Third cinema in the third world

Transcription

Third Cinema in
the Third Worl
The Aesthetics of Liberation
UMI
Research Press
Studies in
Cinema
DATE DUE
PN
1993.5
A35
G3
1982
Gabriel, Teshome.
Third cinema in the
third world.
#4757
ROOM
BORROWER'S NAME
DATE
DUE
NUMBER
#4757
PN
1993.5
A35
G3
1982
Gabriel T Teshome H. ( Teshome Habte
Third cinema in the third world
aesthet ics of liberation / by Tesh<
H. Gabr lei.
Ann Arbort Mich.
Eesearc h Press, cl982.
(Studies
xii, 147 p. ; 24 cm.
no. 21)
c inema
Revis ion of thesis (Ph.D.)
Dnivers ity of California, Los Angel
—
:
—
;
1979.
Bibll ography: p [ 135]-141
Inclu des index.
#4757 Brodart $39.95 AM.
ISBN 0-8357-1359-8
1
Hit) tts-i*^
Third Cinema in
the Third World
Studies in Cinema, No. 21
Diane M. Kirkpatrick, Series Editor
Associate Professor, History of Art
The
Other
No.
University of Michigan
Titles in This Series
Balkan Cinema: Evolution
1 1
No. 12
after the
Michael
Revolution
Nick Browne
The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration
No. 13 Bertolt Brecht, Cahiers du Cinema, and
Contemporary Film Theory
George
Sidney Rosenzweig
Michael Curtiz
Old HollywoodI Nev,' Hollywood:
No. 15
Ritual,
Thomas Schatz
and Industry
No. 16 Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio
During World War //
The High Noon of American Films
Latin America
No.
17
No. 18
The Spanish
European Films
Civil
Richard Shale
in
Gaizka
S.
de Usabel
War in American and
No. 19
Antonioni's Visual Language
No. 20
Cinema
in the
Lellis
Casablanca and Other Major Films of
No. 14
Art,
J. Stoil
Strikes Back: Radical
United States. 1930-1942
Marjorie A. Valleau
Ned
Rifkin
Filmmaking
Russell Campbell
Third Cinema in
the Third World
by
Teshome H. Gabriel
^
UMI RESEARCH PRESS
Ann
Arbor, Michigan
"Xala:
A Cinema
of
Wax and Gold"
Presence Africaine, No.
first
appeared
in
116, 1980 (Paris, France). The
was reprinted in a slightly revised form in
Jump Cut, Issue No. 27, 1982 (Published in Berkeley and
same
article
Chicago).
"Creddo:
A
Revolution Reborn through the Efforts of
Womanhood," was published
in
Framework combined
No. 15, 16, and 17, 1981. PubUshed by the Univerof East Anglia (Norwich, Great Britain).
issue
sity
Copyright
©1982, 1979
Teshome H. Gabriel
All rights reserved
Produced and distributed by
UMI
Research Press
an imprint of
University Microfilms International
Ann
Arbor, Michigan 48106
Library of Congress Cataloging in Pubhcation Data
Gabriel,
Teshome H. (Teshome Habte)
Third cinema in third world.
(Studies in cinema
no. 21)
Revision of thesis (Ph.D.)-Llniversity of California,
Los Angeles, 1979.
Bibhography:
;
p.
Includes index.
Moving-pictures-Africa-History. 2. Moving3. Moving-pictures- Latin
America- History. 4. Moving-picture plays-History and
1.
pictures- Asia-History.
criticism.
I.
Title.
II.
PN1993.5.A35G3 1982
ISBN 0-8357-1359-8
Series.
791.43'096
82-8641
AACR2
To all those filmmakers of the third
world who have suffered exile, incarceration, or death
for their determination
to use film as a tool for social change.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
1
ix
xi
Introduction:
A
Brief Overview
2
The Theoretical Context
5
A Conceptual Framework
What is Ideology?
3
The Major Themes
in
1
Third Cinema
15
Class
Culture
Religion
Sexism
Armed
4
Struggle
Revolutionary Films
Toward a
21
Definition
Approaches to Distribution and Exhibition
Approaches to Style
5
Style
and Ideology
41
The Politics of Style
Bay of Pigs (USA) vs. Playa Giron (Cuba)
Journey to the Sun vs. Last Grave at Dimbaza
Three Films on the Mexican Revolution
Anatomy of Style
Los Olvidados
El Chacal de Nahueltoro
Concluding Remarks
Contents
viii
6
Cultural Codes
vs.
Ideological
Codes
57
Film and Ideology in China
Michelangelo Antonioni's China
Chinese Film Style
Developments in Chinese Films
Film and Ideology in Cuba
Alea vs. Antonioni and Fellini
Memories of Underdevelopment
Film and Ideology in Africa
Jean Rouch's Africa
A
Cinema of
Wax
and Gold
Ceddo: A Revolution Reborn through the Efforts of Womanhood
Harvest: 3000 Years: A Case of Oral Narrative and Film Form
Xala:
7
Conclusion
95
A
Appendix A:
Filmmakers and the Popular Government:
Manifesto
99
Appendix
Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting in
B:
Algiers, 1973
Appendix C:
Filmography
Notes
117
121
Bibliography
Index
Interview with
143
135
103
Ousmane Sembene
111
Political
Acknowledgments
I
wish to extend
my sincere appreciation and gratitude to my colleagues in the
Department of Theater Arts
Howard
Suber, for their
thanks to
my good
friends,
UCLA
Nick Browne, Richard Hawkins and
comments and unfailing encouragement. Special
Ifeanyi Aniebo and Antonis Ricos, for their critical
at
assistance.
I
also
owe an
intellectual debt to the practitioners of
Third Cinema
who
inspired this study.
Above
all,
my deeply felt thanks
my wife, Maaza, for her sustained love
Mediget and my son Tsegaye also deserve a
to
and encouragement. My daughter
special thank you for enabling me to relax from the pressing demands of such a
project.
Preface
new kind of Third World cinema that made its debut in
This new cinematic movement, called "Third Cinema," was
This study focuses on a
the early 1960s.
on the
and propositions of traditional cinema, as
represented by Hollywood. The main aim of Third Cinema is to immerse itself
in the lives and struggles of the peoples of the Third World. Since the Third
World should not continue to dissipate its culture and national identity. Third
Cinema attempts to check this and conserve what is left. This study of Third
Cinema, therefore, deals with films that have social and political relevance and
it embraces the twin aspects of filmic experience
namely, style and ideology.
the
of
this
work
ideology
and
In
body
style are at times seen as inseparable, yet
built
rejection of the concepts
—
at other times treated separately.
The adherents of Third Cinema argue
that even
when
films try to
disengage from any kind of political statement, the ideology they espouse
implicit.
Given
whose ideology
is still
Third Cinema cineasts advocate a political cinema
not only implied but adheres to the dialectic of traumatic
this fact.
is
changes that are engulfing the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This
cinema, therefore, is informed not only with the cultural tastes and ideological
needs of the people
it
represents but also with the militant manifestations of
Third Cinema filmmakers equate film with a weapon and view
the act of filming as more than a political act. To this end, the aim of Third
their struggle.
Cinema
is
not to re-aestheticize traditional cinematic codes but to politicize
cinema to such an extent that a new cinematic code appropriate to
its
needs
is
established.
The
first
chapter of this book introduces the concepts of Third
and argues that the pioneering works done
antecedents of whatever Third
Cinema
in the sixties are the historical
Cinema holds. Following this
brief introductory
overview, chapter 2 lays the theoretical foundation for a critical study of films
with social and political orientation.
practitioners
of Third Cinema,
is
Ideology, a prime concern of the
discussed and an interpretation of
its
concepts provided. Chapter 3 deals with the five major themes of Third
Cinema, and shows how each treatment
is
a call for action. Chapter 4 attempts
xii
Preface
what constitutes a revolutionary film. Due to the disparities in
interpretation it became necessary to pinpoint what a revolutionary film is
through a close reading of some of the best films from the Third World.
Attention is paid both to their innovative style and ideological orientation.
to conceptualize
In chapter 5 style
threefold approach: (a)
The chapter utilizes a
a comparative reading of an American and a Cuban
is
directly linked to ideology.
on the same subject matter; (b) a comparative exploration of two films
from South Africa, and three films on the Mexican revolution, and (c) a
comparative methodological distinction of two films on stylistic and ideological grounds. Chapter 6 attempts to deal with the whole question of cultural
codes versus ideological codes. The chapter establishes the relation between
film and ideology as mediated through culture. While a direct and spontaneous
relation between style and ideology is denied here, the relationship of film to
ideology is not. Film and ideology mutate in response to shifts in style; they are
not seen as absolutes because they interact and complement each other in film
practice. The study concludes by suggesting a direction for Third World film
criticism and by offering the view that, unless presented by repressive
conditions, Third Cinema can truly come into its own by establishing a cinema
both instructive and leavened with folk humor.
film
Introduction:
A Brief Overview
Inasmuch as the creation of the cinema as a social and artistic institution took
place in Europe and America, the image that cinema has traditionally projected
to the world has been one that reflects these western cultures. The development
of editing, a camera movement, and, later, sound gave film a language, a
meaning and a definition. The purpose of this study is to examine some of the
ways in which this cinematic art has been adapted as a cultural means of
expression in the Third World.
It
when Third World people themselves started
cinematic exploration, that the film medium began to be used
was only
participating in
in the 1960s,
—
mass of humanity the peoples of
Third World who had previously been cut off from experiencing this new art
form in a positive way. For the first time, the "nameless" began to receive
significant recognition. Contemporary cinema is definitively marked by the
emergence of a cinema of decolonization, a response to a new historic situation
that demands of Third World filmmakers in particular, and of progressive
cineasts at large, a new revolutionary attitude towards film practice. I believe
that significant steps have already been taken in establishing a new cinematic
as a serious vehicle to give voice to that
—
language.
This study does not intend to provide an exhaustive study of Third World
films; in fact,
it is
limited in scope to a few specific areas of Third
World
films.
However, the few pioneering works that I discuss are exemplary harbingers of
future developments in Third World cinema. This study attempts to appraise
critically the achievements and direction of this new cinema.
Governments in the Third World have usually sought to appropriate the
medium of the cinema for propaganda favorable to their own needs. This effort
has met various complex obstacles, however, most significantly, the absence of
a critically sensitive audience. Despite these and other limitations, I contend
a cinema of
that in the past two decades an alternative cinema has emerged
decolonization and for liberation, hereafter referred to as the "Third Cinema."
Inherent in this cinema of the Third World are its ties with the social life,
ideologies and conflicts of the times. Third Cinema is moved by a concern for
—
2
Introduction:
A
Brief Overview
World man and woman threatened by colonial and neocolonial wars. In selecting the themes and styles for his or her work, the
filmmaker's choice is both ideologically determined and circumscribed. Since
the fate of the Third
the filmmaker disclaims a "non-class" or "above-class" ideology, he/she
necessarily
committed to a certain ideological mode of perception and a
way of
codified
is
of this study
interpreting not only culture but reality
therefore, to place Third
is,
context and to appraise
its
achievements
Cinema
in
in its
terms of its
itself.
One
of the aims
proper socio-aesthetic
own
cultural/ ideologi-
cal outlook.
Third World filmmakers argue that regardless of how "innocent" the
content of a film may seem, the film must necessarily reflect a certain class point
of view. Therefore, they advocate a cinema which corresponds to the cultural
tastes and political needs of the society it represents. The overriding concern of
these filmmakers
Their
is
not in aestheticizing ideology but in politicizing cinema.
call is for
the cinema that recognizes 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
An
attempt
has been
at situating
— in a word, the de-colonization of culture.^
Third World cinematic experience in film history
made by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino
in
an
article/
mani-
"Towards a Third Cinema."" Their major concerns are twofold:
(1) a rejection of the propositions and concepts of traditional cinema, namely,
those of Hollywood; (2) the need to use film to serve an ideological and
festo entitled
revolutionary end:
and exhibition continued to be r/ioiô/ Hollywood
precisely because in ideology and politics, films had not yet become the vehicle for clearly
drawn differentiation between bourgeois ideology and politics.
The models of production,
distribution
Several small industries have been built in
and
all
some Third World
countries
of these parrot both the concepts and propositions of Hollywood. Thus,
they serve to perpetuate cultural confusion in their espousal of foreign values.
Films made in the Third World that show dependency on an external or alien
culture cannot, therefore, be characterized as Third Cinema.
characteristic of Third
who makes
it,
Cinema
is
really not so
but, rather, the ideology
displays.
The Third Cinema
opposed
to imperialism
and
is
that
class
it
much where
it is
The
principal
made, or even
espouses and the consciousness
it
cinema of the Third World which stands
oppression in all their ramifications and
manifestations.
It is
the belief of this author that Third
Cinema cannot but be responsive to
the dialectics of the traumatic changes which
now engulf the Third World.
This
Introduction:
explains the
marked preference
innovative style and, above
all,
in this
its
as the lives
of the people
Cuban documentary
it
3
with political and ideological overtones. Third
political ideology
Hollywood cinema.^
Third Cinema includes an
Brief Overview
study for films with social relevance and
Cinema has a direct political function in that
Just as Hollywood cinema is political and
except that
A
is
it
attacks the cultural status quo.
one-sided, so
opposed to the
infinite variety
portrays. Thus,
is
political
views implicit in
of subjects and
we
Third Cinema,
styles, as
varied
find films as different as the
reconstruction Playa Giron (directed by
Manuel Herrera)
and the Bolivian dramatic film Blood of the Condor (Jorge Sanjines), or the
film opera from the Peoples' RepubHc of China The East is Red (cinecollective) and the film poem Towers of Silence (Jamil Dehlavi, Pakistan).
Also noteworthy are the introspective film Picking on the People (Luis Ospina,
Colombia), the film epic Emitai (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal) and a synthesis
of documentary filmmaking in its best tradition. The Battle of Chile {Pairicio
Guzman, Chile). All these films identify the masses as the true hero and the only
existing force capable of defeating the class enemies in their
home
fronts.
Other films, without being explicitly ideological, uniquely portray the
oppression and plight of the masses and the distortion of their culture and arts
and
are, therefore, integral to
Third Cinema. Films such as Barren Lives and
Barravento (Cinema Novo, Brazil), ethnographic films
Preloran, Argentina) and The Budouin
reaffirmation films such as
Beyond the
Kwate Nee-Owoo's You Hide
like
Imaginero (Jorge
Boy (Nabil Maleh,
Syria), cultural
Plains (Michael Raubern, Zimbabwe),
Me (Ghana)
and
Safi Faye's
Fad Jal (Senegal)
are examples.
New developments
cinema do not take place in a vacuum. The influence
of contemporary trends in cinema on Third Cinema is obvious. For instance,
in
Third Cinema practitioners find a
groups
enrich
in
America,
itself
Italy or France.
common bond
with progressive or Left
Moreover, the Third Cinema continues to
with the theoretical and aesthetic concerns of contemporary film
thought and scholarship. The relationship between the culture of one country
and another, however, or that of individual Third World filmmakers with one
another, is often complicated and vacillating. Although there may not be a
unified, fully coherent movement, it is nevertheless possible to find shared
experiences and objectives. Chiefly, film in a Third World context seeks to:
a.
decolonize minds
b.
contribute to the development of a radical consciousness
c.
lead to a revolutionary transformation of society
d.
develop new film language with which to accomplish these tasks'
The
to
go far
commitments of Third Cinema and the need
beyond the concepts and propositions of traditional western film
theoretical
and
political
4
Introduction:
A
Brief Overview
forms has raised the question of "the
politics of style." Is the
Third Cinema to
adapt traditional structures simply with new content? Should existing beliefs
and traditions be dealt with, or should they be ignored in favor of the more
pressing economic and political concerns. Since style and ideology are tied
together,
how
concerns that
is
Third Cinema to forge a third style?
this
study will be developed.
It is
around these
central
A
Conceptual Framework
The appearance of Third Cinema on
the stage of world history represents a
significant alteration in the parameters of film
form and
and
an explanation of its significance and effect.
The aesthetics and ideology of Third Cinema poses a radical and singular
in the critical
theoretical categories necessary for
challenge to existing or traditional categories of film scholarship, even to the
universalistic claims of contemporary film semiotics.
The bulk of film theory and
criticism in recent years has taken place
under
the umbrella of structuralism and semiology.' Since most current works
published under their auspices have analyzed past traditions of dramatic
narrative fiction, the conception of the universe of film emerges as both
uniform and static. Cine-structuralism strives to find immanent meaning in
works whose deeper meaning is concealed. The films under discussion in this
study do not try to hide their true meaning. The burden of search, therefore,
will
be across a different terrain.
Because film is so new, arguments
"what
cinema?"
abound. In
fact, Christian Metz's widely read and discussed book. Film Language,
attempts to define film simply.^ Film is inherently a collective mode of
production and it is also open to an inherently interdisciplinary approach.
Furthermore, because film is a collaborative effort and of multi-disciplinary
interest,
it
naturally
like
is
demands a socio-economic and
still
ideological analysis of
production, exhibition and distribution.
The
saw an intellectual renaissance of Marxist film criticismideology was examined in the context of both its social and aesthetic meaning.
The complex network of ideological mediations between "base" and "superstructure" became a central issue in film scholarship.^ When Marxist film
early 1960s
came under attack for placing film within the sphere of
"economic determinism," some critics began to search for a critical approach
criticism
that
later
would embrace a metasystem.'*
6
In the last two decades, the Marxist theoretician
who seems most
to have
and guided the ideological concerns within film criticism is Louis
Althusser. The specific contribution of the Althusserian model of ideological
apparatuses and effects (Althusser regards the systems of communication as
inspired
apparatuses)
is its
account of the citizen/ subject's place within this system. The
term "interpellation"
is
used to describe the position of the subject which
manipulated by the mechanisms of ideological discourse. Within
work
the film viewer
this
is
frame-
necessarily placed in a certain position with respect to
is
the message of the text, a position which contemporary film theory
and
criticism has treated as a matter of "point of view."^
What
and analytic
perspectives
Foremost, of course,
is
tools are needed to define Third
the amplification of a
method whereby
Cinema?
the films can be
an evolving aesthetic and social context. This is achieved largely
through the study of a model that film correlates with this reality. An account
of the semi-documentary/ semi-fiction film of Third Cinema must be developed
that will treat its structure, strategies and ideological commitment. Clearly,
viewed
in
more than an aesthetic of transparent reflection is needed; it is a matter of
structuring and representing the evolving social and traditional consciousness
of developing nations. Film theory and criticism at the level of complexity
required to model these relations must be a theory of mediation; represented
reality
is
not simply a direct translation of empirical relations but
its
filtering
reconstruction.^
What
any definition of film outside of the
economic and social sphere has a tendency to see meaning in "form" alone. A
study which treats film strictly as a metasystem, does not take into account the
external factors influencing it or the ideological mediation in operation, is
is
suggested here
is
that
misleading, and a gross error in any analysis of cinema.
We
contend that any film or any theory and criticism of film within the
context of Third Cinema cannot be separated from the practical uses of film.
Real alternatives differing from those offered by the System are only possible if one of two
is fulfilled: making films that the System cannot assimilate and which are
requirements
foreign to
its
needs, or
making films
Neither of these requirements
fits
cinema, but they can be found
that directly
and explicitly
set
within the alternatives that are
in the
out to fight the System.
still
offered by the second
revolutionary opening towards a cinema outside and
against the System, in a cinema of liberation: the third cinema.
The
praxis of Third Cinema,
i.e.,
the call for action of these films, within the
context of production, leads us to view the aesthetic of Third Cinema as a form
of ideology; that is, the films point toward a confrontational cinema and an
aesthetics of liberation.
7
This cinema of the masses, which is prevented from reaching beyond the sectors representing
the masses, provokes with each showing, as in a revolutionary miUtary incursion, a Hberated
space, a decolonized territory.
The showing can be turned
which, according to Fanon, could be "a
to hear
into a kind of political event,
liturgical act, a privileged
occasion for
human beings
and be heard."*
Frantz Fanon, the inspirational guide for Third Cinema, traces three stages in
the development of ideological consciousness in the direction of cultural
decolonization in the Third World:^ (a) the unqualified assimilation phase
where the inspiration comes from without and hence
results in
an uncritical
imitation of the colonialist culture; (b) the return to the source or the
rememberance phase, a stage which marks the nostalgic lapse to childhood, to
the heroic past, where legends and folklore abound; and (c) the fighting or
combative phase, a stage that signifies maturation and where emancipatory
self-determination becomes an act of violence. Both (b) and (c) grow on
indigenous culture.
The
three stages that
Fanon
genealogy of Third World film
World
the Third
reflects
mark and compose
traces alternatively
the
The evolution of the cinema institution in
dependency on the Hollywood model of
style.
(a) a
conventional cinema, submitting both to the concepts and propositions of
commercial cinema; (b) national cinemas that promote the decolonization
process but without at the same time decolonizing conventional film language;
and
(c)
the emergence of decolonization of culture
and
liberation
— here the
spectrum of conventional production apparatuses of cinema undergoes a
radical alteration. Corresponding to Frantz Fanon's third phase, the call in this
one in which
last stage of the evolution of cinema is for a "guerrilla cinema"
the camera is likened to a rifle as the "inexhaustible expropriator of imageentire
—
weapons" and the projector likened to a gun that can shoot twenty-four bullets
a second. '° The concurrent development of ideological consciousness and the
ongoing development of the social institution of cinema in the Third World are
thus bound together.
The theory of "point of view" that bears the mark of AUhusser's
ideological criticism shifts radically
when Fanon's
conceptualization
is
ad-
Third Cinema film practice. This matter of "point of view" is in
fact precisely where discourse in Third Cinema finds its dynamic wholeness. In
Third Cinema, "point of view" does not function on a psychological or mythic
hered to
level
in the
per se but rather takes up an explicit position with respect to an
ideological or social topic.
For instance, the "point of view" in Third Cinema
is
not a reflection of the consciousness or subjectivity of a single subject (a
protagonist/ hero); rather, the central figure in Third Cinema serves to develop
an
historical
perspective on radical social change.
spectators' attention.
actuality
it
is
The protagonist/ hero might
the masses or the people
who
The masses hold
the
cast the glance, but in
give substance to the gaze.
The
8
individual hero in Third
he/she
not endowed
is
Cinema
is
a trans-individual or collective subject;
with individuahty
— the
legitimizing function
of
conventional cinema.
World film production has in fact broken
grammar of cinema. It has also
the assumed
psychoanalytic
model
of
the
"spectator"
in cinema, i.e., the
questioned the
narrative flow which is conditioned and governed by the oedipal complex is
rarely witnessed in Third Cinema. The psychoanalytic spectator, as the ideal
Inchoate as
it is,
therefore. Third
semiotic system of the ideal code or
spectator,
dream
almost non-existent. This approach to film has likened
is
experience.
to political
and
The
identification process in Third
Cinema
is
it
to a
more likened
social experience.
The aesthetic of Third Cinema also moves between two poles; one, the
demand that the works engage the actual pressing social realities of the day,
and the other that the film achieve its impression of reality, not by simply
mirroring, but by transforming the given. Correspondingly, Third Cinema
semiotics move between, and live on, the ambiguity of signifiers (representation) and referent (the real).
Third Cinema, therefore, intervenes in the debate and controversy over
film theory and criticism which tends to claim particulars as universals.
Because little has been resolved in discussions about ideology, the nexus of film
discourse in Third Cinema, it would be improper to proceed any further
without dealing specifically with the question of "ideology" and the nature of
its
functions.
What
is
Ideology
Ideology?
is
the prime target of Third Cinema,
of present day film scholarship.
It is,
and
it
occupies the central stage
therefore, imperative that
concept our special attention and accord
it
we
give the
particular significance. Otherwise,
the decisive nature of ideology in film practice will remain hazy at best
further cloud or complicate any definitive comprehension of
its
and
active role in
and cultural life of a people.
A thorny problem in contemporary theoretical discourse on the problem
of interpreting cinema is confusion as to what "ideology" is and where to situate
the aesthetic political
it
in the cultural experience of society. "
A
considerable variety of contradic-
tory interpretations of ideology has only further confused
study of social
Naess, in fact,
includes
and
its
to the
its
formations and organizations. The Norwegian
relevance to the
Arne
has composed a typology of concepts concerning ideology which
more than
thirty.'^ It
is
sociologist
perhaps the multifaceted nature of the term
concept and the inadequacy to pin
it
down
precisely that has given rise
"end of ideology" school and prompted the emergence of a Sociology of
Knowledge
in its place.
'^
The rethinking of "base" (economic, mode of production of
and "superstructure"
ture)
9
infrastruc-
(institutions of social ideas: culture, the judicial
process, the arts, philosophical concepts of religion, freedom, etc.) has resulted
development of a theory of ideology. The reinvestigation into the concept
of ideology stems from the fundamental works of Marx and Engels. The
ongoing debate on the theory of ideology, instead of leading to repudiation of
the central themes of Marxist structures, has only served to reinstate the
fundamental tenets of dialectical materialism.
in the
The
pertinent theoretical formulation according to
Consciousness can never be anything
life-process. If in all ideology
upside
down
this
but conscious being, and men's being
else
is
their actual
people and their relationships appear, as in a camera obscura,
phenomenon
the inversion of objects
Marx reads as follows:
on the
arises just as
retina
from
much from
their historical life-process as
their direct physical
This model which has often been cited and
is
life
does
process.'''
continuously debated
among
and aestheticians see men/ women in terms of their material
condition which is an inverted form of their real condition. It is, therefore, the
ideologists
task of those adhering to materialist thinking to switch the reflection right side
up. The implication of the model is far too serious and has been the source of a
continuing debate on the concept of "false consciousness," the theory of
"ideology as deterministic" and the mechanical view of "art merely reflecting
dominant ideology."'^ According to the model, once "the historical lifeprocess" has been well understood through the method of historical materialism then there will be no more ideology, i.e., no more camera obscura or seeing
upside-down, which means that men will then simply see social relations as they
the
are, in their actual life process.
To some
the
sense of ideology
camera obscura model suggests an "end to ideology." This
still
predominates
among
adherents of the Sociology of
Knowledge school, not only because "ideology" cannot hold its own but
because a mechanical and direct relationship between "base" and "superstructure" is insisted upon. It is argued that because the superstructure is built
upon the economic base, ideological practice
economy as the principal determinant; hence
is,
therefore, subservient to the
the base
is
seen as the ultimate
cause of social formation.
However, Marx's camera obscura model seems to have been redeemed by
Engel's interactive model of "base" and "superstructure":
The economic
situation
exercise their influence
preponderate
in
is
the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure als&
upon the course of
determining their form.
'*
the historical struggles
and
in
many
cases
10
Marx himself was opposed to a mechanical imerpretation of superstructure as
a mere reflection or echo of the base. In a Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, he joins Engels on the interactive model and at the same
time recognizes the "specificity" and "autonomy" of superstructure with regard
to its economic foundation.
With the change of the economic foundation the
entire immense superstructure is more or
transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be
made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which
can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious,
less rapidly
aesthetic or
conflict
and
phUosophicshon— ideological forms
fight
it
out.
[my emphasis
in
which men become conscious of
this
—THG]''
In other words, the superstructure (read ideology) has
its
own autonomy and
Furthermore, the transformation at the level of superstructure
more complicated and difficult than the struggle to change the base.'*
specificity.
In addition, for
Marx "work"
is
(concrete labor) involves a dimension that
surpasses the mere practical value of transforming the world. In a passage in
The Economic and
Man
man
Political Manuscripts, he writes:
produces free from physical need and only truly produces when he
also fashions things according to the laws of beauty."
In light of the quote,
to the level of
its
it is
evident that
is
thus free
.
.
.
thus
Marx elevates "work" (concrete activity)
To Marx, work humanizes nature, as it
aesthetic dimensions.
engaged in the production of "beauty," and this fashioning of concrete labor
into an aesthetic product helps man to be at one with himself and with nature.
This, most assuredly, can only be realized within the domain of art. In the true
is
materialist concept of the world, therefore, art can serve as a
alienated labor. In the 1857 introduction to the Critique
Marx had
paradigm for non-
of Political Economy
further elucidated that
it is well known that certain periods of their Howering are out of all
proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation.'"
In the case of the arts,
Contemporary Marxist theoreticians share the same view of Marx and
Engels that the relationship of base and superstructure is one of interdependency and reciprocity. Most, like Marx and Engels, also accept the economic
situation to be the most fundamental because "... mankind must first of all eat,
drink, have shelter and clothing before it can pursue politics, science, art,
religion, etc."^' However, they prefer to interpret the economic base not as a
virtual object, and in a static way, but rather as a process. The prevailing
dogmatic interpretation that the historical process is somehow predictable and
predetermined
interpretation
is
11
viewed as too deterministic, and as a grave error of
which denies the relevance of
dialectical
an
investigation
regarded as the soul of Marxist interpretation.
Modern day Marxists also deny the idea that Marx or Engels ever
contemplated giving more emphasis than needed to the economic base. They
refer to the publication of some of his unknown writings which have come to
investigation that
light
is
from the 1930s as proof
complement the mature
man's power over nature has increased more in the
that his earlier writings
Marx.^^ In addition, since
last twenty years than it did during the
creative approaches to orthodox Marxism
The
line
of justification
is
Marxism contains within
moment
new conditions of thought and
very principle, infinite possibilities of development and
in history these make it possible to be fully conscious of
action.'^
Any dogmatic and mechanical
is
is
stated as follows,
itself, in its
renewal; and that at every
conceptual orthodoxy
twenty centuries the need for
also thought to be only pertinent.
last
interpretation of
thought of as denying the
Marxism and an undue
very essence of Marxian
dialectics.
For Marxism, neither the concept nor freedom
outside history: that
is
is
constituted and defined, once and for
outside men's works, outside
man
all,
considered in the development of
his history.^''
It is such a line of creative Marxism that identifies Ahhusser as the
most
advanced proponent of the theory of ideology in contemporary times. His
theory of ideology, as
consumption of
it
pertains to the sphere of cultural production
art, is quite
and
informative:
Ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world
In ideology men do
indeed express, not the relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way
they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence; this presupposes both a
real relation
A
and an "imaginary," "lived"
relation.^'
close reading of the text reveals various layers that constitute a theory of
what Althusser proposes is a dual aspect of ideology.
men to their world, and at the same time, ideology
which unites the "real" with the "imaginary/ lived" relation. Expounding on the
same issue in Lenin and Philosophy, he writes:
ideology. In general,
Ideology which connects
What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern
the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real
relations in
which they live."
12
The nature of
and
ideology, as non-deceptive
as a system in
It
will suffice to
own
its
know
right
is
and non-illusory but autonomous,
For Marx:
quite succinctly put forth in
very schematically that an ideology
is
rigour) of representation (images, myths, ideas or concepts,
a system (with its own logic and
depending on the case) endowed
with a historical existence and a role within a given society."'
For Marx also appears in a much clearer manner in
Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" where he distinguishes between two types of apparatuses used by the State to impose its
hegemony; i.e., the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State
Apparatus. ^^ Briefly stated, the function of the first is to secure power through
direct repressive means (army, police, etc.), whereas the Ideological State
The
advanced
thesis
in
Apparatus is a "call" for the "subject" to see himself in a world seemingly
created by himself. Accordingly, to Althusser: "all ideology hails or interpellates
concrete individuals as concrete subjects.
Just as Althusser acknowledges, once
autonomy of ideology
can begin to look
strictly
at
Most of
organizations.
been
as governed
on the
ideology, since
all
its
by
its
"^^
we
function and
its
relationship with other social
the foregoing discussion
theoretical plane.
theory(ies)
must
recognize the materiality and
own system of representation, then we
on
all
aspects of ideology has
What, we may ask,
is
the practical side of
finally be tested against this
requirement?
It
indeed at this level that a conjuncture must be sought between the
base/ superstructure model and the theory of ideology. And it is to this aspect
is
of the theory of ideology, as
it
pertains to the Third World, that
we must now
turn.
The development of Marxist thought up to now has, to a large extent,
depended on the experience of the post-industrial development of an urban
an experience, therefore, of a very different kind than that of the
Third World. Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, as theorists and practitioners
proletariat,
of the theory of ideology they espouse, speak to that Third World experience.
The two have developed a body of work which informs the political and
cultural practices of the Third
World
in a
more
expounded and advanced by the establishment
countries.
It
comments on
is
important, therefore, to
all
radical
way than
the theories
and Western
take notice of Fanon and CabraPs
Left of Eastern
aspects of the debate thus far outlined.
According to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, "Europe," precisely
because its grandeur has depended on imperialist robbery, "is literally the
creation of the Third World. "^° To both Fanon and Cabral, Europe, therefore,
cannot claim to inspire and assist colonial people towards their liberation.
They call for a ratification of two principles; a just reparation that is the
colonial peoples' due, and the establishment of a national cultural force that is
13
able to undergird and condition the development of national consciousness,
towards liberation.
The Third World ought not
preceded
own
their
it.
On
to be content to define itself in the terms of values
the contrar>', the underdeveloped countries ought to
particular values
concrete problem
we
and methods and a
up against
find ourselves
style
is
which
do
their
which have
utmost to find
shall be peculiar to them.
not that of a choice, cost what
between socialism and capitalism as they have been defined by
men
it
The
may,
of other continents and
of other ages."
the vanguard of revolutions.
upon the proletariat as
This has never been denied. Fanon and Cabral
look
For both, the burden of revolution
Traditional Marxist-Leninist thought has insisted
at this issue differently.
World
vested not in the proletariat,
is
compromised, but rather
in the
who
in the
they characterize as alienated and
peasantry which Cabral identifies
principal force behind the liberation
Third
movement."" Fanon
is
as,
"the
forthright in his
unequivocal convictions:
And
it
is
clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they
have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant outside the
the
first
among
class
system
is
the exploited to discover that only violence pays."
Frantz Fanon's theory of violence (Cabral, too, has theorized the need for
violence in the cause of freedom)^^ must be understood within the context of an
armed
which has become necessary as a
reaction against colonial violence. Both Fanon and Cabral, and particularly
Fanon, have been criticized for theoretical generalities and lack of precision,
but the truth of the matter is that both speak with one principal aim in mind, to
make revolution and not to aestheticize it.^"^
To Karl Marx and Althusser's definition of non-alienated "work" as
aesthetic activity in which man fashions himself as he fashions the world,
Fanon's response is much more radical, to the point, and quite instructive: "For
struggle for national liberation
the native, violence represents the absolute line of action.
man who
The
militant
is
also a
"^^
For Frantz Fanon, "work" (concrete labor) is an act of
anti-colonial and anti-imperialist violence. Fanon's theory is permeated with
this recurring issue. To him, the oppressed persons' "permanent dream is to
become the persecutor."^' Passage after passage, Fanon, in all his writings,
reiterates the theory of revolutionary violence as the brute answer to colonial
violence, and at the same time, as the expression and idiom of emancipatory
works.
self-determination for the colonized:
The colonized man
finds
his
enlightens the agent because
it
freedom
in
indicates to
and through violence. This
him the means and the end.^*
rule of
conduct
14
The Third World, through spokespersons Uke Frantz Fanon and Amilcar
Cabral, has developed
its
own
conceptualization of Marxist theory and praxis.
These conceptualizations deftly cut on the apex of the ongoing theoretical
discourse on ideology and
its
on Third World film practice
pages. Their theory of knowledge is the
influence
The extent of Fanon and Cabral's
will become evident in the following
operations.
theoretical
and
critical
nexus which
serves as a necessary prerequisite for our understanding of the subtle shift, not
only in the theory of ideology, but also in the manifestations of Third World
by film production.
To Cabral and Fanon, "culture," as a fruit of history, is likened to a
"weapon" in the struggle for independence, and to the Third Cinema
culture, as exemplified
filmmakers, the determinants of culture are no
Our time
less:
—
one of hypothesis rather than of thesis, a time of works in process unfinished,
unordered, violent works made with the camera in one hand and a rock in the other. Such
works cannot be assessed according to the traditional theoretical and critical canons. The
ideas of our film theory and criticism will come to life through inhibition-removing practice
is
and experimentation."
The Major Themes in Third Cinema
The various forms of oppression which
afflict
the core of thematic elements in Third Cinema.
validated only
and
oppression
It is
a cinema that
and aggressive opposition to oppression.
to a direct
struggles
World countries form
the Third
is
if
it
integrates
objectives with the aspirations, values,
its
social needs of the oppressed classes.
such that
thematic lines
is
it
Its
committed
purpose will be
is
penetrates
all
aspects of
However, the nature of
life.
To
differentiate
not characteristic of the Third Cinema. Instead,
issues of class, culture, religion, sex
and national
therefore, only for the purpose of analysis that
I
it
among
addresses
integrity simultaneously. It
now arbitrarily
is,
separate these
themes for discussion.
Class
The most
Cinema is that of class antagonism. The
Brickmakers by Jorge Silva and Marta Rodriguez is a synthesis of documentary filmmaking in its best tradition. The film focuses on the daily problems of a
poor family living in subhuman conditions in Colombia. Carlos Alvarez's
Colombia 70 is also strongly class oriented in its demonstration of poverty,
particularly when contrasted with lifestyles marked by excess.' The device of
contrast along class lines had been used by most Third World filmmakers.
In order that the struggle of Third World countries be successful, it is
recurrent theme in Third
essential that the people clearly identify the enemy(ies)
the ruUng classes of the imperialist countries
rather than
all
whites or
all
that the peoples of Third
who
and
see, first, that
oppress the Third World,
Europeans and Americans. Secondly, they must see
countries are also divided into classes; and
World
third, that the bourgeoisie will cling to
its
interests rather
than align
itself
with
national anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments and, therefore, that
inextricably tied
it is
up with the
it is
forces of oppression.
This concern with class conflict has two important consequences. First, it
draws a line of oppositions that is applicable internationally. Sambizanga, an
Angolan
film by Sara Maldoror,
is
an example of this orientation. In coming to
The Major Themes
16
in
Third Cinema
revolutionary consciousness, a character comes to realize that "there are no
whites, nor blacks, nor mulattoes but rich and poor." Secondly, the issue of
racism
viewed
is
in the
context of class antagonism. In Sambizanga a black
revolutionary dies while protecting a white comrade, and films like Soleil O,
The Other Franscisco and The Last Supper portray interracial alliances against
class oppressors.
have also occurred outside the world of fiction in the
history of Third Cinema. In Blood of the Condor, a film denouncing the Peace
Corps, the people who played the roles of Peace Corps members were real-life
members of the Peace Corps in Bolivia. They demonstrated their sympathy for
the goals of the film by agreeing to act in it. As a result of the impact of the film
Such
alliances
on audiences
in Boliva, the
Peace Corps was
later expelled
from that country.^
Culture^
Wherever imperialist cuhure penetrates, it attempts to destroy national culture
and substitute foreign culture; therefore, the struggle to preserve the cultural
make-up of a society also constitutes a major area of concern for Third World
filmmakers.
A significant contribution by the Third Cinema in this respect is in
the area of the aesthetics of liberation. Third
World filmmakers have
realized
the importance of incorporating traditional art forms to retain the distinctive
mass cuhure. Third World countries have two distinctively
The ruling classes emulate a culture co-opted by colonial and
flavor of popular
parallel cultures.
imperialistic values,
which
is
in direct conflict
with the culture of the people.
The recognition of a distinct popular culture unadulterated by foreign
influences came to Third World films long before direct political concerns
dominated their subject matters. An example is the work of Satyajit Ray in
India and Lester James Peries in Sri Lanka. As nationalism became the
dominant concern in post-independence India and Sri Lanka, Peries and Ray
turned to the village as the setting for their films feeling that it was the only
place where national culture had survived under colonialism. Though they
both have been charged with a "lack of political commitment" in their cinema,
they can be seen as the initiators of a concern with cultural identity in the Third
Cinema. Ray started his Apu trilogy as far back as 1956 when he made an
impact on world cinema with his Father Fanchali. The trilogy depicts the harsh
realities of rural life which finally succeed in destroying a family. In the same
year Peries made Rekawa, followed in 1963 by Gamperaliya {Changes in the
Village)
villages
which brought him wide recognition. Both films are set in Sinhalese
and express the same preoccupations with rural life as Ray's early
films.
In the colonized or neo-colonized countries of the Third
have always expressed their joy or despair
in music.
