From Third Cinema to Media Justice

Decolonial Media Praxis

Decolonial Media Praxis: From Cinema to Network

micha cárdenas


In her essay "Guiding Questions" on the main page of the Scalar book From Third Cinema to Media Justice, Kara Keeling asks two of the main questions for the project and scholars engaging with it: 

To what extent is the work of Third World Majority continuous with a socially conscious tradition of film and media making and to what extent does the advent of digital media combined with the exigencies of the current conjuncture signal an historical rupture that asks that we think the relationship between media and social movements anew? 

How does the work of Third World Majority put retrospective pressure on the praxis of Third Cinema?

To answer these important questions, using this project as an archive and a resource, I want to first look to the essay "Towards a Third Cinema"[1], written by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in Cuba in 1969, to understand part of the project of Third Cinema, in order to be able to address how Third World Majority has put pressure on that project. Using ideas from "Towards a Third Cinema" and media from the Third World Majority archive, I propose that Third World Majority adds to the project of Third Cinema by offering a transgender, queer and woman of color centered praxis of media making that is enabled by digital media technologies. The praxis of Third World Majority includes theory, the performance of workshops and an archive of digitally networked media. 

The essay "Towards a Third Cinema" aims to describe a method of producing and distributing film that can be said to "create films of decolonisation". Getino and Solanas, directors of the film "Hora de los Hornos" (Hour of the Furnaces) use the form of a manifesto to propose a filmmaking movement, saying "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." Their goal is to bring film makers into "a worldwide liberation movement whose moving force is to be found in the Third World countries." They contrast "US imperialism and the film model that is imposed: Hollywood movies" with documentary films aimed at bringing about "the revolution". 

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