukamau Group’s films were being given intensive distribution. Blood of the Condor was seen by nearly 250,000 people! We were not content to leave this distribution solely to the conventional commercial circuits, and took the film to the countryside together with projection equipment and a generator to allow the film to be shown in villages where there is no electricity. The results were exciting. The film contributed to the expulsion of the Peace Corps from the country, by encouraging the formation of university and official commissions of inquiry into their suspicious activities, which finally recommended their expulsion.
In Chile, both before and during the Popular Unity government, Latin American films were distributed through the commercial circuits and also in factories and in the countryside. Argentina has seen the interesting experience of groups such as the Liberation Film Group, which carried out an intensive effort to distribute their own films among the workers.
Because of political circumstances there, Ecuador is currently the location of what we believe is one of anti-imperialist cinema’s most interesting experiences. Films such as What Is Democracy?, Cerro Pelado, The Hour of the Furnaces, Compañero President, NOW, Revolution, Ukamau, Blood of the Condor, Courage of the People and The Principal Enemy, are receiving considerable attention in universities and among the workers. Shared problems and a common cultural identity mean that some of these films have reached a remarkable number of spectators. In only two and a half months Courage of the People was seen and discussed by some 40,000 workers in the Quito area alone! On the basis of the available figures, and taking into account distribution to peasants in different parts of the country, we calculate that in a single year approximately 340,000 workers, peasants and students have seen our group’s films. We can give this figure because we have followed the distribution of these films particularly closely, and we think that for a relatively small country like Ecuador they are satisfactory. To a great extent they are due to the efficient efforts of the Film Department at the Central University and to the enthusiasm of the compañeros at the National Polytechnic’s Film Club. Both organisations have concentrated their efforts on grass-roots working-class organisations and trade unions, but have also taken the films into the rural areas. Other universities, trade union and peasant organisations themselves, and third-worldist priests are also making intensive use of the films. It is likely that in the ease of the Ukamau Group’s films cultural factors, such as the use of Quechua, which is spoken in Ecuador, in parts of the films, are helping their acceptance by audiences and thus their distribution. But we believe the principal reason for the success is the audience’s identification with the political and social problematic the films deal with. In our discussions with them, audiences have either insisted on the identity of the problems faced in Bolivia and Ecuador, or have simply ignored the nationality of the films, and discussed them as something of their own.
We’re going to finish this article by quoting some of the workers and peasants who are currently seeing these films. Beforehand, however, we want to make an appeal that the Ecuadorian experience be studied, and that cinema be taken without delay to the people of our countries, wherever this is possible. The attitudes and practices of cinematheques and other organisations which use these films must change, so that their emphasis on static, exquisitely clean theatres—which runs so contrary to the nature of this cinema—may give way to concern with mobile units functioning in factories and communities, so that permanent communication can be established with the people. Such communication benefits both those who receive and those who give, as this relationship alters during the projection event itself and those who are giving find themselves receiving also.
Paul Leduc, Jorge Fons, Raul Araiza, Felipe Cazals, José Estrada, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Alberto Isaac, Gonzalo Martínez, Sergio Olhovich, Julián Pastor, Juan Manuel Torres, and Salomón Láiter
[First released in México, D.F., on 19 November 1975. First published in Spanish as “Manifiesto del Frente nacional de cinematografistas,” Otrocine (Mexico) 1, no. 3 (1975). Trans. Fabiola Caraza.]
Quite unlike the Mexican “New Cinema Group” manifesto of 1961, this manifesto explicitly engages with the politics of the Mexican state and the status of cinema within it, placing Mexican cinema in the rubric of Third Cinema and of Latin American struggles against colonization and dictatorship. Nevertheless, the manifesto does cut some slack to the ruling PRI (Partido revolucionario institucional), which the manifesto scribes argue has changed for the better in the previous six years. While left unstated, these changes come after the state-sanctioned Tlatelolco Massacre on 2 October 1968 during the lead-up to the Olympic games in Mexico City, a moment of political awakening to many and documented by Mexican writer and activist Elena Poniatowska in her book La noche de Tlatelolco (1971).
That the Mexican cinema has until recently been one of the main ideological institutions supporting an unjust and dependent social order.
That it has been an active agent of cultural colonialism exploiting the ignorance, the illiteracy and hunger of the country and the continent.
That through alienating products it imposes ideological values and patterns of conduct that have nothing to do with the essence of the Mexican and Latin American man.
That due to the incompetence of the State to dictate a coherent cinematographic policy to the needs of the people; the national cinema was systematically looted by private producers who consciously or unconsciously created a contemptible cinematographic product distracting the people from the real problems and alienating the cinema from its national roots.
That in the last six years a dynamic of change has begun and it manifests itself mainly in that the State has taken the main (comprehensive) responsibility of production.
That the State has established a partnership with the workers through a so-called “Paquetes” (“Packages”) system that offers, at least in appearance, the possibility for the worker to take part in the profits, even though it’s minimal in proportion to what he produces.
That the State has opened the gateway regarding subject matter.
That the State has manifested a willingness of change when incorporating a new generation of directors and
That this energetic attitude, especially in the last three years, allows us to portray the present as a time of transition towards the creation of authentic national cinematographic art engaged with the historical destiny and the needs of the great majority.
We are aware that for these changes to be irreversible it is necessary to go into them in depth and develop them. This is the reason why we have decided to setup an active movement similar to those in other historical situations which shaped classical music, mural paintings, the Mexican novel of the Revolution and modern dance, taking into account that we recognize in these movements, the true creators of national art.
1. That we cannot avoid that Latin America is a continent where there is 32% illiteracy, 40% infant mortality, growing unemployment and subjugation of the working masses that create the wealth which concentrates in the hands of an exploiting minority.
An extremely high percentage of malnutrition created by the systematic exploitation of the people by the dictatorship held up by the imperialism of our continent.
2. That before this reality, the cinema cannot and should not remain alien and on the contrary, our commitment as filmmakers and individuals is to fight for the transformation of society creating a Mexican Cinema tied to the interests of the Third World and of Latin America, cinema that will emerge from the investigation and analysis of the continental reality.
3. That we are aware that to develop these principles it is essential that the cinematographic creator have direct interference in the decisions relating to the thematic and organizational economic aspect of film.
4. That we reject all mechanisms of censorship that prevent freedom of expression in the cinematographic creation, understanding that this censorship not only can be exercised from the General Management of Cinematography but also in each of the subsequent steps in every project, whether it be in financing, production, distribution, promotion or exhibition.
5. That we propose to narrow the relationships within the cinematographic industry of the continent, understanding that we cannot put off the task of regaining the millions of Spanish speaking spectators who constitute the innate market of our cinema.
6. That the cinema, as a social activity of mankind, can change only in the same measure as the social structures.
7. The ones signing below to the above statements constitute the Fighting Front for the consolidation of a True Mexican Cinematographic Art, assuming the forefront of the Movement and we call to all cinematographic sectors of the country to manifest their fighting support and solidarity to these principles.
