University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Cinema 4.5? Legacies of third cinema at the age of informational capitalism

(USC Thesis Other)

Cinema 4.5? Legacies of third cinema at the age of informational capitalism

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content
CINEMA 4.5? LEGACIES OF THIRD CINEMA AT THE AGE OF INFORMATIONAL
CAPITALISM

by

Sourav Roychowdhury

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA – TELEVISION - CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2010

Copyright 2010 Sourav Roychowdhury
ii

Dedication

To all my friends who have supported me during hard times.
iii

Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Abstract iii
Introduction: Return of the Native 1
Introduction References 12

Chapter 1: The First Generation: Third Cinema and the Nation-State 13
The Concept of National Culture 13
International Lineage 17
The National and the Nation-State 27
The Aesthetics of Nation-State 37
The Global Voice of Early Third Cinema 56
Chapter 1 References 74

Chapter 2: The Neo-Liberal Turn 77
Capital and its ‘Other’ 77
Changes since the 70s 80
Herbert (India, 2005) 93
Cache (“Hidden”, France, 2005) 102
Tribulation 99 (USA, 1991) 110
City of God (Brazil, 2002) 122
Chapter 2 References 131

Chapter 3: Of City, Body and Children 134
Chapter 3 References 175
Conclusion: Death of Which Cinema? 177
Conclusion References 191

Filmography 192
Bibliography 194
iv

Abstract

This dissertation studies continuities and changes in the praxis of Third Cinema over last
two decades. I start from an analytic historiography of Third Cinema in the first
generation, i.e. late 60s onwards, and try to rethink the politics and theoretical positions
of contemporary filmmakers, vis-à-vis their call for de-colonization, quest for a new
cinematic language as well as their use of national imageries. I argue that frequent
conflation between the terms Third Cinema and Third World Cinema derives from a
politics espousing the welfare state as the vehicle of regional development within the
world capitalist system. This is a politics of domestic class alliance in the peripheral areas
of global capitalism as a means of resistance to imperialist exploitation. Paradoxically, it
is also a politics of regional capitalist development, rather than socialism. The dual thirst
for a welfare state and regional prosperity finds expression in the positive utopias built
around the imaginary/emerging nation state that Third Cinema projects in the early years,
especially when assisting radical movements questioning Fordist capitalism around the
world.
The second part of this dissertation studies the structural changes global capitalism went
through in the last few decades, particularly with rise of informational capitalism,
globalization and receding power of the nation state. I argue that with diminished
importance of nation state as an institution as well as disintegration of the Third World as
a territorial referent, the new Third Cinema exercises a politics of absence questioning
representations in the dominant mediascape, rather than proposing alternative positive
imageries. This politics foregrounds processes of structural exclusions integral to neo-
v
liberalism, alluding to the disavowed world outside globally connected spaces of ‘flows’.
I focus on how in absence of other perspective or identities, the excluded physical bodies,
especially of children, function as the precarious ‘other’ of the global network space in
these films. I also trace the locational shift in the diegetic space of these films from
rural/natural landscapes to marginal urban spaces, a shift that correlates with the new
urban explosion characteristic of late capitalism. I argue that even though the new Third
Cinema does not have the emancipatory rhetoric of the 60s, it continues the critical
function and politically informed formal innovation through strategies of
contextualization. In a way, lack of a positive referent makes the new Third Cinema more
radical at a time when marginal positive identities are subject to be co-opted as niche
markets in post-Fordist flexible accumulation.
1
Introduction: Return of the Native
To my knowledge, the last book length study on Third cinema was published in 2001.
One of the inspiring factors behind Mike Wayne’s Political Film: The Dialectics of Third
Cinema was a statement by British filmmaker John Akomfrah made at a BFI sponsored
conference on African Cinema in 1996. Akomfrah declared at the conference that Third
Cinema was dead. While refuting that claim Wayne conceded that although Third
Cinema as a practice is far from dead, “One of the curious deficiencies of Third Cinema
Theory has been its underdevelopment vis-à-vis First Cinema (dominant, Mainstream)
and Second Cinema (art, authorial). To develop Third Cinema theory is to try and
illuminate its relations with and what is at stake in the differences between First, Second
and Third Cinema. (Wayne 2001: 2)”
Although scholars like Teshome Gabriel argued that Third Cinema was defined by its
socialist politics and not geography, their field of study remained confined to the
geographic Third World as a homogenous entity and as we will see in chapter 1, the
premise of the socialist politics was defined in terms of binary opposition between the
First and the Third World. Wayne was the first scholar to clearly spell out that socialist
politics was a function of positionality within the socio-cultural milieu a film is
addressing. He acknowledged the dialogical relationship between First, second and Third
Cinema, placed Third Cinema within the long tradition of anti-capitalist political art, and
roughly based his analysis on Third Cinema’s investment in the social collective, rather
than the individual. Wayne’s repertoire therefore includes films from all over the world,
including Hollywood. Wayne also asserted that Third Cinema’s allegiance was to a
2
politics of intervention rather than representation in the dominant cultural field and
therefore it was not compatible with academic discourses like post-colonialism.
However, Wayne’s analysis does not adequately explain the underlying reasons for
recurrent conflation between Third Cinema and Third World cinema, or the frustration
among filmmakers like Akomfrah when the Third World as a functional entity ceases to
exist in late Capitalism. Commenting on Solanas and Getino’s position on the national
question, Wayne argues,
The specific working-class tradition that Solanas and Getino were influenced by
was a left-wing version of Peronism, which tried to bolt together the two great
conflicting ideologies of the period of de-colonization: nationalism and socialism.
“In neocolonial situation two concepts of culture, art, science and cinema compete:
that of the rulers and that of the nation”. (Wayne 2001: 122)

Wayne sees this dilemma between the nation and trans-national socialism as a problem
which the praxis of Third Cinema is fraught with. I believe this dilemma in fact explains
the state of global capitalism in the late 60s, and can be understood from the perspective
of contemporary capitalist world system. I argue in the first chapter therefore that the
politics of de-colonization Third Cinema champions in its first generation did have a
structural relationship with the Third World nation state, although not in the same terms
as bourgeoisie national cinema. As Wallerstein has argued (see chapter 1), the dominance
of Western Europe – the core area of capitalist World System – originated from
converging interest of different power groups institutionalized in the machinery of
nation-state. Analogically in the 60s, the developmental state in the newly independent
Third World was perceived as a mechanism of domestic class alliance committed to
regional development and a simultaneous deterrent to imperialist exploitation. The
3
combination of these two operations - i.e. ‘catching up’/welfare and an overall resistance
- was expected by the contemporary left to facilitate a global systemic transformation,
leading to socialism. The emancipatory rhetoric of Third Cinema in the first generation
was informed by this positive utopia - structured around the developmental state and
expressed in terms of national imaginaries. In spite of emphasis on regional specificities
and popular culture in these imaginaries, the common denominator of underdevelopment
and neo/colonial experience sustained a simultaneous rhetoric of Third World-ism,
influenced by Non-Alignment Movement and the concept of Tri-continental revolution.
The peripheral status provided a critical perspective of global capitalism. That is where
the impetus for formal innovation - the vibrant, human rebellion against built
environment- and the progressive element of Third Cinema lies. It must be noted here
that by positive utopia I do not mean an essential identity, but identification with the
dynamism of anti-colonial movements. Paradoxically, this positive utopia also shared a
thirst for regional capitalist development, following a Third World version of Fordism.
Another major problem in Wayne’s book is his understanding of neo-liberalism from a
classical Marxist perspective, without recognizing the structural changes brought to
global capitalism by advanced communication and information technologies since the
late 70s. In the second chapter, I try to address these changes affected by transition from
Fordism to Flexible accumulation. The new communication technologies have produced
what David Harvey calls ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989) increasing fluidity and
therefore freeing capital of its space bound constrains (See chapter 2). As a result,
territorial nation states have lost their Fordist function as the mediator between labor and
capital. While the global capitalist economy truly functions on a planetary scale today
4
and pockets of the former Third World - especially urban centers - have become integral
parts of it, following the debt crisis in the 80s, IMF and World Bank have forced
economic deregulation on the Third World nation states, promoting export based
economies on the one hand, and receding welfare function on the other.
Consequently, as Manuel Castells has argued, the contemporary world is polarized into
spaces of global networks- connected by flows of information, capital and technology on
the one hand, and a vast number of people who do not belong to and are excluded from
this network. Castells writes,
At this turn of the millennium, what used to be called the second World (the statist
universe) has disintegrated, incapable of mastering the forces of the Information
Age. At the same time, the Third World has disappeared as a relevant entity,
emptied of its geopolitical meaning, and extraordinarily diversified in its economic
and social development. Yet, the First World has not become the all embracing
universe of neo-liberal mythology. Because a new world, the Fourth World, has
emerged, made up of multiple black holes of social exclusion throughout the
planet. ( Castells 1998: 167-168)

The Fourth World is dispersed around the world, and therefore does not have a regional
identity. The welfare state which was seen as the medium of social upliftment for the
disenfranchised in the 60s is powerless in face of forces of globalization. In fact,
increasingly it maintains its legitimacy by facilitating the structural exclusion, as
exemplified by stricter immigration laws in recent times. Today’s political cinema,
critical of capitalism, therefore does not have a positive utopia. Instead it foregrounds a
politics of absence- a correlative of social exclusion- questioning representation in the
dominant media.
I was tempted to call this cinema Fourth Cinema, but the term has been used at least in
two different contexts. Barry Barclay has used the term simply to mean Indigenous
5
cinema, ‘indigenous with a capital ‘I’’ (Barclay 2003). In an essay written in 2003, based
on a lecture at Auckland University he claimed Fourth Cinema (a medium of
mechanical/digital reproduction) to have a position outside modern nation state/ ‘national
orthodoxy’, which is the premise of the first three cinemas. Barclay claimed,
We learn especially from the overall reaction to our films, how these may differ
dramatically between Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. According to this
outlook, we are not "One People". The One People theory, the One People
paradigm, equates to extinction for Indigenous Peoples. (Barclay 2003: 3)

Significantly, he uses the term “Third Cinema” also as a national cinema category,
without being sensitive to its political connotations. Barclay’s idea of fourth cinema
framed around ‘ancient roots
1
’ therefore, is epistemologically identical to concepts of
bourgeoisie national cinema, another variation of politics of representation that Third
Cinema has resisted since its first generation (see chapter one). Secondly, Barclay’s idea
of the national ‘other’ is a problematic concept at a time when nation-state as an
institution is losing its past relevance. Barclay mentions, for example, an incident where
tribals in Orissa district of India were killed by the police while planning resistance to
takeover an area of their dwelling for Bauxite mining. Barclay’s remedy to the situation
is, “One day, the tribesmen of Orissa State may hold the camera in their own hands. It
will not be the camera of the ship's deck. (Barclay 2003: 9)”. The actual struggle that is
currently taking place in India against mining at the cost of displacement of tribal people

1
Barclay writes, “In some countries (and this is one of them) the Indigenous peoples have
been converted to one of the world's major religions, at least, superficially. Their art
forms may have changed somewhat, their diet, their work patterns, their instruments of
governance. But in as much as the People and the culture survive at all, the ancient roots,
the ancient outlook persist, an outlook with roots far back in time, an outlook ― to a
greater or lesser extent ― outside the national outlook. (Barclay 2003: 7)”
6
is between multinational corporations like the Vedanta group based in England and the
tribal people under the leadership of Maoists
2
(see chapter two), who shoot combat
videos to distribute among cadres, but do not claim any position outside the modern
nation state or globalization. I think this is a classic example of the difference between
politics of intervention and representation.
The second concept of Fourth Cinema – a super 8mm experimental cinema movement-
dates back to 1968 in Mexico. Born out of the world wide political turbulence of that
year, this movement was carried forward by activist filmmakers. The eventual influence
of Solanas and Getino on the movement is clear from the title of their manifesto,
“Towards a Fourth Cinema”. The manifesto shares most of the premise of Third Cinema,
but identifies 8mm cinema as ‘another cinema’ outside the ‘normal’ triad, for the
specificity of the format (Garcia 1999). The embrace of 8mm format was advocated for
its easy accessibility and although this cinema was perceived to be experimental cinema
circulated through alternative channels like cine clubs and festivals, there is an appeal
towards simplicity of subjects in the manifesto. At the same time, Garcia argued that “the
problem lies in the fact that “political cinema” has become a cinema of propaganda,
lacking in cinematographic language, except in a handful of cases (The Battle of Algiers).
(Garcia 1999: 171)” As we will see in chapter one, The Battle of Algiers has been
criticized for its lack of political analysis and thriller structure. Other than the 8 mm
format, politics or aesthetics of the movement for that matter remains ambiguous.

2
Recently, admitting that the growing support for Maoism in tribal India is a response to
corporate plunder of forest and tribal land for mining, the central government, which had been
indiscriminately signing MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with multinationals to attract
foreign investment since the 1990s, has halted a proposed mining project in Niyamgiri of Orissa
district.
7
I avoid neologism therefore. In Chapter three I focus on another major change in late
capitalism, i.e. urban explosion. As Mike Davis has reported, the global urban population
has surpassed its rural counterpart for the first time in history (Davis 2004). The new
waves of urban migration since the 1990s are related to economic deregulation and its
impact on subsistence farming. Growth of internationally competitive agro business,
mechanized farming and retraction of agricultural subsidy by the state among other
factors, have created a huge pull of rural surplus labor that has no other option but to
migrate from their traditional habitat
3
to the cities in search of livelihood. Unlike 19
th
and
20
th
century urbanization, this unskilled labor force cannot be absorbed by the demand
for industrial labor for collapse of import substitution industries in developing countries
and general deindustrialization in the traditional sectors. This population - whom Davis
calls the ‘informal proletariat’- is left with no other identity except possession of physical
bodies, in a paradoxical relationship with the environment of codification/de-
corporealization of informational society. I discuss therefore how bodies have replaced
developmental state/landscapes as the critical referent in the new Third Cinema and the
critique of annihilation of bodies as a structural condition of territorialization of urban
space has become a recurrent theme of these films. One of the consequences of receding
function of the welfare state is exposure of children/non-adults to capitalist exploitation. I
explore this theme- exclusion/annihilation of children as bodies- as another symptom of
emergence of a politics of non-identity, since children have functioned as the figure of
immanence in cinema at least since Italian neo-realism.

3
This population includes tribal people, as exemplified by Freddy, the protagonist of Bolivia (see
chapter three).
8
To the extent Third Cinema was a cultural wing of active social movements in the late
60s and early 70s, it foregrounded the emancipatory rhetoric embedded in the themes it
was addressing. The vibrancy of its formal experiments marked an epoch in the history of
cinema in general. During first few decades of flexible accumulation, when anti-capitalist
discontents lacked the force of a visible systemic challenge, the strategy of Third cinema
has remained rather subdued contextualization of dominant discourses, a strategy Wayne
has described as the ‘holding operation’. I argue in the conclusion that cinema’s power of
contextualization retains its relevance as a worldview/ideology, if not as a medium, at a
time when cinema’s escapist/immersive tendencies are appropriated by Virtual Reality of
computer games.
At the same time, what seems like a lull period might not be the end of story. As long as
periodic recession and systemic exploitation is integral part of capitalism, Third Cinema
will remain alive as a critical practice. As I discuss in the first chapter, Solanas and
Getino were criticized for abandoning their clandestine ‘agit’ films and joining
government propaganda after fall of dictatorship in 1973. Getino defended his position
arguing that the form and statement of a political film is partly determined by the pulse of
time, and mechanical adherence to any formula, no matter how radical it seems, exhausts
its creative potential. It is true that the political stand of Solanas has been ambiguous just
like the populism of Peronism, but for the same reason, it is worth taking a look at his
Social Genocide (2004).
Social Genocide is a documentary on the financial crisis of Argentina between 1999 and
2001, partially brought to an end by popular cacerolazo (banging pot and pans to call
attention) protests which reached its peak on December 20
th
and 21
st
of 2001, and forced
9
President De la Rua to resign. Following the Latin American debt crisis of the 80s and
rising inflation rate, the Argentine government under Carlos Menem adopted economic
restructuring program suggested by IMF. This involved reduction of government budget,
deindustrialization and privatization of state owned industries including profitable ones
like the YPF oil and gas company. Rampant corruption, tax evasion and money
laundering contributed to capital flight to offshore banks. The assumed antidote for
inflation- the newly adopted ‘fixed convertibility rate’ between peso and dollar
eventually hurt the export oriented economy as regional trading partners Brazil and
Mexico devalued their currency and dollar was revalued in the international market
during this period. Diminished state expenditure triggered increasing unemployment,
lowering of real wage and the number of people below poverty line. The situation
reached a critical state when in order to stop capital flight bank accounts were frozen for
a year in 2001 allowing only minor sums of cash to be withdrawn. Simultaneously, to
balance the international debt payment austerity measures were declared cutting back
more public service. The unions called nationwide strikes against these policies, and they
were eventually joined by other sections of the society including pensioners, unemployed
youth, and social organizations like Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (see conclusion) to name a
few. After violent rioting, destruction of corporate property and clashes with the police,
the public demand prevailed. Under President Nestor Kirchner Peso was devalued, the
government encouraged import substitution industries, took an aggressive drive towards
tax collection and social welfare. Finally Argentina was able to pay back their IMF debt
10
by 2006. Solanas
4
called the popular movement ‘the first victory of Argentina against
globalization’.
Commenting on the opening scenes of protests at Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires, the
voiceover of the film says, “After years of apathy, the argentine people have awakened
once more”. Pot banging mingled with animated drumming by musicians present at the
protest, interspersed with interviews and clashes with the police give the sequence a
carnivalesque mood. As a parallel move, the innovative strategies of Hour of the Furnace
(see chapter one) - staccato editing, inter-titles qualifying images, ironic usage of TV
footage
5
, paintings, popular music including political rap and the episodic collage
structure return in Social Genocide. The film starts and ends with documentary footage of
protests and clashes. In between, ten short episodes historicize the crisis leading to the
events of 20
th
and 21
st
December. Solanas does have a nationalist rhetoric in the film
commensurate with his Peronist politics, but numerous shots of the Parliament actually
depict its weakness vis-a-vis economic forces. At one point the voiceover refers to senate
members as ‘hand raisers’ in this context.
In the episode called “social genocide” Solanas interviews representatives of a doctor’s
association who joined the protest movement against austerity plans. The doctors say
austerity plans mean a huge number of ailing, undernourished children would be brought
to the hospitals. So, they came up with a slogan, “Other people decide. We see them die.”

4
Solanas was shot by an unknown gunman after filing lawsuit against Menem for privatizing
YPF before making this film.

5
Solanas contrasts music videos of scantily clad, dancing girls (in one of the clips Menem
participates in a dance show) with a TV interview of Menem where he suavely accepts of his
‘lover boy’ image. Later, with the same attitude he poses for a photograph with the IMF chief,
although the chief lightly warns him of the consequence of this association, referring to himself as
the devil.
11
The doctors continue narrating their experience of working under anti-people economic
policies. Most of these children are underweight, with low intellectual capabilities, even
though they have feelings. It sounds ridiculous to suggest a diet including milk or chicken
to a fourteen year old mother of such a child for permanent cure of diarrhea. Looking for
medical solution to the problem they translated books from English for cheaper cure, but
nothing worked in an overcrowded circumstance. Finally they read an Argentine book by
Juan P. Garrahan which suggested “undernourishment is a socio-economic and cultural
disease that can be cured by giving everybody a job.” The doctor insisted that the book
didn’t suggest “giving food to everyone”, and that’s where they got their answer.
As we will see in chapter three, social exclusion in absence of safety networks of the
welfare state produces literal and discursive animalization of human beings, reducing
them to biological entities outside the sphere of politics. Prescription of politics by
doctors in that context is an attempt to make them political animal once more. Thus, in
guise of older Peronism Social Genocide goes beyond inter textual reference to Hour
addressing problems of late capitalism.
I use the phrase cinema 4.5 rhetorically in the title to suggest contemporary political
cinema’s (uncomfortable) association with its software environment and also as a
reference to earlier nomenclatures of Fourth Cinema. From examples like Social
Genocide, it seems the number will need updates down the line.

12
Introduction References
Barclay, Barry. "Celebrating Fourth Cinema." July 2003.
http://kainani.hpu.edu/hwood/HawPacFilm/BarclayCelebratingFourthCinema.doc.
(accessed August 20, 2010).

Castells, Manuel. End of Millenium. Malden, MA (Castells 1996) (Jameson 1991):
Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Davis, Mike. "Planet of Slums." New Left Review 26 (March-April 2004): 5-34.
Garcia, Sergio. "Toward a Fourth Cinema prologue: a marginal cinema." Wide Angle 21,
no. 3 (July 1999): 70-175.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1989.

13
Chapter 1
The First Generation: Third Cinema and the Nation-state

The Concept of National Culture
After making Hour of the Furnace Solanas wrote in his famous manifesto,
The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and their
equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world
revolution. Third Cinema is, in our opinion, 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- in a word, the de-colonization of culture. (Solanas and Getino 1976:
47)

Although he does emphasize the importance of revitalization of national culture as a
countercurrent of neo-colonial consumer culture, he describes its strategy as, “…not
fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or passively establishes a situation:
rather, it attempts to intervene in the situation as an element providing thrust or
rectification. To put it another way, it provides discovery through transformation.
(Solanas 1976: 56)”
1

Thus while the legitimacy of the movement comes from a global perspective (world
revolution), its practice derives from specific contemporary experience in course of
socio-economic struggle. The concept of national culture (as is the case in any national-

1
In a similar argument Fanon wrote, “Seeking to stick to traditions is or reviving neglected
traditions is not only going against history, but against one’s people. When a people support an
armed or even political struggle against a merciless colonialism, tradition changes meaning. What
was a technique of passive resistance may, in this phase, be radically doomed. Traditions in an
underdeveloped country undergoing armed struggle are fundamentally unstable and crisscrossed
by centrifugal forces. (Fanon 1963: 160)”

14
cultural identity) in this context is oppositional, in the sense it is conceived as a socially
conscious rebellion against imperialism as well as escapist Hollywood aesthetics.
Furthermore, as part of this rebellion against Hollywood conventions of suture, continuity
and closure which Solanas described as ‘cinema of surplus value’ he argued, “Our time is
one of hypothesis rather than of thesis, a time of works in progress- unfinished,
unordered, violent works made with camera in one hand and a rock in the other. (Solanas
1976: 57)” His invocation of national culture therefore is more a faith in collective human
agency
2
as opposed to capitalist de-corporealization
3
and quest for freedom rather than
any essentialist identity politics
4
.

2
For example in the “Political Violence” section of Hour of the Furnaces the narrator informs
that out of 20 recent governments in Argentina 17 were outcomes of rigged elections or military
coup. People were politically exiled, so the task of the liberation was to win back that ‘humanity’.

3
Authentic Third World culture in the 60s was equated with a new epoch of humanity for its
nascent creative energy. Solanas quotes Fanon in the sequence titled “models” In Hour of the
Furnace urging “Let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies in
its mould. Humanity expects more from us than caricature and generally obscene imitation.” The
commentary continues criticism of European modernity for racism and systems of slavery after
this while the image track parades symbols of European high culture: portraits of Voltaire and
Byron, Roman frescos and Parthenon, to name a few. Trained in European culture themselves,
Solanas and Getino were not opposed to European culture per se. Their criticism was directed at
sterile fetishization of high culture in consumer societies and transfer of that culture as cultural
imperialism to the Third World. The images mentioned above disappear in lap-dissolves in the
sequence, but the dissolves also highlight their beauty.

4
We hear echoes of Solanas in Glauber Rocha and Julio Espinoza as well. Rocha wrote, “Cinema
Novo cannot develop effectively while it remains marginal to the economic and cultural process
of the Latin American continent. Cinema Novo is a phenomenon of new people
everywhere…Wherever one finds filmmakers prepared to film the truth…wherever
filmmakers…place their cameras and their profession in the service of the great causes of our
time there is the spirit of Cinema Novo. (Rocha 1995: 71)” Espinoza defined the task of imperfect
cinema as, “(it) must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the
opposite of a cinema principally dedicating in celebrating results…the opposite of a cinema
which ‘beautifully illustrates’ ideas or concepts we already possess. (The narcissistic posture has
nothing to do with those who struggle.) (Espinoza 1997: 81)”

15
Solanas partially echoes Fanon in this formulation. For Fanon, the quest for a national
culture prior to the colonial era is justified by the colonized intellectual’s shared interest,
“in stepping back and taking a hard look at the Western culture in which they risk
becoming ensnared. (Fanon 1963: 148)” This quest according to Fanon is a drive to
renew contact with their people’s “inner essence, the farthest removed from colonial
times.” Thus we notice a post-structuralist impulse in both Fanon and Solanas. National
cultures embodying the native ‘human essence’- as a peripheral space of capitalist ‘built
environment’- enables a critical perception of the latter and therefore facilitates
progressive intervention
5
. Recurring use of contrapuntal voice over in Hour of the
Furnaces to re-contextualize the hegemonic connotation of images is one of the strategies
that complement this politics. For example, an idealized painting celebrating political
independence of Argentina is accompanied in Hour by accounts of financial deals that
continued national debt. Later on another statement clarifies repeating the narration,
“What characterizes Latin American countries is, first of all, their dependence”.
In Fanon’s idea of violence- which according to him is the indispensible form of
intervention- we hear a connotation of primordial vitality. Fanon writes, “The first thing
the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the
dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of
aggressive vitality. (Fanon 1963: 15)”

5
It is useful to remember Althusser here, who talked about the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, i.e.
the ideological system which recruits individuals as ‘legal’ subjects in the bourgeois state and
defines it by proscribed actions. The ISA assigns a predetermined place for the subject in the
system defined by rights, norms and taboos, which is internalized by the subject, and that way it
becomes impossible to think of alternatives, since the Bourgeois state is relatively hegemonic in
the First world context.
16
Thus, rather than a ruralist fantasy early theorists of Third Cinema opted for a rhetoric of
becoming, where a new popular culture emerges in alignment with movements for
political and economic liberation. The primary task for the filmmakers in this context was
to “address the existing situation in all its often contradictory and confusing intricacy
with the maximum lucidity (Willemen 1989: 20)” and provide critical understanding
likely to assist the struggles in hand. Coming from a Europeanized left background,
Solanas and Getino initially started their documentary with the idea of making a film
about the working class in Argentina. Contemporary political and filming experience
shaped their political position, and inflected their ideological trajectory in ways they
never predicted earlier. The clandestine filming was accompanied by test screenings to
political activists and trade union gatherings, feedbacks from which further determined its
next episodes
6
. This discursive attitude is embedded in the essay format of the film where
staccato intercutting between black frames, titles consisting of political commentary and
images resist any impression of a homogenous diegetic space. Accompanied by voice
over and direct address of the titles, images of dictatorial repression contrasted against the
black frames strike the audience as a shock, to which a critical response is expected by
the narrative logic of the film. To emphasize that this response is the guiding principle of
the film Hour refuses closure at the end of the documentary. Instead it invites the
audience to add their experience to the film and continue it. The demand of this critical
response also includes a polarizing function in that it rejects passive, voyeuristic
viewership (one of the titles quotes Fanon declaring, “All spectators are cowards or

6
In a self reflexive move, this process is incorporated in the documentary by inclusion of the
inter-title “Time for discussion and debate” at the end of the second part (“An Act for
Liberation”) of the film.

