Framework 62.1: Documenting Third Cinema (1968-1979)

Overlooked and Little-Known Documents Around Third Cinema

Guest Editors: Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman

“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.”
—from the Guest Editors’ Introduction

Read the full Introduction here.

Read the Guest Editors’ Photo-Essay, “Images of the Itinerary of the Group Cine Liberación and ‘Third Cinema’” here.

Watch a recent conversation between the Guest Editors and Framework Editor Drake Statesman here.

Framework Volume 62, No. 1, Spring 2021