FEPACI (Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes)
[Published in French as “Charte d’Alger du cinéma africain,” Afrique littéraire et artistique 35 (1975): 100–101. First published in English in Angela Marin, ed., African Films: The Context of Production (London: BFI, 1982), 5–6. Trans. Liz Heron.]
Developing on the propositions put forth in the “Resolutions of Third World Filmmakers Meeting” in Algiers in 1973, The “Algiers Charter” argues for the necessity of a militant, pan-African cinema to countervail the dominant cinemas of Europe and the United States and the cultural and artistic domination that continues to ensue from this colonization.
For a responsible, free and committed cinema.
This charter was adopted at the Second Congress of the FEPACI (Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes) in Algiers, January 1975.
Contemporary African societies are still objectively undergoing an experience of domination exerted on a number of levels: political, economic and cultural. Cultural domination, which is all the more dangerous for being insidious, imposes on our peoples models of behaviour and systems of values whose essential function is to buttress the ideological and economic ascendancy of the imperialist powers. The main channels open to this form of control are supplied by the new technologies of communication: books, the audiovisual, and very specifically the cinema. In this way the economic stranglehold over our countries is increased twofold by a pervading ideological alienation that stems from a massive injection of cultural by-products thrust on the African markets for passive consumption. Moreover, in the face of this condition of cultural domination and deracination, there is a pressing need to reformulate in liberating terms the internal problematic of development and of the part that must be played in this worldwide advance by culture and by the cinema.
To assume a genuinely active role in the process of development, African culture must be popular, democratic and progressive in character, inspired by its own realities and responding to its own needs. It must also be in solidarity with cultural struggles all over the world.
The issue is not to try to catch up with the developed capitalist societies, but rather to allow the masses to take control of the means of their own development, giving them back the cultural initiative by drawing on the resources of a fully liberated popular creativity. Within this perspective the cinema has a vital part to play because it is a means of education, information and consciousness raising, as well as a stimulus to creativity. The accomplishing of these goals implies a questioning by African film-makers of the image they have of themselves, of the nature of their function and their social status and of their general place in society. The stereotyped image of the solitary and marginal creator which is widespread in Western capitalist society must be rejected by African film-makers, who must, on the contrary, see themselves as creative artisans at the service of their people. It also demands great vigilance on their part with regard to imperialism’s attempts at ideological recuperation as it redoubles its efforts to maintain, renew and increase its cultural ascendancy.
In this context, African film-makers must be in solidarity with progressive film-makers who are waging anti-imperialist struggles throughout the world. Moreover, the question of commercial profit can be no yardstick for African film-makers. The only relevant criterion of profitability is the knowledge of whether the needs and aspirations of the people are expressed, and not those of specific interest groups. This means that all the structural problems of their national cinema must be of paramount importance to African film-makers.
The commitment demanded from African film-makers should in no way signify subordination. The state must take a leading role in building a national cinema free of the shackles of censorship or any other form of coercion likely to diminish the film-makers’ creative scope and the democratic and responsible exercise of their profession. This freedom of expression for film-makers is in fact one of the prerequisite conditions of their ability to contribute to the development of a critical understanding among the masses and the flowering of their potentialities.
Nicaraguan Institute of Cinema
[First published in Spanish as a pamphlet, “Declaración de principios y fines del Instituto Nicaragüense de cine.” First published in English in Jonathan Buchsbaum, Cinema and the Sandinistas: Filmmaking in Revolutionary Nicaragua (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). Trans. Jonathan Buchsbaum.]
After forty-three years of dictatorial rule by the Somoza dynasty propped up by the United States, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de liberación nacional, FSLN) overthrew the government in 1979. Realizing that Nicaragua had no cinematic history to speak of, the newly formed Nicaraguan Institute of Cinema faced a different set of challenges than those faced by many Latin American countries. Not only did the institute need to mobilize film to educate the people; it also had to develop a cinema from ground zero. This manifesto addresses these concerns, delineates what the Nicaraguan Institute of Cinema sees as the goals of Nicaraguan film, and puts forth the utopian ideals of building a free film culture from the ground up.
Until the day of the triumph of the Popular Sandinista Revolution, Nicaragua was a country dominated by the most bestial of Latin American dictatorships: the Somocista Dynasty.
This dynasty was nothing more than the expression of a secular domination imposed on our homeland by North American imperialism. Submitted to sacking, exploitation, hunger, and misery by this shady, reactionary, and anti-popular force, Nicaragua also had to confront a systematic and entrenched aggression bent on uprooting its national identity.
In the heat of war against this force, the Sandinista cinema was born, out of the need to gather the cinematic testimony of the most significant moments of this struggle to counter the disinformation promoted by the enemy’s news agencies and preserve international solidarity. At the same time it was proposed to conserve for the future generations the document of the immense sacrifice borne by our people to carry forward its revolutionary war.
In the fulfillment of such tasks germinated what today—upon assumption of the responsibilities of the triumph—is known as the Nicaraguan Institute of Cinema. This is a response to the commitment to recover and develop our National identity. It is at the same time an instrument in the defense of our revolution, in the area of the ideological struggle and a new means of expression of our people in their sacred right to self-determination and its full independence.
In each and every one of our works, we will have to satisfy the immediate needs of mobilization, education, recreation, that the current stage of National reconstruction requires of us, strengthening us to produce cinematic works of permanent value which take their place in the best tradition of progressive and revolutionary cinema that has been produced and is being produced in Latin America, and finally, in universal culture, as part of a regional, continental, and world struggle for the definitive liberation of all oppressed peoples.
To begin the task that we, as the Nicaraguan Institute of Cinema, have proposed for ourselves, we are aware that there exists no tradition of cinematography in Nicaragua.
To create the national cinema out of the legacy of ruin that the dictatorship leaves us is a challenge. With the total economic and material destruction, we have insufficient resources to reach our indicated objectives, but we are sure of being able to fulfill them because the same spirit that brought us victory inspires us.
We benefit immediately from the unique cinematic experience obtained during the war of liberation, and with the valuable and necessary contribution of international Latin American companions who at our side will confront the great challenge that awaits us.
Ours will be a Nicaraguan cinema, launched in search of a cinematic language that must arise from our concrete reality and the specific experiences of our culture.
It will begin with an effort of careful investigation into the roots of our culture, for only thus can it reflect the essence of our historical being and contribute to the development of the revolutionary process and its protagonist: The Nicaraguan people.
In defining today the origins and objectives of the Nicaraguan Institute of Cinema, we make a fraternal appeal to the cinemas and the filmmakers of the whole world, so that, united with the spirit of the General of Free Men, Augusto César Sandino, they support our initiative. We will thus have close bonds of solidarity that in this field of expression will favor the advance and development of our Popular Sandinista Revolution.
A Free Homeland or Death!
Med Hondo
[First published in English in Framework (UK) 11 (1979): 20–21.]