17
traitors”). The significance of the ‘national’ in this context is in the concreteness of the
movements, i.e. in “rendering a particular social situation intelligible to those engaged in
a struggle to change it in a socialist direction. (Willemen 1989: 20)”
7

International Lineage
The emphasis on the national paradigm becomes further complicated if we examine the
backgrounds of the early filmmakers of the Third Cinema movement. Influential figures
like Tomas Alea, Fernando Biri, and Julio Garcia Espinoza studied at the Centro
Sperimentale in Rome. Patricio Guzman collaborated closely with Chris Marker while

7
Fanon gives a somewhat over-deterministic summary of historic evolution of Algerian literature
(which he generalizes as ‘indigenous literature’) under colonial rule as follows. “After one or two
centuries of exploitation the national cultural landscape has radically shriveled. It has become an
inventory of behavior patterns, traditional costumes, and miscellaneous customs…There is no
real creativity, no ebullience…culture becomes rigid in the extreme, congealed, and petrified. The
atrophy of national reality and the death throes of national culture feed on one another…Colonial
exploitation, poverty, and endemic famine increasingly force the colonized into open, organized
rebellion…The crystallization of the national consciousness will not only radically change the
literary genres and themes but also create a completely new audience. Whereas the colonized
intellectual started out by producing work exclusively with the oppressor in mind- either in order
to charm him or to denounce him by using ethnic or subjectivist categories- he gradually switches
over to addressing himself to his people. It is only from this point onward that one can speak of a
national literature. Literary creation addresses and clarifies typically national themes. This is
combat in the true sense that it calls upon a whole people to join in the struggle for the existence
of the nation. Combat literature, because it informs the national consciousness, gives it shape and
contours, and opens up new, unlimited horizons. Combat literature, because it takes charge,
because it is resolve situated in historical time. At another level, oral literature, tales, epics, and
popular songs, previously classified and frozen in time, begin to change. The storytellers who
recited inert episodes revive them and introduce increasingly fundamental changes. There are
attempts to update battles and modernize the types of struggle, the heroes’ names, and the
weapons used. The method of allusion is increasingly used. Instead of ‘a long time ago’, they
substitute the more ambiguous expression ‘what I am going to tell you happened somewhere else,
but it could happen here today or perhaps tomorrow’. In this respect the case of Algeria is
significant. From 1952-53 on, its storytellers, grown stale and dull, radically changed both their
methods of narration and content of their stories. Once scarce, the public returned in droves. The
epic, with its standardized forms, re-emerged. It has become an authentic form of entertainment
that once again has taken on a cultural value. Colonialism knew full well what it was doing when
it began systematically arresting these storytellers after 1955. (Fanon 1963: 172-174)”
18
making and editing his seminal Battle of Chile (1975). The influence of Italian neo-
realism, Grierson’s notion of social documentary or the left bank of French new wave in
the works of early Third Cinema is well documented
8
. With neo-realism and British
documentary, Third cinema shares the artisanal, relatively low cost set up that enables the
directors to work with a different degree of freedom compared to Hollywood and its
various national-industrial rivals. Willemen also notes that, “contrary to the unifying and
homogenizing work of mainstream industrial cinemas, this artisanal cinema allowed, at
least in principle and sometimes in practice, a more focused address of the ‘national’,
revealing divisions and stratifications within a national formation, ranging from regional
dialects to class and political antagonism. (Willemen 1989: 5)” To illustrate the influence
of neo-realism on Third Cinema it is useful to take a look at Mrinal Sen’s Interview
(1970). The film is about how Ranjit, a middle class youth looking for job becomes
politicized through his experience of an interview with a Scottish company. Ranjit travels
through streets of Calcutta preparing for the interview. While he is on a tram on his way
to collect his only suit from a professional laundry, one young lady next to him is seen
flipping through pages of a popular film magazine. One of the pages carries a full spread
picture of Ranjit, to which the camera zooms in, giving it a larger than life appeal. The
lady is awestruck seeing the picture and then Ranjit in close proximity. Noticing her
amazement Ranjit turns to the camera and as if gives an interview to the audience. He

8
For example Tomas Alea’s Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) starts with homage to great masters of
world cinema including Bergman, Fellini and Godard. Antonio Eguino, the cinematographer of
Blood of the Condor (1969) said, “The term (neo-realism) is suitable to describe our filmmaking.
For us the term means filmmaking with a certain commitment toward the society we are involved
in, with little money, shooting with non-actors, mostly outdoors. We don’t even have the
minimum infrastructure…The concern of filmmaking in Bolivia, at least for our group, is to make
honest films that we hope will contribute to a better understanding of our country. In that sense,
our filmmaking utilizes the same methods as the Neo-realists. (Burton 1986: 167)
19
says he is not a star, just a regular young man working at a printing press looking for a
better job. It is the director Mrinal Sen who decided to follow him with the camera on the
day of his interview, since he deemed there might be some dramatic element. He also
mentions that this strategy does not make this film a fiction since he is actually looking
for a job, and his anxieties are stark reality. The only thing that is not true about the
movie is the character of his mother in the film, who is a professional actress. Cut to a
clip from neo-realism influenced Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (‘Song of the Little
Road’ 1955), where the mentioned actress Karuna Bandopadhyaya is playing Apu’s (the
child protagonist of the film) mother. In the sequence her husband returns to their village
after a long sojourn. As Harihara, the husband, unaware of his daughter’s (Durga)
demise, pulls out gifts from his bag, Karuna breaks into tears
9
. Thus in a self-reflexive
move, the maternal suffering and its underlying humanism- one of the mainstays of neo-
realism, is invoked in a less idyllic environment featuring political processions and
locked out factories (Ranjit finds the laundry closed after a strike by laundry workers
later). The trope of the mother-actor in Sen’s film thus reworks the centrality of
melodrama in Ray’s film in favor of political analysis.
Third Cinema’s formal experiment is a correlative of its alignment with movements for
social change in the sense that it seeks to curve out a new social space through its critical

9
Ranjit continues the narration of his life after this. He introduces his sister whose husband
abandoned her, then remembers he needs to get off the tram. In between there is a shot of the
cinematographer shooting the scene. That the political reality is also cinematic is repeatedly
emphasized in the film. For example, the tram sequence starts with Ranjit’s POV shots of film
posters featuring popular stars as well as relatively non-mainstream director Tapan Sinha. After
Ranjit finishes his speech to get off, one co-passenger, a middle aged man, reacts to the interview
frontally to the camera. He asks, “Do you call this cinema? These are my words, and may be even
yours!” Cut to another POV shot of another film hoarding featuring popular actress Madhavi
Mukherjee, but a poster declaring strike by cinema employees union is pasted over it, covering
half her face.
20
understanding of the current power relations. In context of Capitalist social space Henri
Lefebvre wrote,
Capitalism and neo-capitalism have produced abstract space, which includes the
‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the
power of money and that of the political state. This space is founded on the vast
network of banks, business centers and major productive entities, as also on
motorways, airports and information lattices. Within this space the town- once the
forcing-house of accumulation, fountainhead of wealth and center of historical
space- has disintegrated…has state socialism produced a space of its own?...A
social transformation must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life,
on language and on space- though its impact need not occur at the same rate, or
with equal force, in each of these areas (Lefebvre 1991: 53-54)

Quest for a new cinematic language in Third Cinema therefore is an integral part of the
projected social imaginary beyond contemporary Capitalism. Here also, Third Cinema
borrows from various schools of modernist, especially Marxist aesthetic precursors. To
begin with, the history of quest for a new language in cinema goes back to the invention
of the medium itself. The trick effects of Georges Melies were later carried forward by
various avant-garde schools. The utopian hope of an emancipatory mass culture espoused
by political avant-garde movements like futurism predates Third Cinema in this context.
The surrealist attempt to adopt the language of the unconscious through bizarre
juxtaposition- especially the belief in unleashing the repressed unconscious drives as a
means of subverting hegemonic social order- finds resonance in Third Cinema’s
experiment with popular culture
10
. Leninist idea of ‘agitprop’ gets re-articulated in Third
Cinema when Solanas writes,

10
Unlike technological utopianism and its fascination with mechanical movements - which was
eventually co-opted in the mass media culture - the significance of surrealism was in its
sensuality, i.e. its investment in the human body, its subjectivity, fantasy and contradictions of
human desire. The unconscious, like the ‘natural’ Third World were seen by the Third Cinema
theorists as uncorrupted domains outside networks of imperialism, which needed to be
21
The new political positions of some filmmakers and the subsequent appearance of
films useful for liberation have permitted certain political vanguards to discover the
importance of movies. This importance is to be found in the specific meaning of
films as a form of communication and because of their particular characteristics,
characteristics that allow them to draw audiences of different origins, many of
whom might not respond favorably to announcement of a political speech. Films
offer an effective pretext for gathering an audience, in addition to the ideological
message they contain. The capacity for synthesis and the penetration of the film
image, the possibilities offered by the living document and naked reality, and the
power of enlightenment of audiovisual means make the film far more effective than
any other tool of communication. (Solanas 1976: 53)

The emphasis placed by techniques of montage on construction of meaning resonates
with Third cinema’s notion of critical understanding or ‘discovery through
transformation’. Making a break with the nineteenth century mimetic tradition in art
Dziga Vertov declared in this context that,
…up to today we have coerced the film camera and made it copy the work of our
own eyes…from today we are liberating the camera and making it work in the
opposite direction, furthest away from copying. (quoted in Wayne 2001: 28)

Self-reflexivity embedded in the idea of montage turns the attention of the spectator
towards the ‘materiality’ of the text, as a product of human labor, consisting of codes and
conventions of the labor process under specific condition. Espinoza echoes this position
when he writes,

…to show the process of the problem is like showing the very development of the
news item, without commentary; it is like multi-faced evolution of a piece of
information without evaluating it. The subjective element is the selection of the

resurrected. For that reason ‘landscapes as inscapes of national identity’ is a recurring trope in
films made for example, by Glauber Rocha. Surrealist influence on Third Cinema is widespread.
It is useful to remember the sequence in Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Tomas Alea,
where the protagonist Sergio remembers his wife who has left the country after the revolution.
Sergio wears his wife’s stockings as a mask while a recorded conversation between him and his
wife plays in the background. The sequence goes back and forth between past and present
exploring interiority of a national bourgeoisie who has sided with the revolution.
22
problem, conditioned as it is by the interest of the audience-which is the subject.
The objective element is showing the process- which is the object. (Espinoza 1997:
81)
11

Espinoza’s call for Third Cinema to ‘show the process which generates the problems’
can also be traced back to Gyorgy Lukacs’s idea of realism. Realism for Lukacs is
exploration of the social dynamics lying beneath the surface appearance. He wrote,
realist art must, “uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible
network of relationships that go to make up society. (quoted in Wayne 2001: 35)”
Wayne identifies two concepts of Lukacs that are specifically pertinent to Third
Cinema. They are typicality and totality. Lukacs defines ‘type’ as,
Convergence and intersection of…the most important social, moral and spiritual
contradictions of a time…Through the creation of the type and the discovery of
typical characters and typical situations, the most significant directions of social
development obtain adequate artistic expression. (quoted in Wayne 2001: 36)

The typical for Lukacs is different from the ordinary in the sense that the ordinary, in
its naturalist obsession, is content with surface details while through the typical realism
finds the nodal points through which major opposing forces converge. In Hans
Weingartner’s Edukators (2004) we come across a particularly appropriate example of
Lukacs’s typicality. The film is about two activists Jan and Peter on a mission to break
into rich people’s homes and re-arrange their furniture, leaving a message that their
days of plenty and security are numbered. In one of those operations Peter and Jan’s
girlfriend Jule get romantically involved. Meanwhile the owner of the house returns

11
A perfect cinematic rendition of this position can be seen in the sequence of Patricio Guzman’s
Battle of Chile (1975) where the cinematographer is shot by a riot police while filming public
protests against the Pinochet government. The sequence shows the policeman taking position and
aiming his gun at the camera. After the shot is fired, the frame wavers before going dark.
Repression of popular revolt and repression on cinematic expression converge here, given a
partisan audience. Mediated through the camera, the audience finds itself in the firing line.
23
and the trio is forced to kidnap him to a hill station. As Jan comes to know about Peter
and Jule’s relationship their camaraderie in activism becomes strained. Meanwhile the
kidnapped industrialist Hardenberg tells them about his own experience as a leftist
activist in his youth and how responsibilities in life gradually made him conventional.
Here symbolic rebellion against private property is conflicted with individual
possessiveness manifested through norms of monogamy. The activists release
Hardenberg in an apparent gesture of disillusion. Hardenberg, against his promise
contacts the police. When the police raid the trio’s apartment, they find it emptied of all
furniture except a note saying, “Some people never change”. Typicality is the central
crisis in the narrative here, driving the activists to embrace the commune.
Totality for Lukacs basically means microcosm. It is representation of a larger entity
compressed into a smaller scale which contains all the essential features of the signified.
A comparison between De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Sen’s Calcutta 71(1971)
illustrates how totality plays a significant role in Third Cinema’s notion of critical
understanding. Even though Ricci, the protagonist of Bicycle Thieves seems to be a
representative face in post world war Italy, his narrative fails be interwoven with larger
socio-economic forces at work. He is introduced in the film sitting on a pavement across
the street, away from men clamoring outside the employment exchange. His journey
through Rome and its various institutions remains eclectic, failing to draw their
interrelationships. The film for that reason remains a story of individual plight without
interrogating social processes. In contrast, the third episode of Calcutta 71 is a local train
journey to Calcutta. In the train there are two groups of people, relatively well dressed
middle class passengers and some underclass teenagers, carrying rice. During the journey
24
a burly middle class man complains of rowdiness when the boys sing in chorus. After an
altercation he slaps the lanky protagonist of the episode, supported by his peer group. The
boy resigns to one corner while the middle class group debate the proper way of handling
these disgusting characters. Later, when the burly man is about to alight from the train,
the boy trips him.
The film informs earlier that these boys earn their livelihood smuggling rice to Calcutta at
a time of food crisis, evading state regulations. This is a reference to Bengal in the late
50s, when as a policy of controlling food shortage, price was regulated by the
government. Food crops were supposed to be bought by the government directly from
peasants for redistribution through public rationing system. Owing to low production,
lack of infrastructure and massive corruption of the state bureaucracy the rationing
system did not function adequately to meet demands, especially for the expanding
population of Calcutta. One of the consequences of this inadequacy was massive black
marketing, where rice would be bought by middle men from peasants and hoarded for
windfall profit. The rice smugglers in the film were mostly from peasant families, who
delivered directly to the retail market in order to avoid exploitation by middlemen.
The lyric of the song is a repetitive single sentence, “chal chulo nei, bechal re, amra jotai
chal”. Using the word ‘chal’ (which means rice, roof as well as proper behavior in
Bengali) paronomastically, the lyric suggests “we are poor/ we belong to improper
culture/ we deliver rice”. The tune of the song is akin to ‘kirtan’, a form of devotional
music associated with Vaishnavite movement (a populist rebellion against elitist
Brahminical Hindu religion in the sixteenth century).
25
Thus in a twenty minute episode we can discern class conflict reflected in terms of
antagonism between the dominant middle class culture of Victorian propriety and
‘improper’ culture of expressivity, generational conflict that characterized the social
upheavals of the late 60s globally, disconnection between the state authorities
12
and life
in rural sectors, invocation of a cultural form representative of a disenfranchised people
in a ‘semi-colonial’ nation (even though our protagonist sports long hair- a possible
influence of Bollywood, the song belongs to resistant folk culture, generally neglected by
cultural imperialism), a guerilla mode of resistance that characterized the anti-
establishment struggles in the 60s, and the strategy of ‘individual annihilation’- the mode
of struggle CPI(M-L) opted for in Bengal
13
.
Of other international influences on Third Cinema I’ll briefly touch upon Brecht and
Walter Benjamin. While Lukacs was critical of (high) modernism on grounds of its lack
of contact with popular culture, Brecht and Benjamin saw its potential in articulating
experiences of the urban masses in industrial capitalism. Especially modernity’s affinity
towards making connections between spatially different phenomena, its skeptical attitude
and innovations are significant in context of Third Cinema. Benjamin was probably the
first critic who talked about politicizing art in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the
Age of mechanical reproduction”. In Arcades Project he defined dialectical image as
“that wherein ‘what has been’ comes together in a flash with the now to form a
constellation”. Third Cinema’s tendency towards contextualization in a way echoes that

12
A police officer visits the protagonist’s house earlier to inform his mother of illegality of
smuggling.

13
I will elaborate on policies of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) later in this chapter.
Suffice it to say for now, that Calcutta 71 was ideologically sympathetic to CPI(M-L).
26
idea both in the sense that as part of its critical practice it is interested in historical
narratives
14
as well as in its idea of active spectatorship. Willemen writes,
Benjamin’s theory on dialectical images, although not mentioned in the manifestos,
is present in their margins as they stress the relations with the viewer as being the
productive site of cinematic signification…it is not within the cinematic discourse
but in the spaces between the referential world it conjures up and the real that the
cognitive process is propelled. (Willemen 1989: 11)

Also, in ‘The Author as Producer’ Benjamin offers a critique of the German cultural
movement called ‘New Objectivity’. New Objectivity arose in reaction to German
Expressionism and its subjective, fantastic qualities. In its attempt to address areas of life
marginalized or ignored by the dominant media, New Objectivity specialized in
representing the working class in naturalistic manner. Benjamin argued in context of
photography that the New Objective influence turned reportage into a modish fashion, by
“turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a…technically perfect way, into an object
of enjoyment (Quoted in Wayne 2001: 45).” The contradiction in form and content
identified here by Benjamin recurs in Espinoza later when he declared, “Nowadays
perfect cinema- technically and artistically masterful- is almost always reactionary
cinema”.
Espinoza also echoes Brecht when he says, “A new poetics for the cinema will above all,
be a ‘partisan’ and ‘committed’ poetics, a ‘committed’ art, a consciously and resolutely
‘committed’ cinema- that is to say, an ‘imperfect’ cinema.” Brecht defines realistic as,

14
In the way Jameson uses the term, not in a strict chronological sense. Jameson wrote,
“historicity is neither representation of the past nor the representation of the future (although its
various forms use such representation): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the
present as history; that is as relation to the present which somehow de-familiarizes it and allows
us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized by the historical perspective”
(Jameson 1991: 284).
27
discovering the causal complexes of society/unmasking the prevailing view of
things as the view of those who are in power/ writing from the standpoint of the
class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which
human society is caught up/emphasizing the element of development/making
possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it. (Brecht 1988:82)

Other than political commitment Brecht does not recommend any specific aesthetic
strategy here like Espinoza. Benjamin praised Brecht’s clarity and communicativeness in
his essay on Brecht’s Epic Theatre. Benjamin uses the word ‘pellucid’ in the essay, which
prefigures Espinoza’s call for ‘lucid cinema for a lucid people’. In order for this lucidity
to be interventionist its ratio of emotional and intellectual stimulation needs to be
different from Hollywood (whose motto is ‘desire is real’, i.e. emotional manipulation at
the expense of understanding). Benjamin wrote on Brecht’s theatre that “it eliminated the
Aristotelian catharsis, the purging of the emotions through empathy with the stirring fate
of the hero. (quoted in Wayne 2001: 43)” Epic theatre produces alienation and
astonishment rather than empathy. In the sequence described earlier featuring Ray’s clip
in Interview we have seen this process at work.

The National and the Nation-State
I have argued so far that the embrace of national culture (and its intermittent conflation
with continental culture) as a strategy of de-colonization has been framed by preceding
left wing cultural traditions, and in the process repeated warnings has been registered by
ideologues of Third Cinema against the “romanticism (that) can idealize the past taken as
essence, as national mythical origin, as an experience of the lost union between human
beings and nature. (Xavier 1997:14)” Nevertheless, the tendency of celebrating national
28
mythology remains a strong current in the praxis of Third Cinema. Fanon wrote while
elaborating the role of national culture in anti-colonial struggle,
…perhaps this passion and this rage are nurtured or at least guided by the secret
hope of discovering beyond the present wretchedness…some magnificent and
shining era that redeems us in our own eyes and those of others…Reclaiming the
past does not only rehabilitate or justify the promise of a national culture. It triggers
a change of fundamental importance in the colonized’s psycho-affective
equilibrium…the final aim of colonization was to convince the indigenous
population it would save them from darkness…in this context the colonized
intellectual who wants to put his struggle on a legitimate footing, who is intent on
providing proof and accepts to bare himself in order to better display the history of
his body, is fated to journey deep into the very bowels of his people. (Fanon 1963:
148)

While Fanon does talk about dangers of nostalgic revivalism elsewhere as we have
mentioned earlier, the ambivalence of his position and the drive towards forging a new
hegemony in light of fusion of western and eastern cultural elements or in terms of
‘otherness’ to the west recurred in form of conflation of Third Cinema and Third World
Cinema. For example, Teshome Gabriel defines Third Cinema as,
The principal characteristic of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is made,
or even who makes it, but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it
displays. The Third Cinema is that cinema of the Third World which stands
opposed to imperialism and class oppression in all their ramifications and
manifestations. (Gabriel 1982: 2)

He follows up this definition later with construction of the following binary opposition.
…First, contemporary film theory and criticism is grounded in a conception of the
‘viewer’ (subject or citizen) derived from psychoanalytic theory where the relation
between the ‘viewer’ and the ‘film’ is determined by a particular dynamic of the
familiar matrix. To the extent that Third World culture and familiar relationships
are not described through psychoanalytic theory, Third World filmic representation
is open for an elaboration of the relation ‘viewer’/’film’ on terms other than those
founded on psychoanalysis
15
. The Third World relies more on an appeal to social

15
This is not a defensible position, since psychology is not absent in Third Cinema viewers, and
in spite of differences in family structure and corresponding psychoanalytic models,
29
and political conflicts as the prime rhetorical strategy and less on the paradigm of
oedipal conflict and resolution. Second, on the semiotic front, the western model of
filmic representation is essentially based on a literary or written conception of the
scenario which implies a linear, cause/effect conception of narrative action.
However, Third World oral narratives, founded on traditional culture, are held in
memory by a set of formal strategies specific to repeated, oral, face-to-face tellings
(Gabriel 1982: 39-40).

As Paul Willemen argued, since Hollywood established its dominance in the world film
market in the 1920’s, it has been a strategy of various national bourgeoisies to cynically
invoke films rooted in ‘national culture’ to protect their domestic market, often co-opting
authorial cinema in its constellation. Fanon’s search for legitimacy in a glorious past or
Gabriel’s projection of pre-modern oral traditions as the model for all of an anachronistic
Third World thus becomes ‘the local answer to imperial stereotypes’.
Even though scholars like Mike Wayne have argued against Gabriel, the precise appeal
behind the conflation between Third Cinema and Third World Cinema has not been
discussed in details. I will argue that this under-explored area is crucial to theorization of
the Third cinema movement since not only it shapes the political imaginary of first
generation of the movement, it helps us understand the shift-that political cinema critical
of capitalism went through from the last decade of twentieth century. We need to take a
look at the political movements to which early Third Cinema was affiliated for that
reason.
During formation of the Bourgeoisie Nation State i.e. Italian and German unification,
Marx argued that the working class did not have a nation. It was mercantile regional

psychoanalytic theories have been applied to Third World Cinema, for example, by Ashish
Nandy and Sudhir Kakkar in case of Indian Films. Fanon was a trained psychoanalyst as well.
Interestingly, Stam has described the revolt of early proponents of Third Cinema against their
earlier generation just like the French New Wave authors, as Oedipal.
30
capital which needed its protected national market, as unhindered circulation of capital
within that region could ensure further accumulation. As capitalism matured, it broke
down national boundaries and through imperialism, globalized its reach. Wallerstein
identifies three structural positions in the history of development of world Capitalism in
this context, namely- core, semi-periphery and periphery. He argues that owing to a series
of historical, ecological and geographic accidents North-west Europe emerged as the core
area of world-economy in the sixteenth century. The defining characteristic of this core
area was that the interests of various local groups converged here leading to the
development of strong state mechanisms which was not the case in the peripheral areas
(i.e. the location of Third World).
16
Apart from superior means of production, because of
this differential power of the state-machineries, we get operations of unequal exchange
17

enforced by the strong states on the weak ones. Thus, Wallerstein writes, “Capitalism
involves not only appropriation of surplus value by an owner from a laborer, but an
appropriation of surplus of the whole world by the core areas. (Wallerstein 2000: 86)”

16
Wallerstein elaborates this with two reasons. He writes, “In peripheral countries, the interests of
the capitalist landowners lie in an opposite direction from those of the local commercial
bourgeoisie. Their interests lie in maintaining an open economy to maximize profit from world
market trade (no restrictions in exports and access to lower-cost industrial products from core
countries) and in elimination of the commercial bourgeoisie in favor of outside merchants (who
pose no local political threat). Thus, in terms of the state, the coalition which strengthened it in
core countries was precisely absent. The second reason, which has become ever more operative
over the history of the modern—world system, is that the strength of the state-machinery in core
states is a function of the weakness of other state-machineries. Hence the intervention of outsiders
via war, subversion, and diplomacy is the lot of peripheral states. (Wallerstein 2000: 88-89)”

17
Detailed elaboration of unequal exchange is beyond the scope of this chapter. For further
details see Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
31
After World War II United States emerged as the hegemonic power in the world system
owing to several factors
18
, the most immediate being freedom from major military
expenditure until 1941 and absence of wartime destruction of its infrastructure. In his
famous speech known as ‘fourteen points’ earlier in 1918, President Woodrow Wilson
had proclaimed ‘self-determination of nations’, implying collective political right to
sovereignty for the colonies. One of the fourteen points of the speech was “The removal,
so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of equality of trade
conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for
its maintenance.” In other words, in place of direct political control of the former
colonies, the Third World was invited to participate voluntarily in the global market
under its own political leadership, whose other responsibility would be ‘national
development’.
Around the same time Lenin identified the age of imperialism as the age of monopoly
and finance capital, where Capitalism had exhausted its potential for development of
productive forces for saturation of the world market, and therefore was dependent on the
colonies for export of finance capital instead of investment in new production. For that
reason, the struggles for national liberation against colonial powers was seen as crucially
important in the overall struggle against ‘moribund’ capitalism. To explain the crisis of
capitalism according to his formulation, he wrote,
Hilferding rightly notes the connection between imperialism and the intensification
of national oppression. “In the newly opened-up countries,” he writes, “the capital
imported into them intensifies antagonisms and excites against the intruders the
constantly growing resistance of the peoples who are awakening to national

18
Wallerstein argues in this context that “The US and the USSR engaged in a highly structured,
carefully contained, formal (but not substantive) conflict, in which the USSR acted as a sub-
imperialist agent of the United States. (Wallerstein 1995: 10)”
32
consciousness; this resistance can easily develop into dangerous measures against
foreign capital.” The old social relations become completely revolutionized, the
age-long agrarian isolation of ‘nations without history’ is destroyed and they are
drawn into the capitalist whirlpool. Capitalism itself gradually provides the
subjugated with the means and resources for their emancipation and they set out to
achieve the goal which once seemed highest to the European nations: the creation
of a united national state as a means to economic and cultural freedom. This
movement for national independence threatens European capital in its most
valuable and most promising fields of exploitation, and European capital can
maintain its domination only by continually increasing its military forces.
(Emphasis mine)
19

Although belonging to opposing political ideologies, according to both Wilsonian as well
as Leninist models the path for emancipation of the Third World was first a political
change that would establish sovereignty (either overthrowing colonial rule or actually
implementing independent policies in so-called semi-colonies), then acquiring economic
prosperity through industrialization and creation of social infrastructure (education,
health etc.) overseen by a benevolent state.
Thus, during the period 1945-70, socialism was a secondary goal to the Third world
nations. Development of means of production was a question of accumulating domestic
capital to eliminate dependence on the First World. For that reason Mao’s concept of
neo-democratic revolution envisioned a four class alliance (National bourgeoisie, Petite
Bourgeoisie, peasants and the industrial Proletariat) in their struggle against imperialist
forces, comprador bourgeoisie and feudal landlords
20
. It was assumed by the

19
V. I. Lenin, “Critique of Imperialism” in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-
hsc/ch09.htm

20
Mao wrote, “It is an era in which the world capitalist front has collapsed in one part of the
globe (one-sixth of the world) and has fully revealed its decadence everywhere else, in which the
remaining capitalist parts cannot survive without relying more than ever on the colonies and
Semi-colonies, in which a socialist state has been established and has proclaimed its readiness to
33
contemporary left that in spite of this apparently bourgeoisie-democratic drive
21
resisting
imperialist interests in the Third World would topple global capitalism in general because
of the latter’s dependency on the colonies
22
and therefore as Ismail Xavier writes, “In the

give active support to the liberation movement of all colonies and semi-colonies, and in which the
proletariat of the capitalist countries is steadily freeing itself from the social-imperialist influence
of the social-democratic parties and has proclaimed its support for the liberation movement in the
colonies and semi-colonies. In this era, any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed
against imperialism, i.e., against the international bourgeoisie or international capitalism, no
longer comes within the old category of the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, but within
the new category. It is no longer part of the old bourgeois, or capitalist, world revolution, but is
part of the new world revolution, the proletarian-socialist world revolution…Although such a
revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in
its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear
the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the
bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois
dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the
first stage, of establishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all
the revolutionary classes. Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider
path for the development of socialism (Mao, On New Democracy 1940
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_26.htm)”.
Similarly, Fanon wrote, “The colonial subjects are militant activists under the abstract slogan:
“Power to the proletariat,” forgetting that in their part of the world slogans of national liberation
should come first. (Fanon 1963: 22)” Even Fidel Castro was not a socialist at the beginning of the
Cuban revolution. His turn to socialism later was largely motivated by the necessity of Soviet
support in case of a possible US military campaign.

21
This is also a reason why in the Third World context often concepts of people and class get
conflated. For example for Alea, “the term ‘popular’, used in its authentic sense, can only exist
when the interests of the people are the same as those of the state. According to Alea this
congruence implies socialism. The people are those who embody the desire to improve social
conditions. (Ramsay 1988: 270)” On the other hand, Roy Armes who identified Third Cinema as
‘Third World Cinema’ itself, criticized Satyajit Ray’s ‘universal humanity’ as, “far from being a
neutral artistic quality, this humanity, too, can be seen most properly as the product of a tradition
created initially by a middle class that has come in terms with colonization. (Armes 1987: 242)”
Thus there was an implicit consensus among theorists of Third Cinema about the progressive
Third World consciousness resonated by the aesthetics of Third Cinema, being innately anti-
colonial, and therefore socialist.