World
the people
Musical themes and songs
The Major Themes
in
Third Cinema
17
taken from the folk tradition figure in significant ways in the films of the Third
Cinema. Venceremos, a film from Chile by Pedro Chaskel, and Mahmoud
Doroudian's Blood Will Triumph Over the Sword from Iran were told
completely in song. Class oppositions are depicted by the juxtapositions
between musical themes. Lyrics often provide a commentary from the point of
view of the oppressed as they do in The Other Francisco by Sergio Giral or in
Mandabi, a film by the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene. In the Cuban film
Lucia, the traditional folk song "Guantanamera," is used to provide ironic
commentary in the third part of the film where a macho husband upsets the
community life of post-revolutionary Cuba. Antonio Das Mortes, by the late
Glauber Rocha of Brazil, is structured after a song about a rebel bandit
(cangaceiro).^ La Hora de Los Homos (The Hour of the Fwr«flc^5J juxtaposes
the Argentinean national anthem and its references to the eagle against shots of
a tiny bird in a cage inside the gloomy shanty of a prostitute.
Religion
The Chilean
The Promised Land, (La Tierra Prometida), by Miguel Littin,
bears many analogies to Biblical paradigms. The hero, Jose Duran, leads his
people much like Moses to a beautiful valley, the promised land, where they
will begin a new life. Duran is surrounded by followers in a fashion reminiscent
of Christ and his Apostles. One of them. Pin-stripe, recruits followers from a
near-by community using methods analogous to Peter's. The Virgin Mary is
represented as a woman in a double role smiling Mary of the poor and ugly
Mary of the rulers. Given the socialist perspective of the film, the biblical
references can only be seen as an attempt to take the symbols with which the
peasants have been trained to interpret the world under Catholicism and use
them to initiate a conflict between that training and the requirements of
revolutionary consciousness. Thus, when pamphlets announcing the socialist
revolution drop like manna from heaven, it is not to make a point of the
analogy per se, but to show the contradictory nature of a political event that
film
—
takes place within the deeply-rooted structures of religion. If that revolution
failed,
it
is
precisely because of the confluence of such mutually exclusive
ideologies.
The Last Supper, a recent Cuban film by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, also
makes use of biblical metaphors but in a different way. The twelve Apostles are
likened to twelve slaves chosen by a Christ/ aristocratic landowner figure, and
the Holy Week is marked by a revolt of the slaves and their subsequent
punishment. In drawing a dividing line between Christ and his Apostles, the
film examines the contradictions between the teachings of Christianity on the
one hand and the practice of Christianity on the other and questions the
possibility of identification with the teachings in
view of the actual relations of
The Major Themes
18
in
Third Cinema
production (slavery). Both The Last Supper and The Promised
Land
see
dominant ideology from which the oppressed classes must
break away, and both examine the profound impact of that ideology and the
difficulty involved in making such a break.
Instead of discarding religion as the "opium of the masses," therefore,
Third World filmmakers attempt to give religion or spirituality a special
significance in their works. Sembene's tender treatment of the religious elders
Christianity as the
Emitai recognizes their democratic procedures with admiration, yet shows
them lacking the consciousness to understand their predicament. The filmin
maker
one of the elders by depicting his inner
feelings through apparitions, visions and folk rituals.
In One Day I Asked by Julia Alvarez, a woman praying in the church
intones, "One thing is sure, he (God) eats at the boss' table. "The delicate film /I
Thousand and One Hands, by the Moroccan Souhel Ben Baraka, uses a
pilgrimage as a device through which to make a political comment about the
reveals the transformation of
condition of the
Moroccan
people.
Sexism
Another important recurring theme in Third Cinema is that of the struggle for
the emancipation of women. In most Third World films, from Vietnam to
Argentina, from Cuba to Angola and from Mozambique to China, we witness
the
integral
participation
of
women
in
all
aspects of the struggle for
decolonization and liberation, including their participation in actual armed
struggle. In films
Grave
at
such as The Long Chain (India), Double
Dimbaza (South
Day (Mexico),
Last
Sambizanga (Angola) Ceddo and Emitai
/?ei/ (Peoples' Republic of China), One Way or Another
Africa),
The East is
(Cuba) and Aziza (Tunisia) the issue of the role of women in bringing about
social change is one of the most essential themes and is integral to the practices
of Third Cinema.^
In dealing with sexism one is confronted with the larger issue of the
liberation of all humanity, not just women. The liberation of women from
stereotypical roles presupposes, therefore, that men must also be liberated
from their confining macho roles. Perhaps the best example of how this is
handled is the Cuban film Lucia, which is in three parts. The film illustrates the
role of women during three periods in Cuban history. It speaks of the changing
nature of women's roles, depending upon their class background and the
structure of the society in which they live. The film's tripartite structure stresses
the crucial transition periods as Cuba passes from feudalism to capitalism and
finally to socialism. Lucia in all three roles represents Cuba's growing
awareness of her problems and achievements. The first Lucia easily succumbs
to the charms of the amoral Spaniard colonizer, Raphael. The second Lucia
(Senegal),
The Major Themes
in
Third Cinema
19
shakes off her romantic naivete and faces her problem directly (as witnessed in
the final shot). The third Lucia realizes that even after the revolution machoism
has not been totally solved. Her husband represents the malcontents who speak
^
as if they accept Cuba's socialist revolution but do not accept it in their hearts.
Last Grave at
Dimbaza
is
also an important film that illustrates the
treatment of women and the breakdown of the family unit. The South African
government realizes that in order to survive it must break the communication
and, consequently, the support afforded black South Africans by the family
Women
men
immense burden
they carry. It is a tribute to them that the government deems it necessary to
separate and divide them. Last Grave at Dimbaza shows perhaps the ultimate
in the physical as well as psychological stress of women. The hardships women
unit.
as well as
are seen to be strong despite the
suffer include not only being unable to live with their
own
families but being
most menial tasks around the clock.*
relegated to the
Double Day, a collective film made with the assistance of an American
women's group, addresses the issue of double duty that women are forced to do
at work and at home while only getting paid for half of their work. The film was
made by
a group of
Conference
in
women
Mexico
attending the 1975 International
City.
Women's Year
Except for the cameraperson, the crew was
composed entirely of women and that became a significant factor in achieving
closeness and trust with the women being interviewed, while at the same time
providing a political perspective that was defined by women themselves.'
Armed
Struggle
Finally, the
the
home
theme of armed struggle against imperialism and
front
is
class
enemies on
repeatedly taken up, particularly in Latin American films.
armed struggle has become the subject of
heated debates and raging controversies. A Luta Continua from Mozambique,
Victory to Victory from the Peoples' Republic of China, and Playa Giron from
Cuba all portray armed struggle as an integral part of the National Liberation
struggle as a whole. Brazil: No Time for Tears, Tupamaros and The Traitors
portray armed intervention as a subversive activity initiated by extremist
groups outside of any mass mobilization.
In calling for immediate armed intervention, most of these films provoked
retaliation from governments that were not sympathetic to their perspective, to
the point that the screenings had to be guarded by armed militants. The
arguments for or against the armed struggle proposed in these films are by no
means homogeneous. The answers to questions such as the appropriateness of
the historical moment for armed insurrection or the leadership and the tactics
chosen vary greatly according to political perspectives and the contexts in
The
position that films adopt towards
which the questions are
raised.'"
20
The Major Themes
The
single
in
Third Cinema
theme that unites Third World
films is that of oppression. In
dealing with the issues of class, culture, religion and sexism, these films are
making a
call to
Their concern
are taken up.
is
action whether in the form of
with social change and
it is
armed
struggle or otherwise.
in this context that all the
themes
Revolutionary Films
Toward a
Definition
According to Jorge Sanjines, director of Blood of the Condor and The
Courage of the People: "The work of revolutionary cinema must not limit itself
to denouncing, or to the appeal for reflection; it must be a summons for
not satisfied with merely presenting the misery and
suffering of the Quechua Indians, but takes a larger view by examining the
Sanjines
action."'
mechanisms
is
work
which are the causes for these circumstances.
Sanjines's concern is to single out and expose the guilty party, as in the
denunciation of the Peace Corps in Blood of the Condor. Faithful to his theory
that "exposing the truth is the most revolutionary cultural act," he proceeds to
at
in society
document the sterilization of Quechua Indians without their knowledge and
consent and to implicate the Bolivian government in its cooperation with
American agencies. The film became such an effective weapon that the
government saw a need to ban it; had it not been for popular support the film
would not have been authorized for distribution or exhibition.
Miguel
that, "there
it
Littin, the distinguished
is
no such thing
Chilean filmmaker (now exiled) argues
is revolutionary in itself," but
as a film that
becomes such (revolutionary) through the contract that
principally through
its
it
estabHshes with
its
public and
influence as a mobilizing agent for revolutionary action.' [See also
Appendix A.]
To
Littin,
masses.
subtle
The
difference between the positions of Littin
and very
autonomy
becomes revolutionary only when it grips the
and Sanjines is quite
Sanjines's theory of revolutionary film suggests an
therefore, a film
significant:
power of the film as "summons for action," whereas Littin's
suggests that a film must first be internalized by its audience before it can be
crowned "revolutionary." For Sanjines, then, the aim is direct action; for Littin
it is
first
in the
a gripping contact with the masses, then action.
Revolutionary Films
22
concern was well demonstrated
Littin's theoretical
in his film,
El Chacalde
Nahueltoro (The Jackal ofNahueltoro) where he describes the brutal slaying of
six people by an illiterate peasant from Southern Chile. As the most wellattended film in the history of Chilean cinema. El Chacal served as a common
cultural reference among Chileans. The controversy over the confessed mass
murderer became a catalyst for discussions of, among other issues, the relation
between society and the individual. The film also raises the issue of the
ineffectiveness of prison reform. Consistent with Littin's theory of revolu-
tionary film. El Chacal was such a controversial film in 1969 that according to
various reports every Chilean was affected by the case of the unemployed and
peasant criminal. According to Littin, his film
illiterate
because
it
gripped the masses and because
Littin's political intentions
First to
Chilean
deny a decaying
who
is
Ousmane Sembene,
political
It's
became a topic for national debate.
decay and
a social decay.
who
And
doesn't realize
it
to the middle-class
or doesn't want to realize
the foremost African filmmaker, defines film
not after having read
Marx
And
that's all.
more
it.'
in
wrong
in society
.
.
.
artist
exclusive way.
revolution.
his earlier
Littin,
To him
He denies
All the
is
to
denounce what he
but, he argues, "to give solutions escapes the artist."'
the film's role as a denouncer that he sees
Unlike Sanjines or
a revolution
Before the end of an act of
it."
According to Ousmane Sembene, "the role of the
,"
make
or Lenin that you go out and
just a point of reference in history.
creation society usually has already surpassed
It is in
then direct
it
terms than in revolutionary manner:
works are
sees
revolutionary
were succinctly put as follows:
official state ...
tied to this
it
is
its
revolutionary potential.
Sembene does not use the term "revolutionary" in an
a film can be revolutionary without creating an actual
a direct relationship between film and revolution.
works, Mandabi, (Money Order), concludes with
this
One of
statement by
postman Bah: "nous changerons tout cela" (we will change all this).
Although the declaration is not "a summons for action," it is, nevertheless, a
call for reflection or a forewarning of what may follow unless radical social
change takes place. The assumption is clear a time will come when out of
despair the masses will be forced to rise up in arms. All of Sembene's films close
with a warning not necessarily stated but implied in the way he constructs his
film and in the way it leaves certain questions unanswered.
Regarding Mandabi favorable reception in Dakar, Senegal, Sembene
the
—
's
remarked:
I
had no
belief that after people
liked the film
and talked about
saw
it
...
make
it
they would go out and
I
participated in their awareness.*
a revolution
.
.
.
people
Revolutionary Films
23
Approaches to Distribution and Exhibition
way that will bring about social change has made
filmmakers who adhere to the Third Cinema aware of the necessity to engage in
alternative methods of production, distritibution and exhibition. They came to
realize that it is not enough to make a film with a revolutionary perspective, or
The need
to address issues in a
to simply express a political opinion, but that the whole institution within
which filmmakers and audiences interact must undergo a radical change.
The Argentinian group Cinema de la Base (makers of The Traitors) argues
that when a film is produced and distributed by a politically motivated film
group or organization direct political benefits and feedback will necessarily
follow from the experience; otherwise it will become a "meaningless exercise in
artistic expression."^ In a similar vein, Solanas and Getino criticize traditional
approaches to the distribution and exhibition of films:
The models of production,
and exhibition continued to be those of Hollywood
had not yet become the vehicle for a clearly
drawn differentiation between bourgeois ideology and politics. A reformist policy, as
manifested in dialogue with the adversary, in coexistence, and in the relegation of national
contradictions to those between two supposedly unique blocs the USSR and the USA
was and is unable to produce anything but a cinema within the System itself."
distribution,
precisely because, in ideology
and
politics, films
—
The consensus among Third World filmmakers seems to be that a single
work cannot instigate action or cause social change. However, flooding the
market with films of a similar cultural and political intent can eventually be
effective. To this end African filmmakers have founded the Pan African
Federation of Cineasts (FEPACI). Some of the objectives of the Federation
are:^
a.
to generally
promote the African film industry, to develop the
part of education, development and a cultural,
cinema as
independence of the African peoples
b.
to develop a sense of solidarity
among African
cultural aspects of the
social
and economic
film-makers, in order to enable them to
join their efforts with a view to defending their moral, professional
and
political
interests
c.
to
promote distribution and commercialization of African
films throughout the
African continent as well as on a worldwide scale
The need
an operative organization with respect to alternative channels of
distribution and exhibition have prompted African filmmakers to establish, as
recently as March 1981, the Committee of African Cineasts (C.A.C.). The
stated aim of the committee is: "To develop a common strategy in the areas of
production, co-production and distribution of films." The new strategy calls
for
Revolutionary Films
24
According to the
spokesperson of the committee, the Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo:
for distributing African films in packages of ten or twenty.
home, distributing and producing companies appeared
but
only on paper. From one session to another, the most militant, incredibly persistent, were
without organizing the distribution of
again and again putting their finger on the problem
'"
the African films in Africa, there cannot be an African Cinema.
Everywhere,
in Africa, at
.
.
Littin, too, sees his
work
as part of Brazil's
.
.
.
.
Cinema Novo, Argentina's Cine
Liberation and Colombia's Cine Nuevo," and believes that distributing twenty
new
films a year will have a greater
chance of effecting change.
Distribution also has been taken up in radical ways in an effort to reach
A
measure of
Sanjines's dedication to the political function of films is his method and format
of screenings. He takes to the field armed with a generator, projector and print,
presenting the film like a modern day Incan travelling storyteller:
would not normally go
the kind of audience that
Showing
before an audience
it
approach.
We
various characters. This
today
composed of
had a narrator who
—there are
still
is
a tradition dating
storytellers
we even
Indians,
tried
an altogether
different
recounted the story by showing photographs of the
first
all
the
who journey from
discussed the story with the audience
to a theater.
— and,
way back
to the Incas
village to village.
showed
finally,
and
it
still
exists
Then, afterwards, we
the film.
It's
a question of
educating people unused to seeing movies at the same time as attempting to create a national
cinema.
And
Sembene
whose behalf
there seems to be so
little
time
'^
.
.
.
also acknowledges the value of direct contact with those
He, too, takes a projector and other
are made.
his films
accessories to the countryside to screen his films.
takes a Polaroid camera
on
Ousmane Sembene
often
when he goes to villages to shoot a film, and in order to
demystify cinema he invites people
who marvel at the motion picture camera to
try out the Polaroid themselves. Instant reaction then allows
explain the principles of
how photographic images
Sembene
to
are made.
Approaches to Style
Third Cinema films, beside having
in
common
the portrayal of the conflict
between progressive and reactionary forces, also try to expand the boundaries
of cinematic language and devise new stylistic approaches appropriate to their
revolutionary goals.
Where
a central character
is
used, the viewpoint goes
beyond that of the individual to develop a sense of the relationship between the
individual and the community, ofthecollective, and of history. A closer look at
these
films
will
reveal
some
characteristics
progressive films and others that are
that are shared
with
new and unique developments.
many
Revolutionary Films
25
must be emphasized that the alternative film style we are examining is as
unique for the Third World viewer as it is for the Westerner. Distribution
politics and cultural saturation with traditional cinema has modeled film lovers
It
so that they passively accept whatever the screen shows;
i.e.,
audiences are
supposed to be passive consumers of a finished product. The Third Cinema
however, is based on provocation and participation, and it must induce
audiences to act, rather than remain passive.
La Hora de Los Homos (The Hour of the Furnaces) goes
other revolutionary films injoltingitsaudienceby the
the explicit and systematic
'^
The
way
that
it
further than most
dynamism of its style and
addresses political and ideological
cinema" or "cinema like a gun" and,
indeed, its images have the force of bullets from an automatic. Coupled with its
montage approach is its division into thirteen chapters or "cells" which makes
its tremendous amount of information easier to understand. The film also uses
written statements, quotations or slogans to highlight key moments of the
narration. Thus, while exploring powerful stylistic approaches. La Hora de
Los Homos tries primarily to communicate facts and figures that will raise the
issues.
film has been called "guerrilla
consciousness of
its
audience.
In Sanjines's opinion, "given the experience, shrewdness
no time, either for ideal pursuits
There is only time to be responsible
of the enemy, one must conclude that there
of estheticism or for personal realizations.
and
and covetousness
is
consistent."''*
The Indian audience,
for
example
—
still
almost entirely innocent of cinema
is
only
now
discovering films like Blood of the Condor; and thus the question of influence, of script
originality, of technical perfection, so
important to them. They are interested
have returned to see
After making
my
films
Mandabi
important to moviegoers
in the story, in the
in
Europe,
images themselves.
is
not very
Many
of them
more than once."
in
a parable form, using a great deal of camera
intimacy with the protagonist, the use of the mass hero in Sembene's Emitai,
achieved with shots from a distance which do not linger on any one face long
enough to enable the audience to become familiar with it, represents a use of
camera style for the purpose of inciting unified action. Like Sanjines, Sembene
also feels that the development of truly African creativity, free of foreign
influence,
is
a revolutionary act by itself
Emitai (The Angry God) is one of the factors underlying the
psychological and political impact of the film. The language used in the film is
The
style of
Dialo, a minor Senegalese dialect, and
much
of the film relies
upon expressive
The film is most poetic as it weaves its story in a film language that is its
own. The deliberately slow pace is characteristic of its style, and long shots are
used almost exclusively throughout the film. Sembene never commits the
images.
Revolutionary Films
26
mistake of extracting the characters from their environmem through close-ups;
makes
instead he
the environment an integral part of the story.
Emitai presents one of the best and clearest views of the raising of
consciousness. The film gives a compact portrait of the key factors leading to
how
revolution and
the revolution
is
enacted. All the interrelationships
between oppressor and oppressed are clearly delineated both in human and
economic terms. The process of how small events push consciousness another
step, closer to action,
is
well illustrated in the film.
an interplay of images and action which subsequently
creates another image and action. The scene of women and men hoeing in the
Sembene
creates
green rice paddies of the rainy season, the scene of women carrying rice across
the field in the yellow brown dry season contrasts radically with the scene of the
women as hostages of the colonizers. '^ Several times in the film the camera runs
up and down over an inanimate object, a big
the sacred forest where the elders confer and
the
women
utilizes
the actual sounds
environment. The sound of a
between the men
Sembene
it
where
also signifies the village
are kept as hostages in the sun.
Sembene
ting
village tree. This tree symbolizes
in this
way
of the village and surrounding
drum is used throughout the film for communica-
in the sacred forest
and the women hostages
in the village.
reinforces the feeling of solidarity so evident in the images
—
perhaps a denial of "laid-in" music and sound pure
silence and pure sound which in many ways is a revolutionary departure from
traditional Hollywood forms of expression, i.e. "piped-in" music or a catchy
of the villagers. This
is
Ousmane Sembene:
sound-track. According to
[a
director] has music for everything in [his] films
European
wind, music
elements speak for
sensations of these elements
The
— music for rain, music for the
moments of emotion, but he doesn't know how to make these
themselves. He doesn't feel them. But in our films we can make the
for tears, music for
role of
felt
sound or
without denaturing [them]"
silence in
Ousmane Sembene's
films
is
quite
by way of illustration in an interview he gave he cites a scene from
Emitai where the women were forced by the French commandant to sit in the
significant;
sun:
The only sound you can hear
however, there was wind.
just to prove
the sound of the rooster
woman who had
in silence.
But
it
and the weeping of the
children;
I wanted
arms were
did not look for music to ask the public to participate.
by gestures that the
burdened. The
always
I
is
was a
women
were
tired, their legs
were
the sun shining in her eyes, the two
silence.
.
.
tired, their
who were sleeping—
which was speaking.
could have had a voice coming from outside, but I would have been lying. For example,
there were two children who were walking along to bring water to the women. When they
I
crossed the woods, you couldn't see their
leaves.
legs,
but you could hear, very clearly, the dead
For me, the search for a cinema of silence
is
there.*
27
Revolutionary Films
In stylistic terms
Sembene
uses Eisenstein's theory of the syntax of inner
speech as the basis for manipulating the imagery and sensual structure of his
films. His films, therefore, do not rely exclusively on the story line but upon a
whole series of poetically assembled impressions. This required Sembene not
only to pace the film slowly but also to develop a non-uttered syntax that
Africans can intuitively digest.
As he
said:
We have to find a language that comes from image and gesture
film-maker
symbols
if
Sembene
different
is
to find a
way
that
is
his
own and
to find his
The work
own
for the African
symbols, even to create
he has to."
projects his audience into the environment in a style that
from most contemporary Latin American filmmakers. This
is
is
quite
because
African filmmakers face especially difficult obstacles, namely, a diversity of
compared with Latin America where one language is common
everywhere (except in Brazil). The wide variety of ethnic and cultural
languages, as
backgrounds
in Africa,
with differences even within the boundaries of one
communicate with a large audience. Also,
audiences in Africa have not been exposed to cinema as much as Latin
Americans, and local film production began only a decade or two ago. All these
factors make it impossible for most African filmmakers to be as experimental
in style as their Latin American counterparts. The common cuhural and
religious backgrounds of audiences and the longer history of film production in
Latin America enable filmmakers there to take more chances with new forms.
Most African films, therefore (Pathway to the Stars by Antonio Ole, an
excellent film tribute to the first President of Angola; Fimbo Ya Mnyonge on
the theme of Tanzanian Ujamaa; and Haile Gerima's Harvest: 3000 Years from
Ethiopia [see chapter 6]), all share the qualities of slow pacing and careful plot
development. Whereas the Latin American films tend to attack and revolutionize the existing style, the African films, on the other hand, tend to engage in
building a new style from the ground up. For instance, a barrage of imagery
and a fast juxtaposition of music, words, photographs, advertisements (as in
the Latin American cinema La Hora de Los Homos) is not common in African
films. Of course, exceptions exist; for instance, Med Hondo's Soleil O and his
most recent film West Indies employ highly experimental forms. Hondo's
camera moves wherever it pleases; he almost paints with it, trying even to
nation,
makes
it
difficult
to
penetrate man's inner consciousness.
One way
to distinguish
between the
style of
African and Latin American
films is in the use of hand-held cameras; these are often used in Latin American
films but rarely in African films, again with some exceptions. The camera style
most African films
observer. There is very
in
is
extremely
little
solid; the point
of view
is
that of a
mute
camera movement beyond a few simple pans which
Revolutionary Films
28
are not unlike the turning of the head. This style creates a sense of veracity
about what we see and hear (and running parallel to the camera, the sound is as
simple as possible). African films, in the main, are governed by slow, long
takes, wide shots and a repetition of scenes. When Latin American filmmakers
utilize this kind of shot, it serves to make an ideological statement. In the
African context, the slow rhythms approximate the Africans' experience of
time,
and
this helps
viewers to appreciate context
— since we experience what
they experience.^"
To keep
the analysis
of the remaining films in this section within
and III) will be given a detailed
treatment, while the others will be discussed or mentioned in passing when
appropriate. The choice of Lucia as a prime example of the muhifaceted nature
of revolutionary films is predicated upon the following: (a) it is the most seen
and internationally heralded film of its kind, as the number of awards it has
won indicates [Italian Producers Association Golden Globe award, FIPRESCI
(International Film Festival), 1969; to mention a few]; (b) it has three parts,
manageable proportions only Lucia
(parts
I,
II
representing three different but consecutive eras, each part able to stand as a
film in
itself; (c)
it
has a complex structure and offers great and rich rewards
and thematically. The
stylistically
insights gained
from Lucia can be applied to
other films.
Lucia
is
a trilogy and
its
development of consciousness
sections represent three crucial
in
Cuban
unrelated except for the presence of a
life is
history.
The
moments
in the
sections of the film are
woman — always named
Lucia
— whose
and Cuba share.
and another twenty-seven years
deeply affected by the historical circumstances that she
Thirty-eight years pass between parts
I
and
II,
between parts II and III. Lucia, 1895, is a fragile Cuban woman, approaching
middle age, whose brother is fighting against the Spaniards in the War of
Independence. Lucia, 1933, is a girl from a bourgeois family who falls in love
with a revolutionary during the revolution against the dictator Machado.
new found consciousness
for her "macho" or domineering husband. The first two Lucias come
upper classes classes which no longer exist in Cuba. The third Lucia
Lucia, "196?," finds herself in a battle between her
and love
from the
is
—
a product of the revolution, though
suffering of the
first
it
should be pointed out that
the earlier husbands die at the end: Lucia, 1895,
she
literally crucifies
who
it
is
the
two Lucias which has raised her consciousness. (Both of
him; Lucia, 1933,
is left
is
betrayed by her husband and
alone and pregnant by a husband
has dragged her along in his search for ideals.) In this
way the three Lucias
— one leads to the next and each one gives
are consciousness-raising
a reason for the existence of the other — so that
are united by an invisible connection
all
films connected to the final goal of the liberation of
itself.
women and
the revolution
Revolutionary Films
29
matched by three different visual styles. For the
1895 Lucia high-contrast and high-key lighting is accompanied by camera
movements circling around characters. These movements are either slow and
The
three segments are
world of the upper-class, or frenetic hand-held shots
with wide-angle lens distortion, describing the world of outside (Fernandina).
The 1933 Lucia uses little camera movement and a more traditional shooting
style, along with a lower contrast. The third part deviates from both by using
deliberate, describing the
normal contrast and a mixture of movements that maintains a normal pace
throughout.
Lucia creates a sense of historical development with its three stories, each
of which reflect a different stage of revolution. The consciousness of each
historical class is conveyed through the style of each segment. The main
characters in each section are not only explored in relation to those closest to
them but
While love relationships are very
sensitively explored, the primacy of social and political forces at work are
affirmed. The first Lucia unwittingly betrays her country and her brother by
ignoring the political situation when she immerses herself in a love affair with
Rafael, who she at least suspects is on the enemy side. The second Lucia has a
positive relationship with Aldo, but they are torn apart by the force of political
events, both having achieved an understanding of these events. The third Lucia
and her husband discover that their love for each other is not sufficient even to
in relation to society as a whole.
preserve their relationship, unless he participates with her in the collective
effort to destroy reactionary lifestyles.
There are endless ways of interpreting and reinterpreting Lucia without
ever depleting the well of insight that the film provides. (See the following
want to concentrate here on the problem of where to place Lucia in
the history of cinema and also comment on some of the film's stylistic
diagram.)
I
innovations. In Lucia,
1
895, there are several sequences recalling the silent film
which "wild," or non-sync, sound is used, as well as the kind of
overdramatized performances that often marked the early silent cinema. For
instance, the rape of Fernandina by soldiers and the sugar-mill sequences with
Rafael are overdramatized with exaggerated gestures. The editing in Lucia I is
fairly traditional but in certain scenes special arrangements of shots are
utilized. One sequence in the very last few shots of Lucia I needs to be
in
recalled
mad
— the scene just before
frenzy for Rafael, an old
thoughts and
Lucia
woman
kills
Rafael.
in front
proceeds to the square, the music gives
way
is
searching in a
of a cathedral seems to read her
her, unsolicited, that Rafael
tells
As Lucia
is
in the square.
As Lucia
to the abrupt introduction of a
steady crescendo of congas leading into a native Afro-Cuban rhythm. At the
conclusion of part
is
the drumbeats are heard as Lucia stabs her lover and as she
away and Fernandina
Both Lucia and Fernandina
stage represent the deceit and rape of Cuba by Spain. This parallel has
carried
at this
I
enters the frame.
30
Revolutionary Films
A
Breakdown of Lucia
Revolutionary Films
31
upon the ambiguity of the cause for which she and her husband were
fighting. The flashback device reinforces the feeUngthat although Aldo's ideals
were unselfish, he was not able to foresee the fact that Machado's death and his
overthrow were not enough to change the system. Aldo was a victim of an
reflect
uncontrollable chain of events
— hence, the appropriate choice of the flashback
device.
The score of Lucia II is similar to Lucia I except that here the music never
reaches the same level of orchestration. The grandiose melodies that underscore the aristocratic family and the love relationship in Lucia
are at odds in
I
At the company party the music played by the orchestra is distinctly
Western it represents a corrupting influence which misguides the people, for
as it is played the party turns into something of an orgy with striking close-up
shots to emphasize the decadence. Toward the end of the film the music gives
way to steady drumbeats, as in Lucia I, representing, perhaps, the coming
Lucia
II.
—
storm.
In Lucia III Solas uses a different stylistic approach: the repression of
and the decadence of the thirties (Lucia II) are no
Rather the focus here is on the changing awareness of the
Victorian times (Lucia
longer the target.
sixties.
Again, style in
I)
this part
shown. Solas views Lucia
Socialist Cuba:
With
political
provided for
III
is
used to
reflect the historical
as representing the real crisis in present-day
oppression gone, basic material needs
all,
period being
nothing seems to stand
in the
satisfied,
way of
the
education and health care
new
socialist state.
Nothing
except vestiges of centuries-old oppression which cannot be erased by governmental decree.
The ideology of the
old order concerning political and economic organization can be easily
replaced, but not the ideology ruling personal relationships.
deeply
embedded
personal of relationships, that
The
emphasis
acting in Lucia
is
The hierarchic social structure is
most difficult to supplant when
^'
between a man and woman.
in the people. It
III is
is
more
lighthearted
—
it
is
placed on Lucia's role as part of a collective
interacting with others.
The
style of
humor
it
concerns the most
a comedy. Here the
— she
is
mostly shown
suggests a feeling of optimism
The song serves as a festive voice-over,
encouraging us to think about the meaning of the process taking place. The
musical accompaniment is simple; temple blocks and conga drums are used
repeatedly to accentuate the melody carried on by the guitar. In this segment of
the trilogy, Cuba has come fully into her own and the folk song "Guantanamera" helps relate the political change to a popular Cuban culture.
The uses of anticipation in Lucia also represent a non-illusionistic cinema
that everything will turn out all right.
which the intentions of the filmmaker are not obscured. Solas seems to urge
us to be aware of how the film produces meaning, how it goes beyond a simple
narrative, and how immanent meaning is, in fact, accessible. He makes his
in
Revolutionary Films
32
viewers
into
thinkers
expressed not only in
and active receptors of ideology. Anticipation is
each segment of Lucia but in the continuity from one
episode to another. In Lucia
window
(Lucia
(i.e.,
Lucia
Lucia
III);
of a young
girl
III
II);
I
at the
there
is
a brief
end of Lucia
anonymous
II,
shot of a child in a
the protagonist
ends with the arrival of a mythical Lucia
is
in the
pregnant
personage
with a goat, projecting us into the future {Lucia IV).
The filmmaker's use of such anonymous
shots as a device of anticipation
^^
Lucia
gives a sense of the inevitablility of the historical process.
I
and Lucia II
from our hindsight into those historical periods. But
Lucia III does not appear to us from this perspective since we have no historical
hindsight; the inevitability here comes rather from the filmmaker's ideological
position. He expresses undoubting faith in the triumph of equality between
men and women over male chauvinism. Lucia, therefore, is an excellent
example and the epitome of revolutionary style in film as well as revolution
derive this inevitability
itself
The
film that seems both to attack conventional film style
culture the
most
is
The Promised Land from
and
utilize local
Chile. This film deals with a rural
population, the original source of religion, myth, symbolism and ballad. The
Promised Land
is
a folk film which depicts a historical situation in 1930 in a
style reminiscent of the
legendary versions of historical events that are part of
indigenous cultural tradition. The film
is
also an allegory for the peaceful road
to socialism advocated by the Popular Unity
government of Allende. The
filmmaker shows a magnificent "prophetic clairvoyance" in the
way
the film
is
informed with the internal problems facing Chile from 1971 to 1973.
Stylistically, Littin uses a subjective viewpoint in The Promised Land as he
did in El Chacal.
in
The flashback
narrative of Jorge in El Chacal was also applied
The Promised Land, except that here the entire movie
is
the flashback of an
man who survived the "revolution" of the 1930s. In the film he appears as a
young man called Chirigua. The narrative is told as if it were passed down as
old
legend with the inclusion of folk songs, ballads and mysticism. According to
Littin:
We observe with concern a certain tendency toward
American cinema
attitude.
Rather
let
picturesqueness at certain levels of Latin
Let us not exhibit folklore with demagogic pride, with a celebrative
us exhibit
it
as a cruel denunciation, as a painful testimony to the level at
which the people have been forced to retain
their
power
to artistic creation.''
According to Littin the film can also be viewed as a critique of popular culture,
hence the two Virgin Marys in the film: one for the landowning class and one
for the peasants. The political assumption is that religion can be used to
oppress as well as to strengthen. This dialectical view, which sees religious
figures essentially as symbols that can be used by any class to foster its own
Revolutionary Films
interests, causes the Virgin del
Carmen
to be seen in
an ambivalent
33
light as the
patron saint of the nation as well as patron saint of the armed forces. The
self-
no longer appears manipulative or
obscure but can be seen as a consciousness-forming exploration and a critique
of the cultural codes which have gripped the popular class. This serves as a
distancing device, eliciting an intellectual and critical response instead of
appealing purely to the emotions. Robert Scott, commenting on the distancing
employed in the film, writes:
conscious use of mythic motif, therefore,
Miguel
Littin has in fact created a text in crisis, a filmic statement in
emotional, even
same time, a
points and destroys
illusionistic, epic narrative but, at the
analysis intersects the narrative at specific crisis
are "designated" only to be "deconstructed"
codes
which
parallel lines of
parallel line of formal
it.
The
basic narrative
by the formal inner workings of the film's
technique. This constant interplay of emotion and intellect forms a continuum of inner
which take place both
collisions
way,
now
that way.
The
The Promised Land as a
in a
number of ways,
(a)
result
in the text
is
and
in the subject (spectator);
a synthesis of extreme
power and
clear ideological statement
it is
able to
show
commune;
strength; (c)
it
(b)
it
are pulled this
seems extremely
effective
the potential of peasants to govern
themselves, particularly in the lengthy sequence that shows
the
we
clarity ..."'*
demonstrates that the people can rely
them cultivating in
on their own united
portrays the tremendous will and courage of the peasants in their
How, then, does the film criticize Allende's Chile, and what
which
the film serves to comment on the country? Miguel
is the context
Littin emphasizes that a revolution cannot be carried out from the top.
defense of Pamilla.
in
is a distinct difference in attitude between one who speaks to the public from a balcony
and those who work with and among the people. So we think that as we cease speaking from
the balcony, and speak from within the struggles of the people, with all the richness and
There
dynamics that
The
this implies,
we, ourselves, are being transformed.''
red plane that arrives in Pamilla and announces the triumph of Socialism
symbolic of the message. The peasants had not taken part
in the
is
change being
proclaimed; they were not seriously taken into account until after the switch to
They were not provided with a revolutionary ideology or
Thus the revolution was short-lived because it did not
involve the masses as active participants. Littin puts it more bluntly;
socialism was made.
viable organization.
We
will make the people understand how
The words "revolution" and "Imperialism" have been
used so much that they now don't know one from the other. I'm not interested in speaking an
elitist language
I want to reach the people. So my problem is to convey these ideas.'*
have to find the images and words which
imperialism affects their daily
—
lives.
Revolutionary Films
34
The
point of The Promised
crisis
Land comes
in a confrontation
between
and the bourgeoisie at Huique, a town the peasants want to
Uberate. Jose Duran emerges as the leader of the peasants. First, the acquisition
of the land, and then the acquisition of manufactured goods, points the way to
the overall control of the economy and the nation. The intent
the larger issue
the peasants
—
of the film
is
not to describe a defeat but to teach the value of constant struggle
means taking up arms. In so doing The Promised Land becomes an
agent of social revolution in which defeat can turn into victory.
The style of popular legend, where "poetic licence" is permissible, is
precariously balanced between the real and the unreal. Jose Duran's leadership
even
is
if
it
not the root cause of the action
historical necessity
one.
He
— he does not make "history" he only serves
— therefore, the decision to march to Huique
helps to rally
enough momentum
not a private
to turn verbal complaint into
physical action. This being his function as a hero, he
private terms. His personality
is
is
never portrayed in
defined only in terms of his social actions.
is
The
They are legendary
figures
here as a sounding board for the expression of the people's conscious
will. It
same principles apply to all
whose deeds are their only definition.
The appearance of the Virgin is a deviation from realism. It is accentuated
by a series of jump cuts during which the action is repeated. Tradition appears
the other characters.
was
no supernatural
stated earlier that the metaphysical appearances have
function in the course of events in this film.
The personification of supernatural
forces has a long tradition with the people
who need
to.
The various
scenes in which the Virgin appears
precisely because she appears as a
woman
a concrete image to relate
become
less
metaphysical
dressed in peasant costume.
Another example of a popular interpretative stance is the cut to a mental
image of the Huique bourgeoisie as it would have been seen through a peasant's
eyes. During an orgiastic party at Huique there is a shot of a stereotypically
dressed group of representatives of the bourgeoisie laughing at the peasants.
Finally, during the massacre, the people do not die "realistically." To the
sounds of few shots, whole families collapse. Their fall does not attempt to
convince us of their agonizing death. It is a legendary way of telling how
helpless they were and how massive was their fall. Then comes a new level of
—a
where the slaughter is overemphasized. Blood flows in grotesque abundance as the torture and death of Jose
Duran and Meche are repeated in an extreme stylization.
Out of the reverence for life comes a climax that leaves the historical facts
behind. In what may seem like a metaphysical "life after death" sequence the
peasants fight back, and out of the ruins of the old a new society emerges; the
film ends with the words of Che Guevara:
description
Of
those
who
dawn. .of
.
sort of thematic close-up
did not understand well enough, of those
blind sacrifices with
no
who
retribution, the revolution
fell
without seeing the
was also made."
Revolutionary Films
35
from the reaUty of hard historical facts to the imaginative reality
of revolutionary thought makes such an abstraction necessary in order to
express in film what in legend would be a prophecy.
The
transition
As
a
model for cinema which attempts
simultaneous critique
to both reach the masses
of that reaching,
it
Promised Land not only suggests that we need a new
that
we need
framework a
to be
and provide them with a
is unsurpassed.
The
(The Promised Land)
political
new people with new perceptual
framework, but declares also
capacities in order to
make
that
reality.'*
becomes evident that the conceptual materialist framework at the base of
The Promised Land in no way suffers as a result of the film's stylistic use of
"abstract" and "supernatural" models. As Miguel Littin has said,
It
The
future
is
no doubt with
folklore.
such since nothing and no one
The
self-critical
will
But by then
it
will
not be necessary to designate
be able again to paralyze the creative
spirit
it
as
of the people.^'
dimension forces a spectator to be not only a cocreator but also
a party to the expressive elements that give the film
In his film
its
filmic substance.
Antonio das Mortes. Glauber Rocha also uses popular
symbols as cultural representations in order to establish a point of
view (seen through the peasant's mind).^° At first glance Rocha 's film might
look like The Promised Land both films embrace the popular religious
culture in order to recapture a lost chapter in the people's history; both are too
mystical and surreal. But the difference between the two films is that in Rocha's
religious
—
film the religious figures
become the subjects of the film. They and Antonio, the
lead character, are heroic individuals
who make
history.
Antonio das Mortes is an individualistic tale. In
contrast, although Littin's The Promised Land focuses on Jose Duran, it
clearly shows the peasants as a mass fighting to maintain its power; the
peasants form a collective group of protagonists. This may be due partly to
Littin's precise and careful approach to religious themes. Another difference
between the two films is that Antonio das Mortes lacks a specific and precise
social outlook and a particular statement. The film deals with the transformation undergone by Antonio from amoral gunfighter to defender of the
peasants, but there is no political statement beyond that. In contrast, by
showing the peasants acting together to take full control of their lives. The
Promised Land explicitly provides a political lesson that the bourgeoisie and
its middle class allies will do everything in their power to stop revolution.
Rocha's film sees national culture or heritage, which he identifies as "tropicalismo," apart from the question of class.
"Tropicalism" does represent a threat to the status quo, to the dominant
culture, but nevertheless it is a threat that can be absorbed by the system in
Essentially, therefore,
—
Revolutionary Films
36
Brazil. In this sense
Rocha's "Cinema Novo" may be characterized as a "cinema
of the establishment
left."