Med Hondo is a Mauritanian filmmaker who has worked extensively in France, best known for his film Soleil O (France/Mauritania, 1967). He has done extensive work in dubbing Hollywood films (most notably the roles played by Eddie Murphy) in France. This manifesto addresses both the absence of African and Arab cultures onscreen and decries the colonization of Arab and African cinema screens that profoundly limits the circulation of films made by Arabs and Africans on their screens and abroad, along with the inability of many filmmakers to work in their home countries, forcing them to go and work in the cinema industries of the colonizers.
Throughout the world when people use the term cinema, they all refer more or less consciously to a single cinema, which for more than half a century has been created, produced, industrialised, programmed and then shown on the world’s screens: Euro-American cinema.
This cinema has gradually imposed itself on a set of dominated peoples. With no means of protecting their own cultures, these peoples have been systematically invaded by diverse, cleverly articulated, cinematographic products. The ideologies of these products never “represent” their personality, their collective or private way of life, their cultural codes, and never reflect even minimally on their specific “art,” way of thinking, or communicating—in a word, their own history . . . their civilization.
The images this cinema offers systematically exclude the African and the Arab.
It would be dangerous (and impossible) for us to reject this cinema simply as alien—the damage is done. We must get to know it, the better to analyse it and to understand that this cinema has never really concerned African and Arab peoples. This seems paradoxical, since it fills all the cinemas, dominates the screens of all African and Arab cities and towns.
But do the masses have any other choice? “Consuming” at least a reflection of one’s own people’s life and history—past, present and future? . . .
Lawrence of Arabia disseminates an image of Lawrence, not of the Arabs. In Gentleman of Cocodie a European is the gentleman hero, and not an Ivory Coast African. Do we have a single image of the experiences of our forefathers and the heroes of African and Arab history? Do we see a single film showing the new reality of cooperation, communication, support, and solidarity among Africans and Arabs?
This may seem exaggerated. Some critics will say that at least one African country, Egypt, produces some relatively important films each year . . . that since independence a number of cineastes have made a future for themselves in African countries. In the whole continent of Africa, Egypt is only one country, one cultural source, one sector of the market—and few African countries buy Egyptian films. They produce too few films, and the market within Egypt is still dominated by foreign films.
African and Arab film-makers have decided to produce their own films. But despite the films’ undoubted quality, they have no chance of being distributed normally, at home or in the dominant countries, except in marginalised circuits—the dead-end art cinemas.
Even a few dozen more film-makers producing films would only achieve a ratio of one to ten thousand. An everyday creative dynamic is necessary. We need to make a radical change in the relation between the dominant Euro-American production and distribution networks and African and Arab production and distribution, which we must control.
Only in this way, in a spirit of creative and stimulating competition among African and Arab film-makers, can we make artistic progress and become “competitive” on the world market. We must first control our own markets, satisfy our own people’s desires to liberate their screens, and then establish respectful relations with other peoples, and balanced exchange.
WE MUST CHANGE THE HUMILIATING RELATION BETWEEN DOMINATING AND DOMINATED, BETWEEN MASTERS AND SLAVES.
Some flee this catastrophic state of affairs, thinking cinema restricted for Western, Christian and capitalist elites . . . or throwing a cloak of fraternal paternalism over our film-makers, ignoring and discrediting their works, blaming them, in the short term forcing them to a formal and ethical “mimesis”—imitating precisely those cinemas we denounce—in order to become known and be admitted into international cinema; in the end, forcing them into submission, renouncing their own lives, their creativity and their militancy.
Since our independence many of our filmmakers have proved their abilities as auteurs. They encounter increasing difficulties in surviving and continuing to work, because their films are seldom distributed and no aid is available. Due to the total lack of a global cultural policy, African and Arab cinema becomes relegated to an exotic and episodic sub-product, limited to aesthetic reviews at festivals, which, although not negligible, are undoubtedly insufficient.
Each year millions of dollars are “harvested” from our continents, taken back to the original countries, and then used to produce new films which are again sent out onto our screens.
50% of the profits of multinational film companies accrue from the screens of the Third World. Thus each of our countries unknowingly contributes substantial finance to the production of films in Paris, New York, London, Rome or Hong Kong. They have no control over them, and reap no financial or moral benefit, being involved in neither the production nor the distribution. In reality, however, they are coerced into being “co-producers.” Their resources are plundered.
The United States allows less than 13% foreign films to enter its market—and most of these are produced by European subsidiaries controlled by the U.S. majors. They exercise an absolute protectionism.
Most important is the role of the cinema in the construction of peoples’ consciousness.
Cinema is the mechanism par excellence for penetrating the minds of our peoples, influencing their everyday social behaviour, directing them, and diverting them from their historic national responsibilities. It imposes alien and insidious models and references, and without apparent constraint enforces the adoption of modes of behaviour and communication of the dominating ideologies. This damages their own cultural development and blocks true communication between Africans and Arabs, brothers and friends who have been historically united for thousands of years.
This alienation disseminated through the image is all the more dangerous for being insidious, uncontroversial, “accepted,” seemingly inoffensive and neutral. It needs no armed forces and no permanent programme of education by those seeking to maintain the division of the African and Arab peoples—their weakness, submission, servitude, their ignorance of each other and of their own history. They forget their positive heritage, united through their foremothers with all humanity. Above all they have no say in the progress of world history.
Dominant imperialism seeks to prevent the portrayal of African and Arab values to other nations; were they to appreciate our values and behaviour they might respond positively to us.
We are not proposing isolation, the closing of frontiers to all Western film, nor any protectionism separating us from the rest of the world. We wish to survive, develop, participate as sovereign peoples in our own specific cultural fields, and fulfil our responsibilities in a world from which we are now excluded.
The night of colonialism caused many quarrels among us; we have yet to assess the full consequences. It poisoned our potential communications with other peoples; we are forced into relations of colonial domination. We have preconceived and false ideas of each other imprinted by racism. They believe themselves “superior” to us; they are unaware of our peoples’ roles in world history.
Having been colonised and then subjected to even more pernicious imperialist domination, if we are not entirely responsible for this state of affairs, some intellectuals, writers, film-makers, thinkers, our cultural leaders and policy-makers are also responsible for perpetuating this insatiable domination.
It has never been enough simply to denounce our domination, for they dictate the rules of their game to their own advantage. Some African and Arab film-makers realise that the cinema alone cannot change our disadvantaged position, but they know that it is the best means of education and information and thus of solidarity.
It is imperative to organise our forces, to reassert our different creative potentialities, and fill the void in our national, regional and continental cinemas. We must establish relations of communication and co-operation between our peoples, in a spirit of equality, dignity and justice. We have the will, means and talent to undertake this great enterprise.
Without organisation of resources, we cannot flourish at home, and dozens of African and Arab intellectuals, film-makers, technicians, writers, journalists and leaders have had to leave their countries, often despite themselves, to contribute to the development and overdevelopment of countries that don’t need them, and that use their excesses to dominate us.
This will continue until we grasp the crucial importance of cultural and economic strategy, and create our own networks of film production and distribution, liberating ourselves from all foreign monopolies.