22
The “Dependence” section in the first part (“Violence and Liberaion”) of Hour of the Furnaces
addresses this issue in a famous montage sequence. Influenced by Eisenstein’s Strike (1924) and
to some extent Andy Warhol’s usage of pop culture, this section intercuts between scenes from a
slaughterhouse (Argentina’s one of the biggest export is beef) and glossy advertising boards
featuring bikini clad women and luxury cars. Various stages of meat processing including
hammering the cattle to death is juxtaposed here with seductive looks of presumably First World
models, suggesting the source of consumerist affluence in the First World coming from the
34
1960s there were great expectations in all Latin America, when the movement in world
history seemed to elect the so-called Third world as the epicenter of change. (Xavier
1997: 8)”
Although this model of development was laid down by the two emerging superpowers
and bought by the Third world countries, the actual mode of struggle against the North
lied in its pacing. The colonial powers were strongly opposed to forcing of the pace by
the Third World in this process of ‘catching up’
23
. But in the post world war scenario the
old model of direct political control was not economically or ideologically sustainable.
By late 1960s decolonization had been achieved almost everywhere, but when it came to
actual national development, by the early 70s the world economy had already reached a
phase of stagnation which according to Wallerstein, still continues.
The relationship between the political movements I have tried to understand with early
Third Cinema becomes clear if we examine the backgrounds of the writers of its best
known manifesto ‘Towards a Third Cinema’. Although Solanas wrote- “A war in which
national liberation can only succeed when it is simultaneously postulated as social

suffering of the Third World. At another level, the advertisements are also ideological attacks of
the consumerist ideology on workers who can barely afford the meat they produce.

23
Dipesh Chakrabarty summarizes this situation as follows. The temporal structure of modern
History (defined in terms of progress, industrialization and democracy) has been ‘first in the west,
and then elsewhere.’ Following this historicism Marx wrote, “Country that is more developed
industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. (Chakrabarty 2000: 7).
In turn, this historicism legitimized saying ‘not yet’ to the colonies. The colonizers who took
pride over ethos of democracy in the metropole could say that Indians or Africans were not
civilized enough to enjoy the same yet. “Mill’s historicist argument thus consigned Indians,
Africans and other ‘rude’ nations to an imaginary waiting room of history. (Chakrabarty 2000:
8)” Against this historicism defined by Johannes Fabian as ‘denial of coevalness’, the national
liberation movements adopted the strategy of ‘now’. The colonial nation-states appropriated the
‘imaginary waiting room’ for themselves as a metaphor of space, and turned it against the
temporal narrative of imperialism.

35
liberation- socialism as the only valid perspective of any liberation process”- Solanas was
admittedly Peronist
24
. Solanas criticized the argentine Communist party and Stalinism in
general in the “Notes on Neo-colonialism” section of Hour of the Furnaces. Referring to
historian Jorge Abelardo Ramos, Solanas argued that while the socialist party followed
the path of social democracy influenced by Euro-communists, Stalinists followed the
diktats of Third International which suggested collaboration with colonial powers in war
against Fascism (after Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in 1941). The goal of
Peronism, Solanas declared was “economic independence, political sovereignty and
social justice” which would eventually transform “semi-feudal, rural Argentina into an
independent nation.” Robert Stam describes Peronism as a version of Latin American
populism (which also included some Fascist tendencies). Stam writes,
In this version, populism represents a style of political representation by which
certain progressive and nationalist elements of the bourgeoisie enlist the support of
the people in order to advance their own interests. Latin American populists, like
populists everywhere, flirt with the right with the one hand and caress the left with
the other, making pacts with god and devil. Like the inhabitants of Alphaville, they
manage to say yes and no at the same time. As a tactical alliance, Peronism
constituted a labyrinthine tangle of contradictions; a fragile mosaic which shattered,
not surprisingly, with its leader’s disappearance…wholeheartedly anti-imperialist,
Peronism was only half-heartedly anti-monopolist, since the industrial bourgeoisie
allied with it was more frightened of the working class than it was of
imperialism…there is ambiguity in the…concept of ‘Third Cinema’. The ‘third’,
while obviously referring to the ‘Third World’, also echoes Peron’s call for a ‘third
way’, for an intermediate path between socialism and capitalism. That The Hour of
the Furnaces seems more radical than it in fact is largely derives from its skillful
orchestration of what one might call the revolutionary intertext, that is, its aural and
visual evocation of tri-continental revolution. The strategically placed allusions of

24
Robert Stam writes, “Should there be any doubt about the Peronist allegiances of the film, one
need only remember the frequent quotations of Peron, the interviews with Peronist militants, and
the critiques of the non-Peronist left. In 1971, Solanas and Getino made a propaganda film for
Peron: Peron la revolucion justicialista (Peron: The Just Revolution). The Cine-Liberacion group
which made the film, according to Solanas served as the cinematic arm of General Peron…upon
Peron’s death, Solanas and Getino made public declaration supporting the succession of his wife
Isabel. (Stam 1998: 267)”
36
Che Guevara, Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, and Stokely Carmichael create a kind of ‘effect
de radicalite’ rather like the ‘effet de reel’ cited by Roland Barthes in connection
with the strategic details of classical realist fiction…Peron’s… contradiction has to
do with its constant swing between democracy and authoritarianism, participation
and manipulation. With populism, a plebian style and personal charisma often mask
a deep scorn for the masses. Egalitarian manners create an apparent equality
between the representative of the elite and the people who are object of
manipulation. The film, at once manipulative and participatory, strong-armed and
egalitarian, shares in this ambiguity. It speaks the language of popular expression
(‘your ideas are as important as ours’) but also resorts to hyperbolic language and
sledgehammer persuasion. (Stam 1997: 265-266)

The group Cine Liberacion to which Solanas and Getino belonged was formed in the late
60s in response to popular resistance movements against the military government.
Defining feature of these movements was collaboration between the middle and working
classes, the principle agenda being democratization of Argentina. The movement
culminated in electoral victory of Peron’s party Frente Justicialista de Liberacion in
1973. During the movement Cine Liberacion called for creation of a ‘guerrilla cinema’
but after 1973 joined the democratic process renouncing production of clandestine agit
films. Getino was appointed the director of the film classification board under Peron
where his achievements included “abolition of censorship, the stimulation of production,
and renewed efforts to limit the influence of foreign films in the domestic market.
(Barnard 1986: 53)” As it is evident, all of the above were initiatives for development of
the domestic mainstream film industry
25
, and when questioned by what Getino called ‘the

25
Similarly, Glauber Rocha said in an interview that, “personally, I believe that the common
objective for the Third World must be emancipation of the market from imperialist domination.
Of course it is obvious that imperialism of the cinema would prefer it if we were to close
ourselves off into a kind of ghetto for pure and uncontaminated artists and surrendered the
market. But we must understand that the economic emancipation of a nation in the cinema, as
well as in other more important fields, is the first condition of political emancipation.
Paradoxically, I would say that in Europe and the United States the left wing wants to destroy the
consumer society, whereas in the Third world the left wing wants to create it. (Rocha 1971: 71)”
37
far left’ about his transformation, Getino defended himself in terms of popular support.
Getino wrote, “They saw in our work a supposed retreat into pro-Government
propaganda, not distinguishing between support for the armed forces and support for a
government elected by 70% of the people. (Getino 1986: 107)”
Thus, we have seen so far that The Third World in the 60s was striving for economic
development (development of regional capital, means of production and infrastructure)
the nature of which was bourgeoisie democratic, although there was a consensus that
elimination of underdevelopment and dependence on the colonial powers would
eventually give the world a socialist turn altering geo-political power relations (and hence
the idea of ‘tri-continental revolution’). In order to match the strong state mechanisms of
the First World, a populist state was projected to be the agency in this development
project, ‘popular’ broadly meaning domestic class alliance in this context. The state was
supposed to undertake social welfare and protect its people against external exploitation.
Deficiency in technology or resources was thought to be overcome by utilization of
hitherto untapped human capital (hence Fanon’s idea of ‘violent, muscular dream’).

The Aesthetics of Nation-state
The emphasis on human capital reflects in the praxis of Third Cinema through its
fascination with popular culture and its reworking into mass media technology of
cinema
26
. Gabriel’s invocation of oral tradition as the defining character of Third world

26
The genealogy of the title Hour of the Furnaces will be a relevant example in this context. The
first Spanish explorers sailing along the southeastern coast of South America reported seeing fires
by the hundreds blazing out from the dark silhouette of the land. For that reason the area what is
known as the present day Argentina, was named Tierra del Fuego- the land of fire. Those fires
were actually hornos, or cooking fire set up by the Native inhabitants. The site of those fires
38
can be explained by this tendency. Willemen identifies several other precursors of this
practice including Brazilian Athropophagia manifestos and works of Oswald de Andrade.
The most important theme in Third Cinema in conjunction with the anti-imperialist
movements however was the emerging populist state, generally visualized in terms of
national characteristics. Willemen mentioned earlier that admiration for a strongly
centralized but benevolent state is a shared characteristic of Third Cinema with
Griersonian documentary. The two tendencies of disseminating stable (in terms of
stereotypes) or emerging (defined in terms of the dynamics of the anti-imperialist
movements) national culture therefore reflects two aspects of this projected nation-state.
On the radical side, it had a critical function against capitalist exploitation of the
underdeveloped periphery of global capitalism. On the conservative side, it was the
vehicle of capitalist development itself, and therefore conceived in terms of totalized,
positive utopia. Homi Bhabha summarizes the process of conceptualization of the people
(the legitimacy of the populist nation state) in a nation space as a ‘double narrative
movement’. He writes,
the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the
discourse an authority that is based on a pre-given or constituted historical origin in
the past; the people are also the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must
erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the
prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity: as that sign of the

blinking on one by one to form a whole new constellation caught the imagination of the
explorers, and eventually “la hora de los hornos” (the hour of the cooking fire) became a popular
expression for Latin American poets and historians. Che Guevara gave it a revolutionary
connotation when, in context of Latin American anti-imperialist movements, he proclaimed
“Now is ‘la hora de los hornos’; let them see nothing but the light of the flames. (MacBean 1970:
31)” We see visualization of Che’s call in the “Notes on Neo-colonialism” section of Hour of the
Furnaces where supporters of Peron listen to his last speech in 1955 before his ouster by a
military coup. During the nocturnal speech, the supporters hold up torches, while the aerial
camera pans over them. The shot continues and after a zoom-in the frame is literally filled with
flames.
39
present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive
process…In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the
continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious,
recursive strategy of the performative. (Bhabha 1994: 145)

The rhetoric of visualization has been a crucial strategy for naturalization of utopias as
national pedagogy. Citing Bakhtin’s discussion of Goethe’s realist narrative in Italian
Journey Bhabha notes, “The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national
identity emphasizes the quality of light, the question of social visibility, the power of the
eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its form of collective expression.
(Bhabha 1994: 143)” The quality of light especially in context of classical realism has
been discussed extensively as a bourgeoisie perspective
27
. The politics of visualization
takes a new twist in Alea’s perception. We have seen earlier in our discussion that in
Third Cinema the Brechtian strategy of alienation resists purgation of emotions through
vicarious identification with the protagonist. In place of the immersive/escapist practice
in Aristotle’s catharsis, it evokes distance for a critical perception. In his essay La
dialectica del espectador, Alea questions the conventional interpretation of the term
catharsis and argues that distancing in Brecht is not a cold detachment but occurs through
emotion, a particular emotion that leads to discovery (cognition and learning), which is a

27
As Baudry wrote in his famous essay about cinematic reproduction of the renaissance
perspective and its consequent construction of the transcendental subject “The world is no longer
only an ‘open and indeterminate horizon’. Limited by the framing, lined up, put at the proper
distance, the world offers up an object endowed with meaning, an intentional object, implied by
and implying the action of the ‘subject’ which sights it. At the same time that the world’s transfer
as image seems to accomplish this phenomenological reduction, this putting into parenthesis of its
real existence (a suspension necessary, we will see, to the formation of the impression of reality)
provides a basis for the apodicity of the ego. (Baudry 2004: 361)” Similarly Guy Debord wrote,
“By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted
monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s
totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in
spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and
between classes. (Debord 1995: 19)”
40
concept close to Aristotle’s catharsis. Alea uses a relatively new translation of Aristotle’s
Poetics (1981) by Leon Golden where Golden translates catharsis as ‘clarification’
instead of purgation/purification. Golden bases this translation on Aristotle’s arguments
explaining the function of tragedy as a catharsis of the emotions of pity and fear, and this
according to Golden places Aristotle in the same league as writers of modern aesthetic
theory like James Joyce, who used the term epiphany to describe vision of truth.
Golden does acknowledge that the dominant trend of Hollywood is to exploit emotions
for sensationalism but he argues that this practice is closer to Platonic mystification than
of poetics. “Plato opposed poets who exposed the way rulers really are, whereas Aristotle
advocated poets (like Homer) who exposed the gods’ true character as vindictive rather
than benign. (Ramsay 1988: 271)”
If we remember that Alea was discussing problems of spectatorship in popular cinema of
post-revolutionary Cuba in the essay, where he defined the popular as a concept where
the interests of the people converged with that of the state, it becomes clear that the
objective of pedagogic discovery through ‘clarification’ was to assess and catalyze the
proper benevolent function of the nascent, projected socialist state. Alea summarizes his
vision of this project of critical clarification in an interview with Julianne Burton as
follows. Describing the character of Sergio in Memories, the protagonist of the film, who
also embodies what Jameson calls the ‘national allegory’ Alea said,
In my view, the Sergio character is very complex. On one hand, he incarnates all
the bourgeois ideology that has marked our people right up until the triumph of the
revolution and still has carryovers, an ideology that even permeates the proletarian
strata. In one sense Sergio represents the ideal of what every man with that
particular kind of mentality would like to have been: rich, good-looking, intelligent,
with access to the upper social strata and to beautiful women who are very willing
to go to bed with him. That is to say, identify to a certain degree with him as a
41
character. The film plays with this identification, trying to ensure that the viewer at
first identifies with the character, despite his conventionality and his commitment
to bourgeois ideology. But then what happens? As the film progresses, one begins
to perceive not only the vision that Sergio has of himself but also the vision that
reality gives to us, the people who made the film. This is the reason for the
documentary sequences and other kinds of confrontation situations that appear in
the film. They correspond to our vision of reality and also to our critical view of the
protagonist. Little by little, the character begins to destroy himself precisely
because reality begins to overwhelm him, for he is unable to act. At the end of the
film, the protagonist ends up like a cockroach- squashed by his fear, by his
impotence, by everything…Because the spectators feel caught in a trap since they
have identified with a character who proceeds to destroy himself and is reduced to
nothing. The spectators then have to re-examine themselves and all those values,
consciously or unconsciously held, that have motivated them to identify with
Sergio. They realize that those values are questioned by a reality that is much
stronger, much more potent and vital. (Burton 1986: 118-119)

Clarification performs a dual operation in this context by first establishing and then de-
mystifying bourgeois values, much in line of a projected two stage socialist revolution.
Few years later however, like Getino, Alea renounced the vision of the second socialist
stage. When asked in context of his The Last Supper (1976) why his later films were
more linear and conformed to conventional forms compared to Memories, Alea replied,
I believe that we are guilty of having overindulged our interest in historical topics,
despite their great importance at this state in our national development. We are very
much involved in re-evaluating our past. All of us feel the need to clarify a whole
series of historical problems because that is a way of also reaffirming our present
reality. It is a genuine necessity. It has, however, led us to neglect our
contemporary situation a bit. Clearly the challenge that we now confront is to
develop a penetrating vision of our contemporary situation and to make more films
dealing with current problems. (Burton 1986: 120)

In other words, the poststructuralist impulse we have mentioned earlier as the radical
aspect of Third Cinema, i.e. the tendency to historicize and therefore look at the present
as de-familiarized history, for which new devices of communication/interrogation
42
becomes necessary is given up at least in two occasions when the filmmakers (Alea and
Getino) are working under state patronage
28
.
Before going into further discussions of the nation- state oriented aesthetics I must make
it clear that Jameson’s idea that the Third World is constituted by colonial and imperialist
experience and therefore all Third World literature must be read as national allegory
29
has
been criticized on various fronts. My argument is not repetition of Jameson but quite the
opposite. Recourse to national allegory and popular culture can be a conscious totalizing
strategy motivated by capitalist aspiration where anti-realist forms carve out a domestic
otherness without having a direct critical function. As we have seen earlier, Glauber
Rocha was an avowed advocate of consumer society and emphasized the necessity of a
successful domestic film industry in terms of ‘economic emancipation of a nation in

28
Alea said, “For someone like Andrew Sarris it must be difficult to understand, but I have to say
that for me what I might achieve as an individual director is no more important than what the
whole group of us here at ICAIC achieves together…In a situation like ours, the collective
achievement is just as important as the personal one…For me to fulfill my individual creative
needs as a director, I need there to be a Cuban cinema. To find my own personal fulfillment, I
need the existence of the entire Cuban film movement as well. (Burton 1986: 130)”

29
See Fredric Jameson. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” Social
Text 15 (Autumn 1986) 65-88. Jameson’s main argument here was that the typical determinant of
capitalist culture was its radical split between private and public. The political being in the realm
of the public, capitalist culture, especially the modernist novel did not reflect social dynamics.
Since this split did not exist in the Third World because of immediacy of experience and lack of
alienation, Third World literature embodied the ‘political unconscious’. Since the resistance to
imperialism was generally conceived in form of nationalism, all Third World literature could be
read as national allegory. Aijaz Ahmed in his famous response to this argument of Jameson
wrote, “For, if one argues that the Third World is constituted by the ‘experience of colonialism
and imperialism,’ one must also recognize the two-pronged action of the colonial/imperialist
dynamic: the forced transfer of value from colonialized/imperialized formations, and the
intensification of capitalist relations within those formations. And if capitalism is not merely an
externality but also a shaping force within those formations, then one must also conclude that the
separation between the public and the private, so characteristic of capitalism, has occurred there
as well, at least in some degree and especially among the urban intelligentsia which produces
most of the written texts and which is itself caught in the world of capitalist commodities.
(Ahmed 1987: 12-13)”
43
cinema’. Solanas criticized Cinema Novo in this context as a ‘movement within the
system’ lacking significant political edge
30
. Interestingly, commenting on Cinema Novo
Solanas agreed that (in Brazil) “the forces of the national and popular culture are very
strong, stronger than they are in Argentina’, but he attributes this difference to a relatively
developed national bourgeois in Brazil. Solanas said in an interview,
The Argentine bourgeois is a fairly marginal one, dependent on the bourgeois on
the oppressor countries, many of whom live in the capital. The typical cultivated
Argentine intellectual is better informed of the situation in Europe than in the rest
of Argentina
31
. The opposite is true for Brazil. (Solanas 1969: 25)

A discussion of Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964) and Land in Anguish (1966) will
make this point clearer. Black God, a film made during the brief democratic phase before
the military coup of 1964, is organized around a peasant couple, Manuel and Rosa. The
opening sequence of the film shows the arid backland in a top shot, intercut with close-
ups of skulls of cattle, suggesting draught. The final shot is an aerial view of a distant
resplendent sea- the destination of Manuel’s flight. Within this teleological journey
towards national development the film speaks about the representative couple’s social

30
Solanas wrote, “The first alternative to this type of cinema, which we could call the first cinema
arose with so called ‘author’s cinema’…’nouvelle vague’, ‘cinema novo’, or, conventionally, the
second cinema. This alternative signified a step forward inasmuch as it demanded that the
filmmaker be free to express himself in non-standard language and inasmuch as it was an attempt
at cultural de-colonization. But such attempts have already reached, or are about to reach, the
outer limits of what the system permits…The search for a market of 200000 moviegoers in
Argentina, a figure that is supposed to cover the costs of an independent local production, the
proposal of developing a mechanism of industrial production parallel to that of the system but
which would be distributed by the system according to its own norms, the struggle to better the
laws protecting the cinema and replacing ‘bad officials’ by ‘less bad’, etc., is a search lacking in
viable prospects, unless you consider viable the prospect of becoming institutionalized as ‘the
youthful, angry wing of the society’- that is, of neo-colonialized or capitalist society. (Solanas
1976: 52)”

31
It needs to be remembered in this context that majority of the population in Argentina is
immigrant European.
44
condition, hopes and representations, their encounters with messianic cults as well as
‘social banditry’ (Cangaco), culminating in negation of both forms of contestations into
pursuance of what Lucia Nagib calls the most famous social/national utopia in Brazilian
cinema. The film consists of four loosely connected episodes. The first episode depicts
the life of the couple on a backland plantation, where Manuel lives as a cowherd. After
being cheated by a landowner (Colonel Morais) Manuel kills him and in turn the
colonel’s henchmen kill Manuel’s mother. Hounded by the henchmen Manuel seeks
refuge joining the followers of a miracle working saint (beato), Sebastiao (the Black
God). The second episode of the film is about Manuel’s experience in the cult where he
places his destiny in Sebastiao’s hands, performs purification rituals ignoring Rosa’s
objections. The increasing following of Sebastiao’s cult eventually alarms the local
landowners and the Catholic Church who assign Antonio das Mortes- “killer of the
cangaceiros” to repress the movement. The third episode begins after Antonio massacres
the beatos and Rosa slays Sebastiao ending his domination of Manuel. Blind singer Juliao
leads the peasant couple- the lone survivors of the massacre- to Corisco (the White
Devil), survivor of another massacre by Antonio, that of cangaceiro Lampiao and his
band. Manuel transfers his faith to Corisco this time, accepting him as another divine
emissary. Corisco- a practitioner of violence in the struggle to master one’s destiny tries
to convince Manuel and his other companions of the superiority of his path over
Sebastiao. Finally in the last episode, Antonio fulfills his promise by killing Corisco,
opening up the Sertao to the headlong flight of Manuel and Rosa.
In the otherwise discontinuous episodes, the leitmotif “the backlands (sertao) will turn to
sea, and the sea will turn into backlands” is reiterated by all major characters of the
45
movie including Sebstiao, Corisco, Juliao, Antonio and Manuel. Although the referent of
the film remains the underdeveloped backlands of north-eastern Brazil and the aspirations
of its inhabitants, the film never reproduces historical events. The acting and
compositions within the mis-en-scene remains theatrical with folkloric overtone. The
dilated time, relative immobility, ‘silence’ of the frames, and editing to the rhythm of the
cordel song playing in the background- instead of illusions of continuity, recreates a
chronotpoic constellation. The experience of scarcity and the desire for opulence
reflected in the opposition between the backlands and the sea finds expression in the
structure of the narrative through dialectics of rarefaction and excess
32
.
Xavier claims this chronotopic strategy conforms to principles of ‘Aesthetics of Hunger’
in that the texture of the film expresses the condition of its production, and turns its
technical precariousness into a source of signification. He argues that the mediation of the
filmic discourse by a poet (Juliao) belonging to the oral tradition of the diegetic universe
of the film is part of this strategy
33
. He writes,
This mediation, if not the only source of the film’s cavalier attitude towards
historical data, at least partially explains the fact that the film speaks of Corisco,
Lampiao, Antonio Conselheiro, and Padre Cicero without seeking any rigorous
fidelity to the official history of dates and documents. The ‘figural’ method of the
film transforms history into a referential matrix covered with layers of imaginary
constructions. The mediation operates as a kind of permeable membrane that
allows passage only to selected fragments and transfigured characters. This
precipitate of the popular imagination takes the form of exemplary tales whose

32
Xavier gives an example of this temporality in the following sequence, “extremely brief shots
render the agitation and fall of the devout under the relentless fire of an Antonio das Mortes
multiplied in a montage effect that recalls Eisenstein’s October and even ‘quotes’ images from
the Odessa steppes sequence of Potemkin. The massacre completed, the film reverts to slow
camera movements over the victims, as shots of pensive Antonio install a new phase of reflection.
(Xavier 1995: 137-138)”

33
It should be noted here that this strategy is Brechtian too, although in this particular film it is
not a vehicle of alienation.
46
purpose is not fidelity to fact but rather the transmission of a moral. The historic
process is represented as a parable that retains only what the narrator sees as
essential, in a style reminiscent, in its criteria of selection and its narrative poetics,
of cordel literature. (Xavier 1995: 139)

At another level, this narrative proclaims a peasant consciousness. Victim of alternative
draughts and deluge, and most immediately a fraud, Manuel fails to understand the
structural nature of his oppression. He seeks emancipation in available modes of anti-
establishment movements. Firstly, availability of Sebastiao at the moment of his personal
rebellion against the semi-feudal hierarchy encourages Manuel to adopt his interpretive
system, attributing the tragedy to a divine plan which requires devotion to the saint for
remedy. After failure of the messianic cult, he aligns himself with existing collective
peasant rebellions
34
embodied by Lampiao and later Corisco. When these unorganized
local rebellions fail as well, he is forced to look beyond his familiar cosmology. Both
Sebastiao as well as Corsico express anti-republican sentiments in the film. This is where
the last sequence of the film is particularly interesting for our argument.
After Antonio kills Corisco in the final battle of the backland, the Cordel singer
concludes his ballad singing “this world is ill divided- it belongs to Man, and not to God
or the Devil.” Thus in a classic modernist move, the legitimacy for the republic derives
here from its projected populism, while its inharmonious elements, including regional
rebellions against the state backed by landowners who hired Antonio is dismissed as
inhuman. The dilated time that has defined the film’s temporality so far changes
dramatically in the sequence as Manuel and Rosa start running away from the scene of

34
It was a common practice among colonial powers to mark rebelling areas or groups-even if
they were demanding tax relief for natural calamities as criminals or bandits. See E. J.
Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: Laurel Editions, 1969).
47
battle under somewhat parental oversight of Antonio behind them. The speed of camera
movement gradually increases in the tracking shot along the sertao, and at one point it
overtakes Manuel in order to reach the sea. Perhaps to emphasize the frenzy of the flight
further, Rosa fails to keep up with Manuel and falls over at one point. Manuel continues
his run without looking back as long as he is seen.
Elaborating on the genealogy of maritime utopia in Brazilian cinema, Lucia Nagib refers
to three influences that are of relevance to our discussion. Glauber Rocha was inspired by
accounts of a rebellion led by messianic leader Antonio Conselheiro in the hinterlands of
Bahia in 1896-7, whose prophecy announced that ‘the backlands will turn into seacoast,
and the seacoast into backlands’.
35
The prosperous seacoast is clearly an economic
imaginary for the backland people in this context. Rocha also mentioned what he calls the
primal obsession of the backland man, is to see the sea. Combining these two fantasies of
vision (and the photogenic qualities of water) and economic prosperity through a slippage
Rocha interpreted Conselheiro’s prophecy as a revolutionary idea, the sea being the
symbol of liberation.
36

The aesthetic influence of the last sequence in Black God however comes from a foreign
source. Rocha’s motif of the sea as liberation was inspired by Francois Truffaut’s famous
final sequence in The 400 Blows (1959) where the child protagonist Antoine Doinel runs

35
See Lucia Nagib. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (New York: I. B.
Tauris, 2007), 6.

36
Rocha wrote, “The northeastern migrants always move towards the shore. As for the ‘The
backlands will turn into sea, and the sea will turn into backlands’, this was Antonio Conselheiro’s
widespread prophecy, and while it does not really contain such an idea, it gives you the liberty to
interpret it in a revolutionary way. I appropriated the symbol and used it in my film. (Quoted in
Nagib 2007: 5)” Significantly, Rocha misquotes the original prophecy here, using the word sea in
place of seacoast.
48
away in search of freedom, from the reformatory where he was doing time for
misdemeanors. The original title of the film was La Fugue d’Antoine alluding to the
musical form of fugue as a metaphor for the protagonist’s flights. After a long stretch of
run depicted in a series of sequence shots, physically exhausted Antoine reaches the sea
tormented by inhospitable wintry climate and immediately recoils after touching the
water. The sequence ends in a frozen close-up of his face, with his back to the ocean
emphasizing the realm of individual psychology over the physical world that surrounds
him.
In Black God on the other hand, Manuel does not reach the sea as an individual. After the
camera surpasses him in the race, the sea itself emerges as an animated mass as the social
teleology of backlands turning to sea is realized cinematically through editing. Xavier
writes,
The moving camera shows us the sea from above, in such a way as to avoid the
composition of a smooth surface, delimited by the horizon’s stable line. The sea
affirms itself as a living mass, with the ebb and flow of the waves. (Quoted in
Nagib 2007: 11)

Manuel as the symbolic representative of impoverished backland people and as a cursor
in the making of a prosperous republic finds expression by displacement in the visualized
social utopia here. Both Nagib and Xavier identify this statement as revolutionary since
the emerging, vibrant sea as a metaphor of social transformation “consummates the
immolation of the individual. (Nagib 2007: 12)”
37

