“Imperfect cinema can also be enjoyable, both for the maker and for its new audience. Those who struggle do not struggle on the edge of life, but in the midst of it. Struggle is life and vice versa. One does not stuggle in order to live ‘later on.’… And in life, as in the struggle, there is everything, including enjoyment.”
Julio Garcia Espinosa
Cuban film director and one of the cofounders of the Third Cinema Movement, author of For an imperfect cinema, translated by Julianne Burto
https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.html
Julio García Espinosa, wrote in 1969 one of the key manifestos of the New Latin American or Third Cinema. It was a polemic calling ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’, he argued that the imperfections of a low budget cinema, created in conditions of urgency, sought to create a dialogue with its audience, preferable to the movies made with high production values in contemporary cinema which merely reflected the audience passively back to themselves.
Third Cinema emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s addressing the role of cinema in developing countries. Rather than reproducing the “First cinema” of commercial filmmaking or the “Second cinema of European art movements filmmakers from Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Asia argued for a “Third World” of revolutionary artistic practice.
As a result Third Cinema is particularly associated with filmmakers in Latin America, though it’s influence is far wider, who used film to both document realities of social and political injustice and participate in struggles for liberation.
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
Find my bio here
Contact me here
BACK TO HOME
Seeds and Fuses 