FEPACI (Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes)
The first international conference on cinema was held in Niamey, Niger, March 1–4, 1982. The participants were filmmakers, critics, officials from several African countries, and international cinema experts. The participants recognized the underdevelopment of cinema, including regular film productions in the majority of African countries.
Further, the participants are convinced that African cinema must be committed to asserting the cultural identity of African peoples; be an effective means for international understanding, education, and entertainment; provide an incentive for development; and contribute to national and regional economic policies.
The Conference started by making a serious evaluation of African and international policies on cinema.
The participants then studied proposals for the development of African cinema, production and the financing of productions, and the possibilities of legislation that would promote pan-African strategies for the development of the African cinema industry. They examined ways of implementing the proposals.
The conference finally adopted the following resolutions and recommendations:
The participants considered and set up the following principles:
The viability of cinema production is closely tied to the complementary viability of the other four main sectors of cinema, namely the exploitation of cinema theaters, importation of films, distribution of films, and technical infrastructure and training.
There cannot be any viable cinema without the involvement of African states for the organization, the support, the stabilization of cinema, and the encouragement and protection of private public investment in cinema.
It is not possible to have a viable cinema industry on a national level in Africa. The development of national cinema should take into consideration regional and pan-African cooperation by integrating cinema to political and economic ties that already exist between states.
At the present stage of development of audiovisual facilities in the world and particularly in Africa, television should be complementary to cinema.
It is possible to finance African film productions from the present revenue from the millions who patronize cinemas in Africa. What is required is a strategy that will ensure that part of this revenue legitimately returns to the production of films. Production should not rely solely on patronage.
Every state should organize, support, safeguard, and develop its movie theater market and encourage and collaborate with neighboring states to form a regional common market for the importation and exploitation of films.
Measures to be taken:
a. The setting up of national ticket agencies to monitor receipts of cinemas for the benefit of the exchequer, the cinema owners, and film producers.
b. The provision of cinemas and other appropriate film projection venues and facilities.
c. To make available funds from cinema taxes to encourage exhibitors to expand their cinema circuits, thus enlarging the market.
d. States to exempt taxation on equipment imported for film projections.
e. States to encourage investment to build cinemas by creating incentives for would-be investors.
We have to control and organize the importation and distribution of foreign films to ensure the projection of African films on national, regional, and continental levels. We have to limit the dependence on foreign suppliers and ensure cultural diversification of foreign films, thus preventing the domination of films from particular areas. All this must be done with the aim of reconquering and enlarging our cultural and economic space.
Measures to be taken:
a. The setting up of national distribution corporations in countries where they don’t already exist, be they state run or in the private sector.
b. The setting up of regional film importation companies that would function as cooperatives, e.g., CIDC. Where possible representative film purchasing companies based in foreign countries should have African status so that taxes related to their activities can be paid in Africa. These companies should promote African films and their diffusion abroad.
c. To strengthen existing importing companies like CIDC by the participation of other states.
d. Enact distribution laws to favor African films nationally, regionally, and continentally. This can be achieved by decreasing the share of revenue to distributors when dealing with African films. This would contribute to the financing of future productions.
Cinema productions, whether national, regional or inter-African, should be financed, not necessarily by state funds, but mainly by revenue from distribution and from various forms of cinema taxation including taxes on earnings by foreign films. Thus, cinema will finance cinema.
Measures to be taken to finance productions:
a. The creation of film finance corporations funded by revenue from cinema.
b. The creation of support funds to be administered by the corporations. The support funds help the production of film on the approval of scenarios.
c. The exemption from taxes of imported products and equipment required for the production of films. This would reduce the production costs.
d. Increase of African producers’ shares of box office receipts.
e. Advance payments to producers by distributors.
f. Governments to legislate that television participate in financing of film production in various ways.
g. To create by legislation incentives for capital investments in film productions. This can be accomplished by offering tax exemptions.
h. To make bank loans at low interest available to producers by national banks. These loans would be guaranteed by support funds.
i. To have intergovernmental agreements, bilaterally, regionally, and continentally, for the free circulation of technicians, equipment, and other production facilities, and to reciprocal support funds and to infrastructure.
j. To reinforce and encourage the activities of existing production organizations, such as CIPROFILMS (International Center for Film Production), through participation by states by paying subscriptions and by contributions from revenues acquired through cinema taxes.
k. To support the production of short feature films through financing from support funds. These will give added experience to filmmakers and be an additional source of labor for technicians. Cinemas should also be compelled to screen these films.
l. Another source of finance for productions can be obtained from theatrical and nontheatrical rights from distributors and television.
Measures to be taken:
a. The last twenty years’ experience have proved that cinema technical infrastructures were impossible to be maintained and made profitable on a national level because of the high costs of maintenance and management. The conference recommends that the future establishments of these structures should be on regional levels after joint studies and agreements between parties involved.
b. To create archives and film libraries on regional and continental levels.
It is preferable that the training of technicians and other disciplines related to cinema be in centers established in regions and within the framework of any cinema activities in Africa. Wherever foreign technicians are employed it should be obligatory that African technicians are attached.
African filmmakers and technicians working abroad should be encouraged to return to the continent to contribute to the development of African cinema.
Measures to be taken:
a. Vocational training centers should be established to ensure the training of film and television technicians and their absorption in both media.
b. Ensure the training of managerial staff and other nontechnical personnel, e.g., lawyers, producers, production managers, etc.
c. Facilitate efficient distribution, the training in programming, promotion, and public relations.
d. Ensure the training of projectionists, cinema managers, and other activities related to exhibition of films.
e. The development of film critics through continuous dialogue between filmmakers and critics.
Cinema legislation of any state should take into consideration the joint development of its cinema industry with that of its neighboring states and also of the region.
National film corporations should be established in every country. The corporations should be autonomous in decision making yet be under a ministry. The role of these corporations should be to centralize all activities and matters relating to cinema in the country. There can be a management committee representing the government and the corporation.
A complementary authority should be established on a regional level to ensure coordination of cinema policies of regions.
Any decision made executively or regarding legislation on cinema, nationally or regionally, should be considered by a committee representing the state, filmmakers, cinema professionals, and investors and cinema owners, to avoid individual or bureaucratic decisions arbitrarily being taken against the interests of African cinema. On the other hand, filmmakers should maintain a sense of responsibility and morality in dealing with their governments and others they have dealings with.
John Akomfrah
[First published in Artrage: Inter-Cultural Arts Magazine 3/4 (1983).]
The Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1998)—known for films such as Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, UK, 1988)—and Sankofa Film and Video were the two key black British independent filmmaking collectives in the United Kingdom under Thatcherism. Influenced by critical theory, in this manifesto by filmmaker John Akomfrah we see both the recognition of the growing number of black British collectives and the concurrent recognition that an independent support network needed to be established to help develop film and video production in minoritarian communities. As well as a statement of purpose, this manifesto outlines the goals of the Black Audio Film Collective in addressing these pressing political and cultural needs.