The
similarity of
camera
style in the
two
films
is
perhaps due to the fact that the same cinematographer shot both films. The
primary difference between the films, however, can be attributed to the
differences between the cultural nationalism of Rocha's film and the revolutionary socialism of Littin's.
Manuel
Playa Giron brings a revolutionary approach to
Herrera's
documentary films. Besides being interviewed, eyewitnesses and participants in
the Bay of Pigs incident are asked to reenact their role in the battle. We are
introduced to each action in the film by a personal account of the events; then
we
see the person
who
has given us the account return to the area where he or
she was at the time of the battle and direct the reenactment as a film director
might do. The film thus acquires a
dimension as it reveals the
process of its construction while foregrounding the problematic relation
between history (the events) and fiction (their recreation). At the same time, a
participation in the fiction of the same people who were involved in the incident
vests the reenactment with a credibility that would have been unattainable
otherwise. More importantly, perhaps, this rhetorical device both allows for an
self-reflective
empathetic entry into the historical events, since we get a sense of
"felt,"
and
at the
same time
it
how
they
"enlists" the audience to participate in similar
incidents in the future.
The empathy, however,
is
never directed towards a single protagonist,
however "real" he or she might
be.
Instead,
identification shifts
different "characters" to finally involve the collectivity.
hardly figures as the hero.
that
is
He
is
on the screen for
103 minutes long), and he
is
less
among
Even Fidel Castro
than one minute
(in a film
never shot in the conventional low-angle
usually reserved for leaders. Playa Giron serves as an excellent example of the
political implications that a radical
The
departure
in style
is
capable of producing.
interaction between real-life participants actually directing their
sequences and the invisible crew seems to mark a synthesis
in
own
revolutionary
—
and criticism i.e., a cine-aesthetic involving
staged cinema verite. The open manipulation of cinematic reality, in a filmwithin-a-film context is also expressed in two instances; (a) a militia man
attempts to pull a grenade pin free with his teeth, "like they do it in the movies";
and (b) a militia woman tries to swallow an overly long message, "just like I saw
film arrived at by discussion
"^'
some spy movie.
The film does not try to confuse the spectator as to which parts of the film
are actual documentary footages and which parts are recreation, but rather
tries to make the distinction clear. The film tries to bring the events of the "Bay
of Pigs" to life, so that the viewer can get an idea of what the situation really was
like, rather than maintaining such a distance that the events bear no
in
resemblance to
real
life.
37
Revolutionary Films
Rafigh Pooya's fn Defense of the People takes the Iranian revolution as its
central focus. The film concerns an Iranian poet and filmmaker who were tried
on Iranian Television during the reign of the Shah for their Marxist-Leninist
convictions. The filmmaker secured tapes of the trial and used them as his
central structural device for the entire film. Using tapes of the trial, together
with footages he shot during the revolution Rafigh Pooya resurrects the two
previously executed prisoners on film. He presents a filmic defense of their
viewpoint and ideology in the light of present knowledge (presenting witness
after witness, including but not limited to. Presidents Nixon and Carter). He
thus puts the audience in the position of jury, forcing them through the
evidence presented to decide in favor of the revolutionary change in Iran. The
film, however, does not end with the accession of the Ayatollah Khomeini. In
Defense of the People ends as still another defendant is called to the stand.
are left with the impression that the struggle continues.
We
The films discussed above are examples of "revolutionary films" from the
Third World and they share a common characteristic. They advance the idea of
mobilizing for a revolutionary transformation of society. In a country where a
revolution
is
in
process such as in Cuba, films such as Playa Giron and Lucia
accentuate the
new awareness and consciousness
that
are
transform a revolutionary situation into the attainment of greater
would be wrong
intended to
ideals.
But
it
suppose that "revolutionary films" emerge only from
"liberated" countries, ^m/ra/ (Senegal), Blood of the Co/7t/or (Bolivia), and La
to
Mora de Los Homos (Argentina) have emerged from
revolution
is
countries where no
unfolding.
There is no contradiction between a film being "revolutionary" and being
born from "a crisis situation" rather than a "revolutionary situation" as in
Cuba, since the common approach of "revolutionary films" is to orient society
towards a more revolutionary outlook on the conditions of society. Thus, it
would be
to, first,
futile to
argue that the crucial task in making a revolutionary film
overthrow a repressive system or
production
relations.
A
alter the
mode
is
of production and
crude political (or economic) determinism, the
unmasking of a process of production or even of "capitalist" financing of films
is
not really the central issue. Rather, the primary concern in the production of
"revolutionar>' films"
moment"
The
in a
is
the calculated intervention of films into a "crisis
given situation.
crucial ingredient of such films
situation of crisis
which creates and
of the forces that work against
it.
is
a revolutionary outlook in a
fosters inspiration
and a greater awareness
A film cannot, therefore, be revolutionary if
it
does not provide a clear-cut class and national perspective or aim towards
greater consciousness.
An
audience attuned to the culture which produced the films
the message
and
its
subtle nuances in their totality, whereas
may
grasp
one not able
to
Revolutionary Films
38
decipher the cultural codes could easily miss the meaning, misinterpret
acquire a meaning rather different from the original.
It
historical
or
can be argued,
therefore, that a film's validity as a "revolutionary" film resides in
intonations,
it
context and ideological dimensions.
cultural
its
The primary
sources of film critics and theorists are generally films that are universally
acceptable as artistic works. But film as a cultural and ideological artifact can
Although Ousmane Sembene considers himself a
militant and one imbued with the universal teachings of Marx and Engels, he
only be national, at
insists that his
When one
primary audience
creates
the African
all,
first.
In this statement
is
his
own
people:
one does not think of the world; one thinks of his own country.
will ultimately bring change to Africa."
It is,
after
who
Sembene speaks
for a
whole generation of Third World
filmmakers of social change.
If
a film
shown
in
its
own
and kindles a ray of hope
and
cultural
historical context incites, sparks
consciousness (even a questioning attitude) within
validity
cannot be denied. The
its
raises revolutionary
society,
its
controversy within the passive state of
its
revolutionary
should not be
film's universality, therefore,
main objective
own culture and society.
brought into question precisely because the
So long
and
for a better society
film's
is
to stir
as there exists a "cuUural curtain" falling between peoples
nations the universal application of a film
is
and
a mute one. Given the fact that
most non-Third-World viewers of Third Cinema bring to the films their own
values and norms of perception in decoding a film, the intent of a Third World
film is likely to be misunderstood completely. The alternative is to provide
audiences with information on the cultural and historical context of the film.
The important point
is
that a "revolutionary film"
different cultural settings.
Knowledge of the
is
quite a different thing in
historical/ cultural
background
is
a prerequisite to identifying with the struggles and lives of Third World peoples
and will provide an additional dimension to the films.
Third World "revolutionary films" cannot, therefore, be viewed simply as
a collection of stream of consciousness imagery or as sets of instructions.
According to Ousmane Sembene, "The mission isn't to make the revolution but
to prepare the revolution.""
Condor (Yamar Mallku)
The
And
Jorge Sanjines, speaking of Blood of the
situates "style"
structure of this film
and "revolutionary films" as follows:
(Yamar Mallku). because of
its
fictive
character,
put our
denunciation at a dangerous level of probability that could hardly mobilize the masses
We
must find a new cinematic language that won't betray the ideology of the
i.e.,
a cinematic language that rejects fiction since
we
film's content,
are interested by historical events.
39
Revolutionary Films
And
according to Miguel
I
don't
make an
Littin:
individualist
and psychological cinema.
I
relate a collective fight in
which the
individual keeps his importance but in function of the collective fight. Everyone involved in
the film participates politically in
its
creation."
These quotes from three distinguished Third World filmmakers provide us
with a summation of the multifaceted yet cohesive nature of "revolutionary
films."
Furthermore, according to the conventional understanding of the Marxist-Leninist category "revolutionary," the
above-mentioned films would
fall
under this category. I contend, however, that while this may be so, it is actually
Third World theorists like Frantz Fanon who seem to provide the primary
inspiration and guidance for the films:
So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating
which draw their inspiration from her.
.
Humanity
is
states, institutions,
and
societies
.
waiting for something from us other than such an imitation, which would be
almost an obscene caricature."
The above quotes, drawn from Fanon's 77?^ Wretched of the Earth reappear in
abbreviated form, yet with the same volume of meaning in La Hora de Los
Homos. Even the tempo of the film is punctuated with such short words as the
following:
My name — an
my
my
my
my
Christian
— humiliation;
— a rebel;
— the stone age;
race — that of the fallen.^'
status
age
This comes from the poetry of
Earth. In
offense;
name
Aime
La Hora de Los Homos
Cesaire via Fanon's The Wretched of the
a version of the same, accompanied by
drum
beats, constitutes the preface of the film. Fanon's dictum, "every spectator
is
a
coward or a traitor,"^* also appears as a banner inviting viewers to reflect on the
issues the film raises and the need for subsequent revolutionary action.
The Mauritanian film, Soleil O, by Med Hondo also shows the heavy
influence of Fanonian thoughts from Black Skin, White Masks. The Algerian
films of the 1960s show convincing evidence of the intellectual influence of
Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. For instance, Ahmed Rachedi's highly
acclaimed film, The Dawn of the Damned, owes not only its title but its
revolutionary impulse to Fanon's theoretical discourse.
In fact, the overwhelming depiction of the Third
moving
force
World peasantry
as the
and the vanguard of revolutions represents the apex of Fanonian
40
Revolutionary Films
The Brickmakers and Peasants by the Colombian filmmakers
Jorge Silva and Marta Rodriguez and the Angolan film, Congeicao Tchiambula, A Day in a Life, by Antonio Ole offer us a unique and intimate experience
by taking us into the peasants' lives to examine their own vision of their own
day-to-day problems. A close study of the most exploited class is thought of, as
conviction.
Fanon implores
us to recognize, as the antecedent of political consciousness in
the Third World.
Furthermore, such films as Jorge Sanjines's The Principal Enemy, Miguel
Littin's The Promised Land, Glauber Rocha's Barravento and Black God,
White Devil,
3000
Ousmane Sembene's Emitai and Ceddo,
Haile Gerima's Harvest:
Fanonian influence
in their depiction of the
Years, all share a definitive
Third World peasant class as the principal revolutionary force to reckon with.
Fanon had said, "In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns
toward the object;"" in Fanon, "the slave turns toward the master and
abandons the object." In Harvest: 3000 Years the servant of the landlord,
Kentu's, ultimate dream is to occupy his master's chair (Hegelian slave). But
the filmmaker's ultimate solution
is
very Fanonian,
i.e.,
instead of taking recourse to regain his stolen land,
the lunatic, Kebebe,
kills
the landlord, the
The same happens in the Latin American film. The Principal Enemy.
Also, such films as You Hide Me, by the Ghanian Kwate Nee-Owoo, and TJie
Mask, by the Nigerian filmmaker Eddie Ugboma, painstakingly follow the
master.
Fanonian thesis of the need for
from European museums.
retrieving Africa's stolen cultural treasures
Style
The
Politics of Style
The
politics of style
and Ideology
has for long bedeviled film
and historians. Does
"style" by itself bear an ideology? Does the ideology of a work transcend style?
Does change in style manifest an ideological shift? These are questions that
recur in any discussion of ideology in a creative work such as film. We need,
critics
therefore, to analyze a concrete application of style in order to
decisive character of
A
its
operation not in one ideology but in
distinction between
two ideologies
will help us
perspective in determining the place of style in meaning.
mode
"capitalist
gain
all
some
mark
the
ideologies.
insight
and
On one pole stands the
of film style" and on the other the "socialist
mode
of film
Films can be placed between the two depending on the relative degree to
which they embody one or the other. Let me preface this argument by repeating
style."
what Umberto Eco has said, "In
precise moment I deny having said
meaning.
It is futile
Chinese films)
style. Style is
is
this precise
it."'
moment
I
say this and in this
A study of style alone will not engender
for instance to argue that the closeup shot (see chapter 6
non-socialist film style or that
montage is a
only meaningful in the context of its
and helps illuminate the ideology within
it.
It is,
less
on
bourgeois film
use— in how it acts on culture
therefore, utterly misleading to
argue, for example, that only the type of distancing device that Brecht used
makes a film "socialist," or that only Godard's non-illusionist device is "non-
bourgeois camera style,"^ or that the use of a film star of a central figure places
a film in the same class as Hollywood with its individual protagonist/ hero.
not reserved for a specific ideology. But style can help us "squeeze"
out a film's ideological undercurrents. In its proper use, style can serve as the
Style
is
"key" to understanding ideology. Style does not exceed meaning, it is
meaning this notion refers to what structural-semioticians label as signifi-
—
cance.
Now we hold
it
and now we do not
—
it is
at
and elusive— but it resides within ideologies with a
expound immanent meaning.
once persistent and
fleeting,
definite intent to subvert or
42
Style
and Ideology
At the outset, the ongoing debate on "form" and "content" must be briefly
analyzed/ Simply stated, one argument supports the idea that "it is not what
you say that is important but how you say it," while the other view states that "it
is not how you say it that is important, but what you say " The third view holds
the division to be meaningless, since there is no division in the first instance
i.e., content is style and style is content.
For Raymond Durgnat only "style" is meaningful and it is all that matters.
He supplies an appropriate example from literature:
.
Two
actors will declaim Shakespeare's
words ("content")
him a
In both instances, "content"
content"
(style, that is) is
resides in style,
his
ways
mind. The other makes
what Durgnat calls "theatrical
altogether different. The example clearly demon-
strates that while "the text"
meaning
in altogether different
One makes Hamlet a warrior-hero who can't make up
neurotic intellectual who can't steel himself to action.'
("style").
is
similar, but
remains constant "style"
i.e.,
style
is
differs.
Thus, substantive
not only part of "content" but
it is
content
itself.
According to the Hungarian Marxist
element
in literature
is
critic
Georg Lukacs, "the
the form."'^ This view focuses attention
properties. Terry Eagleton, a
contemporary
true social
on formal
British Marxist, identifies three
elements of "form":
a.
b.
c.
"form" is shaped by "a relatively autonomous literary history"
it is shaped out of certain dominant ideological structures, and
it embodies a set of relations between author and audience^
The discrepancy in theories of "form" alone is quite instructive. Here I
would like to supply my own understanding of the terms discussed thus far. A
hypothetical situation: A young woman is attracted by the physique and
disposition of a young athlete but upon closer acquaintance she discovers the
young athlete to be mean and brutish. "Form" is still pretty and pleasing to
look at but has "no acceptable meaning" from the girl's point of view.
We may now turn to three examples of films dealing with the same subject
matter from different ideological perspectives. These examples, it is hoped, will
provide us with an initial understanding of the relationship between film style
and ideology.
Bay of Pigs (USA)
Once
vs.
Playa Giron (Cuba/
becomes history the victor explains his success as stemming from
"courage" and "tenacity," while the vanquished refers to it as a tactical
a battle
Style
accident.
incident.
Here we have two quite
and Ideology
"Bay of Pigs"
claimed the Cubans did
different versions of the
We have the NBC/ USA version in which
not necessarily win although the United States
it is
somehow
The Cuban
Cuban people to
"lost."
version refers to the battle as an example of the will of the
away an invading
43
Taken together the two films provide a fairly
complete view of what transpired in the "Bay of Pigs" incident. Individually,
each film concentrates on widely different aspects.
drive
The
NBC
force.
which is mostly newsreel footage, represents network
television documentary at its best; it is narrated by the late Chet Huntley. The
style of delivery of the film is direct and to the point. The film does not provide a
moment in which one can pause and reflect on what is being said; instead, the
viewer is fed with a barrage of information, facts and dates; this is what
happened, this was the plan, this is what went wrong. Chet Huntley's
commentary proposes formulas, isolates flaws and comments on the outcome.
The technique is similar to the evening news where essential information is
presented. In Bay of Pigs the filmmaker cuts away to documentary footages to
reinforce the authority with which information is being provided. The main
intention of the film seems to be to assure the American public that an error has
been committed, the blame placed (i.e., Kennedy was misled by the CIA and his
advisors), and a clean position achieved. It is presented as a painful retrospect.
In Bay of Pigs what is seen is not personal. The secrecy with which the entire
operation was undertaken lent itself to a treatment in which the leaders rather
than the ideologies were paramount. The main emphasis of the documentary is
film,
to find out the person(s) or organization responsible for the failure of the
invasion.
NBC film is not. Rather than seek the
and institutions, it seeks to demonstrate
that the reasons for success are to be found in the revolutionary commitment of
the Cubans who were involved in the battlefield. Instead of buttressing the
"objectivity" of its statements by intercutting documentary footage, Playa
Giron becomes objective in depicting the revolutionary romanticism of the
participants through images of heroism. In so doing, Playa Giron becomes an
inspiration for the future rather than an apology for the past.
From the start neither film seeks to understand opposing motives but
instead energetically confirms its own. The cast of characters around which
The Cuban
film
reasons for the failure
each
is
everything the
among
film's action coalesces
leaders
underscores basic differences. In the
NBC version,
Cuban and American. Fidel
example occupies an infinitely larger part of the
American film than the Cuban film. In the American version we repeatedly
encounter President Kennedy seated behind his desk, talking on the phone. He
wears a black suit and ivy-league tie, as do his cabinet officers. They and the
generals in uniform bear the essence of power itself; they all seem to be in
the protagonists are government officials, both
Castro, the
Cuban
leader, for
44
Style
and Ideology
control of the situation. In the
Cuban
version, Fidel Castro, together with his
Che Guevera, are seen very briefly in fatigue uniforms.
The protagonists in the Cuban version are the Cuban miUtia and peasants.
brother Raoul and
By focusing on
individuals or small groups the film illustrates the very personal
sense in which the
Cuban combatants
important perhaps
is
the illustration of collective action as
individual efforts. While
and
are responsible for the victory, but most
many
it
is
made up
of
of the participants often discuss their feelings
— a device that serves to stress their vulnerability and
us to empathize with them — they also demonstrate a commitment to
fears during the battle
allows
fight that
is
not the result of any orders from "above." By assembling numerous
up depicting a collectivity whose
strength surpasses that of mercenary armies and allows the Cubans to write
individual cases together, the film ends
their
own
history.
In the
NBC version most of the exiled Cuban combatants remain nameless
and they are not even identified by name and activity as in the
Cuban version. Only Kennedy and Allen Dulles, then director of the CIA,
and
faceless,
stand out in the
NBC version.
In fact, the
NBC film sees the entire operation as
Once they have found a culprit
NBC's journalistic investigation
engineered and executed by the shadowy CIA.
and scapegoat
is
for the failure of the operation,
over.
commensurate with the scope, context and
ideological perspective of each film. The Cuban version uses a widescreen
format that lends an epic dimension to the representation as opposed to the 16
mm which NBC had to use for television. The NBC film utilizes U.S. military
newsreels of the invasion and several clips of stock footage some of which also
appear in the Cuban version. It is a kind of hindsight documentary constructed
mostly of documentary footages one exception being the Florida hideaway
of the exiles. Bay of Pigs was constructed on the assumption that real clips will
support and confirm what essentially is an ideological point of view. But can a
camera truly record an "objective reality?" What of Adlai Stevenson waving a
photo at the United Nations, presumably to prove the claim that the United
States Air Force did not participate in the fighting in Cuba? In the Cuban
version we learn that what Adlai Stevenson was holding as proof was a B-26
bomber painted in the colors of the Cuban military.
The Cuban film combines a narration, documentary footage and reenactment, relying only occasionally on newsreel footage. Sequences give the
impression of interpretation, rather than a barrage of facts thrown at the
The
differences in style are
—
viewer.
Both films agree on the basic historical event and chronological succession
of events. (Each country made the films for its own culture, for its own
audience.) Yet, though similar in several ways, the different ideologies
emerging from the films reveal the extent to which the factual story of the
Style
conflict
film
is
is
and Ideology
45
same historic event. In neither
exposed, but the manner of execution, or style,
influenced by basic attitudes to the
the ideology blatantly
encodes a particular ideological perspective.
The American documentary was meant
than
in theaters
—
to be
shown on
television rather
takes on the look of the six o'clock news, recounting events,
it
maintaining distance and
strictly
focusing on the event as a military action
undertaken by Cuban exiles. The Cuban film maintains no such distance. It is a
dramatic statement personal to all Cubans and documents with a sense of
—
—
national pride one of their greatest triumphs, giving studious aetail of events
which the
Munoz
NBC
version would only footnote. For instance, the skirmish at the
Canal, while not even acknowledged in the
NBC
version,
is
given a
heading in the Cuban film, and the sinking of the "Houston," while
acknowledged by the NBC film, is shown in several sequences by the Cubans as
a major engagement in the battle.
The two films address two quite distinct audiences. To that of NBC, the
Bay of Pigs is something to be forgotten even though the exigencies of a newsoriented culture
made
it
necessary to record the event.
To
the Cubans, the film
and gives a dramatic account of events not so much
depicts the aggressors
present the historical facts, but to allow
Cuban audiences
to
to see the part they
played in making history.
Bay of Pigs and Playa Giron, provides a useful example
for the study of the relationship of style and ideology to the extent that the same
event is depicted by both films. At the same time, however, it must be noted that
the contexts in which the two are produced are so different that a close
This double
bill.
comparison of formal elements cannot be made. One
report while the other
is
more akin
to a fiction film.
is
a quickly assembled
We
should
now
turn to
comparisons between films of similar format.
Journey
to the
Last Grave at
Sun
vs.
Dimbaza
Last Grave at Dimbaza^
reflects
imprisonment, both physical (the reserves) and
non-physical (racial attitudes and lack of jobs).'°
The
film incorporates
footages that inform the viewer about the conditions of blacks in South Africa;
these support the voice-over narration of written
The
physical reality
is
words that flash on the screen.
thus interspersed with statistical information to intensify
The drudgery and hopelessness of
South
Africa is heightened by simple takes between shots and a matter-of-fact camera
style. Scenes of South African whites are shot soft focus to show them as if they
the sense of injustice.
are in a
dream world.
In Journey to the
different
the blacks in
South Africa
Sun
—a
the South African Tourist Bureau presents a
luscious land of milk
and honey where "the sun"
never sets and where "natives" are always happy. By a crafty use of cutaways.
46
Style
and Ideology
dancing African "natives" are juxtaposed with dancing birds in a zoo. Little do
the unsuspecting tourists know that "the natives" of South Africa are kept in an
analogous human zoo, the Bantustans. There is "no oppression" in Journey to
we see nothing behind the pretense of an unaffected land. No hint of
the Sun
—
the vicious
human
deprivation and exploitation of Africans
is
depicted as in
Last Grave at Dimbaza.
Two
Portrayals of South Africa
Last Grave at Dimbaza
Journey to the Sun
An
Inexpensively produced film
expensively produced film
Film commissioned by government
Authorized by the underground
Film poses no questions, hopefully
Film poses
lots
of questions;
hopefully viewers will too
tourists will not either
Camera
Style
Expert camera crew
Inexperienced
Elaborate shots and visual angles
Direct and simple camera style
Technical wizardry and gimmickry;
Minimum
visual
obstacles between
camera and subject
smorgasbord
Images chosen carefully;
what would be shown and how
Cinema
Slick tripod operations
Hand-held shots
Mostly establishing shots
with stark and uncluttered
verity style;
probability of seeing
same shots
Angle shots guided by photographic
principles of shooting a scene
from the most
is
shots motivated by the
flattering perspective
principles to
Nothing detracts from
its
relaxed
high
make
a statement
Juxtaposed with words/ statistics;
pacing
pacing
slow but unrelaxing
is
The Nonfiction Documentary
Travelogue
effect
Cinema
verity style
Scripted, using sets and actors
Structured at the editorial
Interested in persuading,
Interested in persuading
stage
and influencing and
influencing and advertising
educating
A
carefully constructed
A
promotional piece
political
carefully assembled
message
Narration
Narrator
is
a lecturer
Narrator
is
a confidant
Lighting
Glamour
lighting, with a
constant interplay of lights
Mostly available lighting
Poorly
lit.
especially indoors
Style
and Ideology
47
Editing
Refined cuts
Simple cuts between takes
Editing by deliberate choice
Editing by deliberate
necessity of utmost
of images
meaning
Color
Realistic color
Retouched color
Dismal, grey and colorless
Diffused with light symbolizing
the film's
title
is dominated by monotones of
drab color. The shacks and
children's classrooms can be
Film
word. Sun.
Excessive colorfulness
of the scenes
is
meant
to reflect
cited as typical
the joyful attitudes of the travelers
examples
Audience
Film addresses
itself to
privileged audience.
Film addresses
a
It
draws
itself to
a
general audience
attention to a specified
elitist
Call
audience
and appeal
to white
upper class
Call directed at progressives,
the lower class,
If
and
intellectuals
the filmmakers of both these films were to switch styles, both films
would surely fail. In other words, a tourist interested in nothing but tourism
would ignore the same things the film ignores, i.e., the existence of people on
"the receiving side of white South Africa.""
The styles chosen in both films discussed is not the result of a mere quirk
on the part of the filmmakers. It is historically and ideologically determined.
"When art reflects life," Brecht once remarked, "it uses special mirrors."'^
Jacques Ehrmann adds
the mirror
by
its
is
neither mechanical reproduction nor instrument of knowledge, but a revealer
very complexity.
It
relationships appear. Yet
It
it
does not reproduce real struggles outside
furnishes a complete
"expresses" the situation precisely because
it
itself
but makes their
and meaningful outlook on a real situation.
reflects certain aspects and cannot reflect
others."
The question is not, therefore, which film is aesthetically superior to the
other. A work can no longer be considered aesthetically correct and proper
because it is sublime or beautiful. A work is aesthetically apt if it is "able to
grasp and portray popular life in a more profound, authentic, human and
concretely historical fashion."''*
48
and Ideology
Style
Three Films on the Mexican Revolution
Duck, You Sucker! is a spaghetti western done
or
Hang'em High, with
important than
effect
important. The film
and
is
in the spirit
of Fistful of Dollars
Causes are more
in a revolution; m Duck, You Sucker! neither is very
primarily a commerical action film. The sets are detailed
all
the polish of Hollywood.
carefully keyed with regard to the location,
mood, time and
character.
We
note from the credits that three individuals were responsible for the film's visual
and it was the technical brilliance that carried the film.
Mexico: The Frozen Revolution is an ambitious film considering that
to cover sixty years in Mexican history in sixty minutes.
style
tries
The
film
is
marred by many minor
presented, the translation and
faults: historical inaccuracies
abound, data
is
it
often badly
English subtitles are deficient and the narrator's voice
disturbing.'*
Thus
the film attempts to explain the country's state of underdevelopment
within a vague historical and ideological framework.
poverty but
fails
to clinch the
It
concentrates on rural
moment since it is unable to give us the real source
of poverty. According to Adrian Lajous- Vargas:
One
is
perplexed by the fact that Mexico's dependent relationship to the United States
never dealt with. This problem
is
present condition. This critical gap
largely at
is
an American audience, and
them. Mexico
is
a central one to understanding Mexico's history and
specially alarming since the film
it is
precisely this topic
which
is
seems to be directed
of most relevance to
— the U.S.'s nearest neo-colonial dependency — offers an ideal e.xample of the
nature and extent of the oppressive American economic penetration.
'"
The filmmaker gives the viewer a socio-historical analysis of Mexico, a
society shown to be the result of a revolution that has failed to live up to its
promises; hence the title "frozen revolution." The film spends excruciatingly
overdrawn moments with poverty stricken tenant farmers; scenes of living
conditions and customs of the Indian communities in the Yucatan are
juxtaposed with the pathetic owner of a hacienda caught in her own cycle of
oppression and stagnation. The film utilizes excellent documentary footages of
social forces that have shaped modern Mexico: Madero, Huerta, Zapata, Villa,
Carranza, Cardenas. By the end of the film we not only understand why the
students were demonstrating at the Plaza de Tlatelolco in Mexico City before
the opening of the 1968 Olympic Games, we also understand why they were
shot in cold blood. As Lajous-Vargas aptly puts it:
It is an appropriate ending as it clearly exemplifies the government's readiness to employ the
most ruthless violence when the instruments of political control fail or are in any way
challenged.'
Style
and Ideology
49
Reed: Insurgent Mexico is distinct in several significant ways from the
other films with which it shares somewhat of a simlar theme. This film deals
with John Reed, the American journalist at the time of the Mexican
Revolution
in the early years
Reed's mind
of the twentieth century.
The question
in
John
whether he should merely continue reporting the struggle or
whether he should join the revolution himself True to the facts, John Reed
is
ends up joining the revolutionary forces.'*
The film adopts the point of view of the protagonist. Deliberately slow in
recreating John Reed's activity and involvement, the film depicts his inner
on the Mexican Revolution discussed above,
Paul Leduc's Reed: Insurgent Mexico manages to create a sense of past history
and culture; the appropriate stylistic device employed is the use of sepia color.
A shift in style marks the moment when John Reed decides to be part of
the revolution. The slow rhythm and pacing of the film's style (in the beginning
parts) gives way to a quicker rhythm signalled by a shattering of the store
window where Reed sees his own reflection. As Reed becomes a revolutionary
the ease with which a viewer witnesses the transformation is also broken.
struggle. Unlike the
two
films
Analysis of Three Films on the Mexican Revolution
Duck, You Sucker!
Mexico: The Frozen
Reed: Insurgent
(1971)
Revolution (1971)
Mexico
Director: Sergio Leone,
Director:
mm,
Director: Paul
Leduc, Mexican
Gleyzer, Argentinean
Italian
35
Raymundo
color
16
mm color/ b & w
Documentary
Fiction
(1972)
16
mm,
sepia
Semi-documentary/
semi-fiction
Audience: general
public
public
Grandiose
Style:
Audience: American
Target of film:
money
public
Style: matter-of-
Style: reconstruc-
documentary
fact
Target of film:
anarchist
rhetoric
Film
is
ship
documentary
film:
historical recreation
Left rhetoric
leftist
rhetoric
about friend-
&
Ambiguous
tion
Target of
information
Ambiguous
Audience: Mexican
war
Film examines the
191
1
revolution
Film
&
is
about
friendship
&
war
contemporary Mexico
Revolution
is
back-
drop to film
Revolution
theme
is
central
Individual's place
in revolution
50
Style
and Ideology
Modest and seems
Unusual (one hour
Unusual, but neither
modest nor sincere
covers 60 years in
reasonable
Mexican history)
but modest
period covered
Transformation of
PRI's non-transfor-
Juan's non-transforma-
is
1913 in Mexico
tion from money hun-
mation from dormant
gry bandido to revolu-
political party to
American journalist John Reed from
tionary
revolutionary party
simple reporter to
central
is
is
the central theme
revolutionary
central
Film inspired by
American western
Conventional and
is
theme
Sentiment
is
anti-
convention, anti-
sentimental
sentimental and
cinema
anti-heroic
Narration
In English
titled in
&
sub-
In
Spanish with
English subtitles
English
—
an intervention its function is not to fill the missing parts, or
ease the passage from emitter to receiver. Rather, the purpose of criticism is to
examine the significant omissions, gaps and absences as ideologically
circumscribed. A creative work cannot help but hide "silences," "gaps" and
Criticism
is
"absences." Criticism belongs, therefore, to the aesthetic region of ideology,
to Terry Eagleton
and according
It is
not that the aesthetic becomes the dominant region of the ideology,
it is
rather that
it is
"foregrounded" as a privileged bearer of the themes over which that formation broods. It is
not, naturally, as though the aesthetic is stripped at such moments of its proper trappings to
become "raw ideology:" There
The
is
no such phenomenon."
aesthetic region of ideology
my"
but also
it
assumes not only
"specificity"
and "autono-
belongs to that region of ideology which shelters the political,
economic and cultural sphere of human institutions. According to
Eagleton, the alliances between the social, political, economic and cultural
maintain their own specificity and internal dynamics and are interwoven in the
historical,
life
of a society.
He
puts the "aesthetic"
domain of
the alliance as follows:
Their [socio-political, economic] ideological efficacy remains an aesthetic one, and
indeed,
lies
ideological
their
power. For the aesthetic
medium:
it is
is
for a
number of reasons a
graphic, immediate and economical, working at the instinctual and
emotional depths yet playing too on the very surfaces of perception, entwining
stuff of
in this,
peculiarly effective
spontaneous experience and the roots of language and gesture.'
itself
with the
Style
Anatomy
A
and Ideology
51
of Style
"anatomy of style" is really a search for a method and,
therefore, calls for an examination and, if necessary, a whittling down of
different approaches to the interpretation of film. Two camps in the battle of
ideas
the psychological (inner) and sociological (outer) aspects of human
activity will help facilitate our search for the place of style in meaning. The
psychoanalytic perspective derives largely from Freud's thinking, while the
discussion of
—
informed by Marxist principles.''
The two methodological approaches can be profitably applied towards an
interpretation of Bunuel's Los Olvidados and Littin's El Chacalde Nahueltoro.
sociological
The two
is
films are similar in
many
respects, particularly in their central subject
or theme, since both deal with "the culture of poverty." Each film deals with
how
individuals relate to society
leadership
and the problems which
— state or institutional —
is
arise
when
positive
lacking. They, therefore, present cultures
which lack not only education and employment but, more significantly, a
strong family network. They feature the downtrodden and the extreme
marginals in society: Littin's film centers on Jorge Del Carmen Velenzuela
Torres, an unemployed and illiterate peasant from Nahueltoro in Southern
Chile, and Bunuel's film focuses on juvenile delinquents in Mexico City.
While Los Olvidados calls for a psychoanalytic interpretation. El Chacal
can best be understood through the application of a Marxist model of analysis.
The manner in which each film resists one methodological device only to open
up to another is an intriguing and interesting reflection on the determinants of
ideology in the production of films. It must be noted, however, that no matter
how the zones of methodological resistance stick, obligatory glimpses which
cannot be hidden appear in each film and let methodologies skid. Though
Freud and Marx may seem to be theoretically distinct, their ideas acquire a
measure of peaceful coexistence in Los Olvidados and El Chacal. This
assertion will require further explanation and it is hoped that in what will
follow we can shed some light on the possibility of a Freud-Marxian coexistence in cinema.
Los Olvidados
Buiiuers career as a filmmaker was conditioned by the great influence Freud
and the Surrealists had on him. This he himself has acknowledged.^^ Therefore,
for most of his creative works psychoanalysis is a decoding device. His interest
dreams, for instance, holds the nexus of Surrealist thought, which, in turn, is
grounded in what Freud labelled as the unconscious. Los Olvidados, therefore,
in
can be seen as a continuation of Bunuel's interest
this particular film
is
in psychoanalysis.
not strictly in Buiiuel's typical style,
it
is
Though
nevertheless
52
Style
and Ideology
—
—
dominated by his constant preoccupation dreams. The contrast between the
who might as well be called "No
child "Little Eyes" and the old blind man
Eyes" operates through a poetic style. Poetic associations are abundant in
Bunuel's works and such stylistic approaches appeal to the viewer's subcon-
—
scious perceptions.
The theme of the "absent
dominates Los Olvidados. The
father" and the lack of a stable family unit
abandoned him,
Juan's father is a drunkard, Pedro's father is dead and Jaibo's father,
presumably dead, is never mentioned in the film.^^ As a result, there are no
father of "Little Eyes" has
positive father figures for the youth to emulate. Jaibo stands, therefore, as the
only model of urban survival for the boys. Treacherous and innately a coward,
he leads them into hideous exploits
and
—
plays a leadership role, Jaibo himself
film
like
pushing the legless beggar's trolley
—
i.e.,
the implications are obvious
his leadership
become Uke
Pedro's mother
who
is
beating and robbing the blind man,
down
the
—
it
makes
all
the other children under
lost souls.
also a provider figure. In Pedro's
is
though he
Ironically,
hill.
destroyed like a dog at the end of the
dream she
provides the carcass of meat. Yet before Pedro can seize
is
the one
meat is
grasped by his negative father figure, Jaibo. In the same dream sequence Pedro
discovers the possibly positive father figure, Juan, dead beneath his bed. Such a
it
the
dream sequence is vital in understanding the psychological interrelationships
present in Los Olvidados.
In Freud's analysis of the Oedipus myth the son focuses his sexual desire
on his mother. The father becomes a rival for the mother's affections, hence a
hate conflict arises between the father and son. Pedro's mother rejects him not
only to exact vengeance for being spurned by Pedro's father, but also because
she has to a large extent assumed the father's role herself Pedro's affections are
a threat to her dominance as a father-figure, and the unhappy conflict ensues
which ultimately results in Pedro's death. The lack of moral system, therefore,
can be blamed on the inability to resolve the Oedipus complex. The lack of a
positive father image forces the boys to turn to Jaibo as an identification figure
and they acquire his mannerisms and his morals. Nothing could be worse for
the members of the gang than Jaibo's becoming an identification figure. Since
his own past has not allowed him to resolve the Oedipus complex, he has no
positive father image, and, even worse, the lack of a mother figure has placed
him in the worst predicament. We are, therefore, able to understand the
fulfillment of his incest wishes when he becomes the lover of Pedro's mother.
El Chacal as indicated earlier remains
tion. Jorge's
mother
is
less
open
to a psychoanalytic explora-
mentioned but not shown and
his father
is
not even
Style
and Ideology
53
mentioned during the entire film. Jorge represents a rural Jaibo. Yet Jorge's
crime cannot be explained away psychologically by a lack of love. Jorge
receives attention as a child from the police officer and the priest and from
others throughout his life. As the filmmaker, Littin, put it: "All the people who
"^"^
appear in the film, and I was very attentive to this, are very good people.
Jorge's cries for his mother before his execution are pathetic, but they do not
As we
elucidate his character psychologically.
are not allowed to enter into
Jorge's psychological past in detail, his mysterious ritual of placing stones
upon
murdered victims becomes obscure in meaning. Jorge's reply as to why he
killed a mother and her five children "so they will not suffer," makes sense not
in relation to the remote corners of his mind (which the narrative refuses to
explore) but to the social reality which impelled him towards the crime.
It has been noted how the viewer of El Chacalis prevented from achieving
a psychological identification with Jorge. This fact shifts the conflict from the
the
individual to the society.
The technique
the use of "episodes" in the film
Taming of
—
reminiscent of Brecht's epic theater:
is
such as "Jorge's Childhood," "The
titles
The
Jorge," "The Execution of Jorge," are significant in the film.
Marxist approach functions well
victim of class oppression.
in interpreting
El Chacal.
We
see
him
as a
We are made aware of the inescapable poverty of his
surroundings, the absence of any psychological motivation. The process of
When
"Jorge's Taming," for instance, indicates the Chilean social structure.
Jorge accepts society's values in prison, he
All
who
participate in the system are guilty, even
cohol, religion, smiles, law, gentleness
—
all
is
if
executed. In Littin's words:
they are understanding spectators
Al-
are part of the system's tools to train
and
subordinate man."'
The themes of
drawn very
society's guilt are
succinctly in the film
revealed in subtle details. For example, before the murder sequences,
we
and
see
Jorge drinking heavily from a bottle of wine
wrapped in a wicker cover. In
busy weaving wicker covers around empty wine bottles. The
implications are all to obvious; he has become part of a slave labor force for the
prison, Jorge
is
very industry which was responsible for his crimes. El Chacal also removes the
element of surprise, by the use of the
appeals to the audience's
ment. The end result
is
before each episode so that the film
titles
critical faculties rather
critical
inquiry will
One such glimpse
who accosted Pedro
nevertheless
emotional involve-
and ideological discourse and action
According to Littin, "the film gave us something
through which we could reach the people.
each film.
its
to inspire political
rather than identification.
The hub of my
than
in
in
its
now focus on the obligatory glimpses in
Los Olividados
in the streets
significant
"^^
—
social
it
is
is
of the decadent bourgeoisie
a minor,
anonymous
meaning and a reference
shot, but
to
class
54
Style
and Ideology
can be argued that beyond the limits of psychological factors
the juvenile delinquency can be seen as an intertwining of social context and
human relationships. When dealing with social context, Bunuel does present us
with the same type of social reality which Littin feels is crucial. So that we are
told in the beginning of Los Olvidados that the following could happen in any
city around the world and that the film was based, as El Chacal, on an actual
identification. It
case.
The
film also brings out the question of reform in the reformatory
towards Pedro. The director of the Reform School could have
been effective had he not been limited by the presence and dominance of a
negative father image in Jaibo, the gang leader. However, the reformatory
director's action
go beyond reform and individual
benevolent acts to some kind of radical action. The interrelationship between
the socio-economic reality and the human structure in Los Olvidados suggests
a claim on social reality that has been otherwise explicated by the strict
director's action does not suggest the need to
psychoanalytic methodological approach.