37
Nagib quotes Rocha in context where he writes, “the politics of a modern author is
revolutionary: nowadays one needn’t even qualify an auteur as revolutionary, because the word
auteur is a totalizing noun. To say that an auteur is reactionary, in cinema, is the same as saying
he is a commercial director: this is situating him as craftsman: as non-auteur. (Quoted in Nagib
2007: 12)”
49
This social-individual binary through which two different modes of authorship, that of
Truffaut and Rocha, claim artistic legitimacy becomes further complicated if we take a
closer look at the history of French New Wave. Like Rocha, Truffaut also envisioned
French New Wave to be the form of commercially viable French national cinema in
future. Jeff Menne has defined the French New Wave movement as a function of
antagonism between the apparatus of the nation-state and the appeals of national culture.
He summarizes Richard Neupert who describes French New Wave ‘as less an
individualist coup than a feature of a youth culture with burgeoning visibility’. Menne
writes further that,
The auteurist descriptions of cinema only served to put individual faces on a
population segment that was becoming a demographic synecdoche for the nation, if
not yet the body politic. Neuport notes the involvement of Godard and Truffaut in
the protest to the ouster of the film programmer Henri Langlois at the
cinematheque…The fact that the Cinematheque protest was, then, a precursor to the
May 1968 marches of nine million in Paris suggests that arguments about the
cinema available to this demographic had become equal to arguments about the
politics of the period. Youth movements in France (and other postwar European
countries like Czechoslovakia) called for national reform, using cinema as a
significant forum. Thus, cineastes within these new waves insisted that the means
of culture could impinge on those of politics, that filmmaking could be thought of
as an organ of the state. (Menne 2007: 71)

To contextualize the antagonism between the nation-state and national culture in Europe
in the 60s, we need to remember it was also the transitory phase from Fordist to Toyotist
mode of production in the history of capitalism. Fordism was characterized by place
bound large industries, organized trade unions and the nation-state as the mediator
between capital and labor. Because of this system of tripartite check and balance, Fordist
mode of production was relatively stable, especially during the phase of economic boom
after World War 2. The rigidity of the system however- in its requirement of large
50
physical infrastructure, and lack of flexibility in face of changing demands or product
differentiation- involved a homogenizing tendency, somewhat reflected in the Hollywood
assembly line production. Protest movements of 1968 were largely directed against this
homogenization (I’ll elaborate this point further in the next chapter). In cinema, the figure
of outlawed individual (Michael Poiccard in Godard’s Breathless or Antoine in 400
Blows for example) in a way embodied that protest in its defiance of the nation-state. At
the level of authorship, the politics of the individual was pitched against Hollywood
assembly line in the same political environment.
Glauber Rocha was not more radical than Truffaut in the sense his visualization of the
photogenic sea in Black God does not suggest any aspiration beyond a hard earned
economic prosperity at the level of GNP (gross national product- if it is acceptable to
borrow the economic terminology). It is doubtful if Manuel’s solo run forgetting his
fallen wife contains any major collective impulse. Where Truffaut and Rocha do differ
though, is in their attitude towards the state. Nagib suggested in her description of the last
sequence from Black God that, “rather than being the focus of interest, the hero is
summarily abandoned in a brusque cut, while the sertao miraculously turns to sea by the
editor’s sleight of hand. The filmmaker, who a while ago was keen to free his hero from
the influences of god and the devil, becomes God himself, imposing a solution through
editing and provoking revolution through art. (Nagib 2007: 11)” The mediating function
in context of national development that Rocha cinematically assumes for himself was
also the function expected of the state projected by various populist alliances in the 60s in
Latin America. Thus unlike Truffaut, Rocha’s authorship found expression in its
51
identification with the republic, whose precarious existence was marked by repeated US-
backed military coup.
To conclude this argument, a brief look at the character of Antonio das Mortes will be
helpful. As Xavier writes, in spite of his initial ambiguity it is Antonio who consummates
the teleological scheme of Black God through his infallible actions, i.e. through
elimination of the symbolic father figures
38
oppressing Manuel (Sebastiao and Corisco)
and releasing the latent Dionysian popular energy
39
into the progressive process of
national development. According to Xavier, Antonio “relinquishes all personal ambitions,
seeing himself as merely the doomed agent of a predestined scheme”. In Rocha’s Antonio
das Mortes (1969) Antonio is initially hired by the landowners, but eventually switches
affiliation to fight for the peasants assisted by the left wing intelligentsia represented by
the character of a professor. Ernest Callenbach interpreted Antonio as the figurative army
which has traditionally been an open instrument of the Latin American ruling classes, but
in a revolutionary context could potentially play a progressive role like in the case of
disintegration of the Tsarist army during Russian revolution (Callenbach 1969). Refuting

38
Rocha wrote, “The father-figure in my films is power. South American dictatorship has been
traditionally, not only in Brazil but elsewhere, paternal. And to this extent some of my characters
may be considered as father-figures, but not in any Freudian way. These are political paternalists,
demagogic figures, who have posed traditionally in political terms as messiahs. And any revenge
that my characters take upon them…has not been due to any personal existential revenge on my
part…Instead, these are political actions. (Hitchens 1970: 30)”

39
Rocha defines Antonio as follows in his interview with Gordon Hitchens. “In Antonio, there is
a strong admixture of traditional religious symbols, used in a current contemporary political
context. To understand this, one must realize that all of Latin America is marked by mysticism.
Above all in Brazil, there is a very strange mixture of Christianity and African religions…The
popular culture, the popular music, the popular theater in Brazil- all are based on an emotional
Dionysian behavior, which comes from this mixture…This mixture, is more emotional than
critical. There are faults and qualities…involved in such a situation, especially that involving the
alienation of the people from everyday reality. But the energy- which is found in the people- this
energy will eventually resist oppression. (Hitchens 1970: 30)” Rocha is clearly referring to the
Bakhtinian carnivalesque here, another example of investment in human capital.
52
Callenbach’s claim, Rocha argued that Antonio is a primitive man, whose conscience
derives out of real life suffering and not Marxism. Rocha wrote,
…the conflict in Antonio, the conflict in my film, does not have these direct
symbolic overtones in terms of international politics. They are conflicts along the
lines of professional and moral obligations that get their possessor into trouble.
Antonio, in my film, reverses his own past; he goes against the man he once was,
against the class which he has served in the past, to create his own future. His only
way to make a future is to cut himself off from alliances he had in the past.
(Hitchens 1970: 28)

In this obvious personification of the welfare state we can locate unquestioning faith in
the primacy of geo-political interest and its concomitant pro-people, class neutral
functioning. In Land in Anguish- a film by Rocha made after the 1964 coup during the
second phase of cinema novo- we can see the disintegration of this utopia.
The sea that emerges as the euphoric symbol of a prosperous republic in Black God
reappears in Land in Anguish, but from there alights the character of Porfirio Diaz
40
along
with his three companions. Diaz carries the cross of Portuguese navigators in one hand
and a black flag of inquisition in the other, referring to the imperial origin of Brazil.
They walk away from the sea in the reverse direction of Manuel’s dash in Black God.
The ceremonial (accompanied by extra-diegetic candomble drumming) arrival of the elite
to the deserted beach shot from an aerial angle underscores the group’s disconnection
from the people. This lack of connection (which was the source of legitimacy for
Antonio’s populism in Black God, as Rocha claimed) is further elaborated in the
propaganda film Biography of an Adventurer made by the protagonist of Land in

40
The name is borrowed from the famous Mexican dictator alluding to similarity in Latin
American history. Stam also suggests that the character of Diaz in Land in Anguish parallels
Brazilian politician Carlos Lacorda, whose political career ranged from being a leftist student
leader, to staunch anti-communist.
53
Anguish, Paulo Martins, which shows how Diaz made his political career through a series
of alliances with dictatorial regimes of Eldorado, the symbolic Brazil in the film. Diaz
finally manages a successful coup with help of Explint (company of international
exploitation, signifying imperial forces) after which Paulo is shot by the police.
The character of Paulo Martins does parallel Antonio das Mortes in Land in Anguish.
Like Antonio Paulo starts his career as a poet protégé of Diaz, then in spite of his
bourgeois background switches affiliation (partly because of his love for the communist
militant Sara, who worked as Vieira’s secretary) to the populist liberal alliance headed by
Vieira. Through his intellectual/romantic ‘hunger for the absolute’ (Paulo quotes the line
from Chateaubriand to Sara) he seeks identification with the environment of physical
hunger of the people in Sara’s company. He reminds Governor elect Vieira about his
electoral promises to the peasants (which Vieira, because of his ties with absentee
landlords fails to fulfill, and unleashes his police for repression of political protests).
Paulo also makes a pact with ‘nationalist’ media magnet Fuentes before making his film
about Diaz, hoping development of domestic industries and creation of jobs (this is the
logic Fuentes gives Diaz in defense of his position before Diaz wins him over to his side,
scaring Fuentes about a possible left wing capture of power if the popular alliance that he
was supporting got elected, instead of the imperialist backed party Diaz led. Diaz asserts
in the sequence to Fuentes, “class struggle exists”) would keep both Fuentes and the
popular alliance happy. Affirming his personified state-like character Stam has compared
Paulo with Hamlet. Stam wrote,
Paulo represents the poet abroad in the world of class struggle and coups d’état. His
habitual mode of speech, simultaneously frenetic and solemn, is poetic…His
poetry, ubiquitous in Terra em Transe, punctuates, interrupts, and counterpoints the
54
action. Most often, however, it expresses his inner voice, rather like the soliloquies
in Hamlet. Paulo recurrently appears in close-up with voice off, in a technique
reminiscent of the Orson Welles adaptations of Shakespearean tragedies. Paulo,
furthermore, shares significant traits with Hamlet- an overheated imagination, a
perverse virtuosity of language, a rigorous skepticism coexisting with exasperated
idealism, and the view of himself as the legitimate heir of power. Like Hamlet, he
is the more or less lucid critic of an ambient corruption in which he himself
participates. (Stam 1995: 152-153)

The narrative structure of Land in Anguish establishes Paulo as a subject of distant
nostalgia. The film begins at the palace of the governor of Alecrim, a province in
Eldorado. Felipe Vieira, the governor refuses to resist an ongoing coup led by Porfirio
Diaz arguing there will be too much bloodshed, then gives orders to disperse any
spontaneous resistance by the people. Paulo confronts Vieira, gives a revolutionary
speech, reminds Vieira about the role of students, workers and peasants in bringing the
popular alliance to power, but fails to convince the crowd present there. Afterwards, he
flees the palace accompanied by Sara in a car, jumps a police check point and as a result
gets shot by the pursuing policemen. As his life ebbs away, he recalls the events that led
to his personal and political defeat. From here, the film explores the political
developments of last four years in Eldorado culminating into the news of the coup once
more. Cross-cutting alternates Paulo’s final dying moments with the coronation of Diaz
and the final shot shows Paulo in a tableau composition, silhouetted with an uplifted rifle
in hand.
This enveloping of the narrative through flashback and doubling of the sequence
establishes Paulo’s demise as the film’s central theme of contemplation. At the same
time, the film is about demystification. Both in prologue and epilogue of the film Paulo
speaks of the impossibility of his naïve and impotent political faith. Stam refers to this
55
strategy as the “Quixotic formula of systematic disenchantment. (Stam 1995: 151)”
Through his journey in the film he is disaffected with all the bourgeois leaders be it
rightist Diaz, nationalist Fuentes or liberal Vieira. Paulo embodies the decadence of the
bourgeois himself. Disillusioned by political betrayals, he wallows in upper class,
hysterical sex orgies. While clinging to his romantic notion of ‘the people’, he shows
only contempt for them in everyday life. At another level, as the poetic representative of
the people himself, he is victim of populism. Stam writes,
Populism sets a trap for the people. It offers the illusion of participation. It incites
the people to speak, but represses them when their voices of protest become too
strident. It invites the people into the palace, but murders them if they become too
militant. In the populist zigzag between democracy and authoritarianism,
paternalistic encouragement often precedes brutal repression. (Stam 1995: 160)

Like Rocha’s idea of ‘aesthetics of hunger’ Paulo also talks about new poetic forms to
talk about politics. He is a poet, journalist as well as filmmaker himself. But unlike in
Black God where the filmmaker becomes God (or the state) according to Nagib-
mediating in the imaginary social transformation through editing- Paulo fails to master
his narrative in Land in anguish. The failure of Paulo and the vision of a people’s state
can be summarized by the poem that comments on Paulo’s death in the film.
He failed to sign the noble pact
between the pure soul and the bloody cosmos
a gladiator defunct but still intact-
so much violence, yet so much tenderness.
- Mario Faustino
Epitaph of a Poet
56
The Global Voice of Early Third Cinema
It has been argued that although it was most comprehensively theorized as a movement in
Latin America, Third Cinema even in its first generation was not exclusively a
geographic phenomenon. Filmmakers across the world responded to global capitalist
developments in the late 60s with a diverse range of political commitments. Certain films
like The Battle of Algiers (1966) has been canonized in the historiography of Third
Cinema that did not reflect the interventionist politics early theorists of Third Cinema
called for
41
. On the other hand, owing to minimal international exposure, the Calcutta
trilogy by Mrinal Sen has never been discussed within the Third Cinema paradigm
42
. A

41
Although Battle of Algiers is a film about anti-colonial struggle it mobilizes the thriller format
in its superficial treatment of violence. In a way the dramatic actions and identification with the
central character Ali-la-Pointe in the film conforms to conventions of Hollywood aesthetics
without delving into political analysis. As Robert Stam has argued in his discussion of the famous
restaurant bombing scene by Algerian women dressed as Europeans, the narrative strategies of
the film make the audience identify with the FLN cause, but that is not because of political
sympathy. The identification remains cinematic manipulation, an inverted version of Hollywood
western where the spectator is located inside the ‘besieged wagon train or fort’ and therefore
sutured into the colonial perspective looking down the barrel of a gun and watching the native
American fall from his horse as another settler’s bullet hits the mark (quoted in Wayne 2001:
17).

42
Discussions of Third Cinema in context of Indian films have been mostly focused on politics of
representation with an overtone of post-colonial theory. For example, Geeta Kapur in her
discussion of Ritwik Ghatak’s Jukti Takko ar Gappo (‘Reason, Debate and Story’, 1974) came up
with a completely de-radicalized definition of Third (World) Cinema when she wrote,
“Alternative cinema, with some of its major practitioners representing the Third Word, has
battled to represent imperialism, hunger and the preconditions of praxis. The Indian experience of
cultural politics suggests that the Third Cinema, as it has come to be called, is equally about self-
representation. It is about the articulation of the colonized individual, the absent subject, into
history. (Kapur 1989: 179)”
Ashish Rajadhyaksha on the other hand has dismissed Sen’s Calcutta trilogy as ‘Latin American
cinema inspired ‘street’ films’. Apparently criticizing Sen’s version of Third Cinema in
somewhat vague terms he wrote, “A Third Cinema made under pre-revolutionary political
conditions almost inevitably sets the filmmaker/viewer in an antagonistic relationship with the
reality sought to be portrayed. The way certain aspects of reality are privileged over others-
usually the conventionally ‘radical’ ones- all too often presents a discursive hierarchy that
unconsciously duplicates what it is apparently opposing. The question of revolutionary identity-
as distinct from ‘identifying with the revolution’- is necessarily a question of political choice. But
57
comparative analysis of Sen’s Interview (1970), Calcutta 71 (1971) and Padatik [“The
Guerilla Fighter”] (1973) with the films we have reviewed so far suggest that beyond the
catch all rubric of anti-imperialism there were films made outside Latin America marked
by striking thematic and structural similarity with styles of Solanas or Rocha.
As Moinak Biswas wrote, “Mrinal brought cinema directly into the political debate. By
its spirit of pamphleteering, his work freed film going to some extent of its ritual aura.
(Quoted in Mitra 2000: 38)” It is not clear how much exposed he was at the time with the
Third Cinema movement per se, but Sen, an erudite cinefile, functional in the
distinctively politicized intellectual circle of Calcutta (known as the cultural capital of
India since the British rule) was familiar with Latin American cinema and was a personal
acquaintance of Miguel Littin
43
when he started making his Calcutta trilogy. Deeply

it is not a choice of this or that alternative within a ‘given’ framework: the more ‘given’ the
political framework, indeed, the more it accepts the basic premises of the system it is supposed to
oppose, the system that we by proxy are therefore also supposed to oppose. (Rajadhyaksha 1989:
171)” It is not clear where Rajadhyaksha is deriving his idea of a ‘given framework’ in context of
Third Cinema since all the major theories on the subject emphasize imperfection and
interventionist creativity. If he means by ‘given framework’ the partisan positioning of political
films, then the question remains that how without a critical position imagination of alternative
articulation is at all possible? Ironically, Jukti, the film Rajadhyaksha eulogizes in this discussion
as “…a chronicle of the contemporary, but … also refuses to endow the contemporary with a
privileged position in history. Instead, the film presents what is seen to be a process, alongside the
processes that shape our seeing. (Rajadhyaksha 1989: 173)” is formally way more conventional
than Sen’s trilogy. Rajadhyaksha’s argument reminds one of the famous sequence of Memories
where Sergio is looking at the cityscape of Havana through a telescope. As Alea mentioned in an
interview later, that sequence precisely depicts the argument Rajadhyaksha misses in the radical
gesture of Third cinema, i.e. Sergio’s take of post-revolutionary Cuba as well as his distance from
the masses owing to his bourgeoisie background. What both Kapur and Rajadhyaksha overlook in
their discussion is that most of the canonical works of Third Cinema (particularly films like
Memories, Padatik, or Land in Anguish) are fascinated by subjective processes and the
complexity of their subjectivity is a function of self-critique (which again is a co-relative of social
critique, a derivative of ‘positioning’) that gives those films more interiority than mere self-
representation.
43
Littin even praised Sen for his visuals in these films. See, Mrinal Sen. Over the Years: An
Interview with Samik Bandyopadhyay (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2003) 66-69.

58
influenced by 400 Blows like Rocha, he also talked about having an ‘infantile
enthusiasm’ (Sen 2003: 49) for freeze frames. He was already one of the pioneers of the
‘Indian New Wave’ cinema for his humorous and formally innovative Bhuvan Shome
(1969), but like the US backed military dictatorship for Solanas, the real inspiration for
the Calcutta trilogy came from the contemporary politically turbulent environment of
Calcutta.
Calcutta was part of the social upheavals that shook the world around 1968. In February
1967, the Indian National Congress, the party which led India to independence
44
, was
defeated for the first time in twenty years in West Bengal by a coalition of left parties
called the United Front. Within the federal structure of the Indian state this strained the
relationship between the central government where the Congress party was in power and
the provincial government of West Bengal, the capital of which is Calcutta. The left
parties accused the central government of ‘stepchild’ like treatment of West Bengal
45
.
United front was an uneasy alliance between various factions of Communist Parties
debating their focus and modes of class struggle. Under the first Prime Minister of India,
Jawahar Lal Nehru, Indian National Congress had formed strategic alliance with the
Soviet Union in the emerging world order of ‘cold war’. As a result CPSU (Communist
Party of Soviet Union) urged CPI to adopt a moderate collaborationist policy towards the

44
The independence of India in 1947 was assessed as ‘false’ by the undivided communist party
which saw the Congress party as representatives of Bourgeoisie and feudal lords.

45
This tension between the central government in Delhi and Calcutta is reflected in the second
episode of Calcutta 71 where a government employee in Delhi comes to Calcutta for work and
visits his distant relatives during the famine of 1943. While on the train, he is reminded by a co-
passenger of his privilege as a resident of Delhi. He discovers all the women in his relative’s
family have turned part time prostitute pimped by their mother- the head of the establishment.
Although the episode is framed by the visitor’s outsider’s perspective, after the revelation he
leaves disgusted, just saying goodbye.
59
Indian State. That policy meant undermining domestic class struggle, and finding ways of
adding the vector of class consciousness into the dominant discourse of nationalism,
following a parliamentarian path. This line was not well accepted in the ranks of CPI.
Especially following the criticism by Communist Party of China (CPC) of CPSU for
turning revisionist in the early 60s, at the Tenali convention in 1964 the Bengal based
pro-Chinese group presented their own draft program characterizing India as
predominantly semi-feudal where the big bourgeoisie was collaborators of imperialism.
The draft argued that because of this class characteristic of the ruling coalition, class
struggle could not be put in the backburner to facilitate Soviet foreign policy. The
undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) thus broke up giving birth to Communist
Party of India (Marxist) – CPI(M).
By the 60s the mainstream Communist parties had moved away from organizing peasant
struggles
46
. The newly formed CPI(M) did not give up the parliamentary path, and in
1966 adopted a tactic of broad electoral alliance with all ‘non-reactionary’ parties,
including the disgruntled offshoots of the Congress party. Their movements were
confronted with state repressions, but generally focused on trade unions in the urban
areas and around regional politics against the central government policies. Within a

46
There was an epoch of armed peasant rebellions led by the Communist party around the time of
independence of India, the most notable of them being Telengana movement (1946-1951) in the
current state of Andhra Pradesh and Tebhaga movement (1946) in Bengal. Historically the
tribal/peasant rebellions in India have been more militant than urban political movements because
of abject poverty, extra economic coercions by the landlords and their colonial allies, and
concentration of the democratic institutions/culture in the urban areas.
Sen addresses the failure of communication between the rural and the urban in his film Akaler
Sandhane (“In Search of Famine”, 1980) where a shooting unit goes on location to make a film
on famine. The unit- having romantic ideas of rural suffering- increasingly finds itself conflicted
with the village, where conservative feudal values and actual memory of famine was borne in
people’s minds.

60
fortnight of the United Front in power, an armed peasant struggle against the landlords
was reported in North Bengal, in a village called Naxalbari. It was followed by several
similar uprisings in places like Debra and Gopiballabhpur. In 1969, in tune with the
contemporary global trend of rebellion by the ‘new left’ against the old, a new
Communist party, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was born under the
leadership of Charu Mazumdar. After the village Naxalbari, they came to be called Naxal
(or Naxalites in English), since the official political line of CPI(M-L) was armed rural
revolution against the feudal system, following Mao
47
. After Lenin, they declared
“Parliament is a pigsty”, and practiced a strategy of “annihilation” of the class enemy
48
.
Sumanta Banerjee has summarized the CPI(M-L) evaluation of the Indian situation as
follows,
Because of (the) collective exploitation by ‘imperialism headed by US imperialism’
and ‘Soviet social-imperialism’, The CPI(M-L) was wont to describe India as a
semi-colony. It said ‘instead of two mountains- British imperialism and feudalism-
the Indian people are now weighed down under four huge mountains, namely,
imperialism headed by US imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, feudalism, and
comprador-bureaucrat capital. (Quoted in Mitra 2000: 50)

Indeed, the late 60s in India was marked by food crisis, nation wide recession, record
level of unemployment and an overall crumbling of the bureaucratic system. The
inefficiency of the bureaucracy was especially evident in the system of higher education
in Calcutta, where corruption and internal mismanagement became so rampant that mass

47
One of the slogans adopted by CPI(M-L) was “The Chinese Chairman is our Chairman.”

48
Charu Mazumdar wrote, “The annihilation of a class enemy does not only mean liquidating an
individual, but also means liquidating the political, economic and social authority of the class
enemy (Quoted in Mitra 2000: 47).” Although the Naxals were not directly influenced by Fanon,
it is not difficult to feel the Fanonian pulse of the time in this position- the colonized man gains
self-awareness through violence.
61
cheating during University examinations, leaking of exam questions and lack of
employment after securing university degrees was everyday reality.
49
The initial support
for CPI(M-L) among students
50
and urban intellectuals owed largely to the resultant
frustration with the ‘system’, or in other words, the state. To differentiate themselves
from the mainstream left, CPI(M-L) abandoned all legal forms of political activities
including over-ground propaganda, mass organizations, participation in struggles for
economic demands and representative institutions. Especially in urban areas, their
activity was solely limited to individual assassinations executed by secret action squads.
Naxal actions were retaliated by brutal state repression of the movement, and as the
beginning of Calcutta 71 suggests, (fake) encounter killing of Naxal activists dominated
news headlines throughout the movement.
Sen was arrested around 1970 for his connection with the communists
51
. After his
unexpected success with Bhuvan Shome
52
two producers approached him for making a
film for each of them, just like Bhuvan. Sen refused the offers, since admittedly he was

49
We can see portrayals of this scenario in Padatik when in radio news broadcast a meeting with
the university vice-chancellor about mass cheating is announced. In another sequence a student
enters an empty classroom with a torch, presumably to set it on fire. The voice over is critical of
the act for its anarchism, but sympathetic with the lack of faith in the ‘system’ in general.

50
The stereotypical Naxal was a romantic, brilliant student, who gave up a bright career for
revolution, became de-classed and went to rural areas for organizing peasants. Alternatively
he/she functioned in the city, and was pursued by the police like Sumit- the protagonist of
Padatik. Sumanta Banerjee elaborates this atmosphere as, “Intellectual frustration with the
prevailing academic atmosphere led them to the political conviction that the atmosphere was a
part of general socioeconomic crisis, to escape from which was to change the social order.
(Quoted in Mitra 2000: 49)”

51
Sen was never a party member, but was involved with communist influenced IPTA (Indian
People’s Theater Association). He called himself a ‘private Marxist’.

52
The film was a dangerous venture for its unorthodox form. Initially no producer was interested
in it, but to everybody’s surprise, it did well in the box office.

62
compelled to respond to the ‘terrible time’ (Sen 2003: 66). Like Solanas, he was shooting
footage of processions, political meetings, and police atrocities since 1968 for his
conceived future projects
53
. Padatik for example, was a result of his personal interaction
with a Naxalite fugitive whom Sen escorted to a hide out in order to evade arrest and
eventually found out he was abandoned by the party for ‘revisionist’ attitude.
The theme of Interview is a critique of colonial hangover (or in Naxal terminology, semi-
colonial culture) that prevents Ranjit from getting his desired job. The film starts with
shots of colossal pillars emblematic of colonial architecture in Calcutta, and then cuts to a
sequence where the statue of a British general is carried away in an armored truck
54
.
Ranjit tries to procure a suit through the film, since his contact at the office suggested
smart appearance would be the most important criteria for the salesman’s post (Ranjit
would be selling products of Richardson and Co., a Scottish mercantile farm wearing

53
Sen spoke in several interviews about incidents when political activists were arrested while
waiting in long queues outside cinema halls, for watching Calcutta 71. During one of the shows
he was approached by two young men, who asked him about the timing of his shoot. When he
replied he started shooting the movie in September 1971, they accused him of lying. Later he
realized that they had seen a friend of theirs in the film who was later murdered by the police.
Since that happened earlier than 1971, they were enraged for Sen’s fictionalization of the events.
The accusation reminded Sen that he had used documentary footage he shot earlier than the actual
film (Sen 2003: 67).
Among the documentary footage, in both Interview and Calcutta 71, there are clips of tribal
processions on streets of Calcutta, brandishing traditional weapons (bows and arrows, etc.). For
lack of other reference to the contemporary peasant struggles that were one of the mainstays of
the Naxal movement, those clips in a way reflect the urban sensibility of the films as well as of
the Naxal ideologues. They were sensitive to and inspired by those struggles, yet the actual mass
struggles remained outside the purview of the city. The middle class Calcutta could perceive the
tribal struggles largely through their sign of otherness, i.e., bows, arrows or beating drums.

54
Treatment of the statues in Interview is similar to the ones seen in Hour of the Furnaces. In
Hour, in a similar sequence where the camera zooms out from an equestrian statue of one of the
founding fathers of Argentina, Carlos de Alvear, the off screen voice describes it as, “Here
monuments are erected to the man who said: ‘These provinces want to belong to Great Britain, to
accept its laws, obey its government, live under its powerful influence’.”

63
business suits if he got the job- the stereotypical dream of a petite bourgeoisie in a semi-
colonial set up) he was applying for. After he finds the laundry- where his only suit is
stored for lack of proper space in his apartment- closed for a strike, he tries different
options of borrowing a suit that fits him. He manages to get one from a friend, but while
on the bus on his way back home, he happens to witness a pickpocket
55
stealing an old
man’s purse. In the process of taking the pickpocket to the police station with the crowd
and filling the paperwork, he forgets the suit in the bus. Having no other option he goes
to his interview wearing traditional Bengali attire (Dhoti-Kurta) against the advice of his
contact and fails to win the job. Calcutta 71 consists of four episodes and five discrete
days in a span of forty years depicting the miserable socio-economic conditions around
Calcutta leading to the early 70s, enclosed by narration of a twenty year old Naxalite
youth- whose murder features in the opening sequence of the film. Padatik, Like Rocha’s
Land in Anguish reflects skepticism about the efficacy of the movement as the
protagonist Sumit, after escaping police custody, takes shelter in an apartment belonging
to an upper class, divorced woman- Simi. In his almost solitary confinement, which
symbolizes the alienation of the movement from the masses, Sumit begins to question his
own beliefs and the method of staging struggle. His questioning puts him in an
uncomfortable position with the party as the secretive organization demanded unfaltering
loyalty for functioning. Finally, Sumit, following the news of his mother’s critical illness
returns home to find her dead. At the house he meets his father again who has also been a
leftist activist in his youth but critical of the wanton anarchic violence by the Naxalites.