The area of black independent film-making will soon see the growth of a number of workshops established with the specific aim of catering for black film needs. We will also see a growth in the number of films made by members of these workshops. As in any other field of cultural activity and practice such a development calls for collective debate and discussion. Some of the important issues to be raised will be around the relationship between the workshop organisers and participants in the course. The others should obviously be about the nature and structure of the courses themselves.
Prior to this debate, however, is the task of accounting for the specificity of black independent film-making. What, after all, does “black independent film-making” mean when present film culture is a largely white affair? And does this posture of independence presuppose a radical difference of film orientation? If this is the case how does one work with difference?
The Black Audio Film Collective has chosen to take up these issues in a very particular way and this is around the question of the “figuration of identity” in cinema. Our point of entry is around the issue of black representation. The Collective was launched with three principal aims. Firstly, to attempt to look critically at how racist ideas and images of black people are structured and presented as self-evident truths in the cinema. What we are interested in here is how these “self-evident truths” become the conventional pattern through which the black presence in cinema is secured.
Secondly, to develop a “forum” for disseminating available film techniques within the independent tradition and to assess their pertinence for black cinema. In this respect our interests did not only lie in devising how best to make “political” films, but also in taking the politics of representation seriously. Such a strategy could take up a number of issues which include emphasising both the form and the content of films, using recent theoretical insights in the practice of film-making.
Thirdly, the strategy was to encourage means of extending the boundaries of black film culture. This would mean attempting to de-mystify in our film practice the process of film production; it would also involve collapsing the distinction between “audience” and “producer.” In this ethereal world film-maker equals active agent and audience equals passive consumers of a predetermined product. We have decided to reject such a view in our practice.
Underlying these aims are a number of assumptions about what we consider the present priorities of independent film-making to be. These assumptions are based on our recognition of certain significant achievements in the analysis of race and the media. It is now widely accepted that the media play a crucial role in the production and reproduction of “common sense assumptions” and we know that race and racist ideologies figure prominently in these assumptions. The point now is to realise the implications of these insights in creating a genuinely collective black film culture.
Such a program is also connected with our awareness of the need to go beyond certain present assumptions about the task of black film-making. We recognise that the history of blacks in films reads a legacy of stereotypes and we take the view that such stereotypes, both in mainstream and independent cinema, should be critically evaluated. This can be connected to a number of things that we want to do. We not only want to examine how black culture is misrepresented in film, but also how its apparent transparency is a “realism” in film. It is an attempt to isolate and render intelligible the images and statements which converge to represent black culture in cinema. The search is not for “the authentic image” but for an understanding of the diverse codes and strategies of representation.
It could be argued that all this is stale water under a decaying bridge and that we know all this stuff already and that black film-makers already accept their responsibility and are aware of these problems. There is a lot of truth in this. Others may say as long as we are making films and gaining exposure of our work we are keeping black film culture alive.
To place our discussion in a relevant and meaningful context the Black Audio Film Collective in conjunction with Four Corners Cinema will be organising a number of screenings to run with the Colin Roach photography exhibition at Camerawork Gallery.
The series of films and discussions will run under the title Cinema and Black Representation and will deal specifically with the complexity of black portrayal in films. The main aim here is to see how film can contain “information” on race, nationality and “ethnicity” with (Presence) or without (Absence) black people in films. With this in mind we hope to cover a number of films and themes ranging from prison movies like Scum to Hollywood social criticism films like Imitation of Life. What we will be attempting will not be to push all the films into one category of racist films but rather attempting to examine what specific responses these films make to the question of race and ethnicity.
In the end we realise that questions of black representation are not simply those of film criticism but inevitably of film-making. These issues need to be taken up on both fronts. With this in mind we are also making preparations with the GLC Ethnic Minorities’ Committee to organise a number of our courses on some of the themes outlined in this article. Neither the dates for the screenings nor film courses have been finalized—both will be advertised when they are.
Fernando Birri
[First released at the launch of the school on 15 December 1986]
This manifesto, written by filmmaker and teacher Fernando Birri, outlines the alternative pedagogical strategies of the International School of Cinema and Television in San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba, and foregrounds a politically informed, participatory style of education that, in the process, redefines third-worldism.
A few days after the beginning of the warm spring of 1986, surrounded by the turquoise blue Caribbean Sea, under a crescent moon, shipwrecked from Utopia, rescued from a world of imperial injustice and atomic madness, the Foundation for the New Latin American Cinema decided to create the International School of Cinema and Television in San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba, Nicknamed the School of Three Worlds (Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia).
The result of needs, experiences and reflections, of criticism and self-criticism over the thirty years of the New Latin American Cinema, this school, before its birth, was located in an itinerant envelope: more precisely, this envelope contained three figures, a red circle, a blue square and a yellow triangle, which today, superimposed upon each other, form the logo of this atypical school.
An atypical school because, as we may perceive in the synthesis of this logo and despite its name, this School is not a scholastic but an anti-scholastic institution, a center that generates creative energy for audiovisual images. (A factory of the eye and the ear, a laboratory of the eye and the ear, an amusement park for the eye and the ear.)
But the concept of the anti-scholasticity of the School must be understood by placing on the other dish of the balance the concept of a “typical” industry, for which it trains its graduates, one of the basic objectives of the School. (Beginning with hands-on training at the ICAIC and the ICHRT—the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry and the Cuban Institute for Radio and Television, respectively.)
Audiovisual images, we said. But the word audiovisual, no matter how it is said, at the end of this millennium, sounds to me a bit outmoded (we know of persons who can perceive the color of an object by merely touching it, and that flies see landscapes of infrared waves, and that there are sleepwalkers—and gadgets—that can hear plants talking among themselves.) That’s why I would rather use the terminology of a “production center for visions and auditions.” But, in order to make myself understood in some way, let us say that the School aspires to become a center of production of the global audiovisual image: Cinema and Television.
Since this school was basically born of a film movement, these film makers—or rather we film makers—should conscientiously so sway with wildly-disseminated prejudice—or the remnants of this prejudice—about the superiority of cinema over television. An elitist, backward prejudice, which can easily degenerate into a reaction, that makes filmmakers behave today vis-à-vis television, much like certain theatrical step-brothers behaved in the past towards cinema, even denying it a place, the last, the seventh place, in the revolutionary orbits of the heaven of the arts. If there is an audiovisual image par excellence that can express magic and science in a contemporary world, if there is an image that can synthesize the historical evolution of our old dream of a democratic audiovisual image—as a result of its simultaneity with the historical event, its geographic ubiquity, its relatively lower production and consumption costs—that democratic audiovisual image par excellence comes from video and television. If this does not occur in daily practice, but just the opposite, [then] it is indeed, partly our responsibility, not only from a professional or technical viewpoint, but also politically speaking.
In this School, where we all come to teach and to learn at the same time, the undersigned, who has been appointed the director of the school, will also be the first students to major in television. Cinema and television, we said: the training of “filmocrafters” and “telecrafters,” or more appropriately, with the invention of the new and ideal term, designed to rectify the division that exists in practice: the training of “filmotelecrafters.”