In respect to El Chacal, Littin succeeds in subordinating the question of
individual psychological motivation to that of class struggle. Although the
entire film
is
a series of flashbacks, Littin chooses to search through Jorge's
past for a reason behind the crime in very
much
the
same way
Marx
More than
that Karl
turned to history to find the reasons behind a more universal crime.
a psychoanalytic search into Littin's film, therefore, another dimension enters
the film
of a
— symbolism. Jorge's execution reminds one of Christ's crucifixion, or
man who had
Finally,
El Chacal,
I
died for society's guilt.
however inadequte the use of psychological terms are to explicate
feel the film
forget Jorge Del
does not ignore
it
completely, because
we cannot
Carmen Velenzuela Torres's final wish before his execution, to
see his mother.
Concluding Remarks
began this chapter with a discussion on the determinants of style by applying
the comparative approach. I hope that my research into the concrete
application of style to ideology has been tentatively established. The decisive
factor is ideology. Style must be understood as ideologically determined. It is,
therefore, futile to argue that style by itself hears ideology. It does not. Ideology
is the "base" (as the mode of production constitutes the base in Marxism) and
style the superstructure, autonomous, but linked symbiotically with ideology.
I
The
crucial factor in the relationship of style to ideology, therefore,
is
the
and from which it proceeds. Although recurring
attempts have been made to establish an "objective" analysis of film style,
nothing so fundamental has yet been offered. This fact alone creates the burden
of searching beyond style into the ideological positions of film.
society the ideology serves
—
Style
and Ideology
55
those positions that are both revealed and concealed by style.
Revealed because ideological positions are always vested in material practices
and style is an attribute of such practices. Concealed because style makes
It
is
possible a rhetoric that eludes rational investigation and substitutes fascination
for cognition. Our task will be to expose the discrepancy between what
is
revealed and what
operation of filmic
is
concealed and, therefore, to expose the ideological
style.
Cultural Codes vs. Ideological Codes
Hitherto, culture has been superficially analyzed and studied in terms of
and "environment." Sociological and anthropological researchers
have been limited to generalized surveys of Third World peoples (defined as
man-the-member-of-a-family, clan, tribe of a given race) and their society
(considered as "primitive" or "evolving"). Such generalizations have only
narrowed the scope of empirical investigations of Third World cultures.
There has recently emerged a body of work on culture articulated by Third
World thinkers which encourages viewing culture in the context of man-theindividual and man-the-social-being interacting with nature and the exigencies
of daily routine. The resuhing cultural definition is thus being built on the
socio-political and economic foundation of a society. The cultural theorist who
presents the most advanced conceptual formulation and whose work is most
appropriate to our study is Amilcar Cabral from Guinea Bissau, West Africa.
"ethnicity"
Culture
the
is
always
economic and
in the life
the kinds of relationships
(considered
more or less conscious result of
more or less dynamic expression of
society, on the one hand between man
of a society (open or closed), the
political activities of that society, the
individually
which prevail
in that
or collectively) and nature, and, on the other hand,
among
individuals, groups of individuals, social strata or classes.
Cabral explains how the culture has its material base at the level of its
productive forces (the relationship between man and nature) and the mode of
production (relations between men and between classes within society).
In our opinion, the
less intensity
mode
of production, whose contradictions are manifested with more or
through the class struggle,
is
the principal factor in the history of any
human
group, the level of the productive forces being the true and permanent driving power of
history.^
Here culture allows for a dynamic synthesis of the socio-political and economic
conflicts which have been developed by social consciousness to resolve
imbalances (referring to class) at each stage of historical development and
Cultural Codes
58
vs.
Ideological Codes
progress. Cabral, therefore, interprets the Third
World
struggles for national
liberation not only as a product of culture, but also as a determinant of culture.
"To speak of
culture."^
these," he says, "is to speak of history but also to speak of
This conceptual tool enables us to understand the organized
which serves as proof of both Third World
dignity.
and
identity
Third World cultures have been characterized as "repressed, humiliated,
betrayed,"'* and grossly misunderstood. As a result authentic cultures have
been forced to take refuge in villages, in slum dwellings and jungles. The role of
Third World cinema, therefore, has been to relieve the emotions of these
denials of history, to bring about the realization of a Third World cultural
ideological expression of culture
renaissance.
To reduce
manageable proportions, three areas of the Third
World China (Asia), Cuba (Americas) and Senegal (Africa) have been
selected for an intensive discussion. They are, in a way, case studies from which
generalizations and at the same time specifications can be drawn. In every film
the filmmaker assumes that his audience is in possession of the necessary codes
that will help them bring to life what is in his mind; otherwise, the films may
prove to be only long and tedious explications of the ethnographic base on
which they are built. Since each culture has its own codes bred into its
practitioners, it follows that a filmmaker producing films for an audience from
his own culture will rely heavily on those cultural codes that make representations intelligible. However, when a cineast from one culture makes a film for
another culture, there is bound to be a clash of codes, poor communication and
even controversy. To illustrate this phenomenon, I have selected filmmakers
from foreign cultures who have made films about certain areas of the Third
World. The three cases we shall examine involve Antonioni's film on China, a
film on Cuba by post-revolutionary filmmakers, and Jean Rouch's Africa.
A word of explication has to be said about my selection of a postrevolutionary filmmaker for Cuba rather than a foreign filmmaker. Cuban
cinema is a good blend of ideology and style but critics insist on linking postthis topic to
—
—
revolutionary
Cuban
films to post Neorealist Italian filmmakers.
to be a gross error, for
economic change,
it
Cuba
as far
It is,
made
Italian.
away from pre-revolutionary
a subtle break from the Western style of
Consequently post-revolutionary films are
films as Italian films are
therefore, to reemphasize this neglected point that
Cuba
filmmaker and a film that
culture/ code, ideological/ code dichotomy.
outside
to
find
a
believe this
has not only undergone an ideological and socio-
has also
filmmaking, including the
I
I
from the Chinese.
did not have to go
will
bring out the
Cultural Codes
Film and Ideology
in
vs.
Ideological Codes
59
China
Michelangelo Antonioni's China
Antonioni was invited to the People's Republic of China in 1 972 to make a film
which later came to be known as Chung Kuo (meaning "China" or literally,
"Middle Kingdom"). Upon the release of this film there emerged a controversy
that had wide cultural as well as ideological implications. Antonioni was
accused of being a "fascist" and a "racist" by Chinese critics, while he insisted
that he was sympathetic to the Chinese revolution and had done his job in the
best way he knew. "I want the Chinese to know this: during the war, as a
member
of the Resistance,
and honesty
in this regard
Chinese to regard
I
was condemned
to death!"^ Antonioni's sincerity
can not be doubted. Then what exactly caused the
this film as
a "reactionary" and "revisionist" manifestation of
and ideology? The film revealed the way Antonioni saw China,
rather than how the Chinese saw their own country.
According to Umberto Eco, the renowned semiologist,
their culture
What
is
Antonioni's China? Those
who saw
it
on
TV remember
it
as a
work
that manifested,
an attitude of warm and cordial participation in the great event of the Chinese
people; an act of justice on TV's part which finally revealed to millions of viewers a true
China, human and peaceful outside of the western propagandistic schema. All the same, the
from the
start,
Chinese have denounced
this film as
an inconceivable act of hostility, an
insult to the
Chinese
people.'
Eco, an Italian like Antonioni, is fully aware that Antonioni's film on China
was appreciated in Italy and elsewhere in the western world (the film was also
shown on educational channels in the United States). But our need to fathom
the course of the controversy demands we go beyond the reaction of western
audiences to Chung Kuo and search for the film's meaning as it was understood
from the Chinese point of view. Three aspects of the controversy are outlined:
1.
A
segment of Antonioni's narration:
An Men
in May. We've begun our brief trip through modern day
up our cameras here. The song you just heard says, "I love Tien An
Men Square." For the Chinese, this is the center of the world: "The door to celestial
peace" as it is called, in the heart of Peking and Peking is the political center of China
and China is the "Chung Kuo," the ancient core of civilization— the country at the
middle of the world. This is the square of the parades, the speeches. We chose to be here
on an ordinary day when the Chinese come and line up to have their pictures taken.
These people, the Chinese people, more so than the country are the protagonists of our
Tien
China by
Square, a day
setting
film notations.
We
We
didn't try to understand
China and we don't pretend
to explain
it.
only want to begin to observe this vast repertory of faces, gesture, customs, and
moods probably
quite foreign to us
Cultural Codes
60
Tien
An Men
is
vs.
Ideological Codes
a huge space, over 93 acres.
Marx and
The
portraits of the fathers of
Marxism
Even though the square has an air of imperial
solemnity, it did not exist during the time of the great dynasties, it was born later under
the pressure of political necessity. A popular republic was proclaimed here; and // was
here that the waves of Red Guards passed by marching for the cuhural revolution.
overlook the square;
Engels.
'
2.
An
excerpt from People's Daily commentator:
An Men square is shown as the film begins.
It
seems quite natural that Tien
is
designed to serve the reactionary theme of the "documentary." The narrator says:
"Peking
is
In fact, this
the poHtical and revolutionary center of China, "the Peoples's Republic
proclaimed here," "here passed the waves of
revolution!"
Then
Red Guards marching for
the film leads the spectators
"away from the square"
was
the cultural
to "observe"
China, supposedly to see what the Chinese revolution has brought the Chinese people.
A
new China beyond recognition. This
and composition of the film is designed solely for the purpose of
concentrating its attack on the revolution led by the Communist Party of China. And
reviling the revolution, negating it and opposing it.*
here lies the nub of the film
series of reactionary scenes follow, distorting
structure
—
3.
Michelangelo Antonioni's reply:
But that
is
our way of looking
point of departure that our
at things,
my
first instinct
civilization, point
our cameras
fascinate me,
from an
own social context
is
individualistic viewpoint.
creates.
to record them.
at things that
That
is
the
When certain aspects of reality
We,
surround
as descendants of Western
us,
with a certain trust in the
interpretative capacities of the viewer.'
As can be seen
the differences in interpretation of the film's narrative
construction seem slight
when one
considers Antonioni's transcript and the
commentary of the Chinese. But the depth of the ideological as well
cultural controversy stems from what seem to be "slight" differences
critical
articulation.
as
in
Antonioni's "existential" preoccupation with individuals and
environment has overlooked the socio-cultural and
ideological emphasis that Amilcar Cabral insisted upon in his definition of
culture. Antonioni's failure to use the Chinese Revolution as primary seems
central to the dispute. But we should go beyond the simple narrative in order to
their relationship to their
establish the decisive
moment
that determines the ideological position of
Chung Kuo.
a.
Antonioni's choice of color in the film was criticized by the Chinese as
"unbearably pale and cold."'" Chinese
Women
or The East
is
films, like
The Red Detachment of
Red. tend to use extremely bright colors
— to the
Chinese their choice of color has a precise symbolic value.
b.
Antonioni's choice of camera style was criticized by the Chinese as
"distorted" and "unstable."" Chinese films, like
From
Victory to Victory
or those mentioned in (a) above use the camera as an "observer." In
Cultural Codes
vs.
Ideological Codes
61
Chinese films from the era of Cultural Revolution the camera is static and
is hardly used in the "participatory camera" style. According to Joris
Ivens, the
famous documentarist:
more contemplative, more static than ours; they do not go
into the action with the camera. They are not used to putting the camera
on their shoulder, like we do, and moving around. It's not just a
question of the moving camera, it's the mind that has to move, to be
Their style
is
'^
quicker to follow an action.
c.
Antonioni was faulted for his "editing" style. According to the Chinese
critics, it was illogical to juxtapose scenes of feudal China with those of
Chinese students returning from work in the fields. As Umberto Eco
points out: "Also, cutting
is
a language, and this language
is
historical,
linked to different things and different persons."'^
d.
Antonioni's choice of characters was also a point of dispute.
The Chinese
saw "old" and "sad" people in Chung Kuo as non-typical Chinese
faces. The problem is one of iconography
the typical Chinese face is the
radiant, happy soldier of the revolution.
critics
—
What
is
at stake in the
above examples
is
the fact that in addition to the film's
ideological connotations, the cultural codes have a direct visual denotation.
For instance, one of the major criticisms of Antonioni's camera style was the
shot of Nanking Bridge. The Chinese accused Antonioni as follows:
The camera was
An
on
intentionally turned
angles in order to
make
it
this
magnificent
appear crooked and
analysis of the shot, however, reveals
it
modern bridge from very bad
'''
tottering.
to be nothing but a long travelling
shot from a boat passing under the bridge. Such a low-angle shot
device in Western filmmaking
—
it
has been used,
among
is
a
common
other things to shoot
skyscrapers or monuments, giving an air of majesty and power. But Chinese
cultural codes prize "frontal representation" and prefer symmetrical shots
from
a distance. Antonioni's shot suggests "tension over balance," as indeed
is
reflection of a low-angle shot of high buildings or bridges.
accusation that the bridge
depends on a
if it
—
it
in this case, the
The Chinese
were on the verge of collapse, therefore,
takes the pro-filmic as the determining
low-angle shot
— as the determinant of
itself
The Chinese
critic also
He [Antonioni] racked
image and
shot as
distinct cultural code;
factor, not the shot
"meaning" by
is
the
remarked that
his brain to get
uglify their spiritual
such close-ups
outlook."
in
an attempt to distort the people's
Cultural Codes
62
vs.
Ideological Codes
In most Chinese films the closest shot to a close-up
is
a long
medium
shot (or
sometimes called the American shot by the French,i.e., from the knee up). The
close-up is avoided in Chinese films for two distinct reasons (but no longer
"distinct" in a number of ways, that is, if we consider our initial definition of
culture according to Amilcar Cabral).
First, the Chinese did not shoot close-ups because according to the
philosophy of Confucius this would be an intrusion into a person's privacy.
Secondly, in accordance with the mass political line of Mao Tse Tung [Mao Zedong], the emphasis is on the "collective," i.e., individuals matter only in the
context of the group. Here, then, is a case in which the "cultural" code is
identical to the "ideological" code.
In recent Chinese history (1976) a technical as well as ideological reversal
was inaugurated: it all began when Chinese photographers covering the death
and funeral of Chou En-Lai [Premier Zou Enlai] took a close-up view and
shots of the deceased premier. This did not occur as a contradiction to the
meaning discussed above because this same period marked the antiConfucian campaign of 1976. At this stage of reversal too, therefore, the
social
cultural/ ideological codes
One
art
is
were
in unison.
of the prime differences between contemporary Western and Chinese
that Chinese "revolutionary art"
is
guided by a theory that combines
"Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism,"'^ and is more
symbolic and less realistic than Western art. Mao Tse Tung once remarked that
the role of "Revolutionary Art"
extra good."
Mao
was
to
"make
the bad extra bad
and the good
also wrote that:
Although man's social life is the only source of literature and art and is incomparably livelier
and richer in content, the people are not satisfied with life alone and demand hterature and
art as well. Why? Because, while both are beautiful, life as reflected in words of literature and
art
can and ought to be on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more
and
therefore,
more
typical,
universal than actual everyday life."
According to many observers, including Susan Sontag, the two different
cultures manifest two distinct world outlooks. The "ideal type" is most
common in Chinese art, i.e., the content of art is drawn from struggles in real
life,
but
its
artistic
manifestation
Photography Sontag
is
made on
a
much
higher plane. In
On
writes;
We see reality as hopelessly and
interestingly plural. In China,
what
is
defined as an issue for
one and wrong one. Our society
proposes a spectrum of discontinuous choices and perceptions. Theirs is constructed around
a single, ideal observer; and photographs contribute their bit to the Great Monologue. For
debate
is
one about which there are "two
us, there are dispersed,
lines," a right
interchangeable "points of view"; photography
is
polylogue.
Cultural Codes
Whereas
Ideological Codes
vs.
63
Realism treated and captured the contemporary
the "Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanti-
Socialist
socialist reality,
cism" of the Chinese went beyond the present reality into the future; hence, the
treatment of heroic epics and futuristic themes socialist man/ woman surging
—
ahead. This partly explains
why most
of the Chinese films that have been
screened in Western countries (and most until very recently, have been Cultural
Revolution films) deal with operatic themes and
styles.
For example, The East
Red. The Red Detachment of Women, Song of the Dragon River, On the
Docks, The Red Lantern; Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and The WhiteHaired Girl, are either operas or ballets. The viewer of these films is clearly
is
made aware which
characters represent evil and which represent the good.
Peter Bonerz, an American actor (he played the role of the dentist in "The
Bob Newhart Show")
interviewed by the
visited
China
in
1976.
Upon
Oh
return
he was
US-China Peoples Friendship Association:
Q. Are their [films] always positive stories?
always get defeated?
A.
his
sure! But then, every
Republic of China)
beyond our
is
dramatic device
positive
I
mean, does the enemy
in the
P.R.C. (People's
— the hero, the victor and so on —almost
ability to believe!
Q. Yes, we're not really used to that. Did the audiences in China seem to
like this?
A.
Oh — this is what they go to the movies for, hoping to experience this
a sort of reaffirmation of their
Q. Yes, and
it's all
the
more
own
interesting
positive support of the society.
when you think
of our "anti-hero"
cult.
A.
Mmmmmm — well, that syndrome would be regarded as an extremely
decadent art form because we're sympathising with
''
evil.
Chinese Film Style
Given the Chinese criticism of Antonioni's view of China and their cultural as
well as ideological orientation in art, it would be useful to discuss two
representative films. The East is Red and From Victory to Victory. The first
film was produced around the turn of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and the
latter was made in 1974.
In the film. The East is Red, the cast are performers in an opera-ballet
stage setting. The Peking opera is more than simply a theater, for it also
includes ballet and gymnastics. The East is Red is a glorious aggrandizement of
Cultural Codes
64
vs.
Ideological Codes
points of reference in the Chinese revolutionary struggle.
The
film serves to
sustain a feeling of nationalism, an overwhelming feeling of solidarity
and
optimism for Chinese audiences. Dramatized are The Long March, the war
against Japanese imperialism, and the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek. To the
Chinese, the film is a reminder of their hard life and their glorious victory over
all
obstacles.
The "heroic" style of the film
is
characterized by symbolic gestures
—
and a "romantic" framing of actions actions that are stylistically exaggerated
so as to render them more than life-like.
Most of the film is shot from the point of view of the audience from the
—
The action, therefore, unfolds in a frontal fashion. The stage-front
shot reveals enough of the stage where the action is taking place. Close shots
occur within the stage-front shot the viewpoint remains the same except that
stage front.
—
it is
An important departure from the stage front is
merely closer to the action.
presented from the point of view of a character (s) in the pageant. In the section
entitled
"Dawn
in the East,"
slowly across the stage
a group of dockers, carrying a load, progress
— haltingly — from
left
to right,
towards two figures
standing several steps above the stage watching over the scene. They are the
imperialistic "masters."
dockers
Then a shot from
in a single file,
the masters' point of view.
looking up, dance with exaggerated moves. The
have been established: the "good" symbolized by
and the "evil" represented by the right side of frame.
dialectics
The shots from
Now the
"left" side of
frame
the back of the theater (which include part of the
audience), of which there are several instances, are generally similar to the
stage-front shots.
shots, that
shown
is,
A continuum of camera positions is established for audience
taking the viewpoint of a position in the audience. Actions are not
segments except within a larger context, that of the entire stage. In
certain scenes, the center of attention fills the entire stage showing the whole
in
space so that the action shown
is
not only understandable and meaningful but
also visually impressive. There are several examples of this type of distant
theater shot. In the section entitled "Night
Must End":
Voice.Jhe October Revolution brings Marxist-Leninism
[Cut to view from back of theater as huge flags with Mao's face on them are raised on
stage.'"]
There are shots that reinforce a sense of "unity" among all the elements, to
emphasize the importance of each of the elements, i.e., each forming part of the
celebration. This
is
specially evident at the beginning
of the film. As the film opens, the viewer
and
in the last
sequences
up the steps and into the opera
house or theater in Peking where he is given a program and allowed to
familiarize himself with his surroundings inside the theater through a pan shot
of the walls, stage, ceiling, choir and fellow viewers. The use of the stage and
is
led
Cultural Codes
Ideological Codes
vs.
65
and with actors informs any viewer of The
East is RedoiiYit theory that history is made principally through the power of
the mass of humanity rather than individuals. Again, as the film comes to a
close, a shot similar to the opening shot is utilized. A 180° movement circles the
conductor as he faces the audience, beginning from within the theater showing
rows of the audience in the foreground then a pan from the audience to the
theater packed with 10,000 viewers
—
The
ceiling lights.
significance of this closing shot
"style" with "ideology,"
to clarify the unity of
the narrative in the pageant
i.e.,
and the theater as a
commemoration of a
whole. The film records a celebration, a
liberation of
is
which the performance of the opera
is,
people's
of course, the center.
It
records the celebration as a whole, reproducing as faithfully as possible the
and actors alike.
The theory of "Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism"
does not make an artificial partition between art and propaganda. The
distinction is rather between what is understandable and what is not.
Therefore, Chinese films take their themes from real life but their artistic
representation is elevated above real life.^' Chinese films use highly stylized and
exaggerated forms of traditional opera and Western ballet to praise the deeds
of the soldier masses in making history. The films, therefore, employ
exemplary models in order to inspire the masses and advance the historical
narrative
and the
all
inclusive ambiance: audience, theater
process.
The East
is
Red
as well as other
referred to as "poster art. "
model filmed
theatricals
have been
The determining factor is not really whether Chinese
films are "poster art" or not;
what
is
crucial
we must
to the poster. In this regard
is
the degree to which one can relate
recall Peter Bonerz's
answer to the
question of Chinese responses to films. (Quoted above.)
From
Victory to Victory
is
a sweeping two-hour
war epic produced
Chinese military might as well as the ideological
tactics of
to illustrate
Mao Tse-tung. The
and subsequent victories over the forces of
Chiang Kai-shek (the Kuomintang Army). From Victory to Victory employs
"social space" as opposed to" individual space," i.e., the mass of humanity
film dramatizes the decisive battles
instead of individual heroism
an
utterly readable film
meaning, everything
correspondingly literal.
its
—
is
it
in evidence.
The
depicted in the film.
From
Victory to Victory
is
does not employ the technique of suspense or cloud
ultra clear.
From
though the same grandiose
still
is
The
film
is
so
Victory to Victory
style
is
literal
that "ideology" too
lighting in this film
is
Rede\en
and movement are
unlike The East
and exaggerated gestures
is
embellished by
is
artificial lighting
throughout.
A
movement in the film leads to
camera movements imitate the movement of
study of camera
—
Panning the
head as he or she looks at the
stage. In
From
these findings.
the spectator's
Victory to Victory, regardless of
Cultural Codes
66
\s.
Ideological Codes
which way the camera is used, the movement is divided into two elements;
visual and ideological. For instance, when the camera moves steadily toward
the right axis of the screen
it
is
to capture the "reactionary forces" (the
Kuomintang Army of Chiang Kai-shek); but when it pans to the left axis of the
Red Star, a Red Army or Mao himself is sure to be depicted. The
screen, a
ideological significance
The zoom shot
is
point blank
—"Right"
is
bad, "left"
is
good!
— the zoom simulates camera movement into or out of the
frame, while maintaining the image in focus. In traditional cinema, the zoom
most often employed
the
zoom
to capture detail
and according
to
is
Robert Scott,
establishes the distance between the ostensible source of the observation (camera)
and the observed (object), and establishes the uniqueness of the character (he is one among
many). He is the unique individual in the teeming city, part of the whole which is not to be
questioned."
A
celebrated and technically acclaimed example in this regard
Snow's Wavelength which employs the slow zoom as it
Michael
advances through a loft
is
on a photograph of
continuity between the room and the sea.
practically unnoticed for forty-five minutes, finally resting
the sea
In
and thus establishing a
From
spatial
Victory to Victory or most other Chinese films, the
instead of "into" the frame:
it
zoom shot is "out"
implies a sense of continuity between individuals
and the mass of humanity. In Chinese films one hardly sees a zoom into the
action. Instead, pan shots on the right/ left axis are used to explore or reveal
objects or people.
The
for
lack of close-up shots in Chinese films, as discussed earlier,
From
Chinese
is
is
also true
Victory to Victory. In this film as well as others the style of the
never to employ any aspect of camera
movement that calls attention
For instance, the quick or swish pan is never used, because this kind of
shot either draws too much attention to itself, or it instills shock or
disorientation, such that in the Chinese visual and ideological paradigm it will
have a distorting impact.
The travelling shot eliminates the necessity of a cut. Travelling on the
right/ left axis, connoting the ideological orientation discussed earlier, either
forwards or backwards enlarges the field of vision. It also helps an audience feel
as if it is being "carried away" by the unfolding drama, in spite of the fact that
the movement of the camera is illusory. According to Jean Debrix, the major
distinction between theater and cinema has been this camera movement in
depth. He writes, "The very essence of dynamic visual dramaturgy derives from
it."" He further distinguishes the travelling shot from the cut:
to itself
What
differentiates the travelling shot
from the simple
cut,
and transforms
it
into one of the
most important of all cinematic means, is its determinate action on our affective reactions, on
our feeling and emotions, on those of our thoughts that are polarized, oriented and colored
by the action, characterization, plot and milieu.'"
Cultural Codes
It is
perhaps understandable
why
vs.
Ideological Codes
the Chinese films have
abandoned the
67
close-
Debrix notes in his analysis of
up shot and embraced
interpretation,
"Whereas
the
sudden
their
appearance of a close-up
shots and
surprises and stops the breath, the travelling shot gently guides us to the core of
the drama.""
In From Victory to Victory there are blasts and explosions at the end of
sequences. We witness bullets flying by, but what is strange is that even if a Red
Army fighter falls or is hit we never see him bleed. Also we do not see the enemy
we only see them as faceless people fleeing or falling back in
suffer and bleed
defeat, just as the soldiers in Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker! The political
goal in the Chinese film is clear a Chinese communist can surmount any
danger. No wonder, therefore, that a Red Army soldier always emerges out of
staccato bullet sounds and deafening bazooka blasts without a drop of blood or
the travelling shot, for as
—
—
a scratch.
Developments
in
Chinese Films
Chinese films have always been a political matter. Films of the first decade after
the liberation of China in 1949 were mostly imitative art forms showing signs of
They depicted artists' styles and tastes which reflected a
Western education and they examined Chinese realities through foreign eyes. It
was only after the 1960s that Chinese cinema began to take its authentic shape.
After the Cultural Revolution of 1966 film as a political imperative emerged
their colonial tutelage.
with
much
greater zeal. In fact, one scholar even suggests that the ideological
clash between
Madame (Chiang Ching) and Chairman Mao Tse-tung and
Liu
Shao-ch'i [Liu Shaogi] (the then chairman of the Peoples Republic) was
on the point of the artist's role in society. Liu Shao-ch'i's reliance on
professionals in the arts was opposed to Madame Mao's and Mao Tse-tung's
preference for the artistic works of amateurs.'^ Because, of all the arts, the film
medium was the most compatible with Mao's mass political and mass cultural
style, the issue was central to the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution of 1966.
In recent Chinese political history, too, the role of art and the artist in
society seems to have been one of the major central issues in the disgrace of the
"gang of four." In fact, according to the New York Times, Chiang Ching,
Mao's widow, was just about to release a film entitled Atomic Bomb, which
was described as a symbolic attack on Chou En-lai and the present head of
state, Hua Kuo-feng." Madame Ching was the principal supervisor of
literature and the arts after the Cultural Revolution and, therefore, was
accused of suppressing films that she did not like, particularly The Gardener's
Song, and Two Blueprints. Both of these films were produced in Hunan where
the present Chairman Hua was the First Secretary. She was also accused of
suppressing The Pioneers, produced on Chou En-lai's instructions. Madame
precisely
Cultural Codes
68
vs.
Ideological Codes
was made without her knowledge and
had a "serious error," asking "Whom
are you glorifying?"^* She denied the film's significance because it was designed
to praise Chou. Mao himself intervened in this instance and ordered the film
released: "There is no big error in this film. Suggest that it be approved for
"^^
Mao Tse-tung, had been interested in film from
distribution. Don't nit-pick.
the very beginning, and he even used to write and publish some of his thoughts
on the films he had seen.^"
The tide has turned again in China and a new shift might be in the making
in the kinds of films to be produced and distributed. The past is being
condemned relentlessly so that a new era may soon emerge.^' Recent reports
from the mainland suggest that individual directors instead of a "collective
directorship" are beginning to manifest themselves. The old ideological
Ching was angered
that the last film
consent and, therefore, declared the film
dispute, whether to use professionals in the arts or amateurs,
in favor of professionals.
What
this
means
is
beginning to
tilt
for Chinese films with regard to
and ideological orientation is at present unclear.
However, without a doubt a great debate is in process. According to Richard
visual
representation
Shull
It appears that this political event of about a year and a half ago has turned entertainment
around 180 degrees. The flowering of new material and revival of shows and pictures
"banned" in the recent past is immense by even our own standards, and to the ordinary
Chinese it must seem as though a culture dam has broken upstream somewhere.'^
It is
obvious that since 1976 there has been a great growth
in film
production
with more than 100 films per year being produced. At the same time Western
becoming available for Chinese audiences and various kinds of
coproduction efforts with Chinese and foreign film companies are underway.
Chinese film production is not only more plentiful but there have also
been thematic and stylistic changes. Themes that were not acceptable prior to
1976 have now surfaced. The prize-winning film of 1980, Romance on Lushan
Mountain by Huang Zumo, is one of the few love stories ever to be made in the
People's Republic of China and is extremely popular among the Chinese
audience. The theme of the film is reconciliation. In the film the Americanized
daughter of a nationalist Chinese general returns to the People's Republic and
falls in love with a son of a communist general who was her father's great
enemy. The final reconciliation of the two families has political as well as
films are
romantic overtones.
Troubled Laughter by Yang Yanjin and Deng Finlan,
implies strong criticism of high party members and control of the media for
political purposes during the Cultural Revolution. Such criticisms, unheard of
before, proved acceptable when referring to the recent past. Other films,
however, implying a more general criticism of conditions have not been able to
Another
film.
obtain release. For instance, the film originally
titled,
"Unrequited Love" (after
Cultural Codes
vs.
Ideological Codes
69
a screenplay by the same director) but later released for a limited showing as
The Sun and the
Man
Hua [a pen name for Chen Youhua,
(1981) by Bai
year-old poet, writer, and film director]
Chinese
intellectual,
an
artist,
who
victories of the Revolution of 1949.
is
a 51-
a case in point. The film focuses on a
returns to his country rejoicing in the
The
intellectual
is
persecuted as bourgeois
and accused of being a spy and finally dies at the end of the Cultural
Revolution. Stressing the central theme of the film the persecuted intellectual is
asked by his daughter, "You love the motherland, but does the motherland love
you?" Through heavy symbolism, analogies, and metaphors the film points an
accusing finger at the
Communist Party
leadership.
The
film has been singled
promoting "bourgeois liberalism" and was a target for
strong criticism during September 1981 by both Hu Yaobang, the Party's new
Chairman, and by the Party's powerful Vice-Chairman, Deng Xiaoping.
According to Michael Parks, an authority on recent Chinese trends:
out, therefore, for
Unlike other films on the Cultural Revolution, some of which have
Sun and
the
the
Man" ended
won prizes this year, "The
pessimistically, with the dying hero leaving his final footprints in
form of a question mark that the author acknowledged was meant to question the
country's future under socialism.
Recent
films,
such as The In- Laws, winner of the Chinese Oscar, the
Golden Cockerel Award for 1981, by Zhao Huanzhang, show a tendency
toward a psychological realism and the portrayal of the inner workings of
individual minds, e.g., dreams, fantasies and memories, often through the use
of special effects. The emphasis on individual psychology as opposed to social
collectivity has led to negative individual portrayals, particularly in the case of
women.
A
and trouble-making daughter-in-law,
Qiangying, in The In-Laws. [In Chinese "Qiangying" reads "Chiang Ching".]
After a long quiescent period films are becoming a major force in Chinese
society. It is now estimated that 40,000 theaters and 80,000 mobile units as well
as television are now being used to show motion pictures to the remotest parts
case in point
is
the selfish
of China.
Film and Ideology
Alea
vs.
in
Cuba
Antonioni and
Fellini
a study of the
human
adjusted,
compromising
man.'"*
The film
is
The film
is
condition at the higher social and economic
the private and confidential confession of a
man who
levels, a
study of
speaks of himself and
his
aberration."
The director is a Socialist, but films evince no striking belief in man's social capacities. In
hermetic world relationships are always deeply unsatisfactory, sex is humiliating.'*
this
Cultural Codes
70
vs.
Ideological Codes
The above quotations
illustrate the vagaries
of film
critics
when
they
review certain kinds of films. Each of the above quotes could have been used to
define and interpret Memories of Underdevelopment, but the director referred
to in the last quote
is
not
Tomas Guitierrez Alea (director oi Memories) but the
and the film referred to
Italian Antonioni;
in the first
quote
is
Antonioni's
L'Avventura. The second quote refers to La Dolce Vita by Fellini. In the
Western reviews of Memories, however, any of these quotes could have
Memories in Western journals and newspapers have
the style and works of Antonioni and FeUini. For
applied. In fact reviews oi
tried to link the film to
instance, according to Peter Schjeldahl of
The
New
York Times
Thematically, "Memories" reminds one in a strange, up-side-down
an impression heightened by
Sergio,
And
of "La Dolce Vita,"
who
plays
and the young Mastroianni.'
Stanley Kauffmann, in The
To
way
certain resemblances between Sergio Corrieri,
New
Republic, writes;
put the matter in shorthand, what the film gives us
of a political revolution.
is
an Antonioni character
in the
middle
38
While the "establishment" film critics have praised Memories by linking it with
the film of either Antonioni or Fellini, the opinion of the "left" has been
ambivalent. The recurrent "left" criticism has been that the film's focus on the
displaced bourgeoisie
is
a waste of time. They hold that socialist films should
focus attention on the pressing issues of class struggle instead of on the
anomaly.
The fact that established critics should praise and the "left" condemn
Memories of Underdevelopment calls for an examination. When the film is
examined, the two positions cited above can be seen as subjective reactions
governed by arbitrary criteria of aesthetic taste and political doctrine. The
imagined problems of a
critical
self-styled social
Memories has always zeroed in not on the film as a totality
character, Sergio. The "left" has often focused on the film's
inquiry into
but on the central
"anti-hero," Sergio, a criticism reminiscent of that of the Chinese of central
characters as "anti-heroes"
terization will
make
— the fear being that such an approach to charac-
the villain
more
interesting than positive heroes. But
we
need to go further, beyond the literal level of the film and towards a textual
reading, because any film, particularly such a film as Memories, intimates very
clearly how it is to be consumed and by whom.^'
Memories of Underdevelopment
At the end of the Second World War the theme of the loner in society, the
individual who feels apart from his surroundings, emerged in films. The Italian
Cultural Codes
film directors Fellini
and Antonioni best
Ideological Codes
vs.
71
preoccupation with the
although each filmmaker
illustrate the
and alienation of the individual. And
approached the theme differently, there were certain common elements that
each had; that is, the central characters have difficulty finding meaning in their
lives. Their personal relationships are either stilted or non-existent. And,
principally, there is an underlying discomfort and disharmony between the
character and his/her environment.
All the elements mentioned above are also common to Sergio, the lead
character in Memories. It is extremely important to note that Memories parts
company with the works of Antonioni or Fellini in a very significant way. In the
films of the Italians, the social environment is a given, and it is a constant and
ostensibly unchangeable arena in which the characters play out their "meaningless" lives. For Fellini's La Dolce Vita it is the opulent decadence of Rome's Via
Veneto. For Antonioni's L'Avventura it takes the form of jagged rocks that are
lifeless. John Howard Lawson in Film the Creative Process puts it this way:
plight
Antonioni
is
less
of feeling as a
make
preoccupied with dreams and
human
and more concerned with the failure
move in a real world, but they can never
environment or with each other. They move against
tragedy. His people therefore
effective contact with their
carefully
illusions,
composed backgrounds of glass and concrete; there are wavering reflections in
men and women appear intermittently as if searching for a reality that eludes
water or glass;
them.^"
Memories of Underdevelopment, the environment has undergone a radical
transformation. The oppressive regime under which an alienated personality
In
could develop has been replaced by a revolutionary government. Sergio,
an anachronism, and his intellectual conundrum is at odds with the
contemporary revolutionary context. There is an entire underdeveloped
country to develop, and millions of fellow Cubans to do it with. But instead,
therefore,
Sergio
is
is
locked into the past (not into the present as in the films of Fellini or
Antonioni), a stranger to the present
Sergio
is
who
a representative of a class
stares blankly into oblivion.
— the petite bourgeoisie of Batista's
Cuba. This class in Marxist theory is defined as a marginal and vacillating class
and may ally either with the oppressed or the oppressor. The ambivalent
position of Sergio is thus epitomized in his internal conflict in which he sees the
reasons for revolutionary change, yet chooses to cling to the old reactionary
on the one hand and his
immobilized and is unable to
values of his class. Between his class consciousness
desire to cling to the values of the past, Sergio
is
act.
The
The
first
dialectic
time
we
is
established very early in
Memories of Underdevelopment.
see Sergio's apartment, through his point of view, he
—
is
walking through the various rooms whistling "Adelita" the national anthem
of the Mexican revolution but what we see in the apartment of an upper-class
—
Cultural Codes
72
home
vs.
Ideological Codes
anthem
and out of context.
The entire film in fact can be viewed from a dialectical perspective. For
instance, in the beginning of the film there is a scene in which Sergio tries to
evoke memories of his wife by putting on her coat and going through her
things. The implications are many. The idea is suggested that things have been
equated with people; his wife's jewelry and cosmetics, have in fact become her.
Sergio's actions reflect a process of reification. Even his wife's voice has been
reduced to a tape recording played over a machine. That the very objects that
represent his wife are themselves symbols of middle- or upper-class affluence is
significant. As Julianne Burton puts it:
renders the revolutionary
totally irrelevant
Though intellectually grasping the point, Sergio fails to make any connection with his own
life. He fails to realize that he too is an accomplice of reactionary forces precisely because he
won't desert his position of
world around. His only
critical superiority to participate, to act, to
field
of action
transform according to borrowed
The people with
whom
is
the
women whom
engage himself in the
he objectifies and
tries to
criteria."'
Sergio interacts also reveal the complexity of his
ambivalent character. The nature of his relationships are emphasized by the
Pablo, Noemi and Elena of each section of the film. Pablo, a
titles
—
—
representative of the middle class opts to go to Miami.
lives
comfortably enough not to want to change
it.
He
is
He tells
no millionaire but
Sergio, "This thing
between the Russians and the Americans."''^ Noemi, whom Sergio sees as
"young, shining, innocent," is "underdeveloped" in his eyes; hers is a kind of
underdevelopment that is beautiful and exciting in itself and in its possibilities.
That possibility turns sour when she loses her innocence in the baptism. There
is also Elena, who wants to be an actress. Sergio tells her that "all those
this
actresses do is repeat the same movements over and over and over again"
is
—
concept
is
beautifully illustrated cinematically
American and French exploitation
Sergio is annoyed with the
inconsistent." Yet, he himself
is
when
short bits of cliched
films are repeated over
fact
"Elena proved to be totally
that
"inconsistent"
and over again.
when he
brings her to his friends
an audition despite his negative feelings about actresses. It is a petitbourgeois ideological ambivalence and vacillation which defines Sergio's
moral duality. He tells his wife it "always excites me, when I see you struggle
for
between elegance and vulgarity,"
himself His wife
tells
him,
"I
—
never
it
is
actually the struggles within Sergio
know when
you're telling the truth or
when
you're kidding," to which Sergio replies, in his typical non-committal manner,
"a
little
of both, darling."
Elena asks him, "Are you a revolutionary?" and he replies with a "what do
you think?" She then says with insight, "That you're neither revolutionary nor
counterrevolutionary." "Then what am 1?" Sergio throws at her and she once
again speaks the truth,
"You
are nothing." Sergio, of course,
knows
this.
For
Cultural Codes
vs.
Ideological Codes
73
him the revolution has been "revenge against the stupid Cuban bourgeoisie,
against idiots Hke Pablo." Yet, in the same breath he goes on to say, "I realize
Pablo
isn't
castigating
Pablo,
it's
my own
life." It
reactionary half.
his
is
as
Though he
if
Sergio's progressive half
rejects
is
bourgeois values as
Hemingway's house in order to show her
is entirely from a foreign perspective. He greatly admires the Europeans and cannot imagine that Cuba can
develop on her own terms. Even Hanna, the woman in his life who was "the
best thing that ever happened to me," was of European stock, a German, whom
he characterizes as "more of a woman than the under-developed girls here."
superficial, he
still
brings Elena to
"culture." His perception of "development"
Just as Sergio
tries to
define himself in others, he seeks Cuba's identity in
European values rather than Cuban values.