55
In yet another instance of cinematic reflexivity, after the pickpocket is nabbed, one shot
portrays him in a poster as a Bollywood villain, wearing turban. Ironically, the incidence does
work as an escapist diversion for Ranjit as a spectator. Instead of living up to the star persona of a
hero, he forgets the packet containing the suit.
64
His father informs him that he refused to sign a bond at his work recently which took
away the worker’s right to strike. Thus the film suggests an infusion between Sumit’s
dream and dedication with his father’s (the old left) mass organization, as a possible
future trajectory of struggle.
Calcutta trilogy shares the characteristics of 60’s aleatory art that attempted confluence of
life and aesthetics like in works of Solanas and Rocha. Like Solanas, there is call for tri-
continental revolution in Padatik. Along with documentary footage of the Vietnam War
and armed struggles in Mozambique, Simi narrates a letter in the film from her brother-
another revolutionary who left home. In the letter his brother writes that Simi need not
worry about him, since he is not alone. People from all over Africa, Asia and Latin
America are with him. Emphasizing the force of time, shots of newspaper reports, radio
broadcast, and stills of poverty stricken people permeate the narrative like in Hour of the
Furnaces. The city of Calcutta- with its over population emphasized by multiple shots of
crowded public spaces superimposed on each other, its skyline as the symbolic collective,
its narrow alleys traversed by handheld, shaky POV shots of fugitive Naxals, or its streets
where political confrontations take place,
56
its luxury hotels where the rich consume in
their trendy international outfits, or the damp, insect infested attic in Ranjit’s apartment
where his shoes lose texture- function in the films as the temporal matrix that determines

56
The streets are spaces of mainstream politics, of strikes, hoardings of blockbuster movies and
legitimate political demonstrations. The alleys on the other hand are subterranean spaces of urban
guerilla warfare. In a way Calcutta trilogy reenact strategies suggested by Brazilian guerilla
fighter Carlos Marighella. We will see in our discussion of Herbert in the next chapter that
Naxalites were familiar with Marighella’s work. Marighella wrote, “The police pursue the urban
guerrilla blindly, without knowing which road he is using for his escape. While the urban
guerrilla escapes quickly because he knows the terrain, the police lose the trail and give up the
chase.” See, Carlos Marighella. “Mobility and Speed” Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urban-guerrilla/ch13.htm

65
narrative options for the characters. The cine-ecriture style of Solanas finds parallel in
Sen’s Calutta 71 when the film begins with the following title as well as voice over,
“I am twenty years old. With twenty years of age, I have been walking one
thousand years. Moving aside piled up poverty, squalor and death, I have been
striding through one thousand years.
57
For thousand years I have seen history,
history of poverty, history of deprivation, history of exploitation”

In the fourth episode of the film these inter-titles are put to contrapuntal use, as anti-thesis
of the visuals that depict an upper class party at a five star hotel. The star attraction of the
party is a political leader (presumably belonging to the Congress party, suggested by the
tri-color scurf he wears) who lectures his adulators about his political vision. While he
talks about his dream of a party that will take the nation forward, Sen cuts to symbols of
different parliamentary parties interspersed with exclamation marks at the center of the
screen. Accompanied by the Rock and Roll music played by the band at the hotel and
psychedelic lighting of their stage, the symbols are sutured into a metaphoric electoral
performance having the solo purpose of garnering vote. Later on, when the leader asserts

57
The fresh vitality of the twenty year old is used as an emancipatory rhetoric here- one more
instance of faith in human capital. This vitality, according to the narrative logic, transcends
physical mortality in its spirit of sacrifice for the collective like Che. Therefore, like Land in
anguish the film is enveloped by posthumous narration. After the introductory narration, music
accompanies the title sequence in an extended montage consisting of shots of colonial
architecture, children swimming in the river Ganga, the Calcutta race course, one recording
session of Indian classical music followed by rock and roll dancing at a discothèque, stills of
famine, city traffic, police firing etc. Thus, after establishing the allegorical life-world of the city,
Sen cuts to a radio news broadcast (The opening logo tune of Calcutta Radio is a reference to city
popular culture. Inhabitants of Calcutta woke up to that tune of the State owned radio station in
the 70s). Against the close-up of a middle aged woman who plays the mother of the teenage rice
smuggler in the third episode of the film, the death of the narrator-naxalite is announced. It is
declared as a street accident, even though the report says there are bullet marks on the body of the
deceased. The woman continues her ominous glance at the camera. The initial titles are
superimposed on her face once more, without the voice over this time- giving the writing a
phantom quality. The doubling of the narrator with the teenage smuggler suggested by the
maternal relationship is also significant in context of celebration of youth culture in the film.
66
his optimism about a new India, the screen is filled with the word “khatam” (annihilation)
ironically referring to Naxalite ideology.
Like the reservations about politically inert high brow culture registered by Solanas in
Hour, Sen critiques abstract paintings practiced and appreciated by the elite in Calcutta
trilogy. The Congress leader in Calcutta 71 refers to a painting depicting the famine of
1943 he owns
58
. He swanks about having the painting in the dining room so that people
can have a reaction to it before having food, and apparently laments his assistant’s apathy
towards it. His assistant walks away from the conversation and informs another
acquaintance at the party that his boss actually became rich during the war exporting
scrap iron- a typical business for the Indian ‘comprador’ bourgeoisie. In Interview
Ranjit’s girlfriend is a fine arts student. When Ranjit visits her on the day of his
interview, she is talking on the phone with her friend who just came back from an art
excursion. The friend is never seen, but during the conversation, a series of sketches,
mostly landscapes done during the trip, appear on screen. Anjana, Ranjit’s girlfriend,
comments during the conversation that she prefers ‘still life’ to landscapes. As Ranjit
enters the room impatient of waiting, Anjana asks if he remembers her friend describing
her as ‘fair, slim, and tall’. Another series of paintings comprising of geometric shapes
accompany the adjectives, drawing parallel between the two superficialities, and in
conclusion of the sequence the dialogue “I like still life” recurs non-diegetically as voice
over. Later, Anjana shares the middle class dream of a consumerist lifestyle with Ranjit

58
It is argued that the he famine of Bengal in 1943 was artificially caused by the World War,
since the British government sent off a large share of domestic agricultural produce for the troops
in Europe. The famine cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the undivided Bengal province.
67
assuming Ranjit was going to get the job. She tells Ranjit their luxury apartment would
be refurnished every few months, since she wanted all her items to be ‘latest’ in vogue.
The politics of domestic class alliance and the consequent skepticism towards the middle
class is one of the central themes of Calcutta trilogy. On the one hand, the middle class is
the leadership- the de-classed, enlightened revolutionaries like in Calcutta 71 and
Padatik, but on the other, they are the section most susceptible to allures of social
mobility offered by the status quo- like Anjana and Ranjit, or the passengers with
condescending attitude towards the poor in the local train in Calcutta 71
59
. The
assumption in the beginning of Calcutta trilogy- like the protest movements of 1968- was
eventually the inertia of the movement would sway the vacillating middle class into a
progressive role. This projected process is visualized in Interview through interaction of
Ranjit with the audience. Stretching the voyeuristic conventions of cinema by conjoining
the space of representation with that of the spectator is not unheard of in Third Cinema,
as we have seen in Hour. What distinguishes Interview within this oeuvre is that the
interrogation of the character comes from an imaginary audience. It is Ranjit who breaks
the wall with the audience earlier in the film claiming what the audience is observing is
his life, and the director is following him anticipating dramatic elements in it. After he
fails to win the job, however, he becomes cynical and tells his mother that he does not
care about the interview and he will continue his present job like many other common
people in Calcutta. Ranjit is seen walking away from the camera after this- framed

59
We have seen similar dilemma in our discussion of Land in Anguish and Memories as well.
Solanas phrases this dilemma most explicitly in Hour when the commentary on a panoramic view
of bustling Buenos Aires disengages its class structure and defines the middle class and the petite
bourgeoisie respectively as “eternal in-betweens, both protected and used by the oligarchy” and
“eternal crybabies, for whom change is necessary, but impossible”.
68
against complete darkness in limbo lighting, he is totally cut off from all social contexts.
This is where off screen voice of two spectators follow him. They remind him that his life
has been on camera since the morning. Ranjit initially ignores the address, but the voices
remain persistent. They keep asking if Ranjit really does not care about the job, if not,
why he spent the whole day trying to get the suit. Repeating his conversation with his
mother about the lucrative salary this job offered the spectators ask if he was trying to
upgrade his status and if he managed to get the job would he still identify with the
common people he is referring to now?
The questions are followed by a split frame sequence where Ranjit wearing traditional
Bengali attire visualizes himself in the other half of the frame- having the job, wearing a
suit in his office corridor approaching the camera in a series of jump cuts. He realizes the
irrationality of the system where appearance rather than qualification determines success.
He addresses the audience once more about his realization that if he had more than one
suit, and a proper wardrobe to store them without worrying about insects damaging the
fabric, he would get the job. He urges the audience that this system should be changed.
His realization brings him back in tune with the contemporary social unrests as a
montage- comprising of documentary footage of Vietnam, police firing and armed tribal
processions- follows it. Ranjit imagines himself in front of the show window of a
garment store he passed by in the morning. The show window features a mannequin
wearing a designer suit and fedora hat. Ranjit imagines himself in place of the
mannequin, abhors the idea, picks up a rock (it is not clear if Sen was familiar with the
Third Cinema manifesto, but this sequence seems straight out of the Solanas essay. Ranjit
clenches his fist in front of the show window; we see the close up of his hand and in the
69
next shot the hand holding a brick. Is this a queue from the idea ‘camera in one hand, and
a rock in the other?’), and smashes the window. He strips the mannequin tearing the suit
away from its body. Thus in the process of decolonization of Ranjit’s consciousness, the
plastic body of the mannequin stands bare inside the broken window in the last shot of
the film.
Resonance of the politics of nation-state as seen in Black God till Land in Anguish can be
traced in Calcutta trilogy not only in the themes but sporadically in the structure of the
narratives. Sen’s sensibility and subjects are unquestionably urban. Although Calcutta 71
is episodic like Black God, the episodes are arranged chronologically, marking calendar
years of the events at the beginning of each episode from 1933 till 1971. In that sense,
even though a fiction, the film contains a strong sense of historic truth claim- different
from the allegoric style of Black God. While Black God is mostly shot in natural light,
Sen uses a wide range of lighting schemes- low light, especially in the night shots
emphasize poverty and imperfection, chiaroscuro lighting at the party of Calcutta 71
allude to an environment of conflict, limbo lighting gives characters centrality when they
address the audience. Sen’s exploration of the medium- quoting other art forms like
painting, jump cuts, freeze frames, stop motion cinematography
60
- are more akin to
Solanas than relatively conventional images of Rocha. However, Black God and Calcutta
71 do come together in their desire for a modernist transformation. We have already
discussed how the dilated time in the world of Sebastiao and Corisco - reflecting peasant

60
In Interview there is a sequence where Ranjit’s mother is helping her find his formal shoes to
match his suit. The shoes are found in a trunk kept in the damp attic, damaged and discolored.
After they are brought out in the sun to Ranjit’s disgust, in stop motion photography they start
walking on their own, suggesting autonomy of appearance in the job market.

70
consciousness according to Xavier- gives way to euphoric linear progression in the flight
of Manuel in Black God. A similar narrative scheme works in the first episode of
Calcutta 71. There late at night, a family fights their losing battle against rain under a
broken roof. They place utensils under multiple holes in the ceiling to keep the floor dry,
so that there is space for everybody to sleep. Periodically the daughter, the oldest of the
children, has to throw out water as buckets and pans fill up under incessant monsoon
shower. The mother oversees the process and alerts the girl when specific utensils begin
to overflow. At one level this episode depicts failure of traditional/feudal patriarchy
61

since the role of the father throughout the scene is passive and his repeated attempts to
assert authority, including physical threat, remains futile. The conversation between the
mother and the daughter wakes him up. Frustrated with the situation, as stormy wind
blow away even more tiles from the roof and renders the room inhabitable, he proposes to
wake up one of the little boys- the last member still managing to sleep. The father
assumes the boy is putting up an act, since it is impossible to sleep in this circumstance.
When his wife protests, he tries to silence her raising his voice and threatening to throw a
lamp at her. His wife- sharing a leaking umbrella with her daughter- reminds him in reply
that he has lost his moral authority to yell, as he is not able to provide for the family. The
patriarch, sticking to his ego, initially refuses to take his family to a rich neighbor’s
outhouse as proposed by his wife. As the situation deteriorates, quarrel between family
members intensify and finally a dog starts scratching the door for shelter, he gives in. The

61
Women’s liberation comes across as one of the important agendas of the proposed ‘neo-
democratic revolution’ in Calcutta trilogy. In Padatik, there is a series of interview taken by Simi,
with professionally successful women who argue that to complete the unfinished project of social
equality of women a revolution is necessary. These interviews are yet another parallel between
Hour and Sen’s trilogy.
71
episode has a real time feel, i.e. the duration of over fifteen minute- where there is no
exterior shot- accentuates the crisis known to the viewer from the beginning. Intercut
between establishing medium shots and close-up of characters, the sequence explores the
unprotected, yet claustrophobic space- the cynicism of the father as he looks up at the sky
through the holes, lets the water dribble down his face and suggests the family should
enjoy the music of raindrops in resignation; the helplessness of the girl as she is unable
pacify her belligerent parents who vent their despair on her; the rational composure that
her mother struggles to keep up.
This stagnation breaks down when having no other option the family heads out for their
neighbor’s outhouse at the end of the episode. They walk forming a straight line along a
narrow alley full of potholes. This journey- the transition into linear progression typical
of modernist narrative- is monumentalized through low angle shots framing only their
legs and accompaniment of background music that was absent inside the room. The
episode does not have a utopian closure like Black God. When the family reaches their
neighbor’s place, they find the place already crowded, including the dog that irritated the
father earlier. However, the spirit of this faltering struggle against poverty carries over to
the next episodes of the film.
In the third episode of Calcutta 71 direct criticism of the state is voiced when the young
rice smuggler is on his way to the railway station. He passes by a house where a little boy
is doing his homework reading aloud the sentence “It is important to learn the
administrative system of Bengal, since Bengal is a state in the sovereign republic of
India”. The smuggler stops by the verandah and deliberately disturbs the kid offering him
72
a biri (country made cigarette). As the boy complains to his father, the smuggler runs
away scoffing at the boy.
Interestingly, like Rocha’s ‘aesthetics of hunger’ Sen talked about ‘dialectics of hunger or
poverty’ in an interview. He said,
“What we wanted to do in CALCUTTA-71 was to define history, put it in its right
perspective. We picked out the most vital aspect of our history and tried to show
the physical side of hunger is the same… But there is a marked change in the
people—their perception changes. In a way I call this the dialectics of hunger, the
dialectics of poverty. How people move from resignation and… callousness to
cynicism… and finally to anger and violence which can become very creative in
the process…This is what we wanted to say…like a Greek chorus this young man
appears and tries to explain the situation and how at the end hungry people become
violent and the process creates something new. (Gupta 1976: 9-10)”
The journey initiated in 1933 thus culminates in the run of the young Naxalite for his life
along alleys of Calcutta in 1971. He is chased and gunned down by the police, but like
Che in Hour
62
by then he has ‘chosen life, by choosing death’. In his address to the
audience he says he was killed because he has seen suffering and wanted to change it
63
.
His photographic presence at the end of the film thus becomes the perpetual present of
‘something new’- the possibility of a benevolent state.
Naxal activity spread beyond Bengal in the early 70s to states of Bihar, Andhra Pradesh,
Punjab and Tamil Nadu. Facing several other simultaneous student movements (the most

62
Like Che’s photograph in Hour, there is a shot of the Naxalite falling dead after being shot in
Calcutta 71. His posthumous address to the audience, where he urges the spectators to stop being
passive looks like a photograph as the camera zooms into close-up of his face, framed in limbo
lighting.

63
This argument strangely echoes Alea’s definition of Third Cinema. Alea wrote, “Looking is the
means by which the subject appropriates and internalizes reality in order to act back upon it.
Some spectacles will encourage an internalization that is critical and questioning, so that the
subject acts back upon the world in a way to change it for the better. This is of course the type of
spectacle and spectatorship that Third Cinema seeks to foster”
73
prominent being led by Jayprakash Narayan) and massive industrial strikes around 1974,
emergency (The Indian equivalent of dictatorship?) was declared in India in 1975. The
aftermath of emergency saw the electoral routing of Congress once more (largely as
popular response to draconian measures taken by the government between 1972 and 1977
to repress protest movements) in Bengal, when CPI(M) led left front came to power in
1977. In an environment of political stalemate and eventual neo-liberal turn the
romanticism of Naxal movement died out for next three decades. Mrinal Sen did not
make overtly militant films afterwards much like Solanas and Getino.
The process which started with politicization of Ranjit in Interview, found glorious
embodiment in the young Naxalite’s death (Calcutta 71), and self-critical introspection in
alienated Sumit (Padatik), reflects tides and ebbs of global anti-capitalist movements of
the late 60s. Wayne has argued, ‘revolutionary conjunctures are the womb from which
Third Cinema emerges (Wayne 2001: 8).’ To the extent the juncture (whether it was
revolutionary is a different debate) of the 60s was about deeper penetration of global
capitalist networks into its periphery, tensions of the transition were manifested in form
of nation-state/global capital antagonism. In spite of regional differences the nation-state
in context of Third Cinema was perceived as the instrument of inclusive development and
therefore its emergence (and grand failure) a new epoch of human exuberance. In
visualization of the sea for Rocha, or bodies of fallen revolutionaries as ‘memories of
future’ for Solanas and Sen, we see the creative celebration of this emergence. In the next
chapter we will notice absence of such celebration, even in form of nostalgia.
74
Chapter 1 References

Ahmed, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory". Social Text
17(Autumn 1987): 3-25.

Alea, Thomas. G. "Beyond the Reflection of Reality" in Cinema and Social Change in
Latin America, edited by Julianne Burton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Armes, Roy. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987.

Barnard, Tim. "Popular Cinema and Populist Politics" in Argentine Cinema, edited by
Tim Barnard. Toronto: Nightwood Editions, 1986.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" in
Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and M. Cohen, 355-365. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994.

Brecht, Bertolt. "Against Georg Lukacs" in Aesthetics and Politics, edited by R. Taylor.
London: Verso, 1988.

Burton, Julianne. "Antonio Eguino (Bolivia): Neorealism in Bolivia" in Cinema and
Social Change in Latin America: Conversation with Filmmakers edited by Julianne
Burton, 161-170. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Callenbach, Ernest. "Anatomy of Folk-Myth Films: Robin Hood and Antonio das
Mortes." Film Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Winter 1969-70): 42-47.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe" in
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton &
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995.

Emmanuel, Arghiri. Unequal Exchange. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Espinoza, Julio G. "For an Imperfect Cinema" in New Latin American Cinema edited by
M. T. Martin, 71-82. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

75
Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation.
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982.

Getino, Octavio. "Some Notes on the Concepts of a Third Cinema" in Argentine Cinema
edited by Tim Barnard. Toronto: Nightwood Editions, 1986.

Gupta, Udayan. "Introducing Mrinal Sen." Jump Cut (12-13) (December 1976): 9-10.

Hitchens, Gordon. "The Way to Make a Future: A Conversation with Glauber Rocha."
Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1970-71): 27-30.

Hobsbawm, E. J. Bandits. New York: Laurel Editions, 1969.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991.

—."Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15
(Autumn 1986): 65-88.

Kapur, Geeta. "Articulating the Self into History: Ritwik Ghatak's Jukti, Tokko ar
Gappo" in Questions of Third Cinema edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines.
London: British Film Institute, 1989.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1991.

Lenin, V. I. "Critique of Imperialism" in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963.

MacBEAN, J. R. "La Hora de los Hornos." Film Quarterly 24, no. 1, (1970-71): 31-37.

Marighella, Carlos. "Mobility and Speed." in Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, 1969
from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urban-
guerrilla/ch13.htm.

Menne, Jeff. "A Mexican Nouvelle Vague: The Logic of New Waves under
Globalization." Cinema Journal 47, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 70-92.

Mitra, Ananda. "Imaging of the 1970s: Calcutta and West Bengal" in The Enemy Within:
The Films of Mrinal Sen edited by Sumita Chakravarty. London: Flick Books, 2000:
37-65.

Nagib, Lucia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. New York: I. B.
Tauris, 2007.

76
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. "Debating the Third Cinema" in Questions of Third Cinema
edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines, 170-178. London: British Film Institute,
1989.

Ramsey, Cynthia. "Review: Third Cinema in Latin America: Critical Theory in Recent
Works." Latin American Research Review 23, no.1 (1988): 266-275.

Rocha, Glauber. "An Esthetic of Hunger" in Brazilian Cinema edited by Randal Johnson
and Robert Stam, 68-71. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Rocha, Glauber. "Propos Political Cinema." in Afterimage 3 (Summer 1971).

Sen, Mrinal. Over the Years: An Interview with Samik Bandyopadhyay. Calcutta: Seagull
Books, 2003.

Solanas, Fernando. "Cinema as a Gun: An Interview with Fernando Solanas." Cineaste 3,
no. 2, (Fall 1969): 18-26.

Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. "Towards a Third Cinema" in Vol. 1 of Movies
and Methods edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of
California Press. 1: 44-64.

Stam, Robert. "Land in Anguish" in Brazilian Cinema edited by Randal Johnson and
Robert Stam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

—. "The Two Avant-gardes" in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of
Documentary Film and Video edited by B. K. Grant and J. Sloniowski, 254-268.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Tse-tung, Mao. "On New Democracy" in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Peking,
China: Foreign Languages Press, 1940.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press, 1995.

—. The Essential Wallerstein. New York: The New Press, 2000.

Wayne, Mike. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press,
2001.

Willemen, Paul. "The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections" in Questions of
Third Cinema edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines, 1-29. London: British Film
Institute, 1989.

Xavier, Ismail. Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern
Brazilian Cinema. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
77
Chapter 2

The Neo-Liberal Turn
Capital and its ‘Other’
As we have seen in chapter 1, the Third World being a liminal space for global capitalism
was crucial to theorization of Third Cinema as a post-structuralist movement. Classical
Marxist theorists of imperialism like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg saw the internal
contradiction of capitalism to be under-consumption, i.e., lack of adequate demand to
absorb the growth in output that capitalism generates within its core area. Since the
working class is exploited, workers receive lesser value as wage than what they produce.
The capitalists on the other hand are obliged to reinvest a sizeable part of their surplus,
unlike consumption patterns of closed pre-capitalist societies. Thus, at both ends the
effective demand for consumption remains smaller than the supply at any given point.
According to Luxemburg, for closing this gap between demand and supply, trade with
pre-capitalist economies becomes indispensible for stabilization of the system
(Luxemburg 1968). Colonial repression is a useful tool in this process since pre-capitalist
territories need to be forced open for trade if they are reluctant to participate in it
voluntarily (opium wars in China are one of the many examples in this context). (Harvey
2003)
David Harvey suggests one of the underlying assumptions of Lenin, Luxemburg and
(derivatively) Fanon in their understanding of imperialism was these non-capitalist
territories needed to be kept in their pre-capitalist stage for maintenance of the imperialist
78
equilibrium
1
, since not only capitalist development in the colonies threaten the territorial
hierarchy of the metropolis, industrialization reduces dependence on the colonizer for
manufactured products (and finance capital) in exchange of cheap raw materials-
shrinking the dumping grounds for over-production in the capitalist countries
2
. While this
assumption is not without merit, keeping colonies underdeveloped is self-defeating in the
long run. Harvey compares British imperialism in India and North America in this
context. Harvey writes,
Fear of emulation led Britain…to prevent India from developing a vigorous
capitalist dynamic and thereby frustrated the possibilities of spatio-temporal fixes
3

in that region. The open dynamic of the Atlantic economy did far more for Britain
than did the repressed colonial empire in India, from which Britain certainly
managed to extract surpluses but which never functioned as a major field for
deployment of British surplus capital (Harvey 2003: 140).

1
This is the reason the politics of Third Cinema in its first generation was in favor of domestic
capitalist development, but anti-imperialist at the same time.

2
Interestingly, Deleuze conforms to this understanding which in a way informs his concepts in
favor of the ‘nomadic’ or ‘rhizomatic’ movements. Deleuze writes, “…Central capitalism needs
the periphery constituted by the Third World, where it locates a large part of its most modern
industries; it does not just invest capital in these industries, but is also furnished with capital by
them…throughout a vast portion of the Third World, the general relation of production is
capitalist- even throughout the entire Third World, in the sense that the socialized sector may
utilize that relation, adopting it in this case. But the mode of production is not necessarily
capitalist, either in the so-called archaic or transitional forms, or in the most productive, highly
industrialized sectors…the polymorphy of the Third World states is partially organized by the
center, as an axiom providing a substitute for colonization. (Deleuze 1987: 465)”

3
Harvey describes the concept of spatio-temporal fix as the contradictory dynamic of territorial
and mobile capital. Production of capitalist space requires investment in infrastructure whereby
capital is locked in one place yielding long term surplus. Geographic expansion helps in
absorption of that surplus elsewhere. However, rapid geographic expansion and the following re-
organization of the expanded capitalist space threaten the embedded, but not yet realized value of
the initial infrastructure- diminishing its territorial advantage. Vast quantities of capital fixed in
one place on the other hand impede profitable investment elsewhere. In order to defer the ensuing
crisis in both cases, capitalism needs to come up with periodic solutions. Either expansion has to
be continued, or re-investment has to be temporally deferred through activities like social
expenditures, depending on specific situations. In case of colonial India, imperial regulations
mostly restricted geographic expansion, and the concomitant discriminatory measures frustrated
the National bourgeoisie.
79
The formation of closed empires in the 30’s after First World War did not solve the crisis
of contemporary global capitalism. Eventually the territorial arrangements gave way to
capitalist aspirations, another World War had to be fought among colonial powers for re-
distribution of the globe, which in turn led to de-colonization by the 70’s. Especially in
context of current globalization it is generally accepted that the fundamental crisis of
capitalism is over-accumulation rather than under-consumption (Harvey 2003). The
molecular logic of capital (as opposed to the territorial logic, which is place bound)
continuously seeks opportunities for profitable investment. The lack of effective
‘consumer demand’, the gap Luxemburg points out, can be covered by reinvestment
which opens up its own demand for capital goods. Geographical expansion opens up
demand for capital goods along with a wider market, even if at the risk of possible
change in territorial hegemony (as was the case in shifting of political power from Britain
to the US in the 20
th
century). Falling rate of profit can also be deferred in face of
stagnant demand if the cost of inputs decline either through technological innovation or
access to cheaper land, raw material or labor. Moving industries to locations favorable to
cheaper inputs is therefore a well known strategy since the 70’s. Such movements
inevitably change the pre-capitalist local economies, also benefitting global capitalism
simultaneously.
Luxemburg’s suggestion of indispensability of a pre-capitalist ‘outside’ of Capitalism
therefore is not significantly relevant anymore. However, this does not discredit the
broader argument that Capitalism needs some sort of an external solution to the problem
of its inner contradiction. For example, Harvey mentions Marx’s idea of an ‘industrial
reserve army’. Capitalism can use its power of technological change to induce
80
unemployment which in turn may exert a downward pressure on wage rates, opening up
new opportunities for redeployment of capital. Induced unemployment (lay-offs) in this
case is throwing workers out of the system so that they can be made available at another
point of time. In the following section I’ll discuss modes of manufacturing this ‘outside’
in perspective of changes in the world economy since the 70’s. This will be important for
my argument about new Third Cinema, since it is this ‘outside’ that keeps the politics of
Third Cinema alive, and perhaps, given the increasing disparity between the global North
and South
4
, makes it more relevant.

Changes Since the 70’s
After the catastrophic depression of the 30’s the role of state took a new dimension in
stabilization of western capitalism, especially in the US. As Harvey summarized,
The state had to take on new…roles and build new institutional powers; corporate
capital had to trim its sails in certain respects in order to move more smoothly in
the track of secure profitability; and organized labor had to take on new roles and
functions with respect to performance in labor markets and in production processes.
The tense but nevertheless firm balance of power… prevailed between organized
labor, large corporate capital, and the nation state…which formed the power basis
for the post-war boom. (Harvey 1989: 133)

The great depression was a crisis of effective demand which needed to be overcome by
some external stimulus package. The ‘new deal’ programs under President Roosevelt
were designed for this purpose following Keynesian policy of ‘dig holes and build

4
As of 2003, “The assets of the world’s top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of
all the least developed countries and their 600 million people. (Steger 2003: 105)”
81
pyramids’
5
. State regulation of banking, investments in infrastructural projects like
railroads and subsidies in agriculture in the first phase, followed by social welfare
programs like promotion of labor unions, social security act, or aid to tenant farmers and
migrant workers in the second phase instilled new energy into the market and set up an
elaborate system of checks and balance for efficient flows of production/consumption.
Harvey writes,
The problem, as an economist like Keynes saw it, was to arrive at a set of scientific
managerial strategies and state powers that would stabilize capitalism, while
avoiding the evident repressions and irrationalities, all the war mongering and
narrow nationalism that National Socialism implied. It is in such a context… that
we have to understand the highly diversified attempts within different nation-states
to arrive at political, institutional and social arrangements that could accommodate
the chronic incapacities of capitalism to regulate the essential conditions for its own
reproduction (Harvey 1989: 129)

The system of Fordism among many other things was ‘breaking each labor process into
component motions and organizing fragmented work tasks according to rigorous
standards of time and motion studies
6
(Harvey 1989: 125)’ broadly known as assembly
line production. Rationalization of this technology through detailed division of labor
increased labor productivity significantly. Organization of this sort required relatively
unskilled but large number of workers, making full employment easier. Most importantly,
Fordism was based on the assumption that mass production primarily meant mass

5
Keynesian remedy was based on the understanding that during periods of crisis expenditure in
one sector generates employment, which derivatively increases consumption and demand,
boosting other sectors. Cumulative effect of such chain reactions revives the economy as a whole.