Hence, the use of celluloid and magnetic tape as the material support for our creative processes; the use of film language and electronic codes, analyzed and implemented in accordance with their specific characteristics and their symbiosis “a synthesis, and not—as occurs in the majority of today’s examples—cinema-television syncretism”: For cinema, specifically, the use of 35-mm and 16-mm film, and, to a lesser extent, Super-8mm film: for television and video, specifically, electronic brushes of different calibers—and for both, the use of color and black-and-white.
For both, training in the field of fiction (contemporary, historical and futuristic) and in documentary film (audiovisual journalism, newsreels, and documentary films as such).
And in all this, there must be an indissoluble blend of theory and practice in a continuum; a dialectical flux between daily life and the key to its understanding in three worlds subject to the implacable laws of underdevelopment—implacable but not fatalistic—and the tensions involved in the liberation from underdevelopment, in the search for an economic, technical scientific, and spiritual identity: in sum, a historical identity. Sometimes, the praxis which anticipates the theory that interprets it; at other times, the theory that reveals the praxis that implements it, but always in mutual verification within the New. Neither uselessly wasteful abstract realization nor miserably utilitarian empirical pragmatism.
From the standpoint of the economy of what is simply useful, what are the necessities to which this School is intended to provide an answer?
There are basically three needs that have developed from the very first years of New Latin American Cinema (even from the times when this cinema had no name): first, the initiation needs, let us say; second, the finishing needs; and, third, the upgrading needs. Three types of needs that equally respond to marked demands and to creative imperative.
The first is for those who know nothing (nothing at all about cinema and television) and want to learn everything. The answer to this need is the yellow triangle: the basic and standard courses or the “little school.” We have called it so, familiarly, in order to differentiate from the complete project, the big school as a whole, global and “trismegistic.”
However, when fully functioning this “little school,” which will begin with 80 students in the basic and standard courses, will accommodate 240 students of both sexes from the three continents on full scholarships (out of a total 300 students including the other fields, as we will explain later on).
Each country will have a quota of 4 students. This is not on the basis of mathematical or mechanical distribution, but in consideration of the fact that as a result of the exchange of training disciplines, these groups of four, on returning to their respective countries can form a mini-working crew.
. . .
The average age of the first group is 25; 50 percent are men and 50 percent women. Efforts were made also to try to achieve a balance between the students coming from capital cities and those coming from hinter regions in their respective countries, as well as in the cases of regional or ethnic minorities (the Cearas and the Piauis from the northeast of Brazil or the Zapotecs from Mexico, respectfully).
The African students come from Benin, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Burkina Faso and South Africa. The first Asian student is comrade Tran Lam from Vietnam.
. . .
Moreover, the curriculum will combine basic training emergency cinema and television (in response to certain specific needs of some of our regions most pressed by underdevelopment or by liberation struggle) with the regular training course for industrial cinema and television (in accordance with the needs of other regions with more developed cinema and television traditions).
. . .
The six-month basic course, in addition to the two pre-admittance tests and the selection of the Evaluating Commission, will serve as the final filter to gain admission to the school’s standard course. Moreover, in view of what was stated in the preceding paragraph, the six-month course will also serve as a basic self-training course for emergency cinema, so that the students that are not admitted to the standard course and return to their respective countries have at least elementary cinema and television training.
Federation of Caribbean Audiovisual Professionals
[First released at the creation of the Federation of Caribbean Audiovisual Professionals, Fort de-France, 8 June 1990. First published in English in Black Camera 3, no. 1 (2011): 146.]
The creation of FeCAViP in 1990 signaled the beginning of a new transnational organization addressing the needs of the Caribbean and its diaspora and the concurrent awakening to the existence of a pan-Caribbean cinema movement. This manifesto foregrounds yet again the need for international interdependency in relation to the production, distribution, and exhibition of works by filmmakers in emergent cinema cultures, filmmakers who are all too often marginalized both in the Caribbean and in venues such as international film festivals.
We, producers, filmmakers, screenwriters, technicians, and actors of the second Images Caraïbes Festival, 1990, being aware of the need to further develop the space within the Caribbean for professional workers in film and video, reflecting our special needs, and after having made a deep analysis of our reality, acknowledging the importance of film, TV, and video, decided to give ourselves the means in order to obtain the conditions necessary for the realization of the expression of the professionals working in film and video.
So together, we have to:
1. Create, produce, distribute, and broadcast the works of our young Caribbean artists.
2. Contribute to the training of our young artists and technicians.
3. Collect, record, archive, and preserve our cultural heritage.
4. Overcome the existing linguistic, legal, technical, and commercial barriers.
5. Promote Caribbean cinema, video, and TV productions.
6. Develop the exchange of information between Caribbean professionals.
7. Establish relationships between all the associations and audiovisual events of the Caribbean and its diaspora.
8. Create new contacts with countries facing similar problems (in Africa, South America, for example).
In order to achieve our goals, we have decided to create a Federation named the Federation of Caribbean Audiovisual Professionals (FeCAViP).
SADCC (South African Development Coordination Conference)
[First released at the conclusion of the First Frontline Film Festival and Workshop, held in Harare, Zimbabwe, 15–21 July 1990.]
This manifesto foregrounds the fact that despite many previous statements, declarations, manifestos, and proclamations, the systematic marginalization of African cinemas had not abated in the eight years between Niamey and the Harare Workshop in 1990. This manifesto presses further for the development of pan-African systems of production and distribution.
The First Frontline Film Festival and Workshop held in Harare, Zimbabwe, 15–21 July 1990, under the aegis of the Ministry of Information, Posts and Telecommunications and with the unique support of the OAU, SADCC Secretariat and FEPACI, was a result of the need to identify actions in co-operation in order to reinforce solidarity and friendship among SADCC member states, particularly in the cultural field. It was also motivated by our recognition of the unique geographic and historic nature of this sub-region of the African continent.
While being held under the seemingly “optimistic” atmosphere in the region as regards the liberation of South Africa, the Workshop still regards the situation there as being far from the desired goals of the liberation of Africa.
The Festival was attended by delegates from Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, members of the SADCC subgroup of the continent, as well as delegates from the ANC.
We also note the continued and valuable support of the Nordic Council and the Commonwealth Foundation for the development of cinema in the region.
The Festival was also attended by personalities and eminent film-makers from Africa, who brought to the Festival their rich experiences for the benefit of the development of the cinema in the region.
Representatives of progressive forces in the cinema field from Africa and Europe also participated in the Festival.
Being a follow-up of earlier fora and the Niamey and Harare Declarations discussing the film industry in Africa and the Southern African region in particular, the Workshop could not but feel disappointed by the inadequate steps taken towards solving the long-existing problems facing cinema in Africa.