Sergio's quest for identity is a dead end. In one
succinctly
summed
camera zooms
up.
striking shot, this idea
is
We see Sergio walking down the street in long shot. The
we actually move in on the frame
itself so that by the end of the shot Sergio's face has been magnified to a random
undulation of out-of-focus grain. The closer Sergio looks at himself, therefore,
in
slowly on Sergio's face, then
the less he sees. His search has
become
larger
and
larger until the weight of
it
crushes his skull, figuratively speaking.
The
Memories of Underdevelopment is its revelation
that Sergio's impotence stems from his inability to participate actively in a
collective socialist struggle. Class consciousness demands more than the
intellectual grasp of theoretical concepts which Sergio has attained. The crucial
fact
is
great importance of
that he does not see himself as being part of a greater
whole where the
group and that of the individual are essentially inseparable.
Sergio, in Memories, is not identical to Marcello in La Dolce Vita, neither
is Tomas Guitierrez Alea Cuba's Fellini. The films, as well as the directors,
represent two distinct world outlooks, be it in their cultural orientation or
ideological disposition. They represent two systems. Whereas Fellini shows the
end of bourgeois civilization, Guitierrez Alea depicts the beginning of the new
socialist order. Where La Dolce Vita depicts universal decadence, the rift
between man and nature or environment. Memories of Underdevelopment
analyzes the origin of human folly. The main point is not the outlook of the
main characters, but rather the manner in which ideological culture is
manifested. To Fellini the ultimate separation of man and nature is an
existential one; to Alea the separation is strictly ideological. L'Avventura
speaks of life and the human condition it denotes the state of affairs of the
society that nurtured it
whereas Memories of Underdevelopment is selfreferential and denotes itself. In Antonioni's film we are presented with a text in
interest of the
—
—
its
material reality:
Cultural Codes
74
Ideological Codes
vs.
The climax of Antonioni's
films bring the characters to recognition of an intolerable
situation, a recognition projected into the future, not as a
something that
Memories of Underdevelopment, on
of ideological signification.
signify?
It
will
that
it
reflects
the other hand, refers us to certain
If the text is
is
To
—
how can
it
it is
a process of "becoming" at one with
Antonioni accepts the
so,
itself,
modes
suggested that Memories of
self-referential and denotes itself, what is being argued is
According to film historian and
ambiguities
not at one with
have nothing to say. But, when
Underdevelopment
promise of change, but as
continue indefinitely/'
will
critic
itself.
Gerald Mast,
men live with the stock exchange, with factories, with
in is how do they live with them, how does it feel to do
fact that today's
What he
interested
is
what are the problems doing
so.*"
Alea, however, the theme of the loner in films must not be looked at merely
as the neurosis of a single individual but rather as the sickness of an entire
nation.
In
La Dolce
Vita the environment
oi^t,
Antonioni or
order and
Fellini
become an apologist
no',
may have
new environment
Film and Ideology
it.
rather, they
In juxtaposing the in 'vidual to
Guitierrez Alea does
a given where existential
They do not propose to change the
seem to want to fit into it.
the emergent socialist society, Tomas
characters play out their lives as alien to
alienating environment,
is
for inescapable alienation, as
been; he rather allows us to see the
new
social
as the answer to Sergio's impasse.
in Africa
Jean Rouch's Africa
Jacques Rivette, the
of the
last
New Wave and
Cahiers group to
come
to
968 that "Rouch has been the moving force for all of
French cinema for ten years even though few people know it.'"*^ Jean-Luc
prominence, remarked
in
1
Godard too has acknowledged
the decisive influence of
Rouch on him
as a
filmmaker.
was when Jean Rouch produced Chronicle ofa Summer in 1961 that his
place in the history of cinema seems to have been settled. In Cinema Verite in
America, Stephen Mamber also gives Rouch credit for helping to launch
cinema verite: "The term (Cinema Verite) first gained popular currency in the
early sixties as a description of Jean Rouch's Chronique d'un Ete'."*^ Jean
Rouch has also helped in the development of the portable synchronous sound
system and the early Eclair camera (according to one critic, "he helped de-bug
It
Cultural Codes
vs.
Ideological Codes
75
Jean Rouch will indeed be remembered for development techniques and
new methods of shooting film and for helping to raise interesting cinematic
questions. But history is bound to judge him on the social import and virtue of
most of his films. Out of sixty or so films that Rouch has done (a dozen shorts,
some medium length and others features), the majority take Africa as an issue.
And it is on this issue that Rouch has been controversial. Except for one film,
Moi, un noir, he has been accused of abetting anti-African reactions in his
films. According to Rene Vautier, Rouch's films have objectively served the
colonizer by perpetuating an image of Africa of the past. Ousmane Sembene,
the leading cineast in present-day Africa, also accuses
Africans like
Rouch
of "treating
insects."'**
Rouch was once invited to Accra to document the possession cult of the
Hauka sect the result was Les Maitres fous. Instead of registering the
"spirituality" or "the essence" of the ritual, Rouch presented the Hauka sect as
—
"possessed by spirits of generals, doctors, and truck drivers from the British
power
structure, as they slaughter a dog,
and foam
dance
by juxtaposing the Hauka
violently
cook and eat it, march back and forth,
According to Jean Claude Muller,
at the mouth."'*^
sect
going about their daily routine with the cult
scenes, the film implied that the possession cult
exigencies of everyday colonial
life."^°
The
film
was a means of coping with the
is
so blatantly racist that both
Europeans and Africans have requested that Rouch destroy the film, but he has
refused to do so. The film nevertheless won a prize at Venice Film Festival.
Rouch's obsession with "penetrating" the African mind reached its climax
with Les Maitres fous, but most of his films in Africa, outside of Moi, un noir,
have studied Africans by employing "psychological essays" into the human
interior.
This approach has given us films that combine "fiction" with "reality,"
otherwise
known
as "psychodramas."
why should
It is
precisely here, too, that
Rouch has
European engage in a search for a
psychological reality while the whole of Africa was in a fervor for political
independence during the same period?
In a recent interview Jean Rouch was asked:
been reproached,
Q.
It
i.e.,
a
struck us that the film about France emphasizes
thinks while your films on Africa emphasize
how
the
European
how the African behaves.
an interesting point, and I must say it is the first time the
question has been put to me. Normally, I would not see so many films
one after the other. As I have said, other films I have done in France do
not have so many close-ups. Another thing, at the beginning we shot
people at 100 meters and they did not know we were shooting them.
They thought we were a group of people who had a camera. I disliked
that very much. We wanted to do something that was spontaneous,
but that was more like candid cameras, something sneaky. Our
A. This
is
Cultural Codes
76
Ideological Codes
vs.
caution goes back to the fact that Angelo and his friends had so
many
enemies that we had to be protective of our subjects. Perhaps the closeups were a kind of backlash.
Q. That
still
doesn't explain the African films where
directly to you.
How
of African culture?
A.
You
accurate
— Aren't Africans as articulate as Europeans?
One immediate
make
talks
that, given the strong oral traditions
good questions. The explanations come on
are asking
levels.
is
nobody ever
response
I
have
that
is
I
.
.
several
have decided not to
about post-independence Africa. After all, these
are not my countries. I think it is imperialistic to project your political
^'
values onto Africa
political films
This interview shows dramatically Rouch's
own
ambivalence, his attempts to
duck questions over and over again. Rouch has given the world an Africa that
is content with understanding nature and coping with the strains of everyday
life; but in none of his works is there an Africa that wants to change its
predicament. This issue
is
extremely important when
we consider that Rouch's
same Africa waging a colonial war. After the second World War
and up to the 1960s Africa saw the most unprecedented anti-colonial struggle.
It was a struggle that culminated in the early 1960s with most African nations
becoming independent from British and French colonial rule. It must be
recalled that most of Rouch's "ethnographic" films were produced in the 1950s,
i.e., in the heat of the war. As the interview indicates, Rouch could have
Africa was the
allowed Africans to have speaking parts instead of presenting a psychological
study of their
reality.
not clear whether you think narration
Q.
It's still
A.
My dream
is
to
is
good or bad.
show in a film what can be understood
directly without
the aid of narration, to explain everything that needs explanation by
filmic devices
Q. In The Mad Masters, near the end, you comment that the ritual helps
the people to be good workers and to endure colonialism with dignity,
some psychological accommodation. Clearly, one of
your aims was to deal with the viewer who would be appalled at seeing
people drinking dog's blood. You wanted to show the positive psychic
benefits to the individuals involved. Our reaction, though, was that
people would not be accommodated to endure colonialism. Is it not
far better for anger to explode on the job than to be let off in some
that
it
provides
harmless religious
rite? Is
it
not better
if
they were "bad" workers
"accidentally" broke their tools and were "lazy '7
who
Cultural Codes
Ideological Codes
vs.
77
no longer care for that ending. Originally that
commentary was impromptu. I wanted to explain that the ritual was a
method which allowed them to function in normal society with less
pain. An important point that got lost was that therapy for the
Africans is not a one-to-one private consultation like you have in
psychoanalysis and most Western therapies. The therapy we filmed
was a public ritual done in the sun. That aspect is one of the most
A. Quite
right.
I
we Westerners need
commentary now. The
important things
to learn. But
jiggle with the
film has existed as
than 20 years.
I
can't very well
is
for
more
^^
The "about-face" implied
impact of the film which
in
Rouch's
won
own
statement does not seem to alter the
a grand prize in Venice.
What
he considers
above is nowhere in the film.
Rouch's place in history must be viewed against his own admission that he
erred in the way he portrayed Africans for an uncritical and ill-informed
European and Western audience. His films tend to reinforce existing prejudices
that had been cemented by literature and the "adventure stories" of the colonial
era. Rouch was perhaps the unconscious tool and agent of French Imperialism
in Africa. The values, myths and symbols of Africa that Rouch transmitted to
his countrymen tell us, therefore, more about Rouch and European colonial
ideology than about Africa.
For Rouch, an anthropologist by training, the African people, particularimportant in the
ritual discussed
ly in his earlier films,
And when one
are scientific specimens
— they are laboratory subjects.
looks at his body of work, particularly the later films, one
is
struck with Rouch's growing tendency to personalize and fictionalize.
As an
outsider
Rouch was not
in a position to
understand nor to prescribe
a future course for African society. His films never pointed the
African future. That work has been taken up, as
it
way toward an
should be, by African
filmmakers themselves.
Xala:
A Cinema
of
Ousmane Sembene
Wax and Gold
possesses the vision of a committed cineast of social
change. All his films, which are essentially
self-critical, offer
constructs to
jumble that covers Africa. In the Sembenian universe,
film does not simply depict individuals bereft of context, caught between the
traditional and the modern or the foreign and domestic, but it shows the
collision of two mutually exclusive symbolic systems which serve their own set
of icons and are equally arbitrary and mutually worthless to the other.
Whereas in Emitai and Ceddo (described below), two historical films set in
interpret the cultural
rural Africa,
Sembene
deals with Africa's isolation in a colonial environment.
Cultural Codes
78
vs.
Ideological Codes
Tauw, Black Girl and Mandabi he treats the alienation of
individuals who live between two cultures in contemporary Africa." In Xala
(pronounced 'hallaO Sembene portrays a man seemingly successful in both
worlds and both systems. Here, unlike the other films, the African has at last
gained access to and mastered both value systems, but his very stance leaves
in
Barom
him
Sarret,
vulnerable.^"
The film centers on El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye (El Hadji is a title
meaning 'pilgrim' and in Islam it refers to one who has been to Mecca and has
come back holy) as the prototype of the emerging African bourgeoisie who
destroy the continent politically in the
"Progress."
To Sembene
this
new
name
class of
of "African Socialism" and
nouveau
riche in Africa presents a
than the openly exploitative European colonialists.
Whereas the colonialists could be readily identified by race, language, dress,
custom, manner of worship, etc., the new enemy insiduously shares all the
African's outward aspects and cultural attributes and has assumed his inimical
much more
role
sinister force
through a conscious
political choice.
we note the transfer of power taking place in an
unnamed African country. To "spice-up" the independence celebration El
Hadji Abdou Kader Beye, a board member in a "Chamber of Commerce,"
As the
film opens,
marriage to the nineteen-year-old N'Gone, the same age as
his daughter Rama. Unfortunately, the weight of El Hadji's fifty years and his
psychological makeup prevent him from consummating the marriage. El Hadji
announces
his third
— someone,
an enemy, has put the spell of "xala,"
impotence, upon him. He suspects his two wives and even a colleague. His
increasing anxiety and desperation as he seeks to break the spell of xala sets the
film's pace, as El Hadji goes from one marabout to another, from wife to wife,
searching for the cause and cure of his lost virility. His wallet grows lighter as he
must pay for each visitation. He becomes so obsessed with regaining his
believes himself
hexed
potency that he neglects
his
work
as a
member of the "Chamber of Commerce"
and quite literally becomes impotent not only in the bedroom but also in the
boardroom.
Xala is on one level a comedy. El Hadji's desire to regain his "manhood"
(as he defines it) is presented in an extremely humorous way. The film
illustrates a simple moral tale of a man who loses everything as a result of living
beyond his age and means. On another level, however, the film offers a
poignant satire about Africa's neo-colonial leaders.
Wax and gold
as a method.
The
film language of Xala,
I
believe,
can be
constructed on the model of an African poetic form called "sem-enna-worq"
means, "wax and gold."" The term refers to the "lost wax"
process in which a goldsmith creates a wax form, casts a clay mold around it,
then drains out the wax, and pours in molten gold to form the valued object.
which
literally
Cultural Codes
vs.
Ideological Codes
Applied to poetics, the concept acknowledges two
79
levels of interpretation,
and representation. Such a poetic form aims to attain a
of ideas with a minimum of words. "Wax" refers to the most obvious
distinct in theory
maximum
and
superficial
meaning, whereas the "gold" embedded
the "true" meaning, which
may
in the art
work
offers
be inaccessible unless one understands the finer
nuances of folk culture.
In the novel Xala, the structural key that explains the story's surface
metaphor with a sociological message. ^^ In the
film Xala, to unearth the "gold" we must go beyond the manifest content and
beyond the sexual metaphor. To restore the "gold" in its purity in Xala means,
therefore, to perform an autopsy and remove the "wax," the comedy format, in
political
meaning
links a sexual
order to gain access to the text's ideology.
How
does Sembene, the filmmaker, help us discover the ideological
lie mute within the comedic form? What cultural codes
modes
does
he employ to mark the film's immanent meaning? His
and filmic
search for African cinema, I believe, comes in his use of these two modes of
discourse. What follows, therefore, is a two-pronged study and investigation of
Xala. The first part deals with the cultural fabric of the film and the second
underpinnings which
section with the film style.
Many symbols
expose the manipulators of the new
social order
the Westernized Africans who like chameleons are ready to
appearance
to protect their selfish interests. At the film's
change their
beginning the board members in the "Chamber of Commerce" (euphemism for
Cultural codes.
in the film
—
government) wear native dress as they acknowledge their assumption of
political/ economic power. They then change into well-cut, European threepiece suits once they reach the boardroom's sanctity. Similarly, the secretary of
El Hadji's warehouse wears a traditional African dress while outside in the
streets,
but once in the office she takes off this outer layer to reveal a European
dress underneath.
two wives represent the duality that has become Africa. The first
wife, Adja Awa Astou (Adja refers to a female pilgrim), is a woman with
dignity and wears the traditional African dress. She understands the institution
of polygamy which in her wisdom and womanhood she knows she cannot
change. She accepts the traditional role of service to her husband without
undue concern for money and success. The second wife, Oumi N'Doye, never
talks to El Hadji except about sex and money. She, unlike Awa who always
speaks Wolof, almost always addresses El Hadji and her children in French.
She likes Western dress and likes to appear sexy. She stands as a symbolic
El Hadji's
figure of neo-colonial destruction.
One
is the ban on
nude portrait of the bride on the wall of her
of the customs of Senegal's Islamized cultural heritage
nudity. Sembene's use of a
80
Cultural Codes
Ideological Codes
vs.
bedroom, with her back to the viewer, defines the new modernity while at the
same time it defies a cultural heritage. The bride, in white bridal gown, also
refers visually to the Western wedding. As if these were not enough, Sembene
includes white plastic figures as the decorations on the large wedding cake.
The choice of language spoken throughout the film is also symbolic in the
way it is used. The use of French in Xala clearly sets those acculturated to
European ways apart from the masses who speak Wolof and are seen as the
preservers of indigenous culture. El Hadji speaks French throughout to the
disgust of his progressive daughter
Rama, why do you answer in Wolof when
WoloJ] Father, have a good day."
El Hadji
[angrily]
Rama
[in
Not only
is
Rama:
I
speak to you
in
French?
Rama associated with the language issue in the film but she also acts
and behavior, and is not
intimidated by him. Rama also represents the omnipresent and omniscient
"voice" behind the film. As the hope of liberated Africa, all progressive
as her father's conscience, questioning his motives
statements in the film are associated with her.
El Hadji
[angrily]
Rama
Men!
Who
are "dirty dogs,"
Rama?
El Hadji
Why
Rama
Every polygamous
El Hadji
[astounded but firmly] Say that again?
Rama
Every polygamous
are they "dirty dogs'?
man
man
is
is
a
a
liar.
liar.
In another instance, he offers her a drink, Evian, an imported mineral
water from France:
El Hadji
Ok, ok,
Rama
I
El Hadji
It's
let
us have a drink. Here, drink,
my
child.
don't drink imported water.
the drink
prefer.
I
I
drink two
litres
a day.
meeting of the board called to determine the
advisability of retaining El Hadji in the administration. El Hadji is summoned
to answer for misuse of funds and for writing bad checks. Here, however, he
During the
uses the
special
same words of
his
more, his request to speak
his moral character.
Board-member
daughter
in
Wolof
Rama
against his adversaries. Further-
rather than French indicates a reversal in
El Hadji, the colonial period
is
finished.
We
govern the country.
You
collaborate with the government. Big Mouth.
El Hadji
Board-member
President,
1
will
speak
in
Wolof.
President, point of order. In French, old boy.
French.
The
official
language
is
Cultural Codes
Calm down,
President
act civilized. El Hadji,
insults in the purest tradition of
Each one of us
El Hadji
We
The
entire
is
a "dirty dog."
1
are crabs in a single basket.
spectrum of symbols used
vs.
Ideological Codes
you may speak but
in
81
French. Even the
Francophonia.
repeat "dirty dogs," probably worse than
We
have
all
in the film
given bad cheques
[
.
.
.
I.
]
reminds us of Africa-in-
its-otherness flirting with Africa-rooted-in-its-own. All the cited cultural codes
open symbols whose meaning is quite literal, i.e., Africa stripped of her
cultural identity and dignity. The film also explicitly criticizes those who
command political and economic power for their myopic vision of independence and for their confused mixing of their own class interests with those of
serve as
African liberation.
The class code. Throughout the film there is a game of opposition between the
nouveau riche and the people those who speak French and those who do not,
those assimilated by the system and those who are its rejects. These two groups
share a common heritage and a form of interdependency. Their paths,
however, differ in one crucial area wealth.
Sembene wastes no time in making dialectical logic out of the two classes'
interaction. A band of crippled beggars makes us uneasy, but since we follow
—
—
the lives of the affluent,
it is
The
comments on
the bourgeoisie's class nature that dominates.
beggars are often seen but, except through the theme music that
their situation, they are not heard, so they
mutely remind us of the harsh
^^
urban Africa.
of mass beggars
realities in
offers a real picture of urban Africa.
The
Sembene depicts the less fortunate as victims of the bourgeoisie who deprive
them of basic needs and view them with utter contempt. The beggars do not
have a way to redress wrongs done to them. In their despair, therefore, after El
film's use
Hadji has been stripped of his wealth and his second and his third wife have
deserted him, they confront him in Awa's villa. [Since Awa (meaning, 'the first
woman on
earth')
symbolizes the
this
band
tells
represents traditional Africa, El Hadji's return to her
exile's
complete return to
his roots.]
Seated like a "tribal" jury,
El Hadji that they alone can cure his impotence.
El Hadji
Gogul, the blind
he emerges from
[as
man
his
bedroom
in
pajamas']
What
is
this,
"Robbery"?
Robbery? No, "Vengeance"!! Our story goes back a long time
ago, before your first marriage with this lady. What I have
become is your fault. You appropriated our inheritance. You
falsified our names and we were expropriated. 1 was thrown in
prison.
1
am
of the Beye family.
Now
1
will get
my
revenge.
I
arranged your xala.
If
will
you want to be a man, undress nude
spit on you.
in front
of everyone.
We
Cultural Codes
82
Again,
to this
it is
vs.
Ideological Codes
the concern for self which motivates El Hadji to subject himself
debasement and revenge by the beggars,
whom
he had once called
"human rubbish." The symbolic class implications are enormous.
Sembene does not use stereotypes such as depicting the exploiter
as
and the exploited as simply heroic, as is the case with the
we examined. In Xala we feel empathy for both El Hadji and the
ridiculously evil
Chinese films
beggars.
Sembene
clearly sides with African unity against the corrupting
influence of imposed systems
and cultures
that divide Africans into exploiters
seems evident that since Sembene warns the
emerging bourgeoisie not to lose sight of its own traumas and inevitable fall
from power, he clearly shows a difference between human nature and the
and the exploited. Rather,
it
corrupting influence of foreign systems and cultures on Africa.
"Xala," in
fact, indicates
—"temporary"
a "temporary sexual impotence,"
suggests that the bourgeois era will end one day.
It
also implies that the
new
when reeducated and having undergone proletarianization will
become an active and valuable cadre when the dominated class seizes and
bourgeoisie
assumes power. Just as the oppressed offer a cure for El Hadji's xala, therefore,
so too
do they
What
for Africa.
has given most viewers of Xala an uncertain feeling about the film's
on El Hadji. The scene challenges spectators to
forget their viewing habits, to fight conventional codes and attend to a new
experience a new code. The spitting seems like a vomiting of bile a symbolic
social act. Its treatment in film language makes it a powerful "trope" or
cinematic rhetoric to connote the bourgeoisie's spiritual and material decadence and the common people's expression of anger and outrage against that
class. Furthermore, the spitting on El Hadji helps reincorporate him into the
people's fold. In other words, the ritual becomes a folk method of purgation
which makes El Hadji a literal incarnation of all members of the class or group
that spit on him and consequently reintegrates him into folk society.
ending
is
the ritual of spitting
—
—
we accept the notion that artistic choice also connotes
choice we must begin to investigate the ideological weight carried
formal elements. The spectators' involvement in Xala does not
Filmic codes.
ideological
If
by a film's
come, I contend, from the plot and story structure alone but also from the
execution of some basic cinematic elements such as editing, composition,
camera positioning and movement.
Sembene acts effectively in Xala
within the frame.
An
in his editing strategy
excellent instance of his editing
comes
and composition
in the
sequence of
wedding reception, an event documenting the foibles of the emerging
bourgeoisie. Two men, a minister and a deputy, meet at a doorway:
the
Cultural Codes
Deputy
Ideological Codes
83
Mr. Minister, after you.
No, Mr. Deputy, after you.
No, Minister, you are the government representative.
But you represent the people.
Minister
Deputy
Minister
Deputy
1
Minister
vs.
will wait.
and Deputy Let
us wait.
by the door. In the next shot we see the bride's mother and
aunt cutting up the meat, followed by a shot of the wedding cake where
everyone is waiting for a share. Here are two government officials splitting the
They remain
erect
nation into halves by claiming that they represent either "the people" or "the
government." They cut Africa as if it were a piece of meat which people
assemble to get a share of.
In terms of composition there are two examples in the film that are indeed
remarkable. One is at the wedding reception. We see the bride's mother and
aunt, Ya Binta, coming towards the camera to greet El Hadji's first and second
wife who enter the frame from the right side. The camera lingers on this shot
while we listen to them exchange greetings. We notice their dress all have
African dresses except El Hadji's second wife, Oumi. But the dress worn by the
she wears a most
bride's aunt reveals the film's whole nature and complexity
colorful dress that appears, at first sight, authentically African; however, it is
spotted with figures of a white European model.
Another instance in which the composition of the film takes on great
meaning takes place in El Hadji's warehouse office where Rama, seated in front
of a map of Africa, talks to her father. [Note the double entendre in the
—
—
dialogue. According to folk tradition, xala
wife's jealousy so that in private
is
usually attributed to the
and public quarters
Awa would
first
be blamed for
it.]
El Hadji
Rama, my child, sit down. How is school?
I do my best. And the activities?
Ok, ok. Everything allright at home?
Rama
Yes.
El Hadji
Rama
Did your mother send you?
No, I came on my own. I am old enough to understand certain things.
[suspecting that she might be referring to his xala] Understand what?
Mother is suffering.
El Hadji
Is
Rama
I remind you, father, that mother
know, my daughter. I will come by, tell her so.
No. She doesn't know I have come.
El Hadji
Rama
Rama
El Hadji
El Hadji
Rama
Before
of the
map
Rama
map
she sick?
Physically, no.
is
your
first wife.
I
stands up to walk out of the frame
of Africa behind her once again.
reflects the exact
same
colors of
Sembene makes
us take note
We notice too that the color of the
Rama's
traditional
boubou
(native
Cultural Codes
84
costume)
aries
— blue,
and
vs.
Ideological Codes
purple, green and yellow
states. It
— and
it is
not divided into bound-
denotes pan-Africanism.
El Hadji
My
Rama
Just mother's happiness [she then walks out
child,
you don't need anything? [he searches
his wallet]
of theframe as the camera lingers on
map]
the
What Sembene
and no longer inaccessible. On
shows concern for her mother this occupies a place of
is
saying to us
is
quite direct
—
one level, Rama
meaning in the dialogue. On another level, when we consider the African map
which occupies the same screen space as Rama, her concern becomes not only
her maternal mother but "Mother Africa." This notion carries an extended
meaning when we observe the shot of El Hadji to his side we see a large
colonial map of Africa. The "wax" and "gold" are posited jointly by a simple
instance of composition. Here then is an excellent case where two realities fight
to command the frame, but finally it is the "gold" meaning which leaps out and
—
breaks the boundaries of the screen.
Low and
abound
in Xala.
cite three
As
high angle shots,
common
connotative devices in filmmaking,
Their use in the film has visual and ideological meaning.
examples to
illustrate
how
I
will
shots acquire ideological signification.
introduced to us through a quick visual montage and a voiceover narration on "African Socialism," we see the colonial representative leave,
the film
is
taking their miniature statues and busts of white figures with them. Immediately
following, the
new government of Africans
enter a huge building
shot from a low angle, a shot which connotes power.
— they are
The next time we
see
them, they are shot from a high angle, a shot which diminishes the people
depicted. They are opening briefcases full of money handed to them by the
whites
whom we
saw leaving
just a short while back.
In the high angle shot of the boardroom we see the members of the
Chamber seated around what appears to be a pool table. The color is green, the
color of money which their business meeting will generate. The six men seated
around the table seem to represent the six pool-table pockets. In the meeting
room, a white advisor stands in the background, like an overseer as in the
colonial era, still visible and still calling the shots. The composition makes us
realize that any change in power is merely illusory and only cosmetic.
Gorgul, the blind man, the leader of the beggars, does not have many lines
to speak (he does not speak until a few minutes before the film ends), but he has
visual importance. All through the film when the beggars are shown, we see the
blind man singled out, shot mostly from a low angle, giving him an appearance
of some kind of power and a sense of majesty. When the film's point of view
coincides with that of the other beggars, however, we see him shot at eye-level.
So long as a "cultural curtain" exists between peoples and nations, an
understanding of how films articulate space and time becomes crucial to
Cultural Codes
vs.
Ideological Codes
85
understanding films coming from a geographical and cultural distance. African
films (or other Third World films) when shown outside of their cultural context
tend to lose their message. Therefore, the degree to which films transcend the
becomes critical to any discussion of film's effectiveness. These
matters often depend on the issue of film's spatial-temporal significations.*'
In Xala there is one continuous scene which calls attention to itself It is a
scene where Modu, El Hadji's chauffeur, opens a bottle of imported mineral
cultural curtain
water (El Hadji's favorite drink), empties
discards the
empty
bottle,
and
it
into the Mercedes' radiator,
closes the hood. Screen time here
is
identical to
would take in real life. Any American or European film
student might be tempted to shorten the scene without any loss in "meaning."
But the issue is not what the film lacks but what it possesses. We must interpret
the scene as it is coded. We need to remember that of all the characters in Xala,
Modu is the only person engaged in any kind of concrete labor. Sembene, a
man understanding Marx and Lenin, does not want the scene's implication to
go unnoticed. The scene, therefore, forces time to become space and space to
become time to emphasize these elements as well as the comedy inherent in the
the actual time
it
character's labor.
Another instance of Sembene's use of time and space occurs in the last few
scenes, when El Hadji submits to the beggars who spit on him. First, the camera
pans (a shot that maintains the integrity of the space) around the proud figure
of El Hadji standing half-naked, the spittle covering his shoulders and chest.
The camera then registers a medium shot of his son and daughter standing by
watching their father's humiliation; it lingers on an intimate image of Awa in
the image of El Hadji is caught as in a freeze
tears. Next, time is stuck, frozen
frame. And we too must stop for a moment to ponder the meaning of this man
and his suffering. Since we cannot rely on El Hadji to "stay put" in the predicted
space offered by the changing world of the screen, we are denied any easy
—
identification with his fate.
We skip
to a different period
— the joyous time of
and the festive mood at his wedding. Time has
played a cruel trick on El Hadji and the class he represents. We watch and
reconstruct a picture of Africa which allows us to be analytical and objective
and demands of us that we take sides.
Xala is not simply another film made by an African which treats themes
and elements. It does not rely on the concepts and propositions of conventional
cinema, be it American, Russian or European. Xala uniquely takes African
folk-narrative tradition and translates it fully into filmic form.
Cinema does not have to tell a story only one way. It does not have to
perpetuate the status quo. The meaningful road to African cinema lies in a
cinema that draws from the wealth of its cultural and aesthetic traditions. Xala
marks and signals a turning point in the development of African cinema in that
the folk-narrative tradition and cinema acquire a measure of peaceful
the Independence Celebration
Cultural Codes
86
vs.
Ideological Codes
new cinematic code, one
own set of rules and criteria of
coexistence. This requires the establishment of a
which
own
will evolve its
system governed by
its
excellence. This brief study has attempted to appraise critically the code-in-
formation and the direction of a new cinema
Ceddo:
A
— a cinema of wax and gold.
Revolution Reborn through the Efforts of
The
Womanhood
and events from an epoch stretching
over hundreds of years and which is still with us today. Reflections on the appropriation of
power. Anticipations of the coups de'etat of the Africa of today. Reflections on theguih of
the former feudal classes and the bourgeoisie of today. Reflections over the responsibility
Ceddo
is
a film of reflections.
direct or indirect
film presents facts
— of religion for the alienation of the African —even today. Reflections over
the slave trade where the toys
and
trinkets of
today were objects of exchange. Reflections on
the spirituality of the African.*"
Ousmane Sembene
come to loggerheads with the
Censorship Board of Sengal for the third time. Ceddo (1977), like Emitai and
Xala, has been delayed in getting onto Senegalese screens. The controversy
With
his latest film
has
word and the linguistic origin of the term
"ceddo." Senegal's Commission for Cinematograph Control refused to release
the film unless the title of the film was changed from "Ceddo" to "Cedo."
Sembene refused on the grounds that the government's preferred spelling is a
violation of African identity and that it represents the continuation of
centers
around the
spelling of the
colonialist influence in Senegal.
After a heated debate Senegalese officials agreed to release the film as
spelled
if
Sembene would agree
to precede the film with a
explanation that the film was "a
fictitious
commentary and
reconstruction of a historical
nature." Sembene stood his ground.
What
is
central to the controversy surrounding Ceddo,
linguistic dispute
What
and the
film's historical reference,
Ceddo about?
"Ceddo," meaning "outsider,"
tions.
then
is its
beyond the
ideological implica-
is
into the short span of time of the
is
life
about the history of Africa compressed
of a traditional African village.
The
film
seems to be set during the period when North African Arabs were creating
Islamic empires all over Africa. In an African village the king and some of his
subjects are converted to Islam.
The majority of
his
people hold on to their
The village has
on African spirituality: a European
trader, a Catholic priest and an Arab Moslem. The film traces the former
colonial period during which these three elements which came from the outside
coalesced to rob Africa of its culture and identity. Where religion could not
traditional gods
and
are, therefore, considered "outsiders."
three symbolic foreigners
who
intrude
penetrate, the intruders resorted to arms. But to acquire arms, one needed to
have
slaves.
power.
Thus, the African people became objects of trade in the struggle for
Cultural Codes
The Ceddo,
therefore, represents Africans
vs.
Ideological Codes
87
who resisted wholesale converTo be Ceddo is to be a warrior
sion to Islam and, to a lesser extent, Christianity.
of just causes. According to Sembene:
The Ceddo
group nor a religion, it is rather a manner of being with rules
a lively mind or spirit, rich in the double meaning of words and
the forbidden meanings. The Ceddo is innocent of sin and transgression. The Ceddo is
is
neither an ethnic
and regulations. The Ceddo
knows
is
jealous of his/her absolute liberty.*'
The
film opens with the daughter of the king, the princess Dior, being
kidnapped by one of the "outsiders," the Ceddo. Several of the princess's
nephew, try to rescue her but are slain by her
of his daughter and his inability to determine what
suitors, including the king's
captor.
The King's
loss
necessary course of action to take in order to rescue her causes a
system between him and the Muslims.
The Muslim Imam, who has gained
the village,
kills
princess. Therefore, he sends out
Dior and
kill
religious as well as political
the king (his death by snakebite
and declares himself king. To reinforce
rift
his
some of
is
in the
power
in
apparently an assassination)
power the Imam wants
to
marry the
his followers to rescue the princess
her captor. This done, the film ends with the princess killing the
Imam. This is the bare skeleton of the film.
The kidnapping of Princess Dior is not simply an act of rebellion by the
Ceddo. The established order in the village had lost control— it had become
impotent— and Dior is claimed by Ceddo as a demand for a renewal of the
society. The princess personifies the figurehead, the Samp, the most sacred
object in the village's culture. The head of the Samp bears the image of Dior.
Dior is thus the goddess, the Samp. The base of the Samp when planted in the
ground designates sacred and
where the men gather to
In kidnapping Dior, therefore, the
sanctified earth
determine the future of their village.
Ceddo's plan is to impregnate her figuratively with the spirit of revolution.
Ceddo is about opposing groups and cuhures. The opposing cultures are
realized in terms of icons. The princess represents indigenous culture
she
symbolizes tradition. Furthermore, she represents the future, since she is not
—
"Queen." Islamic influence is represented by sheiks and the Imam,
and Christianity and Western beliefs by the white trader and the Catholic
priest. Dior is proud, graceful and silent. The camera follows her slowly,
yet called
respects
her privacy.
The white
trader
is
seen only briefly, perhaps to
foreshadow the future bondage of the village. There is a distant shot of him at
the beginning of the film as he trades firearms for humans. At a royal ceremony
we see the trader and the Catholic priest sitting close by, and isolated by the
camera from the surroundings.
Sembene's camera style is often governed by the ideological meaning it
imparts. In one instance, the Imam is shot from medium to close-up— this is in
Cultural Codes
88
vs.
Ideological Codes
Muslim Sheik that he is
Then we see the Muslim leader rise
the scene where one of the king's entourage
tells
the
assuming equal authority with the king.
(low angle, showing dominance) and say there is no king besides Allah. From
the shooting angle we have a transition from being equal (eye-level) to the royal
elders to actually being above them (high-angle) in power. After the death of
the king, when the village is taken over by the Muslims, the villagers are shaved
to signal their conversion to Islam. The camera registers a high-angle shot of
the seated crowd, the Ceddo, and the shot implies that they are belittled in the
eyes of the MusUms. Subsequently each individual is called to the new Muslim
leader for renaming." Here, the frame is deep-focus to show the crowd as
dominated and humiliated by being forced to acquire another name
— another
culture, another identity.
two warriors who were sent to rescue
her, Princess Dior cleanses herself in a river and transforms herself into a
seductress. Then calmly and enticingly she offers water to her captor, an act
which he interprets as a ritual offering of surrender. He soon abandons this
notion when she tries to seize the weapons a bow and poisonous arrows
which he had carelessly cast aside to accept the jug of water from her. Her
failure and his success in stopping her from getting his weapons shows that she
is not simply an empty-headed sex object. He is too vigilant to be taken in by
the wiles of a seductress, however. When he is finally killed by the Imam's men,
therefore, it is appropriate that Sembene shows the first meeting of the Princess
and the Ceddo in a flashback (shot from Dior's point of view), a true
sacramental offer of drinking water to a thirsty noble stranger, a potent symbol
of welcome in those areas of Africa where water is worth its weight in gold. It is
after this flashback that the Princess becomes imbued with the spirit of Ceddo.
As Princess Dior enters the village, dignified and haughty, her appearance
galvanizes the subdued shaven crowd into swift, silent and coordinated action
during which they render the guards powerless by putting the muzzles of guns
into their mouths. This enables the princess to overtake the guards and shoot
the Muslim leader seated on her father's throne. The Princess, being the
"Ceddo" now, imbues her people with the desire for freedom. So the Ceddo is
actually reborn through the efforts of womanhood. Ceddo brings up and in an
active manner condemns the vestiges of the oppression of women inherent in
the Islamic cultures which overlay most traditional African cultures. That the
At a
point, after the
Ceddo has
killed
—
heroine, Dior, should be the chosen instrument of destruction of the alien
shows unequivocally that the earth of Africa must be energized into
revolution through womanhood or otherwise remain emasculated in slavery.
Some critics felt that Sembene had abandoned in Ceddo the earlier
approach of a "cinema of silence" which he had developed so well in Emitai.
But although "silence" in Ceddo might appear minimal, it is very significant in
the film. The absence of sound distinguishes two of the central characters in the
culture
Cultural Codes
film,
from
whom verbal
and
entire film.
The
89
king's silence, for
indecision. In the face of danger
— he has
who
nothing to say. Also the Ceddo
throughout
Ideological Codes
responses are most anticipated.
instance, connotes impotence
define his disposition at
vs.
kidnaps Dior seldom speaks, except to
the beginning of the kidnapping. In person, his silence
pregnant with meaning since he occupies the focal point of the
Dior, too, at first speaks of her abduction and threatens her captor,
is
but in the context of the entire film she hardly says
much and when she does act,
where she executes the Muslim leader, it is performed in
absolute silence. The silence signifies two levels of meaning: first, Sembene
seems to say tradition is instinctual and articulation is not necessary for active
as in the last scene
opposition to the Muslim religion,
the silence seems to
mean
now symbolic
of foreign religions. Second,
reverence for traditional cuhure which in spite of
external influences and internal strife remains true to
The
films shot in social space)
is
in reverse
act or for their action to be successful.
and the chief of the
women
elders
who
its
African identity.
Ceddo
extent of the verbiage in
as well as Emitai (two of Sembene 's
proportion to the characters' ability to
The
best
examples are the king in Ceddo
dies in a battle in Emitai.
By way of contrast
—
Emitai and the crowd in Ceddo they hardly say much
in the film but when it becomes time to act, they are swift and deadly. That is
what is meant by a "cinema of silence."
consider the
in
Sembene 's use of music
in
Ceddo is perhaps the major departure from his
when Africans are being branded by the white
At one juncture,
Afro-American spiritual music is introduced. This musical accompaniment comes as a surprise since it does not readily correspond to the
earlier films.
trader,
physical action. In other words, instead of heightening the emotional content
or reinforcing the theme,
it
adds yet another dimension to the
film.
The
music denotes distancing of the slaves and establishes a
historical perspective. It also further enhances the view that African culture has
survived despite the dilution of the language and the religion of Western
spiritual/ gospel
"civilization."
The
spiritual music, therefore,
pushes events forward in time
towards a later chronological/ historical period.
Sembene's growth and development as a filmmaker has taken phenomenal strides with Ceddo. All of Sembene's films search into the wealth of African
—
new twist in meaning to give
voice to an ideology contrary to the prevailing status quo. In Ceddo Sembene
again acts as a modern day griot, a cultural spokesman, by showing how
culture to select appropriate codes to create a
reprehensible
women's repression
is
and what
is
being lost by
it.