6
Not only this system was adopted in Hollywood, the correlation between cinema as an invention
at the age of mechanical reproduction and contemporary industrial developments can be seen
among other examples in Muybridge’s fascination with motion studies and his consequent
experiment in series photography analyzing gaits of horses.
82
consumption in the domestic market, where workers were potential consumers. Harvey
writes,
The purpose of the five-dollar, eight hour day was only in part to secure worker
compliance with the discipline required to work the highly productive assembly-
line system. It was coincidentally meant to provide workers with sufficient income
and leisure time to consume the mass-produced products the corporations were
about to turn out in ever vaster quantities. (Harvey 1989: 126)

Having a strong domestic market was also an immediate goal for corporations at this
point. With onset of great depression, Ford actually increased wages in the belief that
“this would boost effective demand, revive market and restore business confidence”. His
attempt remained inadequate in face of stiff competition until the government stepped in
with similar measures at a larger scale. Additionally, the subsequent war time
mobilization necessitated large scale planning, boosted demands further and made
rationalization of the labor process acceptable. Thus, the capitalist fear of centralized
control and worker resistance to alienating assembly line production was quelled at both
ends. As Manuel Castells suggests,
The mass production model was based on productivity gains obtained by
economies of scale in an assembly line based, mechanized process of production of
a standardized product, under the conditions of control of a large market by a
specific organizational form…(Castells 1996: 166)

As long as domestic markets remained predictable, Fordism flourished further during the
post-war period assisted by investment opportunities in the reconstruction projects of
Europe and Japan through programs like Marshall Plan.
The reconstruction boom following Marshall Plan after Second World War reached its
apogee by 1970. By the mid-60s the West European and Japanese recovery was
complete. The saturation of internal market in those regions triggered drives to create
83
their own export markets. Maturity of Fordist rationalization, i.e., optimization of labor
productivity further implied displacement of a section of workers from manufacturing in
the US. Meanwhile, import substitution policies in many Latin American countries,
coupled with the push by the multinational companies towards offshore manufacturing
gave rise to a new wave of Fordist industrialization in environments where social contract
with labor was weaker. International competition from all these regions intensified to the
extent where the dollar-gold parity had to be dissolved in 1973 because of depleting gold
reserve in the US. Manuel Castells writes,
When demand became unpredictable in quantity and quality, when markets were
diversified worldwide and thereby difficult to control, and when the pace of
technological change made obsolete single-purpose production equipment, the
mass production system became too rigid
7
and too costly for the characteristics of
the new economy. (Castells 1996: 166)

Devaluation of dollar meant floating and highly volatile exchange rates replacing the
fixed exchange rate of the post-war boom. Simultaneously, the OPEC oil price hike,
which was paraded as Third world militancy, actually funneled much of the available
world surplus into Western (mostly US) banks
8
. Investments in Europe also created the

7
One of the major obstacles to flexibility in the Fordist system was the organized labor. Being
part of the larger problem of large-scale fixed investment in mass production systems, any
attempt to overcome the rigidity of Fordism was challenged by organized working class power as
evident in the strike waves of 1968-72. This problem was multiplied by state commitments to
entitlement programs like social security and pension rights. Stagnation in production restricted
any fiscal basis for state expenditure except for flexible monetary policy. The state policy of
printing money whenever necessary to keep the economy stable caused inflation waves, along
with devaluation of dollar. These inflation waves were a major factor bringing the post-war boom
to sink.

8
Part of this petro-dollar was recycled back to the Third world in form of loans from institutions
like IMF and World Bank to the states, temporarily enabling them to balance their budgets and
continue importing western manufactures. The legitimacy of developmental states in the Third
World was jeopardized when welfare functions had to be cut down following austerity measures
in order to service international debt. Finally, being part of the global economic stagnation during
84
euro-dollar market that could be used by US multinationals for lending and borrowing
outside US, circumventing American state regulations. These developments initiated a
new phase of de-regulation of the financial system and more generally, financialization of
capital. The oil embargo by the Arab states during the 1973 Arab- Israeli war also
increased energy input costs dramatically, making all segments of world economy seek
out ways to economize energy use through technological and organizational change.
Most significantly, introduction of a series of new communication technologies made
coordination of production processes across the globe easier than ever. Satellite
communications rendered distance irrelevant in calculation of cost of communication (the
cost of communicating over 500 miles and 5000 miles became same), air freight rates on
commodities came down dramatically, containerization reduced cost of bulk sea/road
transport, electronic banking and credit cards made global financial market a singular
entity in real time
9
, while different sectors within the financial market- banking,
brokerage, financial services, housing finance, consumer credit, etc- became porous.
Finally internet made distance binary, i.e., one is either part of a computer network or
he/she is absent, irrespective of physical location. The above developments along with
organizational strategies like outsourcing and sub-contracting made possible vertical

the period between 1970-1990 the Third World nation states were unable to pay back the debt in
the 80s, after which their markets were forced open for Foreign Direct Invests (FDI), following
World Bank suggestions of ‘structural adjustment’. Structural adjustment- adoptive steps towards
neo-liberal world order- basically means doing away with state protectionist policies in favor of
domestic capital and subsidies in agriculture, cutting state expenditure by reducing social welfare
and promotion of export oriented economies. This further diminished the power of nation-state
vis-à-vis globalization. See, Immanuel Wallerstein. “The Cold War and the Third World” in After
Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 1995) 10-24.

9
Castells distinguishes between world and global economy as follows, “A world economy…is an
economy in which capital accumulation proceeds throughout the world…A global economy…is
an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time, or a chosen time, on a planetary
scale. (Castells 1996: 101)
85
disintegration of production/consumption of products, whereby different parts of the
same product could be manufactured and assembled at different locations across the
globe under single decision making bodies. Simultaneously, technological innovations
like computer generated design; automation or robotics opened up scope for greater
product diversity as well as accelerated turn over time. Convergence of these new
developments gave rise to a new phase of capitalism, known as ‘flexible accumulation’.
Harvey writes,
Flexible accumulation…is marked by a direct confrontation with the rigidities of
Fordism. It rests on flexibility with respect to labor processes, labor markets,
products… new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and above all,
greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational
innovation. It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development,
both between sectors and between geographical regions, giving rise, for example,
to a vast surge in so-called ‘service-sector’ employment as well as to entirely new
industrial ensembles in hitherto underdeveloped regions. (Harvey 1989: 147)

If Fordism was economy of scale, flexible accumulation is economy of scope. Unlike the
post-war boom, the general productivity of capitalism did not increase significantly after
1973
10
. The technological/organizational innovations were intended instead, to be
sensitive to changing consumer patterns or profitable investment opportunities in a highly
competitive environment. Demand needed to be tapped in volatile and specialized niche
markets through ‘just-in-time’ delivery systems and small batch production. Information
processing was crucial for assessment of these emerging consumer patterns (and hence
the surge in service sector via enhanced importance on data processing, market survey,
customer service, etc.). Extreme mobility of capital made it possible to shift investment

10
See Manuel Castells. “The New Economy” in The Rise of the Network Society, The Information
Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I. (Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996)
147-162.
86
swiftly to a relatively untapped/advantageous area. For example, Harvey writes
“Organized labor was undercut by the reconstruction of foci of flexible accumulation in
regions lacking previous industrial traditions, and by the importation back into the older
centers the regressive norms and practices established in these new areas. (Harvey 1989:
147)” Exploration of new areas deepened penetration of capitalism into its periphery.
Distinction between First and the Third World in terms of capitalist relations of
production become problematic for that reason over last few decades
11
. As Jameson
wrote,
This purer capitalism of our time…eliminates the enclaves of pre-capitalist
organizations it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way. One is
tempted to speak in this connection of a new and historically original penetration
and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious: that is the destruction of pre-
capitalist Third World agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of the
media and the advertising industry. (Jameson 1991: 36)

At the same time, every move away from a location for higher profitability causes de-
industrialization, devaluation of capital goods, or loss of jobs
12
.
Vertical disintegration in flexible accumulation did away with large concentration of
workers in the factory. Therefore the organized working class was not the target for mass
consumption anymore. As is it, fragmented physical presence of workers in diverse

11
Thus the ‘Third World’ has become a simulacrum of the First World, rather than its ‘Other’.
This according to Jameson creates a schizophrenic perceptual crisis, since previously the ‘Third
World’, as a ‘primitive/historical space,’ provided a critical perspective through which
intervention in the dominant discourse was possible. “Without ‘historicity’- we eternalize it and
lose our capacity to imagine alternative to it. And, while it is this perspective that forms the
indispensable precondition to political practice, it is precisely this capacity that appears to have
eclipsed in the postmodern. (Colas 1992: 7)” For that reason, Jameson has defined
postmodernism as the age ‘that has forgotten to think historically (Jameson 1991: ix)’.

12
Especially loss of jobs in the US because of outsourcing to countries like India illustrates the
global nature of this dispossession.
87
locations reduced worker’s power of resistance. Since they did not have to be primed as
potential consumers, real wages went down, organizational practices like sub-contracting
and outsourcing replaced permanent jobs with temporary or part-time work and
rationalization measures like lay offs became easier
13
. Increasing empowerment of multi-
national corporations through mergers and acquisitions made it difficult for place bound
nation-states to mediate between labor and capital. In fact, as Castells suggests, in their
bid to attract investment in an environment of inter-place competition, nation-states or
sub-national authorities like city governments
14
tended to take ‘entrepreneurial’ stands.
Offering Special Economic Zones (SEZ) for business, where labor rights are weaker than
law of the land has been a common practice in the first decade of 21
st
century. Also, since
people- especially unskilled workers- are place bound, they can not match the global
mobility of capital. Overall, As Harvey writes, “Flexible accumulation appears to imply
relatively high levels of ‘structural’ (as opposed to frictional) unemployment. (Harvey
1989: 149)”
Considering the above dynamics, Castells has described the 21
st
century network society
as a space of flow since it is constructed around “flows of capital, flows of information,
flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds, and
symbols. (Castells 1996: 442)” These flows express processes dominating our economic,

13
With reduced bargaining power, the organized working class and their political organizations
(trade union, old school communist parties, socialist parties, etc.) which were hitherto seen as
vanguards in struggle against capitalism by the left lost their importance. More generally, all
political parties, whose premise of operation was the nation-state, lost power facing the trans-
national flow of capital.

14
As the nation-state weakened, sub-national authorities gain more importance in their
negotiation with corporations. Not only corporate deals are struck directly with provincial
authorities, cities within a state or region compete with each other for greater share of investment.
88
political and symbolic life. But as global networks of wealth and power connect hubs and
significant individuals/groups through out the planet, it also disconnects and excludes
large sections of society and regions simultaneously. Before coming back to the
significance of this process, I’ll discuss the cultural implications of flexible accumulation.
Flexible accumulation depends on a high pace of product innovation in order to
meet/create new demands. While diversification of products is better suited for unstable
markets, it also warrants shorter turn-over time for each product. Shorter turnover times
have been crucial for capitalist profitability historically. We have already seen how new
technologies of automation and robotics along with new business organizations reduced
turnover time on the production side in the last three decades. These innovations are
useful only if turnover time on the consumption side is also reduced. As a logical
consequence, while half-life of a typical Fordist product was between five to seven years,
in flexible accumulation it has come down to between two and three years in textile and
clothing industries. At another level, emphasis has shifted from production of goods to
production of service or events since the latter products have almost instantaneous
turnover time.
15
At the level of ideology, promotion of consumerist lifestyle has steadily
increased since the 60s through proliferation of global media industry and advertising
expenditure has taken up ever larger proportion in corporate budgets
16
. Harvey writes,
Flexible accumulation has been accompanied on the consumption side…by a much
greater attention to quick changing fashions and the mobilization of all the artifices

15
For details, see David Harvey. “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation” in The Condition of
Postmodernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1989) 141-73.

16
Harvey writes, “…In a highly competitive world, it is not simply products but the corporate
image itself that becomes essential, not only to marketing but also for raising capital, pursuing
mergers, and gaining leverage over the production of knowledge, government policy, and the
promotion of cultural values. (Harvey 1989: 160)”
89
of need inducement and cultural transformation that this implies. The relatively
stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment, instability
and fleeting qualities of a postmodern aesthetic that celebrates difference,
ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms.
(Harvey 1989: 156)

Manipulation of taste in context of this new social organization has two aspects. Firstly,
as a correlative of short lifespan of commodities, there is a general emphasis on values
and virtues of instantaneity/ disposability. Rather than an attitude limited to the realm of
commodity/consumption, it is an all pervading lifestyle promoted/disseminated by the
establishment. Harvey writes,
The dynamics of a ‘throwaway’ society…began to be evident during the 1960s. It
meant more than just throwing away produced goods (creating a monumental
waste-disposal problem), but also being able to throw away values…stable
relationships, and attachment to things, buildings, places, people, and received
ways of doing and being. These were the immediate and tangible ways in which the
‘accelerative thrust in the larger society’ crashed up against ‘the ordinary daily
experience of the individual’. (Harvey 1989: 286)

Secondly, satellite communication and mass ownership of television since the 70s has
compressed the world into people’s living rooms in form of tele-visual flows,
interspersed with advertisements. Rush of simultaneous images from different spaces as
series of images on screen makes “vicarious experiences of what the world contains
available to many people”. It also induces a simulated worldview in the process
17
.
Baudrillard defines simulation as, “…generation by models of a real without origin or

17
A relevant example in this context is programming of reality TV, where ordinary/everyday
lives of people (usually middle/upper-middle class) are presented as game shows. Thus, the
universe is reduced to (not so) personal life of the average consumer and the commodities
promoted during commercial breaks. Thus, the distinction between active/ passive, cause/ effect,
subject/ object also vanishes in construction of these simulacra. It becomes difficult to distinguish
whether the viewer watches TV or TV watches her.
90
reality: a hyper-real. (Baudrillard 1994: 1)”
18
The model in this context is the global
space of flow. As Harvey writes,
Advertisement…is no longer built around the idea of informing or promoting in the
ordinary sense, but is increasingly geared to manipulate desires and tastes through
images that may or may not have anything to do with the product to be sold. If we
stripped modern advertisement of direct reference to the three themes of money,
sex and power there would be very little left. (Harvey 1989: 287)

Production of images and signs that go into making simulacra- what Jameson has called
the postmodern ‘built environment’- has led to media convergence, making specificity of
a particular medium irrelevant, at least at the level of digitization. The triumph of the
sign-system of advertisement over all original cultural forms in late capitalism has led
Baudrillard to argue that a society where political economy is truly functional has been
realized since there is no difference between the language of politics and economics
anymore
19
.
Thus on one end of neo-liberal globalization we have the global elite and their highly
persuasive cultural machinery, and on the other, disintegration of the working class, roll
back of social security benefits of the welfare state and structural exclusion of people and

18
Baudrillard has defined simulacrum- the effect of simulation- as a state of such near perfect
replication that the difference between the original and the copy becomes almost impossible to
spot. The implication of this in context of the simulated global/tele-visual space is that here the
screen world of advertisement becomes indistinguishable from the world outside, whereas only
images that are commodified and compatible with the language of advertisement feature in it.

19
Baudrillard writes, “The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October
Revolution and the market crash of 1929. Both languages of the masses, issuing from the mass
production of ideas, or commodities, their registers, separate at first, progressively converge.
Propaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces, of political men and
parties with their ‘trademark image’…This convergence defines a society- ours- in which there is
no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language
reigns in both…a society therefore where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully
realized. (Baudrillard 1994: 87-88)”
91
places
20
. Castells described these globally dispersed, disenfranchised population as the
‘fourth world’ since as we have already seen, the Third World as an entity has lost its
significance and the ‘second world’ has disappeared after collapse of Soviet Union. The
‘fourth world’ is the antipode of globally connected network space. Castells writes,
The Fourth World comprises large areas of the globe [...]. But it is also present in
literally every country and every city, in this new geography of social exclusion.
[...] And it is populated by millions of homeless, incarcerated, prostituted,
criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and illiterate persons. [...] Everywhere,
they are growing in number, and increasing in visibility, as the selective triage of
informational capitalism, and the political breakdown of the welfare state, intensify
social exclusion. In the current historical context, the rise of the Fourth World is
inseparable from the rise of informational, global capitalism. (Castells, 1998: 164-
65)

This dispersal of the excluded is integral to a simultaneous crisis of representation and
effective resistance. As Alain Badiou writes,
In its circumstantial aspect, capitalist nihilism has reached the stage of the non-
existence of any world. Yes, today there is no world as such, only some singular
and disjointed situations. No world exists simply because the majority of the
planet’s inhabitants today do not even have a label, a simple label. […] Today,
outside of the grand and petty bourgeoisie of imperial cities who proclaim to be
“civilization,” there is only the anonymous excluded. “Excluded” is the name for
those who have no name, just as “market” is the name for a world that is not a
world. (Badiou 2007: 34)

The condition of being part of this market/world is therefore to be a consumer. The
absence of the safety net of welfare state has given rise to mooring for more traditional
cultural identities among populations excluded by globalization, and found expression in
various religious fundamentalisms. In other cases, identity politics based on gender, race,

20
Castells writes, “The fundamental form of domination in our society is based on the
organizational capacity of the dominant elite that goes hand in hand with its capacity to
disorganize those groups in society which, while constituting a numerical majority, see their
interests partially (if ever) represented only within the framework of the fulfillment of the
dominant interests. Articulation of the elites, segmentation and disorganization of the masses
seem to be the twin mechanisms of social domination in our societies. (Castells 1996: 445-6)”
92
ethnicities, sexual orientations or counter-cultural movements have run the risk of being
assimilated/ proliferated as correlatives of niche markets that flexible accumulation feeds
on. This is not to say that identity based political movements like feminism, civil rights
movement, or movements for LGBT rights were never progressive. As much as
movements around 1968 uprisings were rebellions against the ‘old left’ among other
things- and the organized industrial proletariat was seen by the contemporary left as the
‘primary’ vehicle of emancipation (majority of them coincidentally were also white male
in the US) - identity based movements broadened the voice of the oppressed and won
their rightful place in mainstream politics. At the same time, late capitalism penetrated all
peripheries untapped by Fordism, and its dynamics involves active production of
differential representational spaces just as much as fragmentation of others. Any politics
that finds representation in the global mediascape today is therefore suspect
21
.
We have seen in the last chapter that the utopias of Third cinema in the first generation
were centered on the metaphor of developmental state. With weakening of the nation
state and a general crisis of representation/ positive utopia, I would argue in discussion of
the following films that contemporary political cinema critical of capitalism embraces a
politics of absence as critic of processes of dispossession integral to dynamics of
contemporary network society. Herbert (India, 2005), Cache (France, 2004), City of God
(Brazil, 2002) and Tribulation 99 (USA, 1991) are made in four different continents.

21
A relevant case study for this argument could be the history of Hip-Hop culture. While the
earlier generation of Hip-Hop artists like Gill Scott Heron and Stevie Wonder were inspired by
Civil Rights/ Black Panther movements, and early phases of Hip-Hop produced socially
conscious lyrics as in ‘The Message’ or ‘The Nigger is Afraid of Revolution’, once the movement
earned mainstream recognition, it embraced the metaphor of ‘pimp’ as ideological model.
Celebration of consumerist lifestyle and misogyny are common, if not dominant themes of
contemporary Hip-Hop. See, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down:Hip-Hop’s
Hold on Young Black Women (New York: NYU Press, 2007).
93
However, Like the Third World as the margin of global capitalism in the 60s, the
perspective of excluded spaces in these films mobilize a post-structural thrust and re-
contextualize the dominant mediascape disrupting their claims to be realities perpetually
present, without any alternative. Instead of emancipatory rhetoric, this critical vector
contextualizes dominant discourses continuing Third Cinema’s legacy of ‘showing the
process of the problem’. In a way, absence of a positive utopia makes them more radical,
since they do not have an alternative institution as referent.

Herbert (India, 2005)
Herbert (India, 2005), director Suman Mukhopadhyaya’s debut film is adopted from a
novelette of the same title written by Nabarun Bhattacharya in 1993. The novel is a
landmark in modern Bengali literature for its sleek prose which synthesizes contemporary
urban slangs and sophisticated poetic sensibility into political statements. Thus, the basic
strategies of Third Cinema are built into the source of the film. The novel is also
reflexively cinematic as Lalit Kumar, protagonist Herbert’s father in the novel, is a
filmmaker who mixes words like ‘cut’ in his dialogues
22
. The timing of the decision by
Suman Mukhopadyaya- formerly a CPI(M) sympathizer- to adopt the novel is significant,
since after remaining in power for three decades in West Bengal, CPI(M) was beginning
to loose support among intellectuals around that time for championing neo-liberal
policies like building SEZ for multinationals, evicting farmers.

22
The death scene of Herbert is described using the trope of personified tracking vision of a
house-lizard about to prey on a cockroach, ending in entry of a tearful fairy into the room, whose
bust Herbert saw in an antic shop- a very brief example of the cinematic language of the novel.
94
The film is about the protagonist Herbert whose cremation explodes the crematorium.
Initially it is seen as a terrorist act with a lot of media attention, and investigation into the
explosion unfolds a social history of Calcutta during his lifetime. We have seen how
collapse of the Third World and globalization of consumer culture causes a crisis of
referentiality/historicity. For loss of distance, past or future, there is overcompensation of
the present- present as absolute, without any alternative/rebellion. At the same time,
flexible accumulation promotes a culture of instant obsolescence. There is no place for
the dead in this universe unless it can be commodified. Herbert is an urban subaltern is
this context. He practices parapsychology professionally. He speaks the language of
occult/riddle/poetry that is almost undecipherable. Ironically, his epileptic/semi-lunatic
behavior in perspective of the dominant order of Schizophrenia
23
implies a stronger
connection with the past
24
.
Herbert grows up as the neglected homeboy of his uncle’s family after being orphaned as
an infant and dropping out of school at 8
th
grade. Tragic exclusion from a
proper/prosperous childhood gives Herbert relative stability compared to the world of

23
I am using Jameson’s idea of Schizophrenia being the dominant order of postmodern consumer
society here. See, Fredric Jameson. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” in The Anti-
Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983).

24
When interrogated by rationalist organizations about his business of conversation with the
dead, Herbert hysterically proclaims “You think you know everything spewing fucking English?
Ghosts exist! They shot Binu dead!” ‘Bhut’, the Bengali word for ghost, also means past. Binu,
Herbert’s Naxalite nephew murdered by the police is part of that past. It is generally believed in
parapsychology that souls dying unnatural death don’t attain salvation and remain unsatisfied
spirit/ghosts until proper rites are performed for them. As we will see in the following analysis,
Naxalism- the repressed/disavowed history of rebellion- resurfaces into the world of present
through the ‘medium’ of Herbert, the link between past and present, during his death.
The English language on the other hand is the primary requirement for the middle class to be part
of globalization. Acquaintance with English through colonial experience gives the Indian middle
class competitive advantage in the globally outsourced job market, as it is evident by proliferation
of ‘call centers’. Knowledge of English therefore separates the Haves from Have nots after
liberalization even more than the British period.
95
change around him. His parents die unnaturally
25
. His teenage girlfriend has to leave
town following her father’s transfer. His friend Ravi commits suicide after being
humiliated for writing a love letter to a girl from a different neighborhood. Finally, his
Naxalite nephew is killed by the police. Experiencing this series of losses of his dear
ones, Herbert develops a nostalgic attachment towards the dead. His run down ancestral
house plays an important thematic role in this mode of existence. The rooftop of the
building
26
becomes his refuge while escaping regular harassment by his cousin.
Gradually he builds his private universe on the rooftop comprising of books (including
erotic literature, which he shows to his girlfriend and gets to ‘see’ a bare female body for
the first time in return), kites, and various other disposed items. In one of the unused
rooms of the building he discovers a box full of occult ritual tools including a skull that
haunts him for the rest of his life. Along with Marxist literature, he starts reading books

25
His father dies in a car crash while shooting a dance sequence at a hill station with his
mistress/actress. His mother gets electrocuted while hanging washed clothes on a clothesline on
the rooftop. If it is not too far fetched, is it possible to see the father as the metaphoric
national/comprador bourgeoisie (which Lalit Kumar literally was, and the genealogy of their
ancestry depicted in the film in a way reflects the evolution of Indian Capitalism), and the mother
(cheated on by her husband for the English speaking actress) as the welfare state?

26
North Calcutta is the oldest part of the city established in the colonial period. Since the 70s the
urban sprawl took a southern direction, eventually making the south a more ‘happening’ area. The
cityscape of the North remained distinctly older architecturally. Disintegrating extended family
structure caused affluent family members to move out of ancestral homes for space constrains.
Property disputes or economic situations of people staying back left many buildings ill
maintained (for example in a conversation Herbert asked his aunt if water from the river Ganga
ever actually came to the reservoir known as “Ganga Water tank” on the rooftop. Her aunt
explained in reply how the supply pipe was never repaired after it cracked, rendering the tank
useless) and most importantly colonial urban planning featuring narrow alleys between buildings
and archaic sewage system left the north less adoptable to transformation into modern high rise
apartments. As a result, the north continued to be shabby, the devalued buildings embodying
nostalgia of an old heritage. At another level, these buildings are examples of spaces discarded by
capitalist rationalization of urban space, and therefore part of the ‘outside’ intrinsic to its
dynamics. No wonder, it plays an important role in construction of Herbert’s critical perspective.

96
about afterlife after this
27
. At the death bed of Binu, a police officer interrogates him
about Naxalite awareness of Carlos Marighella’s strategies of urban guerilla warfare.
Marighella’s “Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla” is a compilation of instructions
regarding efficient/possible usage of urban space during militant revolutionary struggle in
the city. As it turns out in the movie, it is Herbert who makes a better use of the rooftop
than anybody else- both as a shelter away from the world’s ridicules, and most
importantly, as the launching pad of his daring visions, retaining his dreams.
The figure of Herbert functions as a perspective of vision throughout the film. When his
Aunt asks Herbert what he does on the rooftop bunking school, he simply answers, “I
see”. Later he elaborates this saying he sees “birds, balloons, airplanes, clouds, kites,
fireworks…” to his girlfriend. After watching projectile motions during a firework
festival on the roof he comes to the realization that, “everything comes down, but first
they fly.” This apparently simplistic observation is also an aphoristic understanding of
cause and effect, a perception of history. Thus, at a time when Baudrillard has declared
that in our mediatized/televisual world there is no more spectacle, since there is no more

27
By reference from one of these books Herbert tries to explain the relationship between afterlife
and attachment to Binu. The reference is a story of a ghost sister who keeps visiting her brother
out of affection. The idea of a ghost is conceivable only from the perspective of a unified self that
is unique and indestructible even by death. Affection between unified selves/souls is also
therefore based on this uniqueness that can not be replaced. This proposition diametrically
contradicts the postmodern idea of ‘death of the subject’, where computers augment our self-
images, and linear time consisting of past, present and future does not provide a stable frame of
reference anymore. Binu tells Herbert during this conversation that ghosts don’t exist. Herbert
replies, “just because you haven’t seen?”

