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Course Description

Summary

This course is a seminar focusing on films that were made by filmmakers and collectives which saw themselves as inaugurating a new kind of filmmaking modeled neither on the commercial American filmmaking, nor on the European “Auteur” Cinema, instead crafting a third position, a cinema that was implicated in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles of the time. These works challenged ideas of authorship, questioned the role of the filmmaker in political transformation, and proposed alternatives to the forms of production that filmmaking made use of. We will wrestle with the ethical, political and aesthetic implications of this period of filmmaking and its legacy, moving through the questions and debates that were opened by these works: what is an anti-capitalist film and how should it be made? What does a politically transformative film look like and which positions does it require? How does it circulate? For whom is it made? We will also look at more recent works which are in dialogue with Third Cinema and think about the implications that these questions have for film and art today.  We will watch films by: Gettino/Solanas, Sarah Maldoror, Sara Gomez, Haile Gerima, Ousmane Sembene, Glauber Rocha, Luis Ospina and other filmmakers and artists engaged with this legacy, up to the present moment. Students will keep a film by film record of the ways in which the debates of Third Cinema are in dialogue with our present moment.