According to
Sembene:
When
the princess kills the
This action
is
only reason, in
in
Imam,
it
has great symbolic significance for modern Senegal.
contrary to present ideas and the role that
my opinion,
that the film has been
our Moslem-dominated society and
cannot accept.*^
banned
women now
in
this representation
Senegal.
of
hold.
And
Women
women
is
this
is
the
have no value
something Islam
90
Cultural Codes
Harvest: 3000 Years:
A
vs.
Ideological Codes
Case of Oral Narrative and Film Form
Haile Gerima in Harvest: 3000 Years has created a personal style of "text in
motion" where oral narrative
art,
with
its
symbols, references, and double
meanings, appears to coexist with filmic modes. Like oral performers the
filmmaker has used commonly known symbols and images of the cycle of
poverty in a feudal society. As in oral art, the film relies on repetitions of cryptic
proverbs and poems, symbols and metaphors. The storyteller's device of
and deepen meaning is used throughout,
giving the film a trance-like rhythmic quality. Images of plowing, planting,
hoeing, digging, harvesting and other field work appear as a repeated theme.
repetition to heighten, emphasize
The pace of
the film, as in oral narration,
is
the pace of a leisurely narrator.
Harvest: 3000 Years best exemplifies the aesthetic of liberation of the
Third Cinema
way it blends imaginatively oral narrative art with
form.^"* The film treats the story of an honest peasant family
in the
revolutionary film
—
working on a plot of land. A layer is added to this the greedy landlord.
Another layer is added still, the life of an insane man (whose land was taken
from him by the landlord). Layer after layer is piled on this simple story. On a
deeper level, the film is truly about Ethiopia and about systems of oppression
that enslave individuals and thereby create a repressive ideology of total
submission. The film's examination of societal ills and the need for revolutionary action calls for an analysis of its thematic as well as stylistic strategy.
Harvest: 3000 Years is long and repetitive. The film, like the storyteller's
their patience and their
art, allows us to share the quality of the peasants' life
—
endurance.
On
another
level the
repeated
lyrics,
"Your 3000-year-old
dress
is
not yet torn," warns us not to be complacent with the continuation of that
existence. The opening sequences in the film establish the central code of the
culture of poverty, where a family unit consisting of a grandmother, father,
mother, daughter (who dies
in the film)
and son (who subsequently
family unit) form a family of exploited peasants.
established they serve as the code to which
of shots
refer.
The number
all
leaves the
Once these opening scenes are
subsequent shots and sequences
three which seems to be universally important in
and folklore recurs constantly in the film and becomes a basic
structural device and a thematic strategy. Each shot and sequence in the film is
marked by three images (or characters) forming triangular patterns. No image
in Harvest: 3000 Years exists without its correlations. Just as an oral form,
images come and go, appear, vanish and reappear, endlessly recalling other
images and associations. Triangular patterns of images and characters interact
unceasingly, in theme and style, to form other, greater triangular patterns
which mark the development of the film's structure. The basic antagonism of
storytelling
the principals
is
established in a series of three stages:
Cultural Codes
The
vs.
Ideological Codes
91
main contradiction between the
two principal characters, the landlord and the lunatic shown separately.
Toward the middle of the film the two antagonists are linked by a swish
pan/ reverse pan as they hurl accusations at each other.
Toward the end of the film the lunatic and the landlord are shown finally
occupying the same frame. Because we have been prepared throughout
the film for this confrontation, we know the two cannot coexist; one
must, therefore, be eliminated from the frame. The lunatic beats the
a.
b.
c.
first
part of the film establishes the
landlord to death.
There are also three
The
a.
first
distinct facial close-ups in the film:
image of the film
is
an extreme close-up shot of the son of the
landlord.
an extreme close-up shot of the peasant father as he
walks downhill to work on the land.
The last image of the entire film is an extreme close-up shot of the
Shortly after, there
b.
c.
is
peasant's son.
The close-up image of the landord's son
image of the peasant's son
at the
opening of the film and the
end of the film serve as brackets for
patterned triangles with dissolves and stop-frame opticals through which a new
close
at the
consciousness
is released in the audience just as it rises in the peasant boy.
Three characters die in the film, the landlord, the lunatic and the peasant
There are three dream sequences in the film, the servant's dream, that of
girl.
and the peasant girl's. In each instance, the dream of the characters
actual or/ and potential consciousness:
the landlord
reveals
Peasant
a.
girl
—actual: to be liberated and free
potential (via her dreams/ represented three times): to fight
back
b.
The landlord
—actual:
master of
his laborers
potential (via his daydream): fear of persecution
c.
the servant
— actual: to serve the landlord's son
potential (via his fantasy/ three kinds): to
sit
in his master's
chair
Harvest: 3000 Years, like oral narrative
The filmmaker thus subverts
ideas
on an
desires; they
art, therefore, rests
linear time
intellectual level.
Dream
and space
in
on atemporal
order to
logic.
call attention to
sequences are used to reveal fears and
symbolize exploitation or liberation.
Dream
sequences
in the film
firmly anchor the trance-like quality of the film. Endless delineations of
92
Cultural Codes
vs.
Ideological Codes
triangular visual patterns ensue throughout the film. Visual patterns within a
triangle
combine
to the initial
back to previous triangular patterns always referring
code of the opening sequence. For instance, in the scene before the
to revert
murder we see him seated in the foreground while peasants
bring him their harvest. The scene mirrors two triangles, (a) itself, and (b) the
triangle of the landscape and the hill in the background. Previous triangular
visual patterns refer to it and subsequent patterns enhance the last triangular
act of the landlord's
synthesis.
The character of
the lunatic
is
drawn from
a wealth of oral and cultural
He
speaks throughout of the exploitation and repression of the
feudal system
he speaks the truth of the film. Although he is consistently
traditions.
—
we can see the sanity of his observations. The "lunatic"
uses the license given to "madmen" by feudal Ethiopian society to speak freely
and to the point. The filmmaker, working in the final days of Emperor Haile
Selassie's rule, appropriated this same "license" in order to comment and
ideologize freely in the film. The filmmaker makes it clear that although his
character is portrayed as "mad" throughout the story, it is in fact only the
portrayed as "mad,"
which has branded him as such.
The film is, therefore, not about individuals and their interaction but
rather it is primarily about the pattern of relationships in a feudal society.
Individual emotions are seldom emphasized and there is little passion except in
the form of sadness and resignation in the film. Thus, we are detached viewers
as the pattern of the film unfolds. For instance, we are not emotionally drawn
into the emotions of the madman, although we can see intellectually the justice
of his position. Again, the hanging scene invites little vicarious remorse. The
dramatic impact of the scene is purposely diminished because we are aware of
the fact of the hanging before it is discovered by the police. The editing strategy
thus brings out, and in an active way, the film's underlying theme, its political
meaning. In this manner we are left not with an emotional feeling of sadness but
with an intellectual awareness of political injustice.
Direct communication devices, the bulwark of traditional narrative
practice, also emerge in Harvest: 3000 Years. Haile Gerima uses this direct
communicative device in the scene involving the peasant girl whose frustration
and desire for freedom is strongly portrayed. From a sitting position in the field
where she is looking after the landlord's cattle she looks over her shoulder and
thereupon is engrossed in her earlier dream, in which she sees the landlord
dressed in white seated above on a hilltop gazing out across his vast land. She
then turns to the audience. The camera tilts upward and registers a close-up
repressive ideology of the society
shot of her face as she addresses the viewer directly, "even
won't submit
—
I
am
not afraid."
audience achieves two purposes:
The
it
direct
if
I
am a woman,
I
involvement of the film with the
highlights the
meaning of her speech while
substituting an older folk tradition for the narrative conventions of film.
Cultural Codes
Immediately after she speaks the Hnes she
and thrust
is
vs.
Ideological Codes
93
abruptly awakened from her
back into the reality of her repression. She is called
to rescue the landlord's stray calf from the river and drowns in the attempt.
Returning to the theme of triangular devices, the dialectical summation of
the film is most intriguing. The peasant boy seems to escape the confines of the
triangular structure and emerges finally as the single most important force.
Until now there has been no hint of potential change. The slightest intimation
of the possibility of social change is suddenly manifest in the peasant boy. This
implication is achieved by the last scenes of the film, where fast-moving close
reverie
ironically
action shots stand out as significant acts particularly
measured and
when
contrasted to the
pace of the entire film up to that point. The tight shot of
the boy's grasp of the back of the thundering truck lends urgency to his action.
He
act
leisurely
looks back to the land he
is
is
fleeing from, he looks at us looking at him.
The
away from
the
the synthesis of the film there
still
dramatically grand. But has the boy indeed broken
confines of the triangular pattern?
appears a counter-synthesis
If
he
is
at large, the
son of the landlord,
who
with the
son establishes a new and inescapable dialectic. There is an
implication that the struggle between these two will continue.
The more subtly encoded meaning of the film, however, may rest with an
almost forgotten third figure, Kentu, the servant, the most exploited character
peasant's
of
all,
who
again completes the triangle. Throughout the film he has been the
only "neutral" contact between
all of the other characters. Unlike the other two
environment to become the repository of the memory of
the events that have occurred. Kentu thus becomes the potential narrator and
oral interpreter to his community. This suggests, both in terms of oral tradition
and of film, that Kentu would emerge as a pivotal figure in any sequel that
might be made of Harvest: 3000 Years.
he remains
tied to his
7
Conclusion
The
infant study of Third
Cinema has already
point of departure the
set as its
—
—
examination of the unique context cultural and ideological in which these
films have been produced. The critical inquiry that has evolved must address
jointly the areas of text
and context and
it
is
to that
end that the following
should be taken into account.
Third Cinema must, above
is
be recognized as a cinema of subversion. It
a cinema that emerges from the peoples who have suffered under the spells of
all,
cinema and who seek the demystification of representational
practices as part of the process of liberation. Third Cinema aims at a
destruction and construction at the same time; a destruction of the images of
colonial or neo-colonial cinema, and a construction of another cinema that
mystified
captures the revolutionary impulse of the peoples of the Third World. It is a
progressive cinema founded on folk culture whose role it is to intervene on
behalf of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America
who must fight equally
for political as well as cultural liberation.
A
examination of Third Cinema cannot take place outside of a
comprehensive knowledge of the lives and struggles of Third World people, in
both their past and their present histories. Lacking this historical perspective,
critical
the film critic or theorist can only reflect
on the ways
in
which
this
cinema
undermines and innovates traditional practices of representation, but he/she
will loose sight of the context in which the cinema operates. An equally
significant component of the critical perspective that must be adopted is the
recognition of the TEXT that pre-exists each new text and that binds the
filmmaker to a set of values, mores, traditions and behaviors in a word,
"culture"— which is at all moments the obligatory point of departure. Without
the necessary understanding of this pre-existent TEXT, critical inquiry would
fall into the trap of auteurist fallacies and "aesthetic" evaluative stances.
One of the characteristics that most films of the Third Cinema share in
common is the adjustments they had to make in response to the extremely
repressive environments from which they originate. The narration and titles of
La Mora de Los Homos represent a radical intervention over footage that in its
—
96
Conclusion
uncut version would hardly attract the attention of Argentinian censors. The
hand-held camera allowed Lasi Grave at Dimbaza, Cry of the People or Blood
—
Triumph over the Sword to be made quickly and cheaply all to the
detriment of technical quality and aesthetic control. Similarly, a shoot-and-run
technique enabled The Battle of Chile to escape the tightest security when it was
Will
filmed in Chile.
These technical or aesthetic compromises are compensated for in the
"educational" potential that the films strive for. While they inscribe the
repressive conditions under which the filmmakers are forced to operate, these
qualities provided the "index of
urgency" by which such efforts must be
measured. The more urgent the need to educate, the more didactic the format
becomes and the less important it is to achieve complete control of the
production conditions. This is mostly the case with documentaries, and the five
films cited above are prime examples of instances where delivering an urgent
message had to take precedence over formal concerns.
On the other end of the spectrum are films whose "entertainment"
potential is not compromised by their radical perspectives. Most Cuban films,
for example, were made under conditions that allowed them to develop and
control a film vocabulary which could engage an audience in an entertaining
way
while addressing various political as well as ideological issues. Solas's
Lucia, Alea's
Memories of Underdevelopment and The Last Supper or Vega's
of Teresa, all evince a style of realism that allows for an empathetic
entry into the world of fiction while at the same time raising questions of
revolutionary tactics and ideological confrontations.
The "entertainment" format also allows a filmmaker to deal with
questions of culture directly. Because culture in its mass character moves
unevenly in relation to the political and economic factors that shape history, an
examination of the cultural fabric of society becomes crucial. Ousmane
Sembene stands out as an example of a filmmaker who raises political issues
through an examination of cultural practices. Through the use of satire, for
example, a mode that is the bulwark of African oral narratives. Sembene
entertains the audience with the antics of his characters while, at the same time,
he invites the audience to reflect on the conditions of oppression. Mandabi and
Xala are characteristic examples of his style, while Ceddo, his latest film, has an
added dimension since it brings up. and in an active way condemns, the vestiges
Portrait
of the oppression of
women
inherent in the Islamic cultures that have
most traditional African cultures. He makes his point by
portraying a confrontation between the two cultures that is resolved when the
heroine, Dior, restores the sovereignty of the African heritage and overthrows
historically overlaid
Muslim oppression.
The issue of women in
up in a number of films
relation to culturally defined practices
that deal with
machismo within
is
also taken
the context of
Conclusion
revolutionary struggles. Such
97
the case, for example, with the third episode of
is
Gomez's One Way or Another and Pastor Vega's Portrait of
Teresa or the third and fourth episodes of Antonio Equino's Chuquiago. On
the other hand, the Mozambiquan films A Luta Continua (filmed during the
armed struggle) and O Povo Organizado (a post-independence film) seem to
suggest that struggle with culture is going to be harder for the women than was
Lucia, Sara
their political struggle against
Portuguese colonialism.
Similarity, the recurrent character of the lunatic as a stand-up
comic
in
Third World films has also been used to educate and at the same time entertain.
The Algerian film. Chronicle of the Years of Embers, and the Ethiopian film,
Harvest: 3000 Years, both feature a lunatic as the central character. In each
the
case,
lunatic
sayings/ poems.
is
The
dressed
lunatic
like
a zen
recites
keans, criptic
madness appears licensed to shelter
the filmmaker who harbors and uses
his
in
revolutionary ideas whereas, in fact,
monk and
it is
the license to hurl political revolutionary messages across to the audience.
Interestingly enough, in the Chronicle
film director himself
Finally,
as a topic
it is
— that
who
gives each film in the Third
all
on an international
empathetic point of entry that
at the
in fact, the
— both as a reference and
Cinema
its
unique character
address issues of political struggle which are
level.
will
These cultural elements constitute the
allow the spectators to recognize themselves
open up an identificatory mechanism in
point out the agents and causes of historical development that have
same time
order to
it is,
plays this role of the crazy poet.
the elaboration of cultural elements
despite the fact that they
relevant
of the Years of Embers,
as the film tries to
shaped that culture. Regardless of the particular
ultimate goal of Third
Cinema
is
style that a film adopts, the
to present their audiences with a rational
interpretation of a historically defined reality so that a line of causation can be
and change their
condition. It is in this double movement of cultural identification and radical
historicization that Third Cinema is a cinema of intervention in the service of
established which they can use in order to understand
revolutionary social change.
Appendix
A
Filmmakers and the Popular Government:
A Political Manifesto*
Chilean filmmakers,
it
is
time for us
all
to undertake, together with our people, the great task of
national liberation and the construction of socialism.
It is
time for us to begin to redeem our
own
values in order to affirm our cultural and political
identity.
Let us no longer allow the dominant classes to uproot the symbols which the people have
produced
in the
course of their long struggle for liberation.
Let us no longer permit national values to be used to uphold the capitalist regime.
Let us start from the class instinct of the people and with this contribute to the
making of a
class
consciousness.
Let us not limit ourselves from going beyond our contradictions;
for ourselves the
The long
way which
leads to the construction of a lucid
let
us develop
and liberating
struggle of our people for their emancipation has laid
down
them and open
culture.
for us the
way
to be
followed. Let us recover the traces of those great popular struggles falsified by official history, and
give back to the people the true version of these struggles as a legitimate
and necessary heritage for
confronting the present and envisaging the future.
Let us recover the tremendous figure of Balmaceda, anti-oligarchist and anti-imperialist.
Let us reaffirm that Recabarreu belongs to the people, that Carrera, O'Higgins,
Rodriguez, Bilbao, as well as the
anonymous miner who
without ever having understood the meaning of his
fell
life
one morning, or the peasant
Manuel
who died
or of his death, constitute the essential
foundations from which we emerge.
Published, together with an interview with Miguel
August
1974). pp. 59-69. Special thanks to Sylvia
January 1975.
Littin, in Cahiers du Cinema, no. 251-52 (JulyHarvey for translating the French into English,
A
Appendix
100
That the Chilean
flag
is
a flag of struggle and liberation,
it is
the patrimony of the people
and
their heritage.
Against an anemic and neo-colonized culture, a pasture for the consumption of an elite,
sterile petite-bourgeoisie, let us devote our collective will, immersed within the
decadent and
people, to the construction of an authentically
NATIONAL
REVOLUTIONARY
and therefore
culture.
Consequently we declare:
That before being filmmakers we are men engaged within the political and
of our people, and in their great task; the construction of socialism.
1
2.
That the cinema
3.
That the Chilean cinema, because of an
4.
That we mean by revolutionary that which
is
people, united in a
an
social
phenomenon
art.
common
historical imperative,
is
realized in conjunction
objective: liberation.
finally the true creators; the
filmmaker
is
must be a revolutionary
The people
art.
between the artist and
his
are the generators of action and
their instrument of
communication.
That the revolutionary cinema will not assert itself through decrees. Consequently we will not
grant privilege to one particular way of making film; it must be that the course of the struggle
5.
determines
this.
cinema removed from the great masses [will] become
consumption of an elite petit-bourgeoisie which is incapable of
constituting the motor of history. In this case the filmmaker will see his work politically
we
That, meanwhile,
6.
shall regard a
inevitably a product for the
nullified.
That we refuse all sectarianism aimed at the mechanical application of the principles stated
above, in the same way that we oppose the imposition of official criteria on the practice of
7.
filmmaking.
That we maintain that traditional forms of production are a veritable rampart enclosing
young filmmakers. They imply, finally, a clear cultural dependency, for these techniques are
8.
derived from aesthetic conceptions foreign to the culture of our peoples.
Against
this
we
technique
contrast research into an original language born from the
participation of the filmmaker in class struggle; this struggle will give rise to
its
own
cultural
forms.
9.
That we maintain that a filmmaker with these objectives necessarily implies a different kind of
critical evaluation;
is
10.
addressed,
That there
we
assert that the best critic of a revolutionary film
who have no
exists
need of "mediators
no such thing as a
through the contact that
it
film that
establishes with
mobilizing agent for revolutionary action.
Julio Garcia Espinosa,
Cuban
director.
its
is
who
is
the people to
defend and interpret
revolutionary
in itself.
whom
it
it."*
That
public and principally through
it
becomes such
its
influence as a
Appendix
1 1
That the cinema
is
a right of the people,
are most appropriate for reaching
12.
all
and that
it is
no acquired
101
necessary to research those forms which
Chileans.
That the means of production must be available to
sense, there exist
A
rights;
all
workers
in the
on the contrary, under
cinema and
the Popular
that, in this
Government,
expression will not be the privilege of some, but the inalienable right of a people marching
towards
13.
their final
independence.
That a people with a culture are a people who
struggle,
who
resist
and who
CHILEAN FILMMAKERS, WE SHALL OVERCOME!
free themselves.
Appendix
B
Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers
Meeting in Algiers, 1973
Committee
People's
1:
Cinema
—
the role of cinema and film-makers in the Third World
consisted of the following film-makers and observers:
neo-colonialism
and
against imperialism
Fernando Birri (Argentina); Humberto Rios (Bolivia); Manuel Perez (Cuba); Jorge Silva
(Colombia); Jorge Cedron (Argentina); Moussa Diakite (Republic of Guinea); Flora Gomez
(Guinea-Bissau); Mohamed Abdelwahad (Morocco); El Hachmi Cherif (Algeria); Lamine
The Committee on Peoples Cinema
Merbah
Mache Khaled
(Algeria);
(Algeria); Meziani
Abdelhakim
—
Fettar Sid
(Algeria);
(Algeria). Observers:
Ali (Algeria);
Bensalah
Mohamed
Jan Lindquist (Sweden); Josephine (Guinea-
and Salvatore Piscicelli (Italy).
met on December 11,12 and 13, 1973, in Algiers, under the chairmanship of
Committee
The
Lamine Merbah. At the close of its deliberations, the Committee adopted the following analysis.
Bissau)
So-called 'underdevelopment'
is
first
of
all
repercussions on the social and cultural sectors.
an economic phenomenon which has direct
analyze such a phenomenon we must refer to
To
development of capitalism on a world scale.
determined moment in its development, capitalism extended
the dialectics of the
itself beyond the
At a historically
framework of the national European boundaries and spread a necessary condition for its
growth— to other regions of the world in which the forces of production, being only slightly
developed, provided favorable ground for the expansion of capitalism through the existence of
immense and virgin material resources, and available and cheap manpower reserves which
constituted a new, potential market for the products of capitalist industry.
This expansion manifested itself in different regions, given the power relationships, and in
—
different ways:
Through direct and total colonization implying violent invasion and the setting up of an
economic and social infrastructure which does not correspond to the real needs of the people but
a.
serves more, or exclusively, the interests of the metropolitan countries;
b.
In a
more or
less
disguised
manner
leaving to the countries in question a pretence of
autonomy;
c.
Finally,
The
—
through a system of domination of a new type neo-colonialism.
has been that these countries undergo, on the one hand, varying degrees of
result
development and, on the other hand, extremely varied
imperialism: domination, influence and pressures.
levels
of dependency with respect to
B
Appendix
104
The
different
forms of exploitation and systematic plundering of the natural resources have had
grave consequences on the economic, social and cultural levels for the so-called 'underdeveloped'
countries,
a
the fact
resulting in
diversified degrees of
common
that even
though these countries are undergoing extremely
independence and social progress
development, they face
in their struggle for
enemy: imperialism which stands
in their
way
as the principal obstacle to their
development.
consequences can be seen
Its
The
a.
articulation of the
in:
economic
sectors:
imbalance of development on the national
level
with the creation of poles of economic attraction incompatible with the development of a
proportionally planned national economy and with the interests of the popular masses, thereby
giving rise to zones of artificial prosperity.
The imbalance on
b.
the regional
and continental
levels,
imperialism to create zones of attraction favorable for
as
models of development
in
its
thereby revealing the determination of
own expansion and w hich
are presented
order to retard the people's struggle for real political and economic
independence.
The repercussions on
characteristic
the social plane are as serious as they are numerous: they lead to
impoverishment of the majority for the benefit
and the national bourgeoisie of which one sector
forces
national development, while another sector
bound
The
to those of the
dominating
and
differentiations
is
parasitic
is
instance of the dominating
in the first
objectively interested in independent
and comprador, the
interests of
which are
forces.
social inequities
have seriously affected the living standard of the
people, mainly in the rural areas where the expropriated or impoverished peasants find
impossible to reinvest on the spot in order to subsist.
Reduced
in
majority to
their
it
self-
consumption, unemployment and rural exodus, these factors lead to an intensification of
unemployment and increase under-employment in the urban centers.
In order to legitimize
and strengthen
its
hold over the economies of the colonized and neo-
colonized countries, imperialism has recourse to a systematic enterprise of deculturation and
acculturation of the people of the Third World.
That deculturation consists of depersonalizing
their peoples, of discrediting their culture
by
and inoperative, of blocking their specific development, and of disfiguring
their history
In other words, creating an actual cultural vacuum favorable to a simultaneous
process of acculturation through which the dominator endeavors to make his domination
presenting
it
as inferior
legitimate by introducing his
history: in a
word,
own moral
values, his
life
and thought patterns,
his
explantion of
his culture.
Imperialism, being obliged to take into account the fact that colonized or dominated peoples
own culture and defend it, infihrates the culture of the colonized, entertains relationships
and takes over those elements which it believes can turn it to its favor. This is done by using
the social forces which they make their own, the retrograde elements of this culture. In this way, the
language of the colonized, which is the carrier of culture, becomes inferior or foreign: it is used only
have
their
with
it
in the
family circle or in restricted social circles.
culture
and
indispensable to
the social
It is
no longer, therefore, a vehicle for education,
science, because in the schools the language of the colonizer
know
it
in
is
taught,
order to work, to subsist and to assert oneself Gradually,
and even the family relationships of the colonized. Language
itself
it
it
being
infiltrates
becomes a means of
alienation, in that the colonized has a tendency to practice the language of the colonizer, while his
own
become foreign to him.
same line of thought, the social sciences, such as sociology, archaeology and ethnology,
the most part in the service of the colonizer and the dominant class so as to perfect the work
language, as well as his personality, his culture and his moral values,
In the
are for
of alienation of the people through a pseudo-scientific process which has in fact simply consisted of
a retrospective justification for the presence of the colonizer
order.
and therefore of the new established
Appendix B
This
is
how
sociological studies have attempted to explain social
determinism, foreign to the conscience and the
will
105
phenomena by
of man. In the ethnological
field,
fatalistic
the enterprise
has consisted of rooting in the minds of the colonized prejudices of racial and original inferiority
and complexes of inadequacy
production.
and community
As
for the
Among the colonized
masteringof the various acquisitions of knowledge and man's
people, imperialism has endeavored to play
for archaeology,
its
on the pseudo-racial
one or another ethnic grouping.
differences, giving privilege to
role in cultural alienation has contributed to distorting history
by putting
and the excavations of historical vestiges which
European civilization sublimated and presented as being eternally
superior to other civilizations whose slightest traces have been buried.
Whereas, in certain countries, the national culture has continued to develop while at the same
emphasis on the
interests
and
efforts of research
justify the definite paternity of
time being retarded by the dominant forces, in other countries, given the long period of direct
domination,
so that
all
has been marked by discontinuity which has blocked
it
that remains are traces of
cultural renaissance, unless
it
is
it
in its specific
it
development,
which are scarcely capable of serving as a basis for a
raised to the present level of
real
development of national and
international productive forces.
It
should be stated, however, that the culture of the colonizer, while alienating the colonized
peoples, does the
same
to the peoples of the colonizing countries
who
are themselves exploited by
the capitalist system. Cultural alienation presents, therefore, a dual character
totality of the colonized peoples,
and
social
against the working classes
— national against the
in the colonizing countries
as well as in the colonized countries.
Imperialist economic, political
and
social domination, in order to subsist
and
to reinforce
itself,
takes root in an ideological system articulated through various channels and mainly through
cinema which
in
is
a position to influence the majority of the popular masses because
its
essential
economic and sociological, affecting to a
major degree the training of the mind. Cinema, also being an industry, is subjected to the same
development as material production within the capitalist system and through the very fact that the
North American economy is preponderant with respect to world capitalist production, its cinema
importance
is
at
one and the same time
artistic, esthetic,
becomes preponderant as well and succeeds
consequently those of the Third World where
that ideology
in
it
invading the screens of the capitalist world and
contributes to hiding inequalities, referring them to
which governs the world imperialist system dominated by the United States of
America.
With the
with a
movement, the struggle for independence takes on a
on one hand, the revalorization of national cultural heritage in marking it
birth of the national liberation
certain depth implying,
dynamism made
necessary by the development of contradictions.
contribution of progressive cultural factors borrowed from the
field
On
the other hand, the
of universal culture.
The Role of Cinema
The
role of
conditions
in
cinema
in this process consists
of manufacturing films reflecting the objective
i.e.,
films which bring about
same time as they contribute sound and objective
which the struggling peoples are developing,
disalienation of the colonized peoples at the
information for the peoples of the entire world, including the oppressed classes of the colonizing
and place the struggle of their peoples back in the general context of the struggle of the
countries and peoples of the Third World. This requires from the militant film-maker a dialectical
countries,
analysis of the socio-historic
phenomenon
of colonization.
Reciprocally, cinema in the already liberated countries and in the progressive countries
accomplish, as their
countries
still
own
must
national tasks, active solidarity with the peoples and film-makers of
under colonial and neo-colonial domination and which are struggling for
their
genuine national sovereignty. The countries enjoying political independence and struggling for
Appendix
106
B
varied development are aware of the fact that the struggle against imperialism
on the political,
economic and social levels is inseparable from its ideological content and that, consequently,
action must be taken to seize from imperialism the means to influence ideologically, and forge new
methods adapted in content and form to the interests of the struggle of their peoples. This implies
control by the people's state of all cultural activities and, in respect to cinema, nationalization in the
interest of the masses of people: production, distribution and commercialization. So as to make
such a policy operative, it has been seen that the best path requires quantitative and qualitative
development of national production capable, with the acquisition of films from the Third World
countries and the progressive countries, of swinging the balance of the power relationship in favor
of using cinema in the interest of the masses. While influencing the general environment, conditions
must be created for a greater awareness on the part of the masses, for the development of
and varied participation in the cultural life of their countries.
their
critical senses
A
all
firm policy based on principle must be introduced in this field so as to eliminate once and for
the films which the foreign monopolies continue to impose
and which generate reactionary culture and, as a
basic choices of our people.
The
question, however,
is
result,
upon
us either directly or indirectly
thought patterns
in contradiction
with the
not one of separating cinema from the overall cultural context which
we must consider
on the one hand, the action of cinema is
accompanied by that of other information and cultural media, and, on the other hand, cinema
operates with materials which are drawn from reality and already existing cultural forms of
expression in order to function and operate. It is also necessary to be vigilant and eliminate
nefarious action which the information media can have and to purify the forms of popular
expression (folklore, music, theatre, etc.) and to modernize them.
The cinema language being thereby linked to other cultural forms, the development of cinema,
while demanding the raising of the general cultural level, contributes to this task in an efficient way
and can even become an excellent means for the polarization of the various action fields as well as
prevails in our countries, for
that,
cultural radiation.
Films being a social act within a historical
maker
is
reality,
it
no longer limited to the making of films but
follows that the task of the Third
is
extended to other
fields
World
film-
of action such
as:
and making the new films understandable to the masses of people by
associating himself with the promoters of people's cinemas, clubs and itinerant film groups in their
dynamic action aimed at disalienation and sensitization in favor of a cinema which satisfies the
articulating, fostering
same time
interests of the masses, for at the
that the struggle against imperialism
develops on the economic, social and political
levels,
and
for progress
a greater and greater awareness of the masses
more concrete way in this struggle.
knowing how cinema will develop is linked in a decisive way to
the solutions which must be provided to all the problems with which our peoples are confronted
and which cinema must face and contribute to resolving. The task of the Third World film-maker
thereby becomes even more important and implies that the struggle waged by cinema for
independence, freedom and progress must go, and already goes, hand in hand with the struggle
within and without the field of cinema, but always in alliance with the popular masses for the
triumph of the ideas of freedom and progress.
In these conditions, it becomes obvious that the freedom of expression and movement, the right
to practice cinema and research are essential demands of the film-makers of the Third World
freedoms and rights which they have already committed to invest in the service of the working
masses against imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism for the general emancipation of their
develops, associating cinema in a
In other words, the question of
peoples.
United and
direct
in solidarity against
or indirect aggressor
intermediary of
in
NATO, SEATO
American imperialism,
at the
head of world imperialism, and
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Palestine,
and
CENTO,
and
in Latin
in
Africa through the
America, hiding
itself
behind the
Appendix B
fascist
coup
d'etat of the
107
Chilean military junta and the other oligarchies in power, the film-makers
present here in Algiers, certain that they express the opinion of their film-maker comrades of the
Third World, condemn the interventions, aggressions and pressures of imperialism, condemn the
World countries are subjected and demand
and imprisoned and the cessation of measures
persecutions to which the film-makers of certain Third
the immediate liberation of the film-makers detained
restricting their freedom.
Committee
Production/ Coproduction
2:
The Committee on Production Coproduction, appointed by the General Assembly of the Third
World Film-Makers Meeting in Algeria, met on December II, 12 and 13, 1973, under the
chairmanship of Ousmane Sembene. The Committee, which devoted itself to the problems of film
production and co-production in the Third World countries, including the following film-makers
and observers: Ousmane Sembene (Senegal); Sergio Castilla (Chile); Santiago Alvarez (Cuba);
Sebastien Kainba (Congo); Mamadou Sidibe (Mali); Benamar Bakhti (Algeria); Nourredine
Touazi (Algeria); Hedi Ben Khelifa (Tunisia); Mostefa Bouali (Palestine); Med Hondo (Mauritania). Observers: Simon Hartog (Great Britain), representing the British film-makers' union, and
Theo Robichet (France). Humberto Rios (Argentina) presented an information report to the
Committee.
The delegates present, after reporting on the natural production and coproduction conditions
and the organization of the cinema industries in their countries, noted that the role of cinema in the
Third World is to promote culture through films, which are a weapon as well as a means of
expression for the development of the awareness of the people, and that the cinema falls within the
framework of the
class struggle.
Considering:
— that the problems of cinema production
to the economic, political
and
in the countries
of the Third World are closely linked
social realities of each of them;
— that, consequently, cinema activity does not develop
in a similar fashion:
those countries which are waging a liberation struggle,
a.
in
b.
in those countries
which have conquered
their political
independence and which have
founded States,
c.
in
those countries which, while being sovereign, are struggling to seize their economic and
cultural independence;
— that
those countries which are waging wars of liberation lack a film infrastructure and
specialized cadres and, as a result, their production
and very often
is
supported by or
is
is
limited, achieved in difficult circumstances
dependent upon sporadic
initiatives;
— that in those countries struggling for their economic and cuhural independence, the principal
characteristic
is
a private infrastructure which enables
them
to realize only a portion of their
production within the national territory, the remainder being handled in the capitalist countries;
This leads to an appreciable loss of foreign currency and considerable delays which impede the
development of an authentic national production.
— that
in those countries in
incorporates
it
in
its
which the State assumes the responsibility for production and
cultural activity, there
is,
nevertheless, inamajority ofcases, a lack of technical
industrial development in the cinema field and, as a consequence, production remains limited
and does not manage to cover the needs for films in those countries. The national screens,
therefore, are submerged with foreign productions coming, for the most part, from the capitalist
and
countries.
— that,
if
we add
as well the fact that world production
controlled by these countries and, in addition,
is
is
economically and ideologically
of very mediocre quality, our screens bring
ideological product which serves the interests of the colonizers, creating
in
an
moreover the habit of
Appendix B
108
seeing films in which
and
lies
social
prejudice are the choice subjects and in which these
manufacturers of individualistic ideology constantly encourage the habits of an arbitrary and
wasteful consumer society;
— that
coproductions must,
first
and foremost, be for the countries of the Third World, a
may vary and cover
in coproductions in which an imperialist country participates,
manifestation of anti-imperialist solidarity, although their characteristics
We
different aspects.
given the following
1
do not
believe
risks:
the imperialist country can shed influence through production
methods which are foreign to
the realities of our countries,
2.
the examples of coproductions have given rise to cases of profit
and the
cultural
and
economic exploitation of our countries.
The
Committee therefore concluded that it is necessary to seek jointly
and coproduction of national films within the Third World
participants in the
concrete means
to foster the production
countries.
In line with this, a certain
— to
number of recommendations were unanimously adopted:
film-makers of the Third World with national cinema
revolutionary
provide the
infrastructures;
— to put aside the conceptions and film production means of the capitalist countries and to seek
new forms, taking
possibilities of the
into account the authenticity
and the
realities
of the economic means and
Third World countries;
— to develop national cinema and television agreements for the benefit of the production and
World
distribution of Third
films
and
to seek such
agreements where they do not
exist
and to
exchange regular programs;
to organize and develop the teaching of film techniques, to welcome the nationals of countries
—
in
not ensured;
which the training
is
— to
audio-visual
use
all
the
means
available
for
the
political,
economic and
cultural
development of the countries of the Third World;
to promote coproductions with independent, revolutionary film-makers, while leaving to each
—
country the task of determining the characteristics of these productions;
— to
include in the governmental agreements between countries of the Third
measures
likely to facilitate
World those
coproductions and film exchanges;
— to influence the establishment of coproductions between national organizations of the Third
World
in
endeavoring to have them accepted by the governmental and professional institutions of
their respective countries (through the infiuence, in particular, of the acting president of the
non-
aligned countries, Mr. Houari Boumediene);
— to
propose the need for the creation of an organization of Third World film-makers, the
permanent
organization, the
Cuba. While awaiting the creation of this
(Union of Audio-Visual Arts of Algeria) will provide a temporary
which should be
secretariat of
UAAV
set
up
in
secretariat;
The film-makers
will
undertaken within the
henceforth keep each other informed of their respective approaches
framework of the FEPACI (Pan-African Federation of
Committee
3:
Cineastes).
Distribution
charge of the distribution of Third World films, after consideration of the
different remarks of the members present, proposes: the creation of an office to be called the Third
The Committee
World Cinema
in
Office.
Appendix B
It
will
be
continent.
composed of four members including a resident coordinator and one representative per
The Committee, in reply to the offer made by Algeria, proposes that the permanent
headquarters of the office be established
The goals of
To
To
1.
2.
109
in Algiers.
the office will be:
coordinate efforts for the production and distribution of Third World films
establish
and strengthen existing
relations
between Third World filmmakers and cinema
industries by:
a.
the editing of a permanent information bulletin (filmography, technical data sheets, etc.) in
four languages: Arabic, English, French and Spanish
b.
documentation on Third World cinema for the elaboration and
distribution of a catalogue on the cinema production of the countries of the Third World
c.
fostering other festivals, film markets
making a census of
existing
and film days on the Third World
level,
alongside the
other existing events
d. the editing
of a general compilation of official cinema legislation
in the
Third World countries
(problems of censorship, distribution of film copies, copyright, customs,
3.
To
etc.)
take those measures required for the creation of regional and continental organization
leading to the creation of a tricontinental organization for film distribution
4.
To
prospect the foreign markets
in
order to secure other outlets for the productions of the
Third World countries (commerical and non-commerical
The
office will
approach the authorities of the
OAU,
the
obtain from these organizations financial assistance for
rights,
TV and
cassettes).
Arab League and
its
functioning.
authorities of those countries having effective control of their
cinema
It
UNESCO in order to
will also
industries,
approach the
i.e.:
Algeria,
Guinea. Upper Volta, Mali, Uganda, Syria and Cuba, as well as other countries which manifest a
real desire to struggle against the imperialist
assistance,
the
commissions on
monopoly. In addition to the above-mentioned
operating budget of the office will be composed of donations, grants and
all
transactions of Third
World
films entrusted to the office.
[The meeting was held in Algiers from December 5 to 14, 1973. The resolutions of the various
committees were released in Algiers. This copy has been only slightly modified in grammar and
spelling by Cineasie Magazine.]
Appendix C
Interview with
Ousmane Sembene was a
[In January 1975,
conducted by
class
Ousmane Sembene
featured guest lecturer in a "Film and Social
Change"
author at the University of California, Los Angeles. His lecture and
this
question-and-answer sessions on films and issues were taped.
What
follows are excerpts that have
been transcribed from these tapes.]
First
and
last
of all,
I
am
want to be a
I
twenty years
Africa was the
not a professor and
militant.
in Africa
last
African culture?
I
want
and
I
do not think
I
am qualified to teach anything. am an artist
I
to participate in the
in the
changes that have been taking place
in the
whole world.
continent to have cinema.
What
is
the face that
we
see of Africa today?
What
there a single African culture or several African cultures? Presently, there
is no
no single Senegalese culture nor a Guinean culture. Because of the
colonial systems imposed upon us, there is no culture in such states. But there are cultures from the
is
Is
Tanzanian culture, there
is
make up these states with their own symbols,
own myths and metaphors.
various ethnic groups because the groups, themselves,
their
own
We
references,
notice that there
Senegalese.
people
and
And
the
who govern
is
their
a fusion taking place. People no longer say
same
is
true for Tanzania. But one of the
these countries or the artists
who
undergone an influence or a method of analysis that
I
am
Wolof; they say
major contradictions
try to express themselves for their
is
is
I
am
that the
people have
And these bourgeoisies,
made an analysis of their own societies.
typically bourgeois.
and 1 am talking about the African bourgeoisies, have not
They make up, as a point of reference or a point of analysis, systems that come from the capitalist
system. We find that the same thing is true in the communist camp. Their whole point of reference is
the Russian system or the Chinese system in countries where the working class
is very advanced
and in Italy. But it is still remains for us to do an analysis of the interior of
Africa. An analysis that might be capitalist or communist is one of the dilemmas facing the Artist.