97
public place, just like there is no secret since there is no private space,
28
Herbert lives a
life of visual experience, thanks to his marginality.
Another aspect of Herbert’s life as visual experience is, it is an alternative gaze, which
invokes possibilities of meaning beyond the mundane and the apparently transparent. He
speaks an obscure language of riddles. He writes in his suicide note something that is
translated in the subtitles as, “Tilapia of a reservoir is going to the sea. Want to see fishy
hobgoblin? Shall I show you fishy hobgoblin?” The intelligence officers dismiss it as
gibberish. ‘Doborer chang’ translated as ‘fishy hobgoblin’ can be interpreted as
scoundrel, but in a broader context ‘Fishy hobgoblin’ simply refers to a concept beyond
the limits of our current language and perception. The sentence ‘want to see fishy
hobgoblin?’ therefore suggests a yearning to see (experience life from a bigger
perspective) the impossible. It has a magical undertone, commensurate with Herbert’s
affinity towards the occult. Because Herbert can think the past/ghost, he can also imagine
a future
29
.
The idea of an alternative gaze is built into the structure of Herbert at various levels. The
film is framed as a film shot by Herbert’s dead father, Lalit Kumar. An oedipal drama
unfolds in this move as the cinematic vision of the father and the gaze of Herbert
contradict each other. Lalit Kumar made money dealing in iron scrap during the Second

28
Baudrillard wrote, “…the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen
(all the useless information that comes to you from the entire world, like a microscopic
pornography of the universe, useless, excessive, just like a sexual close-up in a porno film): all
this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private, the
scene that was played out in a restricted space, according to a secret ritual known only by the
actors. (Baudrillard 1983: 130)”

29
At another place, after being beaten by his nephews Herbert says, “Sensuous people won’t
understand the other world, not only the other world; they don’t understand the finer details of
this world either.”
98
World War like the Congress leader in Calcutta 71. He invested in studio films as a
profitable venture. In a sequence in Herbert, we see Lalit Kumar watching dailies in a
projection room with his lead actress where a dance sequence plays on screen. Ms. Ruby-
Lalit Kumar’s mistress/actress- finds them boring, making Lalit think they need to go to
‘real location’. The sequence continues as Ruby, rejoiced by the suggestion, starts
dancing in front of the screen, doubling the dancing figure. In the next shot, they are seen
shooting a dance sequence in a meadow, followed by one on a car meandering upward on
a hilly road. Ruby repeats similar steps/movements in all three places, referring to
escapist formula films, after which the car crashes. Thus, while Lalit gets disconnected
from life trying to make a spectacle out of it, Herbert explores interiorities of life having
death as a perspective.
In another sequence, after Herbert starts sympathizing with Binu’s political views, he is
seen painting posters for his group, while Lalit and his wife observe/shoot him. Herbert’s
mother describes Herbert’s sympathy for Naxals an act of a tender soul, after which Lalit-
as if verifying that statement- looks into the viewfinder. Through the camera Herbert is
seen as a war hero, dressed in military uniform, machine gun in hand. Like Herbert in the
movie, the power of cinema as the ‘medium’ revealing an alternative reality is
emphasized here, while the dual characteristic of Herbert portrayed in the sequence
reminds us of Paulo in Land in Anguish (as described in chapter one). There are also
montage sequences in the film- including one involving a clip from Battleship Potemkin-
where two realities qualify each other
30
.

30
In one of those sequences Herbert reads a horrific narration of an occult experience where
several severed heads dance on the floor. Herbert’s reading is intercut here with killing of a
99
Finally, Suman Mukhopadhyaya uses the database narrative
31
structure, repeating and in
the process re-contextualizing several sequences of the film. For example, in the opening
sequence of the film we see hysterical Herbert throwing things after members of
rationalist organizations left challenging him. When he says, “Nobody can stop the
catastrophe. You think you know everything just spewing fucking English?” he comes
across as a lunatic, which is the dominant social perception. When this sequence is
repeated towards the end of the film, he is already a tragic hero.
Binu adds a new dimension to Herbert’s conception about death/ghosts. Binu reads the
following quote by Mao to Herbert.
Thousands of martyrs have embraced death before our eyes. Remembering them
fills our hearts with grief. What self-interest can exist that may not be sacrificed?
What mistake is possible that can not be rectified?

What was nostalgia for personal loss so far takes a social connotation here. Herbert
understands that ideas of social justice or aspirations for a better society continue beyond
individual deaths, and people’s contributions carrying those ideas forward make them
part of a larger life force. It is important therefore, to keep those ideas alive. One day, in
his dream he recollects Binu told him about a diary just before dying. As he finds the
diary, people start thinking of him as a potential ‘medium’ between the dead and the

Naxalite- Binu’s friend- by the cops in a fake encounter. The theme of horror along with the
classical 19
th
century language monumentalizes the sequence.

31
Marsha Kinder writes, “Database narratives refer to narratives whose structure exposes or
thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and
that are crucial to language: the selection of particular data (characters, images, sounds, events)
from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific
tales…Such narratives reveal the arbitrariness of the particular choices made, and the possibility
of making other combinations which would create alternative stories. By always suggesting
virtuality and the wave of potentialities linked to the uncertainty principle, such narratives
inevitably raise meta-narrative issues. (Kinder 2002: 6-7)”
100
living. Upon insistence of his local/lumpen drinking partners, Herbert starts practicing
séance professionally.
The world changes before his eyes. Two of his other nephews grow up and start their
own business- one as a cable TV operator and the other as a Kung Fu instructor (both
professions being signs of globalization). Herbert also gets business proposal from an
entrepreneur who promises to take him to the ‘top level’. He suggests Herbert should
glamorize his business through a better establishment and publicity after which they
could have branches abroad. As part of the publicity his promoter manages to publish an
article titled “Dead speaks in the divine supermarket.”
As the wooden framework on the rooftop intended to be seat for pet pigeons gets
replaced by a satellite dish, ‘rationalist’ organizations accuse him of swindling people.
Refusing to submit to their rational examination of his power as a ‘medium’, Herbert
commits suicide. As his body is put inside the electric crematorium (a mechanism of
disposal), dynamites stored inside his mattress by Binu explode. We learn from another
re-contextualized sequence that the dynamites were stored inside the mattress on
Herbert’s birthday many years back, before Binu’s death.
Primarily as a field of vision, Herbert’s narrative is not coherent. His association of
personal memories of loss with social memory of rebellion can only be achieved by
ellipsis. He participates in Maoist activities, just like he passively accepts proposals of
business expansion. He is not an active political agent for that matter, resisting
symbolization. Only his personal history of exclusion, which makes him a distant
observer, is too strong to let go of the past. It is this trace that makes him a
contextualizing interface, an embodiment of history. As Jameson famously wrote,
101
History is…the experience of necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its
thematization or reification as a mere object of representation, or a master code
among many others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather an
inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category in the enlarged sense
of some properly narrative political unconscious…a retextualization of history
which does not propose the latter as some new representation…but as the formal
effects of…an ‘absent cause’. Conceived in this sense, history is what hurts, it is
what refuses desire and set inexorable limits to individual as well as collective
praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their own intention.
But this history can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as
some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which history as ground and
untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be
sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer
to ignore them. (Jameson 1981: 87-8)

Unable to figure out where the dynamites came from, the intelligence officer concluded,
“This incidence proves we are yet to grasp when, where and how explosions will occur.”
The idea of a full proof, perpetual present therefore can not be guaranteed.
Coincidentally, after being flushed out from the cities by the police in the 70s some
factions of the Maoists trained in military tactics and entrenched themselves among
tribals in dense forests suitable for guerilla warfare. Over four decades their organization
and popular support grew in those areas, but remained unnoticed since those areas fell
outside dominant mediascape, and no government development project materialized
there. However, that area in South and eastern India- which now covers almost one-third
of total Indian districts- is rich in minerals like iron ore and bauxite. After neo-
liberalization of India in the 90s, Government of India signed a number of secret MoUs
(Memorandum of Understanding) with multinational companies giving them extraction
rights for meager revenue, and decided to move huge tribal populations from their
homelands to facilitate the projects. When government forces moved in to execute the
evacuations, they faced armed resistance to such a degree that the Indian Prime Minister
102
Manmohan Singh recently termed the Maoists ‘the biggest internal security threat’. The
Naxals were supposed to be dead after the 70s, and their presence in areas lucrative to
multinationals is an accident, but indeed, they have caused an explosion.

Cache (“Hidden”, France, 2005)
On October 17, 1961, the French police under command of former Nazi collaborator
Maurice Papon killed two hundred peaceful protestors in Paris at a demonstration called
by FLN. Michael Haneke learned about the massacre less than two years before making
Cache, accidentally watching a documentary on ARTE channel. His immediate reaction
after watching the documentary was, “How can there be two hundred bodies floating on
the Seine, and nobody talks about it for forty years?”
32
At the same time, he argued in the
interview that Cache could be a story told anywhere, since there could be secrets hidden
anywhere by the ‘common sense’ of a particular national milieu. At another end, the film
is replete with news footage from all over the world; Anne- wife of protagonist Georges
in the film- had just finished editing a book on globalization published to critical acclaim,
she refers to Baudrillard in a discussion about the book; their son Pierrot sports a poster
of Eminem in his bedroom. Cache is therefore about secrets disavowed globally. More
precisely, it is about spaces excluded by the global corporate media.
The first image of the film is a long shot of a narrow urban street in an upper middle class
neighborhood of Paris, leading to a gated, fairly non-descript house. Buildings on both
sides of the street frame the mise-en- scene as a circumscribed space. Cars parked at
various distance in the deep focus shot, along with creeper plants flowing down the

32
This is part of an interview on the special features of the DVD.
103
terrace of the central house gives the image a rich, tranquil texture. Except for occasional
passing of cars or pedestrians, there is no action in the static shot, giving the scenario a
non-suspect transparency. However, the exceptionally long duration of the shot renders
this apparent stability uncomfortable, after which through a glitch on the screen and off
screen dialogue between Anne and Georges we realize it is the footage from a series of
surveillance videotape the family has been receiving. We never know where the
videotapes are coming from, but this anonymous perspective is the source of narrative
dynamics of Cache.
The idea of a surveillance society is not new. In his famous description of the Panopticon,
Foucault wrote, “The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in
the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees
everything without ever being seen. (Foucault 1995: 201)” For Foucault, with
sophistication of the disciplining mechanisms of the modern state the juridical subject
internalizes the notion of constant surveillance, making the metaphoric Panopticon
omnipresent. Baudrillard argued in late capitalism the Panopticon does not exist
anymore, since the functioning of Panopticon presupposes a minimal separation of
private and public space
33
, a separation that ceases to exist with proliferation of global
media industry. Simultaneous programming of reality TV and global news network

33
We have seen how the mechanism of Panopticon works in a colonial context in Battle of
Algiers, where power works through separation of Algerian Casbah from the European Quarter.
Algerian women violate that spatial barrier disguising themselves as European women to carry
out terrorist attack. Colonel Mathieu is seen reviewing footage shot at checkpoints of the Casbah
in the film, to restrict Muslim occupants from entering the European quarter.

104
conflates
34
the mediascape into a frenzied space of communication and flow of
information
35
, a hyper-marketplace, where everything is too visible to the point of being
obscene, of which there can be nothing hidden, or no outside
36
. Georges, himself a
television anchor, is happily embedded in this universe. Return of a perspective ruptures
the illusion of this circumscribed universe, structured around disavowal. One of the ways
in which contradiction between network society and its relegation of vast masses of
people into oblivion manifests itself is terrorism. The bomb- rendered anonymous by
death of the suicide bomber- fails to construct a narrative, but signals at the symbolic
level of a presence that has no representation otherwise. In place of bombs, we have

34
An example of this can be found in Cache, when Anne and George enquire about Pierrot’s
whereabouts calling his friend’s house after he goes missing. They are in their living room
featuring a centrally located TV surrounded by shelves full of books and videos, a mediatized
universe. Anne’s anxiousness while talking on the phone is complemented here by images of
wounded civilians carried away in Iraq following allied bombing. Neither Anne nor George looks
at the TV during the conversation, rendering the suffering of the victims a mere backdrop of
domestic ritual. This concept of war as an event to be consumed through live coverage led
Baudrillard to declare that ‘the Gulf War did not happen’.

35
Baudrillard writes, “Rather than creating communication, (information) exhausts itself in the
act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of
meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The non-directive interview,
speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: ‘You are
concerned, you are the event, etc.’ More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom
content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular
arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the anti-theater of
communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the
traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to
hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of
the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. (Baudrillard 1994: 80)” Thus, while classical
narrative cinema sutures the spectator into the narrative as the ‘absent one’, television structures
the audience within its informational circuit as the ‘absent meaning’.

36
As media hollows out the private space, image of the private becomes more important in form
of the sanctity of the bourgeoisie family. Haneke says in the interview, “As couples work out
their social and domestic life, everything is given the appearance of its success and functionality,
and nothing is discussed outside of it.” Functionality of the nuclear bourgeoisie family legitimizes
the media circuit of consumerism. The image of an affluent middle class family life is therefore
what we see in the first shot of Cache.
105
videotapes in Cache. Thus, while Classical Hollywood sutures the spectator into the
narrative space, Haneke permanently places her outside of it, in an antagonistic
relationship with the image.
The videotapes come wrapped in childish sketches of a face vomiting blood.
Introspection into who might be filming the tapes to terrorize his family, stirs up
Georges’ memory. He remembers Majid, whose parents worked on the farmlands of
Georges’ provincial estate. Majid’s parents were killed in the 1961 massacre after which
Georges’ parents (probably out of sense of guilt) decided to adopt Majid. Despising the
idea of having to share the house with a brown skinned boy, Georges made up stories
about Majid coughing up blood (contagious- therefore needs to be quarantined) and
killing a chicken to scare him (actually it was Georges who asked Majid to kill the
chicken, because he was scared of the bird and portrayed it as if his parents wanted Majid
to do the job- the narrative of Majid is displaced upon the chicken here) to his parents.
Noticing Georges’ discomfort about Majid’s presence, his parents sent Majid off to an
orphanage.
The field of the repressed ‘outside’ expand in Cache in form of a narrative struggle. In
the realm of the visible, recurrent denial forestalls Majid’s entry into the narrative field.
When George visits his mother and asks if she remembers Majid, the Algerian boy she
almost adopted, she answers in negative. Later George describes this conversation to
Anne as, “maybe she doesn’t want to remember”. When the tape featuring Majid’s
encounter with Goerges reaches Georges’ boss, he destroys it to prevent it from ‘falling
into wrong hands’. After Majid’s death, when his son, Hashem comes to see Georges at
his office, Georges refuses to talk to him first, and denies any culpability when forced to
106
have a conversation. Significantly, George’s office is a television station, and George
tells the boy he is not supposed to come inside.
On the other hand, after the second tape arrives, the bloody face of young Majid- blood
being reminiscent of both accusations forged against him- appear in a jump cut as a shrill
psychological projection of Georges, while the tape is playing. Inter-medium
permeability, between the sketch and the video, thus succeeds the transgression between
oblivion/scotomization and trace/sign within the regime of visibility. The third
appearance is a nightmare sequence, where silhouetted Majid ominously approaches
young Georges with an axe in hand, after killing the chicken. This imaginary narrative
segment is followed by Georges’ first encounter with Majid. Georges accuses visibly
submissive Majid of terrorism here, maintaining a violent posture himself. When this tape
plays in Georges’ living room, the part where Majid breaks into tears after Georges
leaves is omitted (Anne has already seen it, but says it is too long and boring to be
replayed). Thus, Majid is denied the stature of a human being, an individual capable of
suffering. Denied humanity, and a space in the dominant narrative of exculpation, Majid
performs the symbolic act of terrorism after being accused of kidnapping Pierrot
37
. He
reenacts the childhood scene of slaughtering the chicken, the chicken being himself this

37
The rupture of the circumscribed universe by terrorism has an apocalyptic overtone-
especially in context of the imagined kidnap of Pierrot which disintegrates the nuclear
family, the symbolic legitimacy of the consumption circuit. Julian Murphet describes
how since beginning of neo-liberalism in the 90s there has been a prominence of neo-
apocalyptic/world disaster films in American cinema. The apocalypse is staged as a
struggle between humans and animals, where for sudden desertion of societal safeguards
and mechanisms in the advanced capitalist core, men also become animals. Murphet
writes, “The history of the apocalypse is a history of animal becomings, magnifications
and meldings, as though in recognition of the fact that the Day of Judgment is a day on
which we are caught naked before the eye of an animal. (Murphet 2008: 107)”
107
time. Significantly, he invites Georges to be present at the ‘scene’. So far we have seen
the anonymous bloody sketches on the one hand, and the complacent domestic space of
Georges, the space of moving image, on the other. With reenactment of the sketch- the
same diagonal splash of blood across the wall in a deep focus shot reminiscent of
Bazanian aesthetics- the ‘scene’ becomes mise-en-scene including Georges in it as the
‘absent cause’. It is the act of ironic sharing of space- the sharing Georges refused as a
child, the memory-space he disavows as an adult- comes to stand as a photographic
punctuation in the way of Georges’ avowed subjectivity. Majid’s suicide also connects
the psychological space to a larger national space as the context of 1961 massacre enters
the narrative in a confessional
38
dialogue between Georges and Anne after Majid’s death.
The suicide makes Georges open up to Anne, and reveal secrets he had held back so far,
to preserve his self-image.
The series of disavowal Georges goes through in order to preserve his image and
possessions (during their first encounter Majid asks him, “what wouldn’t you do not to
lose what is yours?”) is a correlative of series of dispossession capitalism causes for
accumulation. The duality of this existence is summarized in the virtuoso penultimate
sequence of the film. After confronting Hashem at office who explained the reason for
his visit saying “I just wanted to see what feels a man’s death in your conscience”,
Georges returns home. A shorter replica of the opening shot establishes his return.
Contextualized through the film, the shot does not have the aura of complacency this

38
It is literally a confessional environment. When Anne enters the room and turns on the light,
Georges can’t bear it. The conversation takes place in silhouette, the only source of light coming
through the sheers of the two windows.
108
time.
39
Georges, visibly devastated, takes sleeping pills, calls Anne to say not to disturb
him after returning home, then retreats into his bedroom. He closes the curtains making
the room completely dark- as if to protect himself from further interrogation- then covers
himself with a blanket in bed. His family house is seen in the next shot, from the other
side of the field in front of it. Half of the field is covered by the shadow of a building,
simulating an extension of Georges’ darkened bedroom. The rest of the field and
Georges’ house is lit by bright sunlight. Chickens run around on the field. The original
sin/scene of exclusion plays out here once more. A car enters the frame to stop in front of
the house. Representatives from the foster home knock on the door getting out of it.
People look tiny in the extreme long shot, signifying the distance from Georges’ induced
sleep. Eventually young Majid steps out of the house accompanied by Georges’ parents.
Majid starts walking towards the car away from the parents, stops, looks back helplessly,
then starts running towards the shadow screaming “I don’t want to go.” The
representatives follow him. Majid goes out of the frame briefly before being pulled back,
nabbed by his pursuers. The car leaves after he is taken into it. The flight of Majid
parallels the movement of the birds on the field, bringing back his association with the
slaughtered chicken. Through the trope of Goerges’ sleep, Haneke performs a reverse
optical operation here, portraying the scotomized dispossession in bright light.
The last shot of Cache expands the polemic set up by the film into a postcolonial
perspective. After interrogating the institution of Bourgeoisie nuclear family (a recurrent

39
The street sign in the shot reads Rue des Iris. Ara Osterweil writes there are two possible
meanings of the phrase. It could mean ‘street filled with flowers’. This impression comes across
in the opening shot, especially because of the creeper plants. The second meaning is ‘sadness of
the eye’. In context of the second occurrence of the shot this meaning may be stretched to
suggest, ‘visibility that causes sadness’ (Osterweil Summer, 2006).
109
theme in Haneke films like Code Unknown [2000], Piano Teacher [2001], Time of the
Wolves [2003]) Haneke turns his attention towards another liberal institution, the school.
The last shot repeats the opening shot in its set up. It is a wide, multi-layered shot of the
front entrance of Pierrot’s school. Stairs lead up to the glass door of the building. Unlike
Georges’ house it is a bustling public space; students walk in and out of the building and
chat sitting on the stairs. Hashem and Pierrot are seen having an amiable conversation,
establishing the postcolonial scenario. In other words, apparently it is even more
transparent than the first shot. However, the unusually long duration of the take brings
back the eeriness nurtured throughout the film. Haneke, thus continues his militant call to
distrust the image.
Haneke’s strategy of ‘assault on optics’ is not novel. We have seen self-reflexive
rewinding of footage earlier in Funny Games. At one level, skepticism towards naïve
ocular mastery of Hollywood is one of the basic premises of art cinema epitomized by
Antonioni’s Blow-up. This strategy is susceptible to stoicism, being locked in
foregrounding of authorship as structuring principle of cinema on one end and
contemplating emptiness/futility of modernist existence on the other. Haneke’s critic of
this tendency in high culture comes across in Cache (and to some extent earlier in Piano
Teacher) in the sequence when Georges is in the editing room watching a literary talk
show. Georges orders the tape to be cut at the point when the guests start waxing too
theoretical while discussing works of Arthur Rimbaud.
40
In that context, what broadens
the scope of Cache over Haneke’s earlier films is its thematization of the social into

40
Poet Rimbaud was part of the 19
th
century Decadent Movement that valued artifice over
romantic view of nature.
110
aesthetics. In a way, moving from the family to a larger social institution, the last shot
makes that statement.

Tribulation 99 (USA, 1991)
While Third Cinema shares the quest for new cinematic forms with it, social intervention
is even further away from the comfort zone of Avant-Garde than art cinema. Instead, a
recurring theme in discussions on the Avant-Garde is purity. This involves questions of
medium specificity (i.e. the formal essence of cinema, that the avant-garde has to
discover), authorship (“the attempt to give a strictly personal expression of the
universe)”, cult or group identities (“camp”, race or gender for example), and critic of
commercial narrative cinema. At a postmodern moment, when we are more concerned
with recycling, this preoccupation is problematic. We have known cinema has been a
point of convergence of other arts historically and one of its strengths is this very
composite nature. Formal essentialism in that context can be self-defeating. Similarly, in
spite of existential uniqueness personalities are socially constructed, and authors at best
respond to existing discourses. While some group identities/sensibilities are avowedly
apolitical,
41
the overarching problem of identity based politics is its parochialism and
self-obsession
42
. How can we call Avant-Garde cinema- happily ensconced in its own

41
As Susan Sontag writes, “for Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous
surface, and style at the expense of content. (Sontag 1966)”

42
Jameson has written in this context that, “…in the decades since the emergence of the great
modern styles society has itself begun to fragment in this way, each group coming to speak a
curious private language of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect, and
finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else…in
that case, the very possibility of any linguistic norm in terms of which one could ridicule private
languages and idiosyncratic styles would vanish, and we would have nothing but stylistic
111
cathedral- progressive then? Perhaps, films like Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99 (1991)
provide answer to that question. Both Tribulation and City of God (2002) - the last film I
am going to analyze in this chapter- use magic realist strategies to make political
statements. A brief discussion of magic realism will illustrate how political position is
determining the narrative structure of both films, even though Tribulation is an avant-
garde film made in the US, and City is a fiction film made in Brazil.
Magic realism is not all magical. The ‘Fantastic’ and Fantastic literature has been defined
by Tzvetan Todorov as,
Fantastic is the hesitation of a being who knows only natural laws in the face of the
supernatural. In other words, the fantastic character of a text resides in a transient
and volatile state during the reading of it, one of indecision as to whether the
narrative belongs to a natural or a supernatural order of things.”
43

Most science fictions are understood to fall under this genre. Magic realism, on the other
hand is “poetic transfiguration of the object world itself- not so much a fantastic
narrative, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived. (Jameson 1986: 1) It
differs from European surrealism in the sense that the fantastic events in that transfigured
object world is also narrated
44
. What makes this mundane narration of the marvelous

diversity and heterogeneity. (Jameson 1983: 114)” Also, Judith Butler has criticized feminism in
this context. It would be ideal to discuss all of the above points in greater details, but that is
beyond scope of this essay.
43
See, Stanislaw Lem. ‘Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature,’ Science Fiction Studies1, no. 4
(1974), reprinted on http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/4/lem4art.htm, accessed on
December 7, 2005.

44
One of the major thrusts of the surrealist attack against realism was directed at the literary
language. For example, Andre Breton wrote, “The countless kinds of surrealist images would
require a classification which I do not want to make today…what I basically want to mention is
their common virtue. For me, their greatest virtue, I must confess, is the one that is arbitrary to the
highest degree, the one that takes the longest time to translate into practical language, either
because it contains an immense amount of seeming contradiction or because one of its terms is
strangely concealed… (Breton 1969: 38)” In contrast, the urge to narrate/communicate without
112
possible in magic realism is the assertion that the magical is an inseparable part of the
reality it is addressing, and not a supplement. For example, Robert Stam refers to Alejo
Carpentier’s The Lost Steps where “the mere smell of mushrooms induces hallucinations,
and swarms of butterflies darken the sky (Stam 2005: 316),” and then stresses that magic
is not so distant from the truth since ‘some mushrooms are powerful hallucinogens and in
the Brazilian Pantanal butterflies do suddenly darken the sky.’ What makes the real seem
magical here is an outsider’s perspective. How this play between exaggerated immediacy
and the ‘critical distance’ can be political is evident in the following passage from One
Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
But since the afternoon when he called the children in to help him unpack the
things in the laboratory, he gave them his best hours. In the small separate room,
where the walls were gradually being covered by strange maps and fabulous
drawings, he taught them to read and write and do sums, and he spoke to them
about the wonders of the world, not only where his learning has extended, but
forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes. It was in that way that the boys
ended up learning that in the southern extremes of Africa there were men so
intelligent and peaceful that their only pastime was to sit and think, and that it was
possible to cross the Aegean Sea on foot by jumping from island to island all the
way to the port of Salonika. Those hallucinating sessions remained printed on the
memories of the boys in such a way that many years later, a second before the
regular army officer gave the firing squad the command to fire, Colonel Aureliano
Buendia saw once more that warm March afternoon on which his father had
interrupted the lesson in physics and stood fascinated, with his hand in the air and
his eyes motionless, listening to the distant pipes, drums, and jingles of the gypsies,
who were coming to the village once more, announcing the latest and most startling
discovery of the sages of Memphis. (Marquez 2004: 16-17)

Mottled among intimacy, everyday details, technology, self-reflexive imagination, time
lapse, layers of colonial history and finally its framing through childhood memory, death

being illusionist in Magic Realism, I would argue, makes it more political than some other stoic
anti-realist traditions.
113
related to the allegory of dictatorship becomes absurd and non-hegemonic here. Jameson
has argued in this context, that
the possibility of magic realism as a formal mode is constitutively dependent on a
type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present…the
organizing category of magic realist film (is) a particular mode of production still
locked in conflict with the traces of the older mode (if not with foreshadowings of
the emergence of a future one). (Jameson 1986: 311)

Even if we do not agree with this model of economic reduction, even if it is not the ‘real’
‘Third World’ or underdevelopment, the idea of it as a critical space outside of a
homogenized diegetic universe thus returns in magic realism to compensate for the lost
historicity.
Tribulation 99 is a found footage film. Catherine Russell has argued that,
Recycling found images implies a profound sense of the already seen, the already
happened, creating a spectator position that is necessary historical. For many
filmmakers, found footage constitutes a means of recycling the excess waste of
consumer culture. (Russell 1999: 241)

She extends this argument further stating “archival filmmaking promotes a schizophrenic
dispersal of discourses of mastery, authenticity, and authority through fragmentation,
cutting up and interruption. (Russell 1999: 243)”
While these assumptions are correct in specific instances, their tendency towards
architectural essentialism is dangerous. Recycling is not necessarily interventionist or
historical. More than a decade before Russell, Jameson had pointed out ‘pastiche’ to be a
character of post modernity, but differentiated it from parody in terms of lack of political
Motive.
45
For example, in A Movie (1958) by Bruce Conner, another found footage film

45
Jameson wrote, “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the
wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such
114
Russell writes about, the shots of mushroom clouds after atomic explosions are so long,
that they have more hallucinatory or alienating effect, than any appeal to political
consciousness. I would argue what those shots lack is authorial intervention and therefore
fall short of being radical in the process of re-contextualization. In the same inertia
‘historicity’, writes Jameson,
is neither representation of the past nor the representation of the future (although its
various forms use such representation): it can first and foremost be defined as a
perception of the present as history; that is as relation to the present which
somehow de-familiarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at
length characterized the historical perspective. (Jameson 1991: 284)

Thus just watching footage from the past does not give us any critical vantage point. For
that reason, I will emphasize on the level of narrative while talking about Tribulation.
The film is about the US foreign policy in Latin America structured as a combination of
science fiction and apocalyptic Christian mythology
46
. On the one hand, through
apocalypse, the notion of ‘end of history’ as described before, is inscribed in the diegesis
of the film, and the Latin American people except for the collaborators with the CIA, are
rarely seen in the film, but on the other, the US security apparatus, with its vast arsenal of

mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter,
without the still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is
being imitated is rather comic. (Jameson 1983: 114)”

46
I’ll borrow Catherine Russell’s description to give an overview of the narrative. She writes that,
the history of US intervention in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Granada, Nicaragua and Panama is
depicted in the movie. “Interspersed with the footage of flying saucers, monsters, mad scientists,
Latin American actors, diagrams, maps, and American politicians are scenes of Latin American
laborers, religious processions and newsreel footage of street violence in Chile and Nicaragua.
The verbal and written texts describe a complex conspiracy of anti-communist personnel
organized through CIA, the United Fruit Company, and the Warren Commission, which is
battling a supernatural conspiracy of the Bermuda Triangle, Haitian Voodoo, and a Mayan-alien
alliance. In the apocalyptic finale, the Panama Canal is flooded by secret dumping of American
atomic waste, “the Atlantic and Pacific merge…the world comes to an end, for which we are
grateful.” The Chosen Ones flee to Mars via stealth mother ships and damn those left behind.
(Russell 1999: 261)”
115
mass media, military, and government institutions is depicted as mobilized against alien
invaders from outer space, moving through the Latin American landscape. Thus, the
“science fictional space that exists parallel to the normal space of the diegesis (becomes)
a rhetorically heightened ‘other realm’. (Bukatman 1993: 157)” It is the self-reflexive
imaginative vision from this realm, like the trope of childhood memory in the Marquez
passage quoted above, that lends ironical meaning to clips from otherwise illusionist
Hollywood films
47
. It also guides them towards an undesired apocalypse through both
their arrangement and connection via narration. It is significant in this context that the
very short credits towards the beginning of the film says, ‘reported by Baldwin’, meaning
both edited and voice over by. Only mention of the last name in this move gives a sense
of informal intimacy and framing through this personalized consciousness, i.e. through
the breakdown of the binary between the projective private space and ritualistic public
space
48
, absurdity and a repressive ‘reality effect’ coexist in his narrative. The film begins
with the assertion, “This is not a fiction, but the shocking truth about the coming
apocalypse and the events that led up to it,” inscribed on the screen with accompaniment
of eerie Sci-fi music. If we are allowed to follow what Robert Stam did to the Carpentier
example sited earlier in this essay, then indeed ‘this is not a fiction’, since our
consciousness is shaped by extremely escapist pop culture, especially television, and
since ‘there is no longer any system of objects’, as Baudrillard has declared (Baudrillard
1983), we can only make sense through simulacra- the signifiers detached from their

47
Also used are American information films and newsreels, maps, educational documents and TV
programs.

48
This is what Hollywood does and disavows at the same time, through the rise to glory of its
goal oriented protagonists. In that, what we are witnessing here is the exaggeration of the
repressed magic, already existing in Classical Hollywood narrative (Bordwell 1986).
116
signified- available to us. What is more interesting in this assertion though, is ‘the
shocking truth’. Following Lacan, If sci-fi is the realm of imaginary, and the narrated
diegetic space is the symbolic, then our lost ‘real’ is the ‘Third World’ people who escape
representation in the film. Thus they live as ‘aliens’, ‘people who have no referent, but
live in pure representation
49
. (Russell 1999: 261)’ I would argue therefore, that ‘the
shocking truth’-the relationship between the real and the symbolic- of the movie is the
violence/neo-colonial exploitation afflicted on Latin America, which caused its erasure
50
.
This erasure and the subsequent linguistic collapse/social schizophrenia is the apocalypse
Baldwin is reporting. Right after this assertion, we see the title of the movie, Tribulation
99: Alien anomalies under America, followed by the quote from Christian millennial
myth, “and when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and

49
In Tribulation, there is a sequence of assassination attempts on Cuban President Fidel Castro.
When CIA conspiracies of poisoning his cigar, planting a radio controlled bomb on his private
beach, putting a machine gun in the TV set, etc. fails, the narrator laments ‘after 33 failed
assassination affords and spending 50 million dollars they finally realized that you can’t kill
somebody who was not alive after all.’ Throughout the sequence we see clips taken from Sci-fi
thrillers. Russell’s observation in this context about found footage film is useful. She writes, “If
nostalgia is the signature of modernity’s ambivalent embrace of technology, its renunciation
constitutes a postmodern view of history as a discontinuous, non-narrative temporality. By means
of montage…the past is transformed from a fixed space of forgetting to a dynamic time of
historic imagination. The past is the allegorical form of the future, especially when it is perceived
as already embedded in technology, as in found footage filmmaking (emphasis mine). (Russell
1999: 253)” I would like to add to this, that even at the narrative level we see this technologically
embedded historic landscape, as M-16 rifles, and other ‘humanitarian weapons’ are supplied to
the militias fighting the democratic movements in Latin America in the film. This will have far
reaching consequences on Latin American economy, including in development of drug trade, and
therefore a strange form of capitalism, as we shall see in City of God. The imagery of the Latin
American people vacillate between alien monsters (we actually see aliens dying as the US backed
military fires towards its opponents) and ‘slimy’ natural elements, including rocks, deserts,
snakes or ‘creatures who build their city with their own excretory elements’, thus pointing
towards a post-humanist era.

50
Interestingly, when newsreel footage of real people confronted by the police or military is seen,
it is usually not supplemented by any voice over in Tribulation. At one level, this is usage of the
indexical nature of the documentary, and at another, it is the trauma beyond representation, which
is either sublime, or has to be repressed.
117
deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth, and gather them to battle.”
This whole sequence takes place in the outer space, alluding to the location of the
narrator. Also, he narrates the future event of the apocalypse in past tense further
confirming of a sci-fi temporality. After this we see a sci-fi landscape of an alien planet
in 1000 AD, which gets blown up (the explosion, like apocalypse fills up the screen)
owing to internal conflict. These are the aliens that would travel to earth and settle under
the soil. To point out another magic realist element in the movie, the journey of these
aliens to earth is structured following standard continuity editing and seamless cutting.
This is all the more significant since generally the film follows the ‘paranoid
documentary’ style, i.e. layering the imagery with written inter-titles, a whispering voice
over, superimposition etc. In fact there are references to human doubling by the aliens,
including that of the President of Guatemala. This practice of layering/doubling refers to
two or more intertwined streams of consciousness, of fiction and reality, which are
inseparable since the one does not make sense without the other in the film, and the
film’s success depends on this very new coherence
51
. Russell writes about another
character of found footage film as,

51
For example, there is a sequence in the film where Chilean Marxist President Allende is elected
to power. This according to the narrative logic caused disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field,
and a part of Latin America was hit by draught. After a short montage, depicting the landscape
and people hit by the draught, we see a man in traditional attire having a panoramic view of this
landscape from a hilltop. Following his eye-line, the next shot shows a rectangular entrance on
the other side of the hills. This shot dissolves into another shot from a Hollywood film, where a
group of men wearing trench coat and fedora hat enter a similar entrance, accompanied by horror
film music. While the music certainly underscores the break between the clips, the match cut also
invokes continuity between misery and its subsequent advantage taken by imperialist oppression
(for example, by IMF or World Bank loans). This is further emphasized in the next shot, where
we see a television commentary on a jewelry exhibition. An artificial hand is seen rotating
mechanically on display there, holding gems from Colombia. At one point, the commentary says,
“they saw the precious gems of Latin America displayed in the settings worthy of their beauty.”
A similar match-cut can be seen before clips depicting bombing of Allende’s Presidential palace
118
Detached from referentiality, the fundamental link to the past is broken, and as a
fiction, the ethnographic enters a different temporal schema, one based on
metonymic combination rather than metaphor, symbolism, and narrativity. If
metaphor implies a depth of meaning, metonymy takes place on the surface,
constructing a language of appearances and signifiers. (Russell 1999: 258)

Here Russell does not take into account the role of the sound track in these re-
combinations. For example, in a sequence when attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro
is narrated, imagery of different kinds of murder plots (I have mentioned some of those in
another argument. We see a gas mask, a ball pen, a woman in bikini walking on the beach
listening to a conch shell, etc.) Are juxtaposed one after another, Thus only at the level of
picture, threatened “’blizzard of images’…renders memory an inadequate means of
organizing time”,
52
and presents the shock experience in a new form of representation.
But we become aware of the specificity of the murder plots after their labeling by the
factually correct voice over. Additionally, suspense music from a James Bond thriller
plays throughout the sequence, finally synching with the image, as we see Sean Connery
pointing a gun towards the audience, and hear ‘licensed to kill’ in the background. Thus
not only the familiar context of a James Bond thriller is referred to in this sequence, and
used to string together disjoined found footage, but reciprocally the connoted failure of
the murder plot is used to subvert the unshakable image of James Bond into one of
paranoia. Thus the politics of Tribulation 99 is not a journey back to the pre-Griffithian
actualite, or any resistance to metaphoric depth, but a ruptured sense of time trying to
come in terms with itself, as a minority discourse.

by the army backed by CIA. There a character from a movie clip throws a grenade into an
entrance like I have mentioned before. There is a series of match-cuts of explosions from there
leading up to ouster of Allende.

52
(Paraphrasing Russell) narrative on the other hand is representation of chronological time.
119
I would like to point out to a more self-conscious use of metonymy within the diegesis of
Tribulation in this context. After the episode of overthrow of the Allende government, an
intertitle states, ‘the great white brotherhood’. Hereafter we see alternative shots of
speeches by Pinochet- the Chilean dictator, Henry Kissinger- the US secretary of state,
his old Nazi friend Walter Ralf (the voiceover reports he has been appointed the chief of
DINA, the right wing internal security force supporting Pinochet. It also mentions
another WW 2 anti-communist leader Harry Chandelmann who had been summoned
from Guatemala for more immediate duties in Chile.) In between these clips, we see
profile close-ups of DINA soldiers wearing helmets and expressionless face. After the
voiceover finishes, in a black and white clip, army boots march diagonally across the
screen. Low angle framing of the shot detach the boots from their perspective. In the next
shot, the impact of the previous shot is further emphasized as we see only one boot
marching slowly towards the camera. Laura Mulvey wrote in her famous essay, “one part
of a fragmented body destroys Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the
narrative; it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the
screen. (Mulvey 1975: 309)” A similar effect, magnified by a strong metonymic
familiarity, totally de-humanizes those army men here. They look like ominous robots.
Later, in another part of the film, a native Latin American is seen holding up a similar
boot, presumably taken from a dead/wounded soldier, adding to the general theme of the
film.
Finally, as the last political/aesthetic strategy of Tribulation I’ll discuss its usage of maps.
From the time of early explorers, mapping has been a means of totalizing, visualizing and
therefore controlling unknown space. Simon Ryan writes,
120
Imperial discourse, indeed, looks in a mirror; everything it sees is a reflection of
itself. For the other what it constructs is merely a reflection of repressed desires and
urges…The symbolic order driving this essentially solipsistic construction of
difference works to deny the castration threat difference implies. (Ryan 1996: 200)

The solipsistic drive that we see in Tribulation in installing puppet governments all over
Latin America and labeling of its opponents as aliens thus gets translated in the film as a
cartographic gaze. There are several shots of maps or bird’s eye view of different parts of
South America. Baldwin has those maps abruptly rotate at times, giving a catastrophic
effect. We see a hand moving over a map in front of the camera- precisely inducing the
very castration effect cartography wants to avoid, and alien radars or apocalyptic ocean
waves are superimposed on these maps. However, what I would call the best magic
realist subversion of the cartographic gaze happens in the movie without any direct
reference to a physical map. The sequence leading to depiction of Chilean President
Allende’s election to power starts with inter-titles saying ‘Easter island mystery’. Rocks
shaped like human faces are seen on the sea shore of Easter Island and the voice over
comments, ‘specially bred in a super secret lab on Easter Island, their cybernetic
replicants are insinuated into critical positions of power’. After this, following a montage
of complex technological steps we see a process of brain mapping. Images of human
brains (which look like maps) get manipulated by electronic signaling and turn into
metallic circuits featuring beeping lights, but still look like brains. These brains are now
transplanted into heads of androids, which are then given human forms by hair transplant
and face grafting. This process follows clips from Sci-fi films once more, where human
beings are brainwashed in alien electronic chambers, and come out with the same look,
but a different mind. The sequence is accompanied by Sci-fi/horror music. This is
121
followed by another inter-title ‘axis shift’, and then we see President Allende giving a
speech on TV, whose subtitles read, “I have no alternatives. Only by riddling me with
bullets can they end my determination.” The voice over contradicts this inter-title stating,
“The so called Salvador Allende, proceeds to disrupt the economy, the resulting chaos
shifts the earth’s polar axis.” This is followed by two shots of hands fiddling with
magnets and compass, then a three dimensional map of the rotating earth’s magnetic
field. The voice over asserts here, “the earth stops moving,” and the rotating globe on the
map actually stops.
From a dominant perspective, what is disturbing in this sequence is the possibility of an
alternative mapping of the same body. That puts into question the sacrosanct status of
technologies of mapping, namely compass and therefore its assumptions about
geography. Technological threat in a bi-polar world armed with nuclear weapons is a
reality. Thus in the delirium of paranoia over election of a Marxist President in Chile
(which is close to the US and not in Eastern Europe) and his decision to nationalize the
industries (which affects the US investments in the country adversely), economics,
geography and science fiction get conflated. The paranoia is underscored by the rigor and
precision with which the idea of an alternative mapping is constructed, and juxtaposed
around the newsreel footage of the Allende speech.
Now, I will discuss some of the narrative strategies from City of God and try to draw a
parallel between the two films.

122
City of God (Brazil, 2002)
City of God is a film about a Brazilian favela of the same name in Rio, through the period
of 1960’s till an unspecified present
53
. The title refers to the medieval Catholic priest St.
Augustine’s famous book, where he does a comparative study of the heavenly and the
earthly city, since the beginning of the world. At one level, the history of urbanization in
Brazil follows a similar trajectory. Owing to its colonial and neo-colonial history, Brazil
has the second widest economic disparity in the world between the rich and the poor.
During the international urbanist movement led by Le Corbusier immediately after WW2,
“Brasilia finally offered the modernist planners the best settings for the ideal city: it could
be built from ground up, in an absolutely open and empty space-a nothingness well suited
to the early 20
th
century urban utopia (Carvalho 1991: 359).” As a result, ultra-modern
architecture became part of cities like Rio and Sao Paolo. On the other hand, the uneven
forces of modernization attracted large groups of migrant laborers to the cities, for whom
make-shift housing projects like the City of God had to be built, which did not have the
basic civic facilities like sewage, electricity or paved roads. Thus in the post-dictatorial
urban Brazil, there was development of constitution based on rule of law and democratic

53
A number of personal stories get intertwined in the movie, under the general theme of gradual
criminalization of the favela, as drug business flourish and consequent gang wars break out. A
group of children grow up in this atmosphere both as witness and players in the process. Violence
rob them their innocence before they are even ten, and gang members consider themselves lucky,
if they live till twenty. There are three principal threads in the film, namely the story of Lil Ze
(the leader of one of the gangs in the City), Knockout Kned (leader of Lil Ze’s opponent gang),
and Rocket, an aspiring photographer from the favela, through whom the story of the city is
narrated. Lil Ze has his childhood friend Benny as his companion, while Knockout Kned is
assisted by another gangster, Carrot. Initially Lil Ze starts an organized drug trade in the city,
after killing off his predecessors, but soon faces challenge from Carrot and Knockout Kned after
he rapes the latter’s girlfriend. All these characters except Rocket die by the end of the movie and
Carrot gets arrested following encounters with the police. Rocket finds a job in a newspaper as a
trainee photo-journalist.
123
values as parallel moves of urban planning, but the civil component of citizenship
remained seriously impaired, owing to economic underdevelopment. This disjunction
between politics and economics was bridged by systemic violence. As the state could not
provide citizenship rights, and in many ways suppressed demands for it, it lost legitimacy
as an institution of justice. This loss of legitimacy fueled criminalization of the poor, and
mushrooming of illegal, parallel economies. That in turn required forceful regulating
bodies, like the armed gangs. Since even these gangs failed to have total control over
their business
54
(since they have to expand according to Capitalist necessities), the cycle
of violence proliferates (Holston 1999).
55

The cycle of violence is summarized in one brilliant sequence of the film. One of the
protagonists of City, Knockout Kned, in spite of his intention to live a non-criminal civic
life in the favela, gets drawn into drug trade under unavoidable circumstances and as
everybody else, is killed. The sequence where he makes the decision to join a
sympathetic drug dealer starts as follows. Lil Ze (Kned’s rival) sends a messenger boy to
Carrot (the sympathetic drug dealer and leader of Lil Ze’s rival gang before Kned)
proposing Ze would strike a truce with Carrot if Carrot kills Kned. The trajectory of the
message from Ze to Kned through the messenger kid and Carrot is constructed through
two false matches where Ze and the kid repeat the same dialogue. The camera pans along
the eye line of Ze to show the kid, but when we see him, he is already at Carrot’s den

54
Like in Tribulation, usage of maps to depict this crisis in the City of God is significant. To
describe the power relations of the city, three mapped territories controlled by three groups are
seen in the movie. While describing each group their territory is outlined with fluorescent color,
while the rest of the map is left dark.

55
For a detailed discussion of this process, see James Holston and Teresa P.R. Caldeira.
‘Democracy and Violence in Brazil’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (Oct.
1999) 691-729
124
conveying the message. Carrot enters the frame through a reverse/oblique pan in the next
shot. Hearing the proposal he looks off-screen in a parallel direction as Ze in the earlier
shot, and following another pan along Carrot’s eye line we see a closet, from where Kned
comes out. Realizing Kned is already under Carrot’s protection the messenger kid flees
the room pursued by one of Carrot’s associates. Meanwhile, Carrot asks Kned to make a
decision about his future. Here, as Kned contemplates, the frame splits unevenly,
approximating with the spatial proportion between the room and the favela alleys. In the
narrower frame, the kid is being pursued. In the wider frame there is a close-up of Kned,
deciding between two choices of eventual death. As the kid looses the race and gets
dragged back to Carrot’s room, the split is resolved in a push cut. Kned decides to join
Carrot.
I will argue social production of the favela space is recreated cinematically in this
sequence. The combination of pan, false matches and the split frame resemble the flow of
dispossession – in this case Kned’s dispossession of citizenry – that propels the parallel
economy of drug trade, the alternative space for capitalism proper. While the trajectory of
camera movement resembling the letter ‘z’ gives an impression of a magical, three
dimensional volume, repetition of dialogue connecting disparate places in the continuum
of false matches foregrounds the unequivocal brutality of the process of accumulation,
that renders all the involved characters eventual victims
56
. That way, this is also an

56
As we learn through the film, the surplus of drug trade is used for buying weapons mediated by
the police. While gunfights in the favela cleanse people already excluded from the legal sphere of
larger society, the surplus eventually makes it way back to places manufacturing Uzis and AK 47.
In the documentary accompanying the DVD of City, the former police chief of Rio makes this
point. Zizek has written in this context that, “Although it is global, encompassing all worlds,
[capitalism] sustains a stricto sensu “worldless” ideological constellation, depriving the great
125
example of ‘annihilation of space by time’
57
which culminates in the split frame. The
split momentarily ruptures the symbolic order of the image. Like the disunity of space,
Kned is torn here between two subject positions, the citizen and the criminal. At another
level, it draws a parallel between the kid and Kned, alluding to the broader social
dynamics of the favela. While Kned looses his defense against criminalization in the
room, the kid looses its innocence in the alley, realizing the fragility of Ze’s protection. In
this referential de-corporealization, we confront the traumatized absent subject
58
, Giorgio
Agamben’s Homo Sacer, who has to be disavowed for the unity of the image once more,
when the subject position for Kned as the criminal has been restored, and the new spatial
order has been established.
Favelas do not match the idyllic image of St. Augustine’s City of God. Rather they
resemble what he called earthly city described as follows,
…the earthly city, which shall not be everlasting (for it will no longer be a city
when it has been committed to the extreme penalty), has its good in this world, and

majority of people of any meaningful ‘cognitive mapping’. The universality of capitalism resides
in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a “civilization,” for a specific cultural-symbolic world,
but the name for a neutral economico-symbolic machine. (Zizek 2006: 318)”

57
Marx defined this as a characteristic of capitalism, since capitalism brings dramatic changes to
places through rationalization/re-organization of space for swifter circulation of capital. Castells
has argued that within the sphere of network society this dynamics has changed, since with
integration of the global financial market bulk of investments are made based on speculations of
future return (as we have seen through the recent collapse of the housing bubble in the US),
whereby ‘space eats time’ (Castells 1996). The dynamics I have described in this therefore a
phenomenon of marginal capitalism.
58
Zizek writes, “the Real is the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is
anamorphically distorted; it is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and
the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting
screen which makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of
perspective from the first standpoint to the second (Zizek 2006: 26).”

126
rejoices in it with such joy as such things can afford. But as this is not a good which
can discharge its devotees of all distresses, this city is often divided against itself by
litigations, wars, quarrels, and such victories as are either life-destroying or short-
lived. For each part of it that arms against another part of it seeks to triumph over
the nations through itself in bondage to vice. (Book XV. CHAP. 4
of The Conflict And Peace Of The Earthly City
59
)

But it is also a city where lack of state support and violence make people depend on
miracles for survival. This is the reason the city is known by its dwellers as City of God-
a place where miracles happen, where the real and the magical co-exist. The characters
try to solve the miracle/mystery of the city weaving their own outsider’s perspectives in
the movie. For example, Clipper, a member of the relatively amateurish gang ‘tender trio’
from the 60’s, develops faith in God after his life is unexpectedly saved during police
firing.
60

Lil Ze, on the other hand, visits a shaman who worships the devil, on his 18
th
birthday. In
a room lit with candles, the smoking shaman (whose face we never see fully, like the
under represented ‘Third World’ in Tribulation. He is the pre-Christian trace in post-
colonial Brazil that gives Brazilian capitalism its specific character. Therefore he is like

59
See, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/aug-city2.html, accessed on December 9, 2005.

60
The ‘Tender Trio’ was being pursued by the police after a motel hold up. As the cops chase a
suspect, Clipper walks past them in a gentle pace, posing as an innocent civilian. Another boy of
the same age, who is actually a ‘worker’ according to the police, starts running in anticipation of
a shootout, and gets killed. The cops realize their mistake and decide to make the kid a
posthumous hoodlum. A bullet hits a rear view mirror of a bike after several deflections off the
imposing walls of the favela alleys, right next to Clipper (the effect is induced by virtuoso rapid
pace, discontinuous cutting). Clipper keeps walking without blinking his eyes, limping towards
the sound of an echoing church sermon, which can be heard in the background throughout the
sequence. Along with this contrapuntal use of sound and the sepia tone, the sequence becomes
magical with a piece of retrospective information. What appears to be Clipper’s disguise during
the sequence turns out to be truth, as we are told he has become a priest. This episode, along with
two other stories, marks the end of a generation in the history of teen hoodlums in City of God.
This was a time when people were still nostalgic about integration into the civil society like in the
pre-capitalist times, and crime was a pastime. Two of the three members of the tender trio die
nurturing that hope, but Clipper survives.
127
the metonymical found footage, existing only in the realm of the signifier. This is the
only time, we have access to him in the film) suggests ‘why live in the city of God, where
God has abandoned you?’ He gives Lil Ze an amulet that would give him power, changes
Lil Dice’s name to Lil Ze and warns him not to fornicate wearing it. Later in the film Lil
Ze rapes Knockout Kned’s girlfriend wearing the amulet. More importantly he fornicates
with the rules of consumption/cannibalism by not finishing off Knockout Kned at that
very moment, and thus scripts the beginning of his own end.
Lil Ze starts off as the epitomic lumpen proletariat. As it is narrated in the film, he is
ugly. Lacking the symbolic capital of look, he has to force or pay for women’s attention,
unlike his rival Knockout Kned who is handsome. ‘He could either perish, or defy the
laws of God, by making his own.’ Therefore he rebelled against his elder brothers, and
made the current laws of the city through cannibalism
61
. He brings to the city the rules of
killing as a means of accumulation. In other words, organized capitalism entered the City
of God holding Lil Ze’s hand as he transformed himself from a robber to drug dealer
62
.
Before him people who had money used to be in the drug business, now people with
more guns ran it.

61
In the Brazilian context, cannibalism has two connotations. According to Oswald de Andrade’s
Movimento Antropofago (Cannibalist Movement) of the twenties, cannibalism is somewhat
similar to Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, where the colonized appropriates the dominant culture and
through consumption and critical elaboration transforms it. During its later revival in the mid-
sixties it came to mean simply consumerism. As Joaquim Pedro De Andrade wrote, “those who
can, ‘eat’ others through their consumption of products, or even more directly in sexual
relationships. (Stam 1995: 82)” In case of City of God, both of them apply. According to the first,
an organized business network develops without the initial capital investment. According to the
second, as gang war with Knockout Kned starts in the City, ‘more drugs means more guns, and
more guns mean more drugs’.

62
If Lil Ze works like the blind eye of profit motive, then his alter ego Benny acts like the welfare
state of this little universe. He deters Lil Ze from killing people indiscriminately and maintains a
balance of power among the hoods. His death symbolically marks the beginning of an anarchy,
which pushes the City towards total criminalization at the end of the film.
128
Knockout Kned on the other hand is the marginalized ‘civil citizen’. He worked in the
army and later as a bus conductor before joining Carrot’s gang. He looked for legal
avenues of prosperity and lived in the city with his extended family for want of a better
job. In his first meeting with Rocket as a bus conductor, he said, “I’m a peaceful person,
and I don’t like to fight. But if I have to…” At this point the frame freezes and the
narrator forecasts his future as a fighter
63
. He couldn’t find a better job soon enough and
his symbolic mainstream stability – the family and a girlfriend – attracted the wrath of
Ze. Kned retaliated for the first time when his house was attacked by Ze, after raping his
girlfriend. Eventually Kned got devoured by the spiraling violence, emerging as the
leader of Ze’s rival gang, perpetually struggling to retain his humane values.
These multiple layers of realities are strung together in City by the voice over of Rocket,
the budding photographer of the City. At a time when boys of his age group start craving
guns to taste power, Rocket became interested in cameras. As violence accelerated and
death became everyday reality in the City, Rocket became interested in preserving traces
of life, questioning the velocity of narrative temporality
64
with interiority of moments.
Details of his photographs foreground the database structure of the film revealing
alternative connotations
65
. From his perspective, the film takes shape as the matrix of

63
This is one example re-contextualization and de-contextualization takes place simultaneously.
The freeze frame ruptures the linear narrative of Rocket’s story in reference to the coming
catastrophe, but opens up a new thread of consciousness in the narrative.

64
The precarious nature of linear temporality is depicted numerous times in the film. To give one
example, after Shaggy’s dramatic death, his apparently emotional girlfriend is shown in the arms
of another guy later in the film without any commentary, almost like in a documentary footage.

65
For example, in one of his first photographs of the film he asks Tiago, then boyfriend of
Angelica – the girl Rocket secretly coveted- to step back composing for a group photo on the
beach. This move put Tiago’s face in shadow, next to lustrous Angelica in the frame. His relative
129
episodic micro-narratives crisscrossing each other, mapping the volatile social space.
Each segment, like in Tribulation, is marked by intertitles. As part of the self-reflexive
database narrative structure the segments share same footage, and re-contextualize each
other as they interweave. For example, The Story of Tender Trio ends when Rocket’s
elder brother Goose apparently leaves City to avoid arrest. The segment ends in a freeze
frame as Goose starts running after snatching some money from Lil Dice and Benny. The
sequence returns in The Story of Lil Ze, when the shot continues beyond the freeze, and
Lil Dice shoots Goose after offering him a gun for the road. Thus two functionally
different time periods- of unorganized petty crime and organized drug trade- are
punctuated through the trope of recycled temporal overlap. Like Herbert, Rocket is
socially awkward. He lacks the aggression like most people around him and fails to be a
competent criminal. Like Herbert, this slowness (he is ‘scared of getting shot’) gives him
the perspective to see life from a critical distance.
City of God is not a found footage film, but its relationship with the archive is interesting.
The film is based on a novel by Paulo Lins based on experience of the favela where he
lived. When asked, the director of the Fernando Meirelles described his style as hyper
neo realism. Although there is no newsreel footage used in the main body of the film,
during the credits names and photographs of the actors and the real life characters they
portray feature simultaneously. At the end of credits, real life Knockout Kned is seen
giving a television interview about gang wars in a newsreel clip. He utters exactly the
same words as the flamboyant fictional version used in the film. Finally, we see a written
text saying, ‘based on a true story’. Thus, the truth claim that comes before the credits in

slowness and timidity compared to the hoods and the derivative drive towards alternative
meaning fuels Rocket’s silent intervention in City.
130
Tribulation, comes at the very end in City of God, and in both cases, they frame the texts.
In both cases the resultant distantiation is a Brechtian intervention. The genre - fiction or
avant-garde - becomes a matter of secondary importance in this context.
In context of found footage films, Katherine Russell has pointed out that,
De-contextualization is the means by which the archive offers up history as a non-
narrative series of bodies and events (and)…the traces of another historical
narrative (challenges) the ideologies of capitalism grounded in bodies of time.
(Russell 1999: 258-259)

I would like to add to this assertion that, de-contextualization alone does not form any
argument against dominant meta-narratives. Formation of any argument involves
narrativization of the indexical traces found in found footage or photographs. Thus while
neither Tribulation nor City of God provides us with narrative closures, they do provide
contexts to look at images, and connect them to larger political questions. This becomes
possible through a dialogical relationship with linear narrative only. Both these films use
the power of narrative against itself, through spatialization of time.
131

Chapter 2 References

Badiou, Alain. The Century. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994.
Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 126-133. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983.

Bordwell, David. "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures."
In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 17-
34. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1969.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Carvalho, Jose Jorge de. “Review: The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of
Brasilia by James Holston.” Current Anthropology 32, no.3 (June 1991): 359-362.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture, Volume 1). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Colas, Santiago. “The Third World in Jameson’s Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of
late capitalism” Social Texts 31/32, (Third World and Postcolonial Issues, 1992) 258-
270.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Dulac, Germaine. "The Avant-Garde Cinema." In The Avant-Garde Film, edited by P.
Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage,
1995.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1989 .

—. The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford university Press, 2003.
