CS7 Week 1: Histories of political cinemas

‘In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnamese victory over the French,
the Cuban revolution, and Algerian independence, Third Worldist film ideology was
crystallized in a wave of militant manifesto essays – Glauber Rocha’s “Esthetic of Hunger”
(1965), Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969), and Julio
Garcia Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969)’ (Shohat & Stam 1994: 248)

colonialism is ‘not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip […] By a kind of
perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.’
(Fanon 1964: 210)

‘In the face of Eurocentric historicizing, Third World and minoritarian filmmakers have
rewritten their own histories, taken control over their own images, spoken in their own
voices. It is not that their films substitute a pristine “truth” for European “lies”, but that they
propose counter-truths and counter-narratives informed by an anticolonialist perspective,
reclaiming and reaccentuating the events of the past in a vast project of remapping and
renaming.’ (Shohat & Stam 1994: 249)

‘Imperialism and capitalism, whether in the consumer society or in the neocolonialised

country, veil everything behind a screen of images and appearances.’ (Solanas & Getino
1969)

‘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.’ (Solanas & Getino 1969)

‘When a repressive regime makes filmgoing a clandestine activity punishable by prison or

torture, the mere act of viewing comes to entail political engagement […]’ (Shohat & Stam
1994: 262)

‘The spoken and written commentary addressed directly to the spectator fosters a
discursive relationship, the “I-you” of discourse rather than the “he-she-it” voyeurism of
“story”.’ (Shohat & Stam 1994: 263)

‘a binaristic approach to relations between First World and Third World’

‘The film’s rhetoric of authenticity masks the colonial-settler origins of the Argentine
national formation. A more complex view would see both First and Third Worlds as mixed
sites, as culturally and politically multiple, as indigenous, African and European: all the loci
of both hegemony and resistance.’ (Shohat & Stam 1994: 267)

‘the film’s masculinist nationalism’ (Shohat & Stam 1994: 268)

‘Women’s presence in The Battle of Algiers causes a stylistic shift that questions the value of
the documentary style. This stylistic shift could be referred to as a “third space of
enunciation” that dramatises the rupture between an official nationalism that privileges the
masculine in filmic representation, and the people apparently represented by those
signifiers. The representation of women in The Battle of Algiers causes this rupture between
sign and referent to question the overriding discourse of a new national image.’ (Khanna
1998: 19)

‘The mirror scene, where weapon is replaced by cocoon, dramatises woman as only image.
She becomes both a metaphor for an Algeria that the French wish to 'unveil' and,
simultaneously, metonymy for 'tradition' which makes her signification unquestionable.’
(Khanna 1998: 24)

woman ‘falls out of the system of representation in the film, causing the very mode of
representation employed to be questioned.’ (Khanna 1998: 25)

‘How can the sexed subject as subaltern find a voice within this construction?’ (Khanna
1998: 25)

‘A fourth space, in a fourth revolutionary cinema will give testimony to a different sort of
representation, when women’s gazes are not forbidden or simply reflected inward, and
when women's sounds are not severed.’ (Khanna 1998: 25-26)

‘Fourth Cinema would point towards the inability of Third Cinema to represent the violence
undergone by women in the process of decolonisation by both the coloniser and by
colonised men.’ (Khanna 1998: 28)

‘Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the

way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.’ (Mulvey [1975] 1989:
57)

‘the language of representation’, ‘the cinematic process itself’, ‘probing dislocation between
cinematic form and represented material, and investigating various means of splitting the
established rapport between screen and spectator.’ (Mulvey 1979: 7)
‘What recurs overall is a constant return to woman, not indeed as a visual image, but as a
subject of inquiry, a content which cannot be considered within the aesthetic lines laid
down by traditional cinematic practice.’ (Mulvey 1979: 10)

‘It is important to recognize that when we speak of housework we are not speaking of a job
like other jobs, but the most pervasive manipulation and the subtlest violence that
capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class’ (Federici [1974]
2012: 16)

‘Black female spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not
take on the phallocentric gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the
binary opposition Mulvey posits of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” was
continually deconstructed.’ (hooks 1992: 122-123)

‘the impulse to create histories where no official record exists’ (Hole and Jelaca 2019: 256)

‘disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its
statements’ (Hartman 2008: 9)

‘to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened
or might have been said or might have been done.’ (Hartman 2008: 11)

‘Default cinema offers at once a gesture of queer radicality and a strategy of refusal, an
illegibility that is closer to Edelman’s notion of critique than any positivist politics of
representation. Default cinema derails meaning, linearity, identity.’ (Galt 2013: 66)

‘the film disrupts the narrative legibility of Mao and Marcia’s relationship by mixing desire
with coercion and fantasy with realism. There is something disturbingly unknowable about
Marcia and Mao’s relationship.’ (Galt 2013: 72)

‘anything can happen at any time. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t.’ (Lerman cited in Galt 2013:
79)

‘The collapse of the economy in December 2001 was the end point of a decade of neoliberal
policies that had ballooned Argentina’s debt to $140 billion, extracted wealth for foreign
companies, and led to poverty across the country.’ (Galt 2013: 79)

‘a blank refusal: a refusal of IMF austerity measures, a refusal to put the desires of foreign
investors first, a refusal of the terms of global capital. Suddenly at once enacts this national
refusal of the terms of global politics and a queer refusal to make political meanings. Default
is a refusal of meaning, a simple ‘no’ to the demands of a system in which you cannot win. It
is this ‘no’ to neoliberal narratives of crisis that Suddenly figures in its queer textuality.’ (Galt
2013: 79)

Works cited

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004)

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1964)

Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Revolution, and Feminist Struggle
(Oakland, CA: PM Press 2012)

Rosalind Galt, ‘Default cinema: queering economic crisis in Argentina and beyond’, Screen,
54:1 (2013), 62-81

Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, 26 (June 2008), 1-14

Kristin Lene Hole and Dijana Jelaca, Film Feminisms: A Global Introduction (London:
Routledge 2019)

bell hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, in Black Looks: Race and
Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 115-152

Ranjana Khanna, ‘The Battle of Algiers and The Nouba of the Women of Mont Chenoua:
From Third to Fourth Cinema’, Third Text, 12:43 (1998), 13-32

Helen Hok-Sze Leung, ‘New Queer Cinema and Third Cinema’, in Michele Aaron (ed.), New
Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004)

Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
(Semiotext(e), 2012)

Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16: 3 (1975), 6-18; reprinted in
Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp.
14-28

Laura Mulvey, ‘Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde’, Framework, 10 (Spring 1979), 3-10
Viviane Saglier, ‘Decolonization, Disenchantment, and Arab Feminist Genealogies of
Worldmaking’, Feminist Media Histories, 8:1 (2022), 72-101

Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media
(London: Routledge, 1994)

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for
the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World’ (1970), available here:
http://documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html

Filmography
Battiglia di Algeri/Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1966)
La hora de los hornos/Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas,
Argentina, 1968)
I Am Somebody (Madeline Anderson, USA, 1970)
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, France/Belgium,
1975)
La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (Assia Djebar, Algeria, 1977)
Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen, UK, 1977)
Leila wa al-Ziab/Leila and the Wolves (Heiny Srour, Lebanon/UK, 1984)
Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, UK/USA, 1991)
The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, USA, 1996)
Tan de Repente/Suddenly (Diego Lerman, Argentina, 2002)