Africa has its own inherent contradiction. Africa was a country of kings, and when we talk about
kings, we talk about serfs. Maybe it is different from the European notion of things, but there was a
problem of caste. There were people who were bom to occupy certain positions until their death.
The colonial system came with the French language or the English language, and while the people
had one language, the officials had another. If you go into court in French-speaking West Africa,
the judge and the prosecutors speak French to another citizen who does not speak French. They
bring in an interpreter even if the judge, himself, is Senegalese and speaks the language of the
for example, in France
defendant.
It is also cultural. What we will have to begin to do is to
from breaks that prevent our being what we were before.
Now the traditional African education no longer responds to the needs of the contemporary society
of young people. We also know that the people who govern are copies ofthe Western world, even if
they are black. And so to resolve the problem, we are going to have to suppress something. I think
The disharmony
is
not simply economic.
try to see all the contradictions of these
Appendix
112
that
C
we should begin by suppressing
copy of the Western world.
the
I
don't
exclude ourselves from the international community, because we have a
the West, including
its
we have
technology. But
mean
that
we should
of things to learn from
lot
to control these things.
I'd already written several books.
think that I am a committed
and I'm not ashamed to say so. My commitment is to raise awareness and to bring the
people to change their situation. I live in Africa, and no matter what happens tomorrow, I will not
go into exile. But the problem when 1 was writing books was that I was only known by the elite
Before becoming a filmmaker,
I
writer,
minority.
When
some had heard about me or they had seen my picture in
they knew about me. And so the problem for me was
like cinema, which has a larger audience. When began making films, was
cinema we went into the bush. Sometimes was invited to the university
talked with the masses,
I
the newspaper, but other than that, that
to get involved in
an
art
forced to do a traveling
is all
I
—
1
I
or to the schools in the very countries that had expelled me.
(I
prefer that to prison.) There are other
my films are forbidden. But in countries where am permitted to show my films,
we organize debates. Perhaps we don't reach all of the countries, but we reach quite a few people.
Sometimes our discussions last three or four hours. It is not upon leaving these discussions that the
people are going to make a revolution. We have been to certain regions, for example, where the
people refused to pay taxes after seeing Eniitai. because they began to ask themselves, "Why are we
paying taxes?" The next day the local political leaders threw us out.
The problem for us is that it is not for the artist to make the revolution by proxy. That is a
European sickness. That is what we say in Africa. We think that it is a European sickness when
countries in which
people
feel that the
I
thinkers are also
be a point of reference
behind, because
is
it is
in
men
of action.
An artist's
order to arouse awareness.
place
He must
is
with his people, and he must
never be too far ahead or too far
who make the revolution. This is the role that cinema can play. That
And when I say "we," am talking about the w hole African cinema, because
the people
what we wish to do.
I
Filmmakers w hich includes all of the African filmmakers.
on the same level, but for ten years, our films have been posing
political problems in Africa. There are some African cineastes who have made only one film and
they can't make any more, and there are others who have only made short films, but they pose the
same problems that IVe explained. We had a meeting in January 73 in Algeria to determine the
role of cinema, and we think our role is to give a certain common awareness. It is true that our films
will not be commerical films that will be seen widely in Europe, but we want to at least control our
own boulevard and cities and countryside. For the meantime, that will be sufficient.
What is an artist? It is very hard for him to grasp for himself what he is, because it is impossible to
measure his impact. It is impossible tomeasure the impact and the extent of influence of a book ora
film. How does it come about that he can seize upon a certain moment in the history of things and
create a book or a film from that? The artistic creation comes about when people begin to reflect
upon what they have done or what they have seen. At the moment he is watching a film, for
example, the spectator forgets that he has been the cause, the moving force for the creation of that
product. When the African filmmaker has completed that analysis and has realized the importance
of that analysis, he wants to look for his place within his own community. If it was easy for us to
analyze this situation in a theoretical way, the practical application of it is much more difficult,
because the Africans had to wait seventy-five years after the birth of cinema in the w orld to have an
African making a film. And then we had to wait three years after that before we had an African film
with an African language. Two years after that, we created the Affair Passe.
Now the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers has been in existence almost ten years. It was
we have
the Pan-African Federation of
Perhaps our films are not
just this year that
allows us to be
all
we wrote up
a code of conduct for African filmmakers. This code of conduct
much more committed
politically.
community without being a
nature of our role and because we noticed
progress of the
We
have
tried to insert
political party,
that
we have
our films
in the
general
because we understood the political
far
more
followers in Africa than any
Appendix
C
113
Muslim or Christian. But that was not enough for
have given us the support that we need. They
us, because the masses, who really do not have
have also helped us to go beyond the ethnic problems of language and have become our allies. This
has come about because we have been moving toward the masses. We have been showing them our
films and we have been talking politics with them. People were not meeting to get someone elected;
political party or
any
religious faith,
whether
it is
a face,
they were meeting to spread an awareness that they were the only ones who should decide their fate
and that their own culture and their own language have as much culture inherent in them as any
other culture in any other language.
could replace the traditional story-telling activity, the traditional legends, because
the filmmaker, himself, becomes a story-teller. It is up to the filmmaker to explain his work as much
as possible, because once he has completed the work, it goes beyond him and he loses control of it.
Cinema,
itself,
out a piece of work and has given birth to it, once he presents that
must undergo the consequences. So for us, the filmmaker's role appears to be
very explicit and clear. With the support of the masses, we began to discuss the possibility of a
national cinema with the political leaders. We knew that a national cinema was controversial. We
are seeing the birth of a modern African bourgeoisie. But since they were in power, we took
When the filmmaker has thought
film to the masses, he
advantage of nationalist attitudes to bring about the creation of a national cinema. We continue to
struggle and continue to bring about awareness and to give people something to reflect upon.
We also take a position against imperialism that is controlling our culture. We know that we can
not simply solve the problems of cinema without getting involved in the political problems that
There can be no single solution for cinema if we forget the other aspect, the political
aspect, of the culture. Presently in Africa, one of the major problems that we confront is the
circulation and distribution of our films. We know that we receive the worst films from Europe,
and the same is true for our television. So cultural imperialism exists in Africa and is creating a
exist in Africa.
black bourgeoisie. This black bourgeoisie
is
becoming more and more
cannot do our work thinking only of the color of the skin.
We
fascist.
Because of this, we
also have to consider the political
aspects.
[QUESTION:
Is
developing new
I
will
the
artist in
Africa coming from the educated class? In other words, are they
bourgeois attitudes?]
not talk about
then from
new
my own
some other
arts.
personal experience;
I
will just give
you examples from cinema and
We are not rich (the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers), but we
We don't take responsibility for their lives, but we give them technical
still
train people in Africa.
and
political training. In this
way, during the liberation struggle
in the
former Portuguese colonies,
we brought some of their filmmakers for training in Senegal. Those filmmakers certainly don't
come from the bourgeousie. In West Africa, for the past ten years, we have had four classes of
filmmakers. And they do not come from the bourgeoisie, either. Although we're afraid that they
might want to become bourgeois because of the myths of cinema and the way the public responds
to
filmmakers
A
in the
Western world.
phenomenon can assume two aspects in a developing
determined
by the country where we received our training and
attitude,
mental
country. It can be a
therefore not necessarily corresponding to the realities of our own country. We know that much
more was said about the new Brazilian cinema in Paris than it was in Brazil. We have seen French
bourgeois attitude or a bourgeois
filmmakers arriving
proceeding
bourgeois.
in
Cannes
in
to criticize the realities
We
order to justify the existence of the French Left and then
of their
own
know, for example, that there are
they find in the Western world. Others cannot
who
You can live in these countries and be
some people who impose the same schedule that
country.
work without
their whiskey,
require taking a shower before going to bed and there are those
having a discussion with the peasants because there
machine for them to work with.
Many
is
so
much
and then there are those
who
have great difficulty
dust on the highway and no good
refuse to confront these obstacles; they refuse to reach out
C
Appendix
114
toward the masses. This can also be an example of a bourgeois
attitude.
We
must bring about an
we are the conscience of the masses. If we say
that, then we become paternalistic, then we are doing the same thing that priests are doing in all
other countries in the world. Every Sunday we go out and visit the people and say, "Be very patient,
everything is going to work out."
awareness
in the masses,
QUESTION:
If it
but
it is
not true to say that
became necessary, what kind ofpolitical party would the artists ofyour country
join?
if there existed a party that respected what the artists want, that
one with a clear cultural policy for the country, then the artist, I think, would be forced to work
with them. The fact that a federation of African filmmakers can even exist in the continent, a
federation that is not obedient to any government, is one of the controversies that we have been
I
think that in the present context,
is,
able to overcome.
We
have been recognized by the Organization of African Unity and we have
observers at the Arab League and at
OC A M We do not know how long this is going to last, but we
.
have to work within those boundaries.
As
that
far as
is
our relationship with the African heads of state
our enemy. The federation of African filmmakers
each national film association must solve
its
own
is
is
concerned,
aware that
it is
it is
foreign imperialism
within each state that
problems.
QUESTION: What are the languages of Senegal and how many people speak those languages? Do
you think Africans should
There are a
lot
of languages on the African continent.
think that between
80% and 90% of the
speaking ethnic groups.
forget that
we
and what
is
that philosophy?
The major language
in
Senegal
return to their original philosophy,
It is
population speak Wolof, even
a "national" language.
are in a country where the president
The
official
if
is
Wolof.
We
they are not from Wolof-
language
is
French.
You
mustn't
and
The Wolof language could very easily serve as a unifying factor for the various
Senagal. Sometimes we are told that if we opt for an African language, we are only
is
the poet of negritude. French, Greek,
Latin are taught.
ethnic groups in
isolating ourselves.
We
can only say that that
is
political
Switzerland and in Belgium, there are several languages.
language. But as far as the European
community
is
myopia.
We
We
notice, for
example, that
in
notice also that Finland has a single
concerned, an African language
is
a minority
language. There are other languages in Africa that are dominant even over Wolof. In West Africa,
you have Hausa, Mandingo, and Pular. African filmmakers have stopped making films in
European languages. For our meetings, all of the African languages are the official languages.
As for your question on the philosophy, it is difficult to answer in a concrete way because we have
to go back a little bit. We know that in our languages there is great richness. We know that by
opting for African languages, we can find the sense of these traditions and adjust them to
contemporary realities. All of that is linked to a real independence for Africa. It is not the problem
of adapting those languages that will solve class conflict. The fight to impose an African language is
a political act. We find in our own languages our own philosophy and our own genius. Whenever
Africa is studied in the African universities, we study much more of the past than we do the present.
That also convinces us of the richness of our languages.
QUESTION: Can you talk to us a little bit about the problems ofproduction — thefinancial aspect
ofproduction of cinema? And also explain to us how it came about that you film in 35-mm,first of
all in black and white, and then 35-mm in color. And what do you think of the possibilities offilm
production
in
16-mm?
C
Appendix
Our
sources of financing
come from
participate in film projects.
They
There
different areas.
cooperation and another cooperation that
is
either give
is,
for example, the French national
two companies
responsible for Africa. Those
money
115
before the film
is
made or
money
give
to
For example, the French cooperation has a scriptwriting competition each year
with a prize of 15 million francs. In both ofthose companies, we have representatives who represent
the filmmakers. In this way, at least one filmmaker can make a film each year. When he returns to
Africa, he must cooperate with the national association in his country. He must recruit his crew and
gather his material there. The laboratories in France and Rome and elsewhere have a system of
credit. The most difficult aspect to deal with once the film is made is marketing. For that, we also
have a tactic. We make a survey of the films that exist and then we go to a festival in a country that
says it wants to help us. We show them these films and we say, "These are the films that you can help
complete the
film.
us with." This helps us to break even as far as the cost of the film
Now, as
16-mm
far as
or
35-mm
is
concerned,
it
concerned.
is
varies according to the filmmaker.
It is
true that
I
35-mm, but it was just chance that that happened because have a 35-mm
we have found a new method. The young people whom we have trained
other
hand,
camera. On the
like 16-mm color because it is much more mobile, the crew is much smaller, and it can be blown up
to 35-mm. Of the six films made in Senegal last year, only two were made in 35-mm and the other
four were in 6-mm. In the other states. 6-mm is popular. Now we are negotiating to get a camera
have always worked
in
I
1
1
in
Super 16 to reduce the cost of our
We
films.
use color because color permits us to correct
some fiaws
that
would be very
visible
if
the
cinema were black and white. We mustn't forget that we break even on our films, financially, only
in Europe and Europe prefers color. Africa is colored and we sell Europe color. We do not have
complexes about it because our work is in Africa and in Africa we show our films for free, and that
is
the only thing that interests us.
QUESTION: So you
can
make a feature-length film
Even with 4,000 francs you can make a
QUESTION:
First
of all, I want
with $35,000
film.
to find out
whether or not you consider
it
a filmmaker's duty to
comes first? Which should come first?
between African and American films?
give priority to his artistic or political dictates. First, which
And
I
what form
also, in
think that you can
starts
But
is
make
the
major difference
a film with $4,000 because film
out with the idea of making a film
in
is
the
work of a crew.
Hollywoodstyle, then ofcourse he
in the
our countries, the beginners make films for
less
collaboration of the people and our friends. For example,
If the
will
filmmaker
need millions.
than $8,000. Of course, we have the
we do not have any studios. We film in
and so the crew can work for much less. It just depends on their will
and also it depends on their ideology. What interests us is to see if we
can associate form and content, because that is when the work reaches its universal aspects. Every
artist is seeking that. If we could manage to have the technical aspects that are found in American
cinema while maintaining our own content, then I think we would bring a great change to world
apartments that people lend
power and
cinema.
We think that that type of form could
open space,
As
us,
their togetherness,
we
form
far as
We looked at
is
we work out
is
slow.
We
We noticed
have to change
that.
that often in our films, there
Films with
less talk,
more
explicitness are needed as far as the masses are concerned, because
We also know
is
too
same language.
that
much
rapidity,
many
And so our
and the
and much more
talk
of the people don't speak
sound creates visual images; so we must
an association between the visual and what is heard.
the
in the
concerned, the African filmmakers, themselves, have established a competition.
our films and discussed them and decided that we have to move forward.
cinema must assume a new form.
rhythm
be very useful in Africa. Because
save money.
try to bring
about
Appendix
116
We
don't
C
know what
is
going to happen
contribute something. At the present time,
all
this
year or next.
We
think that
we
are going to
of the African filmmakers are working on a subject
want to film. We are not trying to define ourselves in relationship to any specific cinema.
We want to borrow from each one whatever we can and transform to make up our own cinema.
We know that there is a difference between America and Africa, but we don't want to spend our
time trying to define ourselves in relationship to America. We say both with pride and with
that they
it
modesty that we are the beginning and the end of the world, because we can no longer be
suppressed or killed. If others are not happy with us, that is too bad; but we continue to exist and we
will
do everything
in
order that they recognize our existence.
Concluding Remarks
I
thank you very much. I don't know if 1
working in the Third World, there
to be
most important
is
the cinema.
The
really
is
brought you anything. But for those
a place for you in cinema.
Of all
cultural nourishes the political, but
the final definition to the cultural aspects of film.
it is
who are going
the arts, presently the
the political that gives
We will not go back anymore. We have enormous
but we are sure of our victory because people can no longer do whatever they want to
know, of course, that the American establishment sees things differently. We know that
they will find allies in Africa and we know they will do everything to maintain their supremacy. But
what they don't know is that they can no longer break us. We have seen the failure that they have
difficulties,
do.
We
had and we know that they will never leave Southeast Asia. We are sure that Latin America is going
to be free also. There will never be in the future a docile colony. Africa is on the move.
We have a lot of faith in the young people. There are a lot of young people who don't think the
same way I do or the way our fathers
did.
We are acquiring a lot from our men of college. When we
created our federation, our friends from Latin America created their
FELACI. We have an
office of
cinema from the Third World
there will be a meeting of filmmakers in the Third World.
It
own
in Algeria,
federation called the
and within the next
year,
won't just be a meeting of pleasure, but
and find out how to become more effective. Presently, we
We are going to do the same thing very soon
in Somalia; we are even preparing a meeting in Tanzania with Nyerere. All of this is part of the
liberation of Africa and the Third World.
a meeting to exchange our experiences
are organizing a
week of Senegalese
films in Mexico.
Filmography
On
Third World Films Cited in This Study
Film
Country
Antonio das Mortes
Aziza
Barravento
Battle
of
Beyond
Chile,
The
the Plains
Black Girl
Black God. White Devil
Blood of the Condor
Blood Will Triumph over the Sword
Borom
Sarret
Brazil:
No Time for
Tears
Brickmakers, The
Budouin Boy, The
Ceddo
Chuquiago
Colombia 70
Conêicao Tchiambula,
A Day
in
a Life
Courage of the People
Chronicle of the Years
of Embers
Cry of the People
Dawn of the Damned, The
Defense of the People, In
Double Day, The
East is Red, The
Emitai
118
Filmography
End of Dialogue
Filmography
Tupamaros
119
Notes
Chapter
1.
1
Initially the term.
America which
(capitalist)
Third World, was used to designate those states
called themselves "non-aligned,"
i.e.,
in Africa,
Asia and Latin
committed neither to the Western
nor the Eastern (communist) power blocks. The term implies a common economic
and ideological purpose. Third World Ideology is "more socialist than the American model
and more democratic than the Soviet one"; it is not a Western model of "social democracy"
but one that is truly indigenous and places more emphasis on culture as a tool for ideological
as well as economic independence.
The term also bears a connotation of rural life, especially on agricultural economy and
poverty.
The term "Third World"
socialist reconstruction
some of which have opted for
China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique)
also refers to developing nations,
of their society
(e.g.,
and some of which have chosen a capitalist mode of development
The new term, "North/ 5ow//; dialogue" is another in a
developing,
less
(e.g.,
Nigeria, India, Brazil).
series
developed, south, nonaligned and underdeveloped
of terminologies
— that refer to the Third
World.
As Pierre Jalee writes, "The expression [Third World] is short, practical and everyone
knows pretty well what sort of country it refers to."
For further reading on the term and its application, see the following introductory articles:
Irwin Silber, "China and the Three Worlds," Guardian (February
Sidney Mintz,
(September
"On
1976),
Commentary,
1,
1978), p. 21
and passim;
the Concept of a Third World," Dialectical Anthropology, vol.
pp.
377-82;
vol. 72, no.
and Peter Berger's "Speaking
to
the Third
I,
no. 4
World,"
4 (October 1981), pp. 29-36.
See also the following for a detailed study of the socio-political and economic history of the
nations of the Third World: Peter Worsley, The Third World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Immanuel
The Modern World-System (New York: Academic
The Sociology of the Third World (New York: Modem
Reader, 1968); Pierre Jalee, TTie Pillage of the Third World (Hew York: Monthly Review
Press, 1968) and The Third World in World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press,
Wallerstein,
Press,
1965);
Press,
1974); J.E. Goldthorpe,
1969).
2.
The concept and proposition of "Third Cinema" used to refer to a special kind of Latin
American film. Of late its use encompasses all films with social and political purpose. The
term is being widely accepted by the progressive Third World cineast. The concept is referred
to as "New Wave" or "Left Cinema" in India; "cinema shebab" in the Arab world; "parallel
cinema" in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon); and "cinema de conscience" or "engaged cinema" in
Senegal. In general
all
share in the "politicization of cinema": a cinema for the decolonization
Notes for Chapter 2
122
Cinema" refers to those who follow the models of
and production of Hollywood. "Second Cinema" refers to the national cinemas
the Third World that are limited by a neo-colonialist ideology.
of culture and total liberation. "First
distribution
in
Nichols, ed.,
Movies and Methods (^tvkt\cy: University of California
3.
Bill
4.
This theoretical work
first
appeared
in
1
969 as an
Press, 1976),p.47.
article in Tricontinental (Theoretical
Organ
of the Executive Secretariat of the Organization of Solidarity of Peoples of Africa, Asia and
Latin America).
and
in the
The same
theoretical piece has since been reprinted in Cineaste, Afterimage
anthology edited and compiled by Nichols, Movies and Methods. The notion of
is not the creation of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino alone; similar
"Third Cinema"
concerns about the state of Third World cinema were articulated earlier by such notables as
the Argentinean
Fernando
Birr
who wrote about
"a cinema that reinforces the revolutionary
consciousness of the masses." See Cine cubano. Year
7,
nos. 42-43-44, "Cine y subdesarrollo,"
1957, p. 14.
5.
6.
7.
Nichols, Movies
p. 45.
Those who adhere to the mainstream of Hollywood cinema have acquired names which link
them with their mentors: The Indian cinema of marble staircases and Victorian villas where
song, dance and sacred cows abound is referred to as "The Third World's Hollywood," and
the Egyptian cinema of belly dancers and beautiful people who celebrate their lofty
exclusiveness is typed as "Hollywood on the Nile" or the "Arab World's Hollywood."
An
interview with Glauber Rocha,
IV, no.
8.
and Methods,
(Summer
1
"Cinema Novo
vs.
Cultural Colonialism," Cineaste, vol.
1970), p. 4.
Andres R. Hernandez, "Filmmaking and
no. 3 (January/ February 1974), p. 383.
Politics,"
American Behavioral
Scientist, vol. 17,
Chapter 2
1
For an understanding of the application of semiotics and textual analysis to film, the reader is
an excellent introductory textbook with a useful bibliography: Bill Nichols,
referred to
Ideology and the Image (B>\oom\nôn: Indiana University Press, 1981). For further reading
Roland Barthes, Image I Music I Text and Elements of Semiology (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1967 and 1967 respectively). The debates in Screen magazine are also a
useful source, and so are a number of articles published in Camera Obscura, among which
there is an overview of the work of Bellour, Heath and Kuntzel by Janet Bergstrom in issue
no. 3/4 under the title "Enunciation and Sexual Difference."
on
2.
this topic see:
Christian Metz, Film Language:
A
Semiotics of the Cinema
(New York: Oxford
University
Press, 1974).
3.
An excellent introduction for the study
May 68 and Film Culture (London:
of film in the context of ideology
British
Film
Institute,
1978).
Ideology/ Criticism" in Screen (translated by Susan Bennet), vol.
is
Sylvia Harvey's
See also. "Cinema/
18, no.
4 (Winter 1977-78),
pp. 35-*7.
4.
Metasystem
— a system that tends to turn inward toward the mechanism of own operation
— a film which takes as theme the problem of own
its
and production of meaning. Metafilm
its
its
Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Memories of Underdevelopment, or Glauber
Rocha 's Antonio das Mortes both question the nature of cinema. When filmmakers focus on
"the aesthetic factor" underlying their work and make this a dominant factor in their style, it is
referred to as operating under a metasystem. Picking on the People by Luis Ospina is a good
creation.
The
film of
Notes for Chapter 2
123
example of self-reflective (or metacinema). The film criticizes the exploitative nature of some
Third World filmmakers who do not approach their craft as a tool of social transformation
but only to capture images of misery because of their commercial appeal. In this particular
film a member of the lower class delivers an outrageous monologue as the filmmakers try to
pay him
off.
A short Cuban film.
of seeing a film for the
cinema
which
5.
at
it
an
time.
first
intellectual as well
records as well as
An excellent
For the First Time by Octavio Cortazar, is about the delight
The film is successful in evoking a critical understanding of
as emotional level. The film documents and criticizes that
itself.
reading of the concept of "point of view"
UMI
of Filmic Narration (Ann Arbor:
6.
The
is
given in Nick Browne's The Rhetoric
Research Press, 1982).
is an intriguing one and it points to the films'
work of art assumes a special type of code viewers require the same
artist poses. An example will illustrate the case: Matisse, the French
relationship of realism to reality
verisimilitude. Because a
key to grasp what the
—
was once approached by a woman who had noticed a portrait the figure of a woman
which one arm was longer than the other. When she drew the artist's attention to it he is
supposed to have remarked. "Madame, you are mistaken. That is not a woman, that is a
artist
in
picture."
It
seems that
better to discuss "reality" in terms of relationships instead of just
it is
facts. To communicate a certain reality an artist may venture beyond the pale of
such an act does not make a certain fact any less real, particularly since all art
verisimilitude
work is a construct.
—
Movies and Methods,
7.
Nichols,
8.
Ibid., p. 61.
9.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press
Movies and Methods,
10.
Nichols,
11.
For the lack of
idealism, see:
interest in the
Raymond
Inc.,
New
York), 1968,
p.
222.
p. 58.
connection between Marx's view of ideology and
William's recent book,
University Press, 1977) chap.
12.
p. 52.
sec. 4,
I,
Arne Nesse, Democracy, Ideology and
Marxism and
his rejection of
Literature (Oxford: Oxford
Ideology.
Objectivity. Studies in the
Semantics and Cognitive
Analysis of Ideological Controversy (Oslo-Oxford, 1956), pp. 160-68.
13.
The prime proponent and advocate of the theory of Sociology of Knowledge, Karl
Mannheim recognized "ideology" as a form of socially distorted thinking. To him ideologies
correspond to the interest of ruling social groups which sought to preserve the status quo and,
therefore, he believed
had a conservative character. He therefore put forth the theory of
it
Sociology of Knowledge
(London, 1936),
p. 69.
in place
For
of ideology. See Karl Mannheim's Ideology
this particular school's
and Utopia
contemporary adherents and the
shift in
"The Internland of Science: Ideology and the
Stuart
by
Hall in Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 10
the application of the conceptual tool see,
'Sociology of Knowledge'
"
(1977), pp. 9-32.
German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
14.
Marx and
15.
For an in-depth discourse of the debate see the two major parts: (a) Theories and
Problems of Social Democracy in Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 10, 1977.
16.
Frederick Engels, "Letter to Bloch" (1890),
Lawrence
17.
Engles, The
&
Wishart, 1970),
p.
Engels, Selected
(b)
Works (London:
682.
Marx, Preface to a Contribution
182.
Marx and
1974), p. 47.
to the Critique of Political
Economy,
in
Selected Works,
p.
124
18.
Notes for Chapter 2
There
is
a school of thought which proposes an alternative route: In Maoist terms, aspects of
the superstructure of society can develop in advance of the substructure
and even assist
transformation of the base. See: American Behavioral Scientist, vol.
1974), p. 353.
The
aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt school,
i.e.,
Maz
in the
17, no. 3 (Jan/ Feb.
Horkheimer, Herbert
Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin et al, shares the same view that a revolution can
first take place in the superstructure which in turn will effect a revolutionary change on the
mode
of production.
(New York:
19.
Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan
20.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans, by Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973),
21.
Karl Marx, Selected Works (1968), F. Engels, "Speech at the Graveside of Karl
1977), p. 82.
p.
109.
Marx
in
1883," in 435.
22.
Adam
Schaff,
Marxism and
the
Human
Individual (McGraw-Hill
Book Company: New
York/ St. Louis/ San Francisco/ London/Sydney/Toronto/ Mexico/ Panama, 1970), pp. 2,
3. Schaff enumerates the following important books as having surfaced only since the 1920s:
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The German edition of this book appeared
The other book mentioned by Schaff is A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right in 1927. Schaff contends that these essential writings of Marx were
unknown to Kautsy, Rosa Luxemburg, Plekhanov and Gramsco, and even Lenin. In a new
book The Grundrisse by Karl Marx, edited and translated by David McLellan, the editor
in 1932.
mention of this thousand-page manuscript (apparently unknown
was made available by David Rjazanow, the director of the Marx-Engels institute
in Moscow, who announced its discovery to the Socialist Academy in Moscow in 1923." The
Grundrisse as well as the other unknown writings of Marx began to appear in English editions
in the West only in the 1950s. See also Martin Nicolaus, "The Unknown Marx," New Left
states that "the first public
to Engels)
Review, 1968.
23.
Roger Garaudy, Marxism
in the
Twentieth Century
(New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons;
1970), p. 211.
24.
Ibid., p. 205.
25.
Louis Althusser, For
26.
Althusser, Lenin
27.
Althusser, For Marx,
28.
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 121-73.
29.
Ibid., p. 162.
30.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
31.
Ibid., p. 99.
32.
Cabral, Amilcar, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral (London:
Marx (New
York: Vintage Books, 1970),
p.
and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New
p.
Monthly Review Press
233.
Left Books, 197
1
),
p.
1
55.
231.
p. 102.
1973), p. 54.
33.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth,
34.
Cabral, Return to the Source,
35.
For an indepth study of Fanon's theory see: Peter Geismar, Fanon: The Revolutionary as
Prophet (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1969).
36.
Fanon, Wretched,
p. 85.
p. 61.
p. 52.
Notes for Chapter 3
37.
Ibid., p. 53.
38.
Quoted
Review
39.
in
125
Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon, Colonialism and Alienation (New York: Monthly
Press, 1974). p. 80.
Nichols, Movies,
p. 57.
Chapter 3
1.
When
Lenin made the statement, "of
all
the arts, the
most important
for us
is
the cinema."
began to be inextricably linked to ideology; hence the class nature of films. When
Fernando Solanas spoke for "a cinema that chose its public and not a cinema of cultural coexistence with a generalized public (Cineasie interview, vol. Ill, no. 2. Fall 1969). he was
characterizing the new cinema as anti-oligarchic and anti-bourgeois on the national front and
anti-imperialist on the international front. Such propositions have had a great impact in
identifying the masses and their true purpose, which is to achieve total liberation. For
instance, the direct result of Blood of the Condor was not only in the expulsion of the Peace
Corps during the Torres Regime but also in serving notice to the Indians about their
film
predicament as a colonized people
when
their
was shown
the film Emitai
in
in Bolivia.
To cite another example, Sembene
Dakar, Senegal, the maids and servants
domestic responsibilities and invited each other to see the
film.
left
relates that
the babies and
Here again
is
a case of
cinema as an organizing tool of the masses. G.M. Perry and Patrick McGilligan, "Ousmane
Sembene: An Interview." Film Quarterly, vol. XXVI, no. 3 (Spring 1971), p. 37. See also
"Interview with Jorge Sanjines," Cineasie (Spring 1972),
2.
All these films
do not
restrict their
themes to
of class. For instance, the failure in Soleil
"white thinking blacks"
hand with the
is
racial
O
p. 18.
concerns alone. Race
is
seen in the context
to turn African migrant workers in Paris into
better understood in the context of class.
issue of slavery the class perspective
is
never
lost.
Even when
films deal first
Two films from Cuba serve as
The Last Supper, an allegorical depiction of Christ's last supper, centers
around a count and his twelve slaves; The Other Francisco tells a story of doomed romance
between two slaves who are persecuted by their masters. In both instances, the films do not
excellent examples.
lapse into liberal rhetoric: instead the socio-historic
and economic base of racism
is
the films'
prime concern.
3.
"The Courage of the People: An Interview with Jorge Sanjines," Cineaste (Spring 1972). p.
18. See Supra 1. Antonio Eguino. the cameraperson for Sanjines's Blood of the Condor
subsequently did his own film. Chuquiago a film appropriately called "X-Ray of a City" (La
Paz. Boliva). This excellent film is divided into four episodes and revolves around four
representatives of social classes in Boliva: Isico. a young Indian peasant boy; Johnny, the son
of an Indian bricklayer, who does not want to identify himself as an Indian; Carlos, a corrupt
bureaucrat; and Patricia, the daughter of a bourgeois industrialist.
—
4.
The term has
a widespread use; culture here
is
used
in the
context of music, but culture also
denotes literature, theater, film, painting and sculpture. The term also signifies "folk-culture."
It
attacks what
is
seen as the "mechanical" aspect of "civilization." Culture has a "double
relation": to nature
and to other men women. For further reading on
theme,
this
see:
Media and
R.
Marxism and
Mass Communication and Society (London: Oxford University Press,
1977), pp. 315-48; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press. 1963).
pp. 207-48 and Amilcar Cabral. Return to the Source (New York: African Information
Williams.
'Ideological Effect'."
Service, 1973), pp. 57-69.
Literature.
See also: Stuart Hall. "Culture, the
the
Notes for Chapter 3
126
5.
Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes had a wide critical acclaim in the United States and in
Europe. The Spring of 1974 issue of Screen gave a twenty-one page "structural and textual"
analysis of
The method was presented by Rene
it.
Gardies. In the United States, Journal of
Thomas Kavanagh's "Imperialism
Cinema; Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes. " For a critical
perspective of Cinema Novo, see: Hans Proppe and Susan Tarr, "Cinema Novo: Pitfalls of
Cultural Nationalism," ywm/j Cut, 10/ 1, pp. 45-48. See also the cover story: "Cinema Novo,
Modern
and
Literature, vol. Ill, no. 2 (April 1973) published
Revolutionary
1
Cinema engage," Cineaste (Summer
cinema
is
A
1970).
helpful bibliography of
Bradford Burn's "The Brazilian Cinema:
A
works on Brazilian
Bibliographical Guide." This brief
bibliography has thirty-six entries. For additional material on the subject see
Randal
Johnson, "Brazilian Cinema Today," Film Quarterly (Summer 1978).
6.
A
Cinema from other kinds of cinema is its insistence
to view women in a much more progressive light. The most poignant examples in this regard
are Humberto Solas's Lucia, Ousmane Sembene's Emitai (see chapter 4) and Ceddo (see
chapter 5). With the Cuban Woman by Octavio Cortazar and a recent film. Portrait of
Teresa, by Pastor Vega documents the changing role of Cuban women in building socialism.
Mention must be made of four distinguished Third World women filmmakers Sara
Maldoror (Sambizanga), the Colombian cineast Marta Rodriguez (The Brickmakers and
principal issue that distinguishes Third
—
most recently Campesinos, [Peasants]), the Senegalese Safi Faye (Fad
Cuban filmmaker, Sara Gomez Yara (One Way
challenging in
still
film
its
choice of theme and style
—
Jal),
late
depicts the issue of women and race, which
lagging behind other achievements in present day socialist Cuba.
The imagery
is
is
in the
is
Lucia has had a wide viewing and
critical
Many
spirit.
21-27.
Mraz
is
Gomez
died suddenly of an asthma
The film is an excellent example of the
made of Lucia. The following sources will
the efforts of the Cuban Film Institute. The best
coverage.
studies have been
serve as introductions to the film as well as to
analysis to date
Sara
her last tribute to the issue she raised so profoundly.
attack at age thirty-one. This film
best of Third Cinema.
John Mraz, "Visual
Style
and
Historical Portrayal,"
includes visual structure, shot analysis
/wmp
and segment themes
Espin, "Lucia:
36-40.
An
Another
tionary Film,"
Cut, No. 19, p.
in his study
film. See also: Peter Biskind, "Lucia: Struggles with History,"ywm/j Cut, no.
8.
and the
One Way or Another
— an iron ball smashing down the old slums of Havana — symbolizes the need for a new
consciousness to replace the old machismo
7.
it
or Another).
of the
2, pp. 7-8; Olivia
Introduction and Critique," Caribbean Review, vol. VI, no. 4 (1974), pp.
is Steven Kovacs, "Lucia: Style and Meaning in Revolu-
interesting piece
Monthly Review (June
For a detailed discussion of the film
see
1975), pp. 33-48.
an indepth interview with Nana
the film, conducted by this author: "Let Their Eyes Testify,"
Ufahamu,
Mahomo, director of
vol. VII, no.
1
(1976),
pp. 97-113.
9.
Elena Solberg-Ladd, the director of Double Day, follows the interview format
in
her
subsequent film Simplemente Genny, a film described as an essay on lower-class Latin
American women. The
film
documents
conflicts
on
cultural as well as class levels.
Solberg-Ladd's films were produced by the Latin American Film Project,
10.
The Third Cinema's proposal
to develop a
in opposition to the prevailing
New
new system of industrial production
system has resulted
in direct
Both of
Jersey.
parallel to
and
confrontations with certain Third
World governments. Because enforced censorship has caused the creation of underground
distribution networks in some Latin American countries, such films as The Traitors and La
Hora de los Hornos ran the risk of government retaliation and had to be protected by militant
armed guards during their screenings. It is due to such direct confrontations that
governmental repression against filmmakers in Latin America is widespread. Most of the
Notes for Chapter 4
filmmakers discussed
few have
as
study have, therefore, either been exiled or tortured and quite a
in this
lost their lives.
127
According to Andres Racz, "The government hates the artist as much
it realizes that they are the same." Hans Herman, an
hates the revolutionary, because
it
Argentinean cameraman, actually recorded his
own death— he was
shot by government
and films,
for instance, in Patricio Guzman's The Battle of Chile.) For a list of those Latin American
filmmakers, jailed, exiled or killed, see: "In Latin America They Shoot Film-makers," Sight
and Sound (Summtx 1979), pp. 160-61. The same article has also been reprinted in Seven
troops as he was
filming. (This particular footage has been used in several newsreels
Days, 25 April 1977.
Chapter 4
1.
Jorges Sanjines, "Cinema and Revolution," Cineaste (Winter 1970/71),
2.
Michael Chanan,
3.
"Film
in Chile:
4.
CM.
Perry and Patrick McGillian, Film Quarterly (Spring 1971),
5.
Ibid.
6.
Ibid., p. 39.
7.
From "On
8.
Bill
9.
See Teshome H. Gabriel, The Developing African Cinema (Los Angeles: Crossroad Press,
the
ed., Chilian
An
Cinema (London:
British
Film
p. 14.
Institute, 976), p. 84.
Interview with Miguel Littin," Cineaste (Spring 1971), p.
Making of
Nichols, Movies
the Film, Traitors.^'
and Methods,
A
5.
p. 40.
Tricontinental Center promotional piece.
p. 45.
forthcoming 1982).
10.
Ibid.
11.
"Film
development as a filmmaker took place in
from BoUvia, Brazil, Cuba, etc. See also Chanan,
in Chile:," p. 6. Littin also states that his
constant relationship with filmmakers
Chilean Cinema,
p. 64.
12.
"A Talk with Jorge
13.
La Hora de Los Hornos had a wide
film that posits
an
Sanjines," Cineaste (Winter 1970/71), p. 12.
critical
reception and acclaim as an excellent example of a
ideological-political argument.
be a result of a collaborative
effort, hence,
Although the filmmakers claim the film
a collective film,
it is
to
nevertheless clear that both
Solanas and Getino were the major motivating force behind the
film.
Both worked on the
sound and the script; Solanas is credited for the
MacBean,
"La
Hora de Los Hornos," Film Quarterly {¥a\\
photography. See: James Roy
1970), pp. 3 1-37. See also a reprinted interview from Cinetique, no. 3, 1969 in the same issue
editing of the film; Getino
is
credited for
of Film Quarterly, pp. 37-43.
14.
Jorges Sanjines, "Cinema and Revolution,"
15.
Ibid.
1
6.
Such seasonal cues
p.
14.
to denote time lapse are, of course, not new. Shorter time
and space lapses
between sequences or locations have been achieved through a shift in seasons; for instance, in
The Island, directed by Kaneto Shindo, flowering trees were used for
the Japanese film.
spring, yellowing leaves
winter.
were employed for autumn and
falling
snow was used
to signal
Notes for Chapter 4
128
17.
An
18.
Ibid.
19.
interview with
Ousman Sembene,
In spite of the emphasis
now
Cineaste, vol. VI, no.
1
placed on innovations in sound,
(1973), p. 29
and passim.
Sembene proposes
to accent
instead the importance of "silence" in films. In this regard he joins a notable auteur such as
who once remarked, "1 don't like music in films; think it's a lazy device, a kind
of trickery ..." See: Ado Kyrou. Luis Bunuel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 111.
Luis Bunuel,
20.
21.
1
See Teshome H. Gabriel, The Developing African Cinema.
In this respect.
One Way or Another could
Sara Gomez's film
22.
is
be regarded as an excellent sequel to Lucia, since
informed with a sense of reality similar to that articulated by Solas here.
must acknowledge the concept of "anonymous shots" to John Mraz's analytic work
earlier. (See chapter 3, note 7). The concept opens up a new critical perspective in
that it makes shot(s) that appear only once in a film as semiotic devices for understanding film
I
mentioned
details.
23.
24.
Julianne Burton, "The Promised Land." Film Quarterly (Fall 1975),
Robert Scott, "The Arrival of the Instrument
'The Promised Land,'" Cine-Tracts, no.
25.
"Film
26.
Ibid., p. 9.
27.
The
28.
Scott,
29.
Burton, "The Promised Land,"
30.
Before Antonio das Mortes Glauber
in Flesh
p. 59.
and Blood: Deconstruction
in Littin's
4, p. 91.
in Chile," p. 8.
film text
The Promised Land.
"The Arrival of the Instrument,"
and Land
in
p. 97.
p. 59.
Rocha
directed Barravento, Black God, White Devil
Anguish. All these were considered autobiographical works on the peoples and
cultures of Brazil.
Antonio das Mortes which
is
both
in
opera and parable form
is
considered
"a resume and critique" of his earlier films.
