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CONTENTS

Documenting Third Cinema (1968-1979):
Overlooked and Little-Known Documents Around Third Cinema
Guest Editors: Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman

Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman
Introduction

ESSAY
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino
“Cine militante: una categoría interna del Tercer Cine” (1971)
“Militant Cinema: An Internal Category of Third Cinema”

ESSAY
CinémAction
“L’impact du ‘troisième cinéma’ dans le monde” (1979)
“The Impact of ‘Third Cinema’ in the World”

ESSAY
Octavio Getino
“Algunas observaciones sobre el concepto del ‘Tercer Cine’” (1979)
”Some Observations on the Concept of ‘Third Cinema’”

PHOTO-ESSAY
Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman
Images of the Itinerary of the Group Cine Liberación and “Third Cinema”

INTRODUCTION

Documenting Third Cinema (1968-1979):
Overlooked and Little-Known Documents Around Third Cinema

The proposal of Third Cinema from the group Cine Liberación has had a broad impact on world political cinema since the end of the 1960s. Of course there were many films, texts, and filmmakers in those years associated with committed political cinema, a cinema of intervention, or militant cinema, throughout the world, with more or less affinity with Third Cinema and/or other experiences with similar names such as Cinema of the Third World, Third Worldist cinema or Tricontinental cinema. Nonetheless, the Argentine documentary The Hour of the Furnaces ( June 1968), paired with the manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema” (October 1969) by Fernando Solanas (1936–2020) and Octavio Getino (1935–2012), continue to stand out as pre-eminent exemplars of political filmmaking and theory of political film. The manifesto is the best-known document of the group Cine Liberación, in which writer/filmmaker militants Getino and Solanas laid out the principles of their proposal of three types of cinema and of “cine-acción” (film action). The articles translated in this issue are three little-known but seminal documents that demonstrate how their thinking about radical filmmaking changed during the tumultuous years from the production of the film, beginning in 1966, through the years of clandestine distribution of the film and the escalation of the repression, to the violent coup d’état in 1976 installing the military dictatorship that forced Solanas, Getino, and so many others into exile. Anglophone readers have known the film and the manifesto since their completion through subtitled prints and translations of the manifesto. Many writers at the time and since have criticized aspects of the only work translated during those years, the Manifesto: a rigid conceptual schematism, difficulty in applying its analysis, and their political identification with the mass popular movement known as Peronism. The documents translated in this special issue show that Solanas and Getino in fact were constantly revising their earlier ideas, especially in response to a rapidly changing political ferment in Argentina.

First chronologically, the lengthy article by Getino and Solanas, “Cine militante: una categoría interna del Tercer Cine,” was completed in March 1971. This article shows the evolution of their thinking about political cinema that led them to this formulation of militant cinema, “the most advanced category” of third cinema. In 1979, Getino wrote the essay “Algunas observaciones sobre el concepto del ‘Tercer Cine,’” a meticulous retrospective analysis that explains the dialectic between the writings published by the group Cine Liberación and the process of clandestine distribution of the film in Argentina until the period following Perón’s return to Argentina in 1973. Also in 1979, a French collective devoted to political cinema, the newly founded French CinémAction group—created by Guy Hennebelle and Monique Martineau in 1978 in Paris—compiled a dossier of eleven responses to survey questions about the impact of the film and the manifesto in different countries during the decade since the explosive response to the first European screening of The Hour of the Furnaces at the Pesaro Film Festival (Italy) in 1968. That CinémAction dossier offers perhaps the most articulate and concentrated assessment of the significance of third cinema among committed film activists from all three continents.

As we have written previously about these documents, we propose here a brief presentation highlighting several questions that remain pertinent to understanding better the history of Third Cinema. At the same time, in our Photo-Essay, the many images include more specific references to the history of the film and the manifesto since they first appeared in 1968/1969 to 1979. (Continued in the print edition; also available on EBSCO and JSTOR)

—Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman