The challenging aim of the Archive section is that of rediscovering and revitalising past cinematic experiences. As alternative filmmakers what's better than starting with an article on Third Cinema? [...]

We asked Paul Willemen, lecturer at Napier University and co-editor with Jim Pines of Questions of Third Cinema (BFI, 1989), a few questions on Third Cinema and its relevance to us, both as filmmakers and audience.

Q - What are the shortcomings of Third Cinema?
A - The main shortcoming of the notion of Third Cinema is that people (critics, students, etc.) persist in equating it with Third World Cinema. The second shortcoming is that the weight of the Latin Americans of the late 60s makes a redefinition more difficult than I anticipated. Their writings and films are such a clearly defined "moment" in film history that any attempt to build on it runs the risk of getting bogged down in comparisons. The third shortcoming is the emphasis my notion of Third Cinema put on the creative and intellectual activities of the viewers. In my book, I carefully outlined that we are talking about the conscious orchestration of connections between text and history, at the level of the film text, but also at the level of the reading. That was the point of saying that there were First and Second Cinema films (at the level of production) that could be read in a Third Cinema way. Such a suggestion, which takes on board the fact that viewers also make meaning by means of the film, has been around for some 20 years in the independent film sector, but still does not seem to have penetrated deeply enough into the culture. People still seem to think that viewing films is primarily a matter of recognising the characteristics intended, and/or achieved by the filmmaker, and that films do not change as the historical and situational conditions change.

On that basis, comments and remarks can then be made about the films as if they were objects, the contours and dimensions of which have been established and agreed by all. This would make Third Cinema into a kind of genre, like a Crime Film or an Art Film or some such category.

I mobilised the notion of Third Cinema as a way of pointing out a direction for BOTH filmmakers and film viewers: just like the "best" directors seek to orchestrate film texts that have complex, multi-layered connections with the situation in and for which the films are made, so the viewers should open themselves up to "reading" not only the connections proposed and mobilised by the film, but also to a consciousness of the historicity of the way we see and read films.

Third Cinema is merely the type of film which activates and encourages such a practice of making sense. Obviously, as "we" become better at reading history at work in texts, more and more films will reveal their Third Cinema dimensions to us. Keeping these points in mind, Third Cinema is less powerful than Hollywood because the Hollywood machinery and its subsidiary variations (such as the Ukanian one, i.e. British) disposes of a vastly more powerful arsenal to discipline viewers into consuming films in very specific ways, and those are not Third Cinema ways of reading. On the contrary. Just think of the amount of money spent, almost throughout the century, day in day out in all media and educational institutions as well as advertising practices, on habituating us to read stories "for the content" or to make sure that we give absolute priority to the "characters". Looking at it that way, getting us to read films the way we do now, as "ordinary punters", costs billions of dollars and requires an absolutely gigantic cultural and educational machine to keep disciplining us on a daily basis. And even then, there are some thousands of people active in film culture who still have not succumbed (or have recovered) and persist in seeing films historically.

The very size and cost of the machinery deployed to make us read in "the industry way" (in order to make selling films more predictably profitable) suggests that, yes, it is powerful, but people's desire to read differently is even more powerful, otherwise the Big Machine would not be so necessary and would be more successful.

The problem, though, is that although it may require immense effort and cost to make us read in a particular way, the real success of the Machine is that it has made other ways of reading difficult to imagine for most of us, leaving us with an obscure, unfocussed sense of "something else ought to be possible". That may fuel desire, but it cannot provide a market sizable enough to make an entire production sector profitable.

Further questions include:
Q - What relevance does the concept of Third Cinema have for film and video practitioners working today in the UK?
Q - What is the relationship between Third Cinema and the so-called diaspora cinema? Is Third Cinema only relevant to Black Independents, or can it be applied to Gay and Women's cinema? Or are these sections irrelevant?
Q - Does Third Cinema offer an alternative visual grammar?...