Analysing the existing conditions of cinema in the region the participants note:
1. That there is yet no regional policy and strategy for the development of culture and communication. There is also the absence of viable structures and mechanisms to develop real co-operation within the region. That situation does not permit the valorisation of the cultural-historical heritage and potential existing in the region. The little co-operation that has been undertaken to date has been mainly bilateral and on an ad hoc basis.
2. That there is quite a substantial stock of film equipment in the region which is grossly underutilized due to lack of knowledge of its availability and lack of communication between the owners and prospective users.
3. That in the field of training there doesn’t exist a regional policy and programmes to enable the use of the existing facilities and institutions.
4. That there is a total absence of African and even Southern African films being distributed in the region due to the inherited and yet unchanged distribution structures and the lack of promotion of the exhibition of those kinds of films.
5. That the aesthetic development of the African cinema is still very disturbing, requiring greater efforts at instilling an African identity, more so in the areas of language, censorship and the role of women in the cinema.
6. That there is yet no permanent programme for the co-production of films and videos in order to promote the culture and the potential of the region.
7. That the national television networks in the region need to re-orientate themselves and their role in the cultural development of the peoples of this region.
8. That to date national film workers’ associations do not exist in most of the countries of the region to help rally film workers towards film development in their countries in the region and continent as a whole.
Therefore, we SADCC delegates to the First Frontline Film Festival and Workshop recommend that:
1. The SADCC Council of Ministers adopt a Declaration on Culture for the SADCC region, outlining and clarifying the relationship between national and regional policies, objectives and responsibilities of member states in the development of film, information, culture and the arts.
2. Regional film-makers and artists and experts from other cultural disciplines wishing to participate be included in the drafting of the proposed Declaration on Culture for the SADCC.
3. Regional film-makers and artists and experts from other cultural disciplines be charged with drafting a programme of action to implement the proposed Cultural Charter for SADCC in such a way that short-term, medium and long-term phases and projects are detailed.
4. All member states of the SADCC which have not yet done so adopt national policies on culture and information incorporating the principles of the OAU Cultural Charter for Africa.
5. All member states of the SADCC place levies on all films, film projects, videos and television programmes from outside Africa in order to create a national film fund for financing training programmes, refurbishment of non-commercial cinema halls, construction of new halls, film production and film distribution.
Sandra Peña-Sarmiento
[First published in Jump Cut 39 (1994): 105–106.]
This manifesto focuses on Chicana/Chicano culture in the United States and examines the interstitial position filmmakers from this community hold. Peña-Sarmiento draws on her own narrative in order to call for a cinema that does not deny this “in-between” cultural space but celebrates it politically and personally.
All action is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. . . . At some point we will have to leave . . . to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border to a wholly new and separate territory. . . . The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not [simply] react . . .
—GLORIA ANZALDUA
Throughout my life, I’ve constantly moved between cultures. My father is Mexican-American, my mother Bolivian, and I myself have been born and raised in suburban Southern California. In living a kind of “cultural nomadism” (drifting in and out of “heritages”) I grew frustrated with definitions in general—especially those imposed upon me by outside “authorities.” This wasn’t a simple reaction to the vocabulary of classification, as much as it was a reaction against the resonances (the categories, boundaries and representations created by their use) these words carry.
Traditionally it has been the ethnic or third world “other” that has played the role of passive recipient in this word-symbol-power game. For the Latino, this distortion (the representation as greaser, primitive, superstitious, lazy, violent, deceitful, etc.) has resulted not only in anti-immigrant violence and legislation (such as the mass deportations of Mexicans during the depression) but in cultural oppression at the ideological level by forcing many to define themselves as Mexican-American in relation to an Anglo-American norm.
The power of “Sight” here cannot be dismissed. To see an image of ourselves or another, as represented in (or conspicuously excluded from) the U.S. Iconography, is to believe the situation exists as it’s presented. “Seeing is believing”—and rarely, if ever, do we question sight. We begin to think that “Sancho” and “Maria” do exist (cheating, stealing and seducing honest southwest settlers) in a kind of mythic no man’s land of time; that image becomes one that we are ever conscious of living up to even as we try to live it down.
Cultural affirmation movements offer retreat into a romanticized past (Aztlan) as an alternative to the “Anglo norm.” Aztlan is groovy, but does not change the oppression women experience within Machismo and now continue to experience within the Chicano movement. Too many women’s aspirations are short-circuited by expectations of future duties as wife, mother, supporter/nurturer. The woman who gives, remains the ideal; the woman who takes is viewed as an abomination and a threat to the community. The Chicano Power movement has not changed our view of the feminine—and so, the idea of “women’s fate” as non-active entity is still found at all levels of Chicanismo. For many Chicanas it is far too easy a fate to fall into under supposed pressures of “family” and “heritage.”
As a young woman with aspirations for an academic career, not as someone’s hip ruca with all the bullshit that role entailed, I found that a negotiated assimilation into mainstream “American” culture was my only other alternative. The problem with these choices (resistance or assimilation) is that they are both reactive and thus continue their dependence upon an ambiguous Anglo “ideal” (the iconography of a 1950s Coke ad).
It wasn’t until the advent of “post-modern-post-feminist-post-colonialist” authors such as Gloria Anzaldua, Teshome Gabriel, Trinh Minh-ha, Edward Said and others, that this dilemma—of how and where to place oneself within a world of definitions and categories we ourselves did not create—was finally addressed in print. A redefinition and reclamation of “gender and ethnicity” began taking place. Meanwhile in the arts, poets and painters (Maricela Norte, ASCO, Gomez-Peña . . .) were challenging the validity of a singular Chicano identity and/or experience.
I stumbled upon these literary and artistic movements quite by accident during my early college years and was excited to find people more “established” than I could ever hope to be, venting similar frustrations as mine in such an eloquent and direct manner. Already involved in cinema, I began to seek out the “cultural nomads” within the medium.
The most dynamic area was in Ethnographic Film, the least in U.S. narrative cinema. Wayne Wang (CHAN IS MISSING), Kidlat Tahirnik (THE PERFUMED NIGHTMARE) and Trinh Minh-ha (in questioning “sacred cow” aspects of race relations, ethnic identity, etc.) were initiating discourse—not simply presenting their versions of an alternate singular perspective. I wanted to find a similar discourse in Narrative Cinema but found that even in independent films there was a formula “fish out of water” dynamic. The Chicano fish as caught by the Anglo hand flops though the story of his trying to get back to the sea—or settles for a fishbowl of pseudo-Mexican water. Where, I wondered, is a story of how it is living always between borders—a Chicano fish that even when he is in the water is out of the water. Outside of Cheech Marin’s BORN IN EAST L.A., I found no such questioning of “The Chicano Experience.”
After many lean years Chicano films seem to be “suddenly” hitting the market. They follow similar plots, holding up a street-hip male ideal as the new stereotype (LA BAMBA, STAND AND DELIVER, AMERICAN ME). The importance of these films cannot be overlooked: for the first time “mainstream” Hollywood cinema is being acted, written, directed and produced by Latinos. Now that Chicano cinema is beginning to take off, it is important that future representations of the Chicano are not distorted by a singular mythology—there is need for a multiplicity in perspective (as well as a questioning of all perspectives). A Pocha/Pocho “Intro-to-Cultural-Chaos” is needed.