31.
The
32.
Katherine Montagne, "Sembene: The Pacesetter," Topic, no. 70,
33.
film text
Play a Giron.
p. 34.
Ousmane Sembene, Cinema-Quebec, vol. 3, no. 9-10, pp. 13-18. Sembene is
who had said, "... I'm not part of all of
them because they're going to bring on the revolution. They're going to help make films, and
Interview with
joined here by Mexican film director Jorge Fons,
by those the revolution, but
(Albuquerque:
34.
New Mexico
first
things first." See, Beatriz Nevares, The
Mexican Cinema
Press, 1976), p. 124.
"Cinema Revolutionnaire, LTxperience Bolivienne,"
Positif, no.
164 (Decembre 1974). pp.
27-32.
35.
Littin
is
stated,
will
in
consort with the Chilean "Film-makers Manifesto" that he helped write, where
"That the revolutionary cinema
struggle determines this."
Revolutionary Cinema,"
36.
will
not assert
itself
through decrees. Consequently we
way of making film;
See Chanan, Chilean Cinema p.
not grant privilege to one particular
1,
Jump
it is
it
must be that the course of the
See also "Twenty Years of
84.
Cut, no. 19.
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
p. 315.
Notes for Chapter 5
37.
Ibid., p. 86.
38.
Ibid., p. 199.
39.
Fanon, Black Skins/ White Masks, footnote no.
129
8, p. 221.
Chapter 5
1.
Umberto Eco, "On
Studies, vol.
2,
no.
1
the Contribution of Film to Semiotics," Quarterly
(February 1977),
p.
1.
The popular joke
Review of Film
in Italian reads, "qui
ITiodettoe
qui lo nego." Eco cited this phrase in connection with a theory he was advancing in his short
To the question "To what extent can filmic experience help one to better understand
cinema?" or "To what extent can filmic experience help one better understand semiotic
problems?" He chooses the former, hence the popular joke he cited. I tend to agree with the
essay.
latter
2.
his.
Brian Henderson, "Toward a Non-Bourgeois
37.
3.
statement of
This work
To Roland
is
Barthes, Significance
language or his style but
how
it is
is
Movies and Methods,
work through which an
not a
an altogether
Style,"
pp. 442-
link of style to ideology.
different kind of labor
artist
can master
his
through which one explores
language or style works. Significance cannot be reduced to communicate or to represent
or to express:
"it
places the subject (of writer, reader) in the text not as a projection
"loss," a "disappearance." See:
Wang,
4.
Camera
an elaborate commentary on the
...
Roland Barthes, Image/ Music/ Text (New York:
but as a
Hill
and
1977), p. 10.
TTie solution to the
form/ content dichotomy
which, though "content"
must be one
is
which "form"
in
may
best be defined as
one of interpretation
in
regarded as determining "form," any art that has lasting value
is
appropriate
in all respects to its
"content." Without "form"
there cannot be art; but "form" alone also cannot be offered as art.
For a film to be a socially
and aesthetically significant art form it must strive towards an appropriate blending of "form"
and "content." As Terry Eagleton puts it, "But if form and content are inseparable in practice,
is why we can talk of the varying relations between the
Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: University of
they are theoretically distinct. This
two." See: Terry Eagleton,
California Press, 1976), p. 22.
5.
Raymond
Durgnat, Films and Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: The
6.
Eagleton,
Marxism and
7.
Ibid., p. 26.
8.
Bay of Pigs, the
Pigs
is
NBC
MIT
Press, 1967), p. 24.
Literary Criticism, p. 20.
film
was produced
a 30 minute film while Playa Giron
in 1964.
is
Playa Giron was produced in 1973. Bay of
a 103 minute feature. In one sense, therefore, the
comparison of the two films may seem out of place and unnecessary. I was, however,
motivated to compare the two films because of the subject matter they both share.
For background reading of the "Bay of Pigs" incident, see the following introductory
pieces: Robert A. Devine, ed.. The Cuban Missile Crisis (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971).
See also a short piece with a deeper insight into the issue Victor Bernstein and Jesse
Gordon, "The Press and The Bay of Pigs," Jlie Colombia University Forum (a reprinted
—
form, no date supplied).
9.
Journey
to the
Last Grave at
Sun was produced by the South African government in 1975. The same year
Dimbaza was produced by Morena Films a film group which comprises
—
black and white South African exiles in Britain. Their
Africans inside South Africa.
Nana Mahomo
first film.
explains
how
End of Dialogue, was shot by
this first film
was done: "One
Notes for Chapter 5
130
asset in
our favor
is
that
South Africans don't
see a black person carrying a camera, they think
The international distribution and its impact was so
strong that the South African intelligence was asked to find out all about this invisible black
crew. For the sequel to End of Dialogue, Last Grave at Dimbaza, a diversionary tactic was
needed. The Morena Films group decided to let the South African government know that
they were shooting a new film. Immediately, of course, the government increased their
they were looking for the same black crew, but this time around Morena Films
vigilance
comrades to tour the country as tourists and film at the same time. The film
two
British
sent
was later assembled in London.
he
is
carrying
it
for his white master."
—
10.
An
interview with
Ufahamu,
11.
A good
Nana Mahomo,
vol. VII, no.
director of Last Grave at
Dimbaza, by Teshome Gabriel,
1976.
I,
introductory article about the state of affairs in South Africa
"The State of California and Southern African Racism," Ufahamu,
is
John Harrington's
vol. Ill, no. 2
{
1976), pp.
117-56.
12.
Jacques Ehrmann, Literature and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967),
p.
and
173
passim.
13.
Ibid.
14.
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London:
15.
Adrian Lajous-Vargas, ''Mexico: The Frozen Revolution," Cineaste (Winter 1970/71),
16.
Ibid.
17.
Ibid., p. 37.
18.
Reed: Insurgent Mexico
is
New
Left Books, 1976), p. 20
and passim.
36.
based on Reed's 1914 book. Insurgent Mexico (New York:
International Publishers, 1969) which he wrote while working as a journalist for Metropoli-
on an article about Pancho Villa. Later on, Reed went to the Soviet Union
where he wrote Ten Days That Shook The World (fiew York: International Publishers, 1971)
tan Magazine
on the Bolshevik Revolution.
19.
For a penetrating analysis of
Critic
explain
this
theme,
see:
Eagleton, Criticism
not, of course, a therapist of the text. His task
is
why it
is
as
it
is."
Alternately,
only what
Marina Heck
is
emitted
and what
is
not said and could be said."
isn't
is
and Ideology,
p. 92:
not to cure or complete
in Cine- Tracts, no.
1
,
it,
p. 43, writes,
said that has a signification but also the
a message
it
is
"The
but to
"When
way it is said,
20.
Ibid., p. 20.
2
The material is enormous; the following are introductory works and attempts at a synthesis of
Freud and Marx: Thomas Johnston, Freud and Political Thought (The Citadel Press, 1965),
pp. 81-102; Reuben, Marxism and Psychoanalysis (A Delta Book, New York, 1965) pp. 55125; Bruce Brown, Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life: Toward a Permanent
Cultural Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 1973); Jack J. Spector, The Aesthetics of
Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1972), pp. 77-145;
Paul Robinson, The Freudian Left (Colophon Books, 1969 and Harper and Row Publishers,
1
1974).
22.
was a big lesson in my life and also a big marvelous poetic step."
Matthews Surrealism and Film (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
141 and passim. Buiiuel also is fond of repeating a statement attributed to Andre
Buiiuel had said "Surrealism
See: J.H.
1971), p.
Breton,
"He
is
a jackass.
He
never dreams." Bufluel believed that the irrational governs the
Notes for Chapter 6
world and the cinema even more. See: Joan Mellen,
ed.,
131
The World of Luis Bunuel (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978) pp. 92, 107.
23.
1
am
indebted to Denise G. Williams "The
Young and
the
Damned,"
Dimension of
Visual
Latin American Social History: Student Critiques of Eight Major Latin American Films,
edited by Prof. Burns. Williams puts "the Culture of Poverty," using Oscar Lewis's Five
Families, to proper use
24.
"Film
25.
Ibid.
26.
Ibid.
in Chile:
An
when analyzing
Bunuel's Los Olvidados.
Interview with Miguel Littin," Cineaste (Spring 1971),
p. 5.
Chapter 6
1
Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source (New York: African Information Service, 1973),
p.
1 1
and passim.
2.
Ibid., p. 42.
3.
Ibid.
See also Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, the chapter on "Nationalism," where
Fanon
writes, "nationalism
is
at the very heart
of the struggle for freedom."
(p. 232.)
4.
Cabral, Return,
5.
Gideon Bachmann, "Antonioni After China: Art versus Science," Film Quarterly (Summer
p. 42.
1975), p. 26.
6.
Umberto Eco, "De
interpretatione, or the Difficulty of Being
Marco Polo (On
of Antonioni's China Film)," Film Quarterly (Summer, 1977),
7.
Peter D'Agostino, "Chung:
Journal (Summer 1977),
8.
Ibid.
9.
Ibid.
10.
'Still'
Another Meaning," The
the Occasion
p. 9.
Dumb
Ox:
A
Quarterly Art
p. 8.
See an eighteen-page pamphlet entitled
"A
Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks
— A Criticism
of Antonioni's Anti-China Film 'China'," (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1974). See also
"Repudiating Antonioni's Anti-China Film," Peking Review, no. 8 (February 22, 1974).
11.
Ibid.
12.
Daniel Bickley, "Joris Ivens Filming
13.
Umberto Eco, "De
14.
Quoted
in
in
China," Film-maker's Newsletter,
vol. 10, no. 4, p. 26.
interpretatione," p. 11.
Susan Sontag,
On Photography (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978),
p.
171.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Paul Pickowicz, "Cinema and Revolution
Publications, vol. 17, no.
17.
Mao
18.
Sontag,
3.
Tse-Tung, Selected Works,
On Photography,
p.
in
China," American Behavioral
(Jan/ Feb., 1974),
173.
p.
Scientist,
Sage
350.
vol. Ill (Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, 1967),
p. 82.
Notes for Chapter 6
132
19.
US-China Peoples Friendship Association,
20.
The
21.
Pickowitz,
22.
Robert Scott, Cine-Tracts, no.
23.
Jean Debrix, "camera dramaturgy," Films
24.
Ibid., vol. Ill, no.
25.
Michael Flacon from Raccords, no.
26.
Pickowitz,
27.
The
28.
Ibid.
29.
The Guardian, November
30.
Mao Tse-tung had written an editorial in
film
text— 77j^ East
New
p. 3.
352.
p.
4, p. 87.
6 (June 1952),
in
Review, vol.
Ill,
no. 5
(May
1952), p. 283.
p. 282.
6.
"Cinema and Revolution,"
York Times. November
pp. 346-47.
11, 1976, p. 4.
14, 1976, p. 6.
Hsun. He had attacked the film for
The
(Jan/ Feb., 1976),
1
Red
is
"Cinema and Revolution,"
landlord's agent."
Newsletter, vol. 2, no.
its
film presented
195
1
in the
praising of
Wu
gain a better education. Again, in 1953
Hsun
Peoples Daily criticizing The Life of
Wu
Hsun
(1838-96)
as a person
The
whom he considered "a
who was willing to
Mao Tse-tung wrote a
letter
Wu
help children
attacking Inside Story of
was condemned for distorting the
nature of imperialism by
It had come to light in
recent years that Liu Shao-chi, former President of the People's Republic, had considered the
film "patriotic." For further reading on these circumstances, see Mark Scher, "Film in
the Ching Court as a "film of national betrayal."
"vilifying the Yi
Comment
China," Film
31.
Ho Tuan
film
(Boxer) Rebellion."
(Spring, 1969), pp. 8-21.
According to Sergei Toroptsev, "The Chinese Cinema under the Veil of 'Re\i\a\\'' Asia and
Africa Today, no. 5 (Sept/Oct. 1978), no genuine "rehabilitation of former films has taken
place yet."
The
opposites of
writer argues that
Mao
Tse-tung,
who
still
assiduously distorting these truths."
film
— the
1950s
— was not
"the Chinese press
is
blowing up the 'tragedy' of the
preached 'correct' truths and the 'gang of
in the list
He
four',
who were
further argues that the most productive period of
of the
first six
films 'rehabilitated.'
For an account of
early Chinese years which indeed were the most productive times in Chinese film production,
most helpful book, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in
China (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1972).
see Jay Leyda's
(May
32.
"Show
33.
Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, May 26, 1981. I am deeply grateful to Professor Richard
Hawkins of the Department of Theater Arts (UCLA) for enlightening me about present
conditions of production and trends in Chinese cinema. He has been to China and has for a
long time been keenly interested in promoting interest in Chinese films in America.
34.
Pauline Kael, / Lost
Biz in
Red China After Mao,"
it
at the
Variety
Movies (Toronto:
An
24, 1978), p.
Atlantic
1.
Monthly Press Book,
1954), p.
148.
35.
Quoted
in
John H. Lawson, Film: The Creative Process (New York:
Hill
and Wang,
1964), p.
246.
36.
Penelope
Gilliatt,
"The Antonioni Canon," L 'A vventura:
(New York: Grove
37.
Peter Schjeldahl,
20, 1973.
A
Film by Michelangelo Antonioni
Press, Inc., 1969), p. 264.
"Cuban 'Memories' You Won't Soon Forget," The New York
Times,
May
Notes for Chapter 6
New
(May
38.
Stanley Kauffmann, The
39.
True, the film does show the "alienation" of a "non-socialist" within Socialist
Republic
133
19, 1973).
Cuba but that is
not the essence of the film. Although the film, firsthand, represents the alienation factor,
not the "central" concern of the film; rather,
it is
ideology that
is
it is
the object of the text. People
view Sergio as a character to such an extent that they get caught up thinking that he represents
the point of view of the director.
Not
so.
The
point of the film
character, does represent. For further orientation
Tomas
Gutierrez Alea," Cineaste, vol. VIII, no.
is
to ask
I.,
p. 8.
See also;
what Sergio, the
"An Interview with
"Cuban Cinema: Tomas
on these questions
see
Gutierrez Alea," Film Quarterly (Winter 1975/76), pp. 45-56. For the relationship of
"ideology" to "Alienation," see Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology, pp. 79-80.
40.
John Howard Lawson, Film the Creative
41.
Julianne Burton, "The Promised Land," Film Quarterly (Fall 1975),
42.
The
43.
Lawson, Film the Creative Process,
44.
Gerald Mast,
45.
Quoted
46.
Stephen Mamber, Cinema
A
Short History of the Movies (New York: Pegasus, 1971),
The
MIT
Verite
in
On
America: Studies
Press, 1974), p.
p.
353.
Film, no. 8 (Spring 1978), p. 26.
in
Uncontrolled Documentary
1.
Interview with Jean Rouch, "The Politics of Visual Anthropology," Cineaste, vol. VIII, no. 4,
p.
48.
18.
p. 354.
Laurence Gavron, "Jean Rouch 'Revisited',"
(Massachusetts:
47.
p.
Memories of Underdevelopment and passim.
film text
in
Process, p. 341.
17.
Lyle Pearson, "Four Years of African Film," Film Quarterly
(Summer
1973), p. 45.
Rouch's
un noir were censored by the government of the Ivory Coast; La Pyramide
Humidine on race relations was banned all over Africa; and Les Maitres fous was
"controversial everywhere." In Rouch's own words, Cocorico Monsieur Poulet was
considered "scandalous: to tell a funny story when there is a drought in Niger." See Dan
Yakir's "Cine-transe: The Vision of Jean Rouch," in Film Quarterly (Spring 1978), pp. 2-1
and the interview with Rouch cited above, note 47.
films such as Moi,
49.
Emilie
De
Brigard,
"The History of Ethnographic Film," Principles of Visual Anthropology
(The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1975),
50.
Ibid.
51.
Interview with Jean Rouch, p.
52.
Ibid., p. 20.
53.
Ousman Sembene
thesis film
Borom
p. 36.
19.
has directed nine films including Xala.
under Konskoi and Guerassimov
in the
The Songhai Empire made
as a
Soviet Union has never been distributed.
documents a day in the life of a horse-cart driver. Niaye treats the subject of
incest, suicide and murder. Tauw presents a young unemployed who cannot find employment
in Senegal's neo-colonialist system. The rest— Mandabi, Emitai and Ceddo—are all
Sarret
discussed in this study.
54.
It
must be noted that Ousmane Sembene himself straddles two cultures. He is rooted within
where as an image-thinker he has written several books and stories
Africa's literary culture
using French; he
is
also rooted in the present where he assumes a
which he plays continuously with the concept of image-making
new kind of artistic mode in
itself.
Notes for Chapter 6
134
55.
"Sem-enna-worq" is a favorite form of poetry in Ethiopia. The concept, however, exists in
most African languages. For its unique use and meaning see, Donald Levine, iVax and Gold:
Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
56.
Ousmane Sembene, Xala (Conn: Lawrence
Hill and Co., !975). Xaia, the novel, differs
from the film version. The book explores interpersonal relationships and
individual inner states more fully. For instance, in the novel El Hadji's negative side comes
from his own nature and attitudes towards others, whereas the film captures his negative side
mostly by a contrast established between his life style and that of the beggars. The film omits
many family relationships; for instance, Awa's father is present as a Christian character in the
significantly
and Rama has a fiance, Pathe, a psychiatrist with whom Rama discusses her father's
Dimensions of Oumi's, Awa's and Rama's personal and family lives are altogether left
novel,
xaia.
out in the film version.
57.
Most of
58.
Although
the dialogue in this study
I
is
taken from the film
itself.
have referred to beggars continuously, Sembene shows a peasant
who represents
man who replaces El
When
(not in the novel)
the destitute rural workers.
Thierry (the
Hadji as a board member), steals the
among them
a skillful pickpocket,
money
his villagers
gave him to buy food, ashamed to return to the village he joins the beggar band
Sembene
59.
If
in the city.
includes a peasant in an urban setting so that the national issue will not be forgotten.
a spectator's
initial
his latest feature
introduction to
Sembene 's
filmic
work
for instance, either Emitai or
is,
Ceddo, both employing a collective heroism and shot
in social space,
one
might conclude that Sembene does not understand the value of intimate shots. However,
in
Mandabi, shot with individual space and much camera intimacy, Sembene
shows a mastery of close-up shots. In fact, anyone who has seen the film is sure to remember
the face, the feet and even the nostrils of the lead character, Ibrahim Dieng. The details remain
Sembene 's search for
in our visual memory. In each of the above cases one thing is certain
an
earlier film,
—
an African cinema
is
evident. In each instance, style modifies subject matter.
60.
Translated from Nations Nouvelles, 1976,
61.
Ibid.
62.
The
p. 28.
Sembene plays in his films a la Hitchcock illustrate his interest in popular
iconography: in Tauw he portrays an employment office bureaucrat; in Mandabi Sembene is
bit parts
the post office scribe
— a cross cultural translator;
in
Emitai he
objects to replacing a five-star general with a two-star. In
convert and
63.
64.
is
given the
Interview with Oi
Haile
revolution."
is
smane Sembene
in
Seven Days (March
five films including Harvest:
plays a forced
who
Muslim
Mama
is
10, 1978), pp. 26-27.
3000
a film based on the concept of "you can
Bush
a quarrelsome corporal
Muslim name Ibrahima.
Gerima has completed
Resistance,
is
Ceddo he
jail
Years. His short film. Child of
a revolutionary but not the
a portrait of urban black America; Wilmington 10
— U.S.A.
community produced film on the incarceration of the Wilmington 10. His most
Ashes and Embers, treats the subject of a black veteran of Vietnam who is torn
between his ideals and fantasies. The war has so messed up his head that he can neither relate
10,000
is
a
recent film.
with others nor with himself.
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1
(I & L). "The Other Francisco: Film Lessons on Novel Reading," vol. I. no.
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Jeune Afrique. "Alyam Alyam: La Jeunesse paysanne au Maroc," no. 923 ( 3 September, 1978), p.
Ideologies
&
Literature
5 (January/
1
53.
"Le Premier Long Metage Ethiopien," no. 854 (20 Mai 1977). p. 60.
"Les Films africains veulent etre vus" and "Hollywood sur Volta," no. 947 (28 Febrier
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(1
1
Octobre 1978).
p. 81.
Latin American Literary Review. "Blow-up: Cortazar's and Antonioni's," vol. IV, no. 9 (Fall-
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Presence Africaine. "'Xala': Une Satire caustique de la Societe Bourgeoisie Senegalaise." no. 103
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"Le Cinema au Senegal en 1976," no. i07 (1978), pp. 207-14.
The Pacesetter," no. 70, 1973.
Topic. "Sembene:
"When An
African Makes,
He Does So
to Express
Something Deep within Himself."
no.
70, 1973.
UNESCO
UNESCO
"The Awakening African Cinema," no. 3 (March 1962).
"The Reluctant Pioneers of the Cinema," nos. 574/757 (May 1-2, 1970).
Ufahamu. "Image of Black People in Cinema," vol. VI. no. 2 (1976). pp. 133-67.
IVorking Papers in Cultural Studies. "Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge," no. 10 (1977),
Courier.
Features.
pp. 9-32.
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Index
and ideology of Third
compromises. 96; of
6, 16. 90; of Third Cinema,
Blood of the Condor. 3, 16, 21, 37, 38, 17
Blood will Triumph Over the Sword. 17, 117
Aesthetic(s): 3;
Cinema,
1
5-8;
liberation,
Bolivia, 16, 117
8;
region of ideology, 50
Brazil. 3, 17, 19, 27, 117
Africa(n): 22, 23, 24, 25; films vs. Latin
American, 27-28; films and ideology
79; South,
Alea,
Tomas
in,
74-
45-47
69/70, 73, 74,
17,
133
Althusser, Louis, 6-7,
1
1-12, 13
C.A.C. See Committee of African Cineastes
Cabral, Amilcar. 12, 13, 14, 60, 62; on
117
15,
Alvarez, Julia, 18,40, 118
Angola, 18, 27, 117, 118
culture, 57-58
shot: as a device of anticipation
[in Lucia], 32; obligatory
glimpse
[in
Los
117,
1
22,
1
26; vs.
The
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 59-60, 61, 69, 70,
71,73,74
Ashes and Embers, 134
16, 47, 49;
Sembene
projects his,
27; in the position of jury, 37, 22; point of
view of the, 64; to participate
18,
in,
64
117
1
18.
See Chen Youhua
of Chile. The. 3,96,
Ben Ammar, A., 17
Ben Baraka, Souhel,
of, 36; violent works made with, 14
Campesionos, 126, 18. See Peasants
Ceddo.S6-S9, 117
Censorship: [in Senegal], 86; [in Latin
America], 126/7
Changes
Plains, 3,
18,
1
See Gamperaliya
1 ;
133
17,
69,
1
119
18.
See Bai
Hua
1
21,22, 132
China [Peoples' Republic
Ideology in, 59-69
3,
Chou En-Lau,
1
1
6;
choice of, 6 in relation
to, 29; of the lunatic, 92, 97; representing
evil/ the good, 63; Sergio [in Memories] as
Chile,
118
17;
1
1 ;
ChiangChing.67,68,69
Child of Resistance. 34
117, 127
metaphor, 17/
religious figures as symbols, 32
Birr, Fernando, 103, 122
Black Girl. 78, 117
Black God. While Devil, 40, 17, 128
paradigm,
in Village.
Character(s): 24, 7
Chen Youhua,
1
Biblical:
27,
rifle, 7;
30; Style: 25, Antonioni's 60-61;
African/ Latin American film, 27-28;
participatory, 61; Sembene's, 87; similarity
Chaskel, Pedro,
Barravento. 3,40, 117, 128
Barren Lives, 3, 119; see Vidas Secas
Barthes, Roland, 112, 129
Beyond the
an observer, 60; hand-held,
in
a,
Bai Hua, 69,
Battle
as
29; intimacy, 25, 134; likened to a
1
Argentina{n), 17,37, 117/8, 122; group of, 23
Armed struggle, 13, 19-20
Aziza,
Camera:
movement,
Olvidados], 53; concept of, 128
Antonio das Mories. 17,
Promised Land, 35
Audience,
117
Brecht, Berthol, 47, 54
Algeria, 39, 97, 103, 107, 109, 117
Anonymous
19,
1
Gutierrez,
Alvarez, Carlos,
No Time for Tears.
Brick-makers, The, 15, 117
Budouin Boy, The. 3, 17
Bunuel, Luis, 51, 130
Bush Mama. 1 34
Brazil:
18;
of): 3, 18,
Film and
62; symbolic attack on, 67
Chronicle of a Summer, 74
Chronicle of the Years of Embers, 97. 117
Chronique d'un Ete. See Chronicle of a
Summer
Chung Kuo,
59-61
Index
144
Chuquiago,
117,
1
Distribution:
25
of. 23-
24. 108
Cine: aesthetics, 36; liberation. 24; Nuevo,
Documentary:
24; structuralism, 5
Cinema: 5; as a gun, 25; confrontational, 6;
de conscience, 2 de la Base, 23; engaged,
121; First, 122; Freud-Marx co-existence
1
and exhibition, models
1 ;
in, 51; guerrilla, 7, 25; non-illusionistic, 31;
Novo, 3, 24. 36; of decolonization, 1, 121/2;
of establishment Left. 36; of intervention,
97; of liberation, 6; of the masses, 7; of
44; non-fiction, 46.
See
Revolutionary film
Dolce Vita. La. 70.71,73,74
Doroudian, Mahmoud, 17, 117
Dos Santos, Nelson Pereira, 19
Double Day. The. 18. 19. 117
Duck, You Sucker, 48-50
Durgnat. Raymond. 42
1
"silence." 26. 88-89; of subversion. 95;
revolutionary. 100; role of. 105; Second. 46.
122; traveling, 112. Verity, 36,
74
Class: 15-16, 17; historical. 29;
representative of. 71
Close-up: 26, 30; to emphasize decadence.
3 1 Chinese style, 61,62; lack of, 66. 75.87;
images as brackets. 91/92; thematic, 34
;
Cocorico Monsieur Poulet, 33
Codes: cinematic, xi; ideal. 8; cultural versus
1
Eagelton. Terry. 42. 50
East is Red, The. 3, 18, 60, 63. 65
Eco, Umberto, 42. 59. 61
Editing: comparison of. 47; in Lucia. 29, 30;
style, 61; strategy, 82
Eisenstein: theory of syntax, 27
El Chacal de Nahuelioro: 22, 32, 5
style. 52-54
Emitai. 18, 25-26, 77, 89,
1
1 ,
134
17,
ideological. 57-93; class. 81; filmic. 82;
End of Dialogue.
conventional. 82; in formation, 86; of the
culture of poverty. 90, 92
Engaged cinema. See Cinema
Engel: interactive model of "base"/
Colombia,
15. 24.
1
17.
1
anatomy of
118, 129
"superstructure," 9
Entertainment, 96
18
Color. 47. 49; choice of. 60, 83
Comedy(ic): 78; form, 79; pedagogic. 30
Ethiopia, 27. 90. 92
Committee of African Cineastes, 23
Equino, Antonioni. 17, 125
Exhibition. See Distribution
Eye-level shot. See Shot
1
Composition, 82-84
Communication:
direct, 92; system of. 6
Confeicao Tchiambula, A Day in a Life AQ, 17
Context [text, reception, production]: 2, 5;
1
cultural, 85; historical, 30; ideological, 95;
evolving, aesthetic and social,
6, 13, 19, 20;
of man-the-individual and man-the-socialbeing, 57; style in the, of its use. 4
theoretical. 5-14; viewers to appreciate, 28
1
Consciousness:
false. 9; ideological. 7;
of
historic class, 29; radical, 3; of
revolutionary, 17; stream of, 38
Cortazar, Octavio, 118, 119, 123
Courage of the People, 21. 117
Critical inquiry, 95.
See Criticism
Criticism: film theory and,
Aesthetics and Context
Crv of the People. 96. 117
1
1
of, 2, 7: definition of, 157;
90, 131.
See also Folk and
Folklore
Dawn of the Damned,
The, 39. 117
Defense of the People,
Dehalvi.Jamil, 3, 118
In, 37,
Deng Finlan, 68. 118
Deng Xiaoping, 69
3,
117
See Pan African Federation of
Filmmakers
Fellini, Fredrico, 69, 70, 73
Fiction: their recreation, 36; world of, 96
Film: as allegory, 32; form, 90; pace of, 27, 90;
within-a-film, 36
Fimbo Ya Mnyonge. 27, 117
First Cinema. See Cinema
Flashback(s): 54, 88; choice of [in Lucia], 3 in
TTie Promised Land. 32. See also El Chacal
de Nahueltoro
23.
method of
purgation [in Xala\ 82; narrative tradition.
83, 85; song, 17,31,32
Folklore. 32, 35, 90, 106
Culture: 16-17, 125; curtain, 38, 84, 85;
1 ,
FEPACI:
Folk: culture, 79, 95; film, 32;
Cuba(n): 17. 18. 28. 29. 31.43-45, 58; Film
and Ideology in, 69-74; 96, 18. 19
poverty, 5
Faye, Safi,
1 ;
5, 6, 14;
ideological. 7; as intervention, 50. See also.
decolonization
FadJal. 3, 117
Fanon, Frantz, 7; on conceptualization of
Marxist theory and praxis, 12-14
117
of
Fons, Jorge, 128
For the First Time. 117,
Frame, 64. 66. 84. 88
1
23
Gamperaliya, 16
Gardner Song, The, 67
Gerima, Haile, 27, 40. 90-93, 18, 134
Getino, Octavio, 21,23. 118, 122
1
Ghana.
3,
119
Index
145
Liberation: struggle for decolonization and,
Giral, Sergio, 17, 118
Godard, Jean-Luc, 74
Guinea Bissau, 57
18; of women, 28. See Aesthetic(s) and
Cinema
Ufe of Wu Hsun. The: Mao Tse-tung on, 32
Guzman,
Linquist, Jay, 103, 119
Gleyzer,
Raymondo,
49, 118
1
Patricio, 3, 117, 127
Miguel, 17, 32-33, 35, 39,
revolutionary film, 21/22
Littin,
Haile Gerima. See
Gerima
Hand-held. See Camera
Hans, Herman, 127
Harvest: 3000 Years. 23, 27, 90-93, 18
Harvey, Sylvia, 99, 122
Hero: anti-, 63, 70; as collective subject, 8;
collective, 62, 134; function as a, 34; mass,
25; in The Promised Land,
Hitchchock, Sembene a la, 134
High angle: use of, 84. See Shot
Hollywood: 2, 3, 7; the Third World's, 122;
Holmquist, Pea,
Low Angle shot,
Hour of the
Hu Yaobang,
Mad Masters,
18, 126/
1
127
Hora
68,
1
any easy,
85; ideological discourse rather than, 53; in
Third Cinema,
1
18
1
Fous
18
1
17, 22,
67; on films, 132.
Marx, Karl: "camera obscura" model, 9; on
beauty, 10; "work" as aesthetic activity, 10,
12, 13
8; possibility of, 17; shift
among characters,
19, 97,
118
Manifesto, 2, 99
Mao Tse-tung: 67, on release of The Pioneers.
18
Identification: cultural, 97; denied
Mask. The. 40, 118
36
and Ideological State
12; apparatuses and effects,
criticism, 7; Christianity as the dominant,
18; deterministic, 9; end of, 8, 9; forms
Ideology(ical):
Apparatuses,
6;
[Marx], 10; theory of, 12-14; What is, 8-14
Image: weapon, 7; mental, 34; quality, 30
Imaginero, 3, 18
In Laws. The. 69, 118
Mauritania, 107, 118, 119
Mediation, ideological, 6; theory
Medium Shot. See Shot
Memories of Underdevelopment.
Meta-system. See System
of,
6
70-74,
Interpellate(ion), 6, 12
Metz, Christian, 5
Mexico, 48, 49, 118
Mexico: The Frozen Revolution. 48-50,
Middle Kingdom, 59. See Chung Kuo
Moi, UnNoir. 75, 113
Money Order. See Mandabi
Iran, 17, 37, 117
Morena
Island 127
Morocco(an),
18,
118
Mozambique,
19,
1
1
India, 16, 18, 118
Inside Story of the
on
Maitre Fous. Les, 75
Maleh, Nabil, 117
Maidoror, Sara, 18
Mandabi.
69
Huang Zumo,
18;
See Shot
The, 76. See Maitre
Mahomo, Nana,
107, 118
Furnaces, The, 25. See
36.
Luta Continua, A,
Arab World's, 122
Hondo, Med, 24, 107, 118, 119
HoradelosHornos, La. 25, 21, 39,
1
Lucia, 18.28-32, 118
1
Nile, 122;
17,
Lui Shao-ch'i, 67
Lui Shaoqui. See Lui Shao-ch'i
Long Chain, The, 18, 118
Long Shot, 25. See Shot
Los Olvidados, 51-54
1
on the
1
Ching Court,
1
32
Jackal of Nahueltoro, 22. See El Chacal de
Nahueltoro
Journey to the Sun, 45-47, 18
1
1
1
1
18
Films, 129
18
Narrative: 32; oral, 90-93; structure, 30. See
Flashback, Folk and oral tradition
Narrator: as lecturer and as confidant, 46; as
oral interpretor, 93; leisurely, 90. See also
Kaneto Shindo, 127
Lakhdar-Hamina, Mohammed,
Land in Anguish,
Last Grave at
1
"Voice" and TEXT
Nee-Owoo, Kwate, 40, 119
17
Nigeria, 40, 118
128
Dimbaza, 19,45-47,
1
18,
129/30
Last Supper. The. 17/ 18, 96, 1 18
Latin America: repression of filmmakers,
126/ 127; style of, 27-28
L'.^vvfmMra, 70, 71,73
Leduc, Paul, 49, 118
Leone, Sergio, 48, 49, 67
O Povo Organizado.
97,
1
18
Ole, Antonio, 27, 40, 117, 118
One Day I Asked. 18,
One Way or Another.
theme and
style,
118
18,
1
1
8;
challenging
in its
126
Oral tradition. 27, 90-93. See Folk, Folklore,
Index
146
Sanjines, Jorge,
Culture and Narrative
Ospina, Luis, 3, 118, 122
Other Franscisco, The,
Pakistan,
3,
17,
Second Cinema,
118
1
12,
shot: left/ right axis, 66; integrity of the
space, 85; quick, 66; reverse, 91; swish, 91
Panning, in Chinese films, 65-66
Father Panchah. 16, 118
26. See Campesinos
Peoples Republic of China. See China
Peries, Lester James, 16, 117, 118
Feasants,
1
as revolutionary film, 36; vs.
3,
Bay of Figs, 42-45
3,
Enemy,
1
18
Red Detachment of Women.
Red Lantern. The. 63
See also
and
118
Representation: elevated above real
life,
65;
frontal, 61; of signifiers, 8; traditional
practices of, 95; religious
symbols as
cultural, 35
[film]: 21-40;
approaches to
documentary
film, 36; as a call for
reflection, 22;
epitome
Silva, Jorge, 15, 118
of, 32;
16, 27,
118
1
17,
17,
1
1
form, 90
18,
Sambizanga,
15, 18,
118
128
model in cinema, 8;
according to Fanon, 39; to recognize
themselves, 97. See also Subject
Sri Lanka, 16, 118
Style: anatomy of. 5 1-55; approaches to, 2440; new, 22; of African and Latin American
film, 27-28; of
humor.
68, 118
25; radical
departure, 36; of realism. 69. 96; politics
4, 41-50; Third World film, 7. See also
Camera
Subject,
8.
7,
6 33; call for,
12; collective subject,
See also Spectator
1
of,
Style
The. 69,
1
18
17
System: meta-.
18
Romance on Lushan Mountain,
62
in,
liberated, 7; social/ individual, 65, 134
17, 35,
1
cultures,
Sound: Sembene's use, 26; innovation
28. See also Cinema of silence
South Africa, 45, 46, 47
Space: and time, 85; integrity of. 85;
Syria. 3,
74, 75, 76,
Pan
"Significance," 41, 129
Sun and the Man,
Rouch, Jean,
shot.
Zoom shot
103, 117
15,
Anonymous
High angle
Spectator(s): 33, 36;
63
Religion, 17-18
Rodriguez, Martha,
19
Spaghetti western, 48
Reed: Insurgent Mexico, 49-50, 119, 130
Humberto,
Rouch, Glauber.
1
1
8;
psychological, 69; revolutionary, 62
Rios,
18,
Song of the Dragon River, 63
Sontag, Susan, on two different
1
Revolutionary
travelling, 66/67.
SoleilO,
Race, 125. See also Class
Racz, Andres, 127
RaySatyajit, 16, 118
Real, The, 36; and the unreal, 34; referent,
within the imaginery/ lived,
Realism, 123; deviation from, 34;
16,
1
1
The, 40, 118
Fromised Land, The. 17,32-35,40, 118
Fyramide Humdene, La, 133
Rekawa,
17,
1
1
Simplemente Genny, 118, 126
Snow, Michael, 66
Sociology of Knowledge, 8, 9, 123
Solanas, Fernando, 2, 23, 18
Solas, Humberto, 31, 118
Soberg-Ladd, Helena, 117, 118
theory of, in Third Cinema, 7
Pooya, Rafigh, 37, 117
Fortrait of Teresa, 96, 97, 1 18, 126
Preloran, Jorge,
3, 17/ 18, 22, 86,
shot. Close-up shot.
Point of View: 5, 42, 88; ideological, 44;
interchangeable, 62; of a character, 64; of
observer, 27; through peasant's mind, 35;
Frincipal
1
1
Shot, eye-level, 84, 88; high angle, 88; long,
73; long medium, 62; low angle, 61, 84;
Fioneers, The, 67
Flaya Giron:
1
Sequel, 93, 128
Sexism, 18-19
118, 122
3,
36
1
Senegal,
Peru, 118
Fickingon the Feople,
definition of, 122. See
Sem-enna-worq, 78, 34. See "Wax and
Gold"
Sembene, Ousmane: 3, 17, 22, 24-26, 107,
1-1 16
17,
18,
19; and interview with,
Semiotics [semiology]: 5, application of, and
textual analysis, 122; Third Cinema, 8
1
to the Stars. 27, 118
6;
Cinema
Self-refiective,
113, 114
Fathway
film, 21-
Sanz, Luis, 1 17
Sara Gomez Yara, 118, 126
118
Pan African Federation of Filmmakers,
Pan
on revolutionary
22; 117, 118
5. 6.
122/3; of
representation, 12; semiotic, 8
77
Taking Tiger Mountain bv Strategy. 63
Tanzania, 27, 117, 118
Index
Tauw.n, 118, 133
TEXT: pre-existent
147
Van
text, 95.
See also
Narrator, Voice and Culture. Text: in
crisis,
motion, 90; message of, 6; object
133. See also. Culture, Folk, Folklore
33; in
of,
Leirop, Robert, 1 18
Vega, Pastor, 96, 97, 118, 126
Venceremos. 17, 119
Victory to Victory. From. 19, 65-67,
Vidas Secas. 1 1 9. See Barren Lives
1
Theory(ical): 62; context, 5-14; traditional
"Voice": omnipresent and omniscient,
combines "Revolutionary
over, 31. See Narrator and TEXT
Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism," 62
Wavelength, 66
Third Cinema: concept of, 122; definition of,
"Wax and Gold," 78; a cinema of, 77;
6, 121-22; praxis, 6^8; semiotics, 8; Towards
a, 2; ultimate goal, 97. See also,
definition of, 78; method, 78
Aesthetic(s), Context and Ideology
Welmington 10— USA 10,000, 134
Third World, 1; definition of, 121
West Indies. The. 21, 119
Thousand and One Hands, 18, 118
With the Cuban Women, 26
Tierra Prometida, La, \1. See The Promised
White Haired Girl, The. 63
canons,
19
80;
14; that
1
Land
Time: Africans' experience
of, 28;
and space,
Xala, ll-%b
85; linear, 91
Towers of Silence,
3,
1
18
Travelling Shot, 66. See Shot
Tricontinental, 122
"Tropicalismo,"35
Troubled Laughter. 68,
Tunisia,
18,
117
Tupamaros,
19,
Two
118
Blueprints. 67
Yamar Mallku, 38. See Blood of the Condor
Yang Yanjin, 68, 118
Yara, Sara Gomez. See Sara Gomez
You Hide Me, 3,40, 119
1
18
Ze-dong, Mao. See Mao Tse-tung
Zhao Huanzhang, 69, 118
Zimbabwe. 3, 17
1
Zoom
Ugboma,
Uruguay,
Eddie, 40, 118
1
18
shot: use in Chinese films, 66; in
Memories, 73
Enlai, 62. See Chou En-Lai
Zou
ISBN 0-8357-1359-8

Third cinema in the third world

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