WE [STILL] MUST DISCUSS, WE [STILL] MUST INVENT.

“We must discuss, we must invent […]” This is how the manifesto “Hacia un tercer cine” (Engl. Towards a Third Cinema) by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas from the year 1969 begins. It is no coincidence that this quote, deriving from Frantz Fanon, introduces the demand for a cinema of liberation, considering that Fanon was one of the central masterminds of decolonisation. The motto of this year’s retrospective echoes Fanon’s statement, with the insertion of [STILL], however, also refers to the present and the question whether the demands can be regarded as fulfilled. With their manifesto, Solanas and Getino coined the term Third Cinema, which to this day functions as an important reference point, even though there are differing ideas on what it ultimately in fact stands for. The term, for instance, is used synonymously with “third world cinema” or “militant cinema.”

But also in the manifesto itself there is room for contradictions, not least because even the authors themselves did not lay claim to a perfect concept. („Our time is one of hypothesis rather than of thesis, a time of works in progress – unfinished, unordered, violent works, made with the camera in one hand and a rock in the other.”) According to Getino and Solanas, the Third Cinema was a counter concept to the First Cinema, the cinema in the style of Hollywood, and the Second Cinema, the European auteur movies.

In contrast to these, the Third Cinema was not a consumer product, they claimed, and neither did it exclusively serve the purpose of entertainment. The Third Cinema was meant to wake the audience from its passivity, had to function outside the capitalist logic and show up causes much rather than effects. In their impact, the Third Cinema’s camera and projector resembled a weapon that fired twenty-four images per second. This year’s retrospective doesn’t mean to attempt and find answers to open questions either or to formulate a definition of the Third Cinema.

The manifesto, and the film LA HORA DES LOS HORNOS, closely associated with it, offers much rather an entry point, from which a multifaceted panorama, both in time and space, of films unfolds. Films that in various ways approach the subjects of emancipation, liberation and self-empowerment, as well as referring to their immanent heterogeneity and complexity. Films that often faced extremely difficult production and distribution conditions and cover a wide spectrum of aesthetic forms, from conventional narrative cinema to experimental films, and deal with various facets of mechanisms of suppression and empowerment. What connects the selected films is the understanding, inherent in them all, of film as a medium of emancipatory discourses, as a motor of change and means of liberation and self-empowerment of marginalised and suppressed demographic groups. Film is used towards different goals, for agitation, for the flagging up of unequal balances of power and their consequences, for raising questions concerning our own viewing habits and interpretation patterns, for creating awareness of the power of images and the persistent danger of unequal power structures being reproduced, even by filmmaking itself, and in order to broadcast the ideas of crucial thinkers. LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS (1968), the didactical film essay by Fernando Solanas, is split into three parts and in total lasts more than four hours. On the occasion of IFFI, we will be showing the first part, entitled “Neocolonialismo y violencia.” Realising a film of this length is impressive, especially in view of the fact that the film was shot clandestinely for four years and could only be brought into its final form in exile in Italy. When it was smuggled back into Argentina, it found more than 100,000 viewers, even though it was banned. Independent distribution channels were also provided by the Ukamau group around Jorge Sanjinés, in 1970s Bolivia, after the group returned from exile. In this way they presented films like LA NACIÓN CLANDESTINA (1989) by Sanjinés even in small communities without electricity far from the capital. In addition, they established training opportunities in film for indigenous people and campesinos. Some graduates of these training courses already were involved in realising LA NACIÓN CLANDESTINA. Neo-colonial practices and continuities will be demonstrated above all in three films from Senegal. By way of individual biographies, Ousmane Sembène’s first short film BOROM SARRET (1963) and his first feature-length film LA NOIRE DE … (1966) examine exploitation mechanisms that prove the reproduction of social dependencies and hierarchies even after the country gained independence. In REASSAMBLAGE (1982), Trinh T. Minh-ha forces us, with the help of a flood of documentary images from village life, to reflect on our Eurocentric perspective and our interpretation patterns. At the same time, the film opens up a spectrum that critiques the ethnological gaze and the claim to documentary authority and in the process re-examines the filmmaker’s own position as well as the impossibility of a neutral or objective perspective. Horace Ové’s BALDWIN’S NIGGER (1968), on the other hand, makes clear that oppression and the potential of cinema as a means of empowerment are also relevant themes in the so-called West. The eloquent voice of the civil rights campaigner and writer James Baldwin also is the focal point of JAMES BALDWIN: THE PRICE OF THE TICKET (1989) by Karen Thorsen. In FRANTZ FANON: BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK (1997), the artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien casts a critical glance at the anti-colonial mastermind, psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon, at his career and influence on later theoretical movements and activists. CONCERNING VIOLENCE (2014) revolves around the eponymous text by Fanon from his book Les Damnés de la Terre, that is not meant to point out problems, but rather to serve as an instruction manual. The documentary confrontation with archive materials is the main theme of the films OFF FRAME AKA REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY (2016), CONCERNING VIOLENCE (2014), and AFRICAN MIRROR (2019). What they also share in common is that the materials take on new meanings through their montage and combination with soundtracks. In OFF FRAME AKA REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY, Mohanad Yaqubi traces the militant Palestinian film practice of the years between 1968 and 1982 and in the process pays tribute to the film project “Revolution Until Victory,” initiated by Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group. Even though the latter was never realised, Yaqubi gains a reference especially from that image in OFF FRAME AKA REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY that revealed itself off frame, the empowerment through the right to self-representation.