There is no one Chicano experience. And I am concerned that this aspect of our diversity is being overlooked. As a Latina, I find the representation of women in Chicano Cinema as victim, virgin, whore, etc., disheartening. It is the father who speaks for the mother, the husband for the wife, the brother for the sister. In cinema, the Chicana takes her place as a silent and passive victim whose fate is dependent upon the men around her. This representation affects tangible social conditions and issues of identity for the Latina in her community. In the same way Mexican-Americans suffered from a cultural bias which was largely propagated by the media, Chicanas continue to suffer from a gender bias found within both the Anglo media and the conventions of their own culture. Now that times are changing for the Latino, they must also change for the Latina.
This is a rally call to Pocha Filmmakers! We cannot turn away from our community—nor can we embrace it. We must carve our own non-space to be or not; taking with us our more useful cultural remnants and moving on to create new ones. We must wipe words like “sacred” and “martyr” from our minds, building as we tear down—recreating, reclaiming, renouncing the past, present and future. As filmmakers, our greatest tool and weapon is the visual image. Our work is not so much a writing of ourselves back into history (who reads today anyway?!), but a re-deconstruction of iconography. Through image(s) we will create a base on which to form the beginnings of a new consciousness.
Narrative cinema can reach and “re-educate” a large audience. We are not all(ways) “gang members,” maids, gardeners, “American,” straight, “Mexican,” etc. To prove it we must show it. This goes for all Latino film and video makers; the focus must be in seeing and being seen—in our sight—because ultimately, after the story, after the arguments, what’s left is an Image . . . an Icon . . . of a chameleon Pocha/Pocho in limbo land.
Humberto Solás
[First released at the First Poor Cinema Film Festival, Gibara, Cuba, 2004. Trans. Fabiola Caraza].
Founded by filmmaker Humberto Solás (1941–2008), the Cine pobre festival championed films made for less than $300,000. The Cine pobre manifesto provides a link back to the radical Latin American models of filmmaking that emerged in the 1960s and to the kind of “Poor Cinema” argued for by Colin McArthur in regard to Scotland (see McArthur, “In Praise of a Poor Cinema,” in chap. 2 of this volume). This manifesto also proclaims the intrinsic value of the changes in production and access brought on by the advent of digital technology.
Let’s clear up the misunderstandings: “Cinema of the Poor” does not mean cinema which lacks ideas or artistic quality, it means a cinema with a tight budget which is produced in outsider or less developed countries as well as in the bosom of the culturally and economic guiding societies, whether it be within official production programs or may it be independent or alternative cinema.
The increasing movement towards globalization accentuates the divide between rich and poor cinema. Therefore there is a danger of establishing a single-minded model, sacrificing diversity and legitimacy of the rest of the national and cultural identities.
Today is the technological revolution in cinema; it is the bearer of effective mediums of resistance to this depersonalizing project. When new technological possibilities progressively consolidate, as it is the case with digital video and its larger format 35mm, they notably reduce the economic demands of film production.
When shaking the balance of the elitist character, which has been unabashedly linked to the industry, the consequences are a gradual democratization of the film profession.
To support and take advantage of this reduction in production costs would mean the introduction in an immediate future of social groups and communities that never before have had access to produce film, and at the same time give durability to the budding national cinema.
This will be a bastion to escape the feeling of helplessness before the globalizing vandalism and allow once and for all the legitimization of versatility of styles, legacies and goals of an art form that will not be part of a patrimony of just one country or one imposing definition of the world.
In order for this to effectively happen, we will have to tear down the wall of control of film distribution by single transnational groups, which generate alienation in the audience when they don’t have access to the works of their national authors.
This will allow us to fight against the spectacle of gratuitous violence in film, which cripples the audience, especially young audiences.
A gradual move towards engaging the audiences will only come to fruition if all governments put in place legal actions that support the production and distribution of their native cinema.
Only then will cinema finally be out of the Stone Age.
Ciné Institute
[Distributed to students at the Ciné Institute, Jacmel, Haiti.]
David Belle, an American filmmaker, founded the Ciné Institute in Jacmel, Haiti, in 2008. The Institute trains young Haitians in filmmaking and offers screenings of Haitian and international cinema. The “Jollywood Manifesto”—a play on Bollywood and Nollywood, two of the largest film production centers in the world—encourages filmmakers to produce work that addresses Haitian life and foregrounds the need for collective, inclusive, DIY film production.
1. We create simple local stories set in everyday life.
2. We tell our stories with images. We do not heavily rely on dialogue.
3. We recognize and use local resources.
4. We use non professional actors. We cast our friends, family, neighbors and associates.
5. We use a small cast and crew.
6. We use natural light.
7. We credit every person who assists in making a film.
8. We are honest and transparent. We are respectful with our cast, crew and community.
9. We are rebranding Haiti and showing the world the richness of our country.
10. We work within a cultural context and for the good of humanity.
11. We are active, and work together to accomplish a better reality for all Haitians.
12. We are active, and we work together to accomplish a better reality for all of us.
John Greyson, Naomi Klein, Udi Aloni, Elle Flanders, Richard Fung, Kathy Wazana, Cynthia Wright, b h Yael
[First published online on 9 September 2009: torontodeclaration.blogspot.ca.]
This manifesto, protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s “City-to-City” Spotlight on Tel Aviv in light of Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories, prompted an acrimonious debate in Canada at the time. The filmmakers and writers involved in writing the manifesto—including social and political activist Naomi Klein and Canadian new Queer Cinema filmmaker John Greyson, who also pulled his film Covered (Canada, 2009) from the festival in protest—were accused of anti-Semitism (a perverse accusation, given that five of the signatories are Jewish and one an Israeli) and censorship. Countertexts decrying this supposed act of attempted censorship were released by David Cronenberg, Norman Jewison, and Ivan Reitman, among others.
An Open Letter to the Toronto International Film Festival:
September 2, 2009
As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.
In 2008, the Israeli government and Canadian partners Sidney Greenberg of Astral Media, David Asper of Canwest Global Communications and Joel Reitman of MIJO Corporation launched “Brand Israel,” a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel. Brand Israel would take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its aggressive wars, and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. An article in Canadian Jewish News quotes Israeli consul general Amir Gissin as saying that Toronto would be the test city for a promotion that could then be deployed around the world. According to Gissin, the culmination of the campaign would be a major Israeli presence at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. (Andy Levy-Alzenkopf, “Brand Israel set to launch in GTA,” Canadian Jewish News, August 28, 2008.)
In 2009, TIFF announced that it would inaugurate its new City to City program with a focus on Tel Aviv. According to program notes by Festival co-director and City to City programmer Cameron Bailey, “The ten films in this year’s City to City programme will showcase the complex currents running through today’s Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”
The emphasis on “diversity” in City to City is empty given the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program. Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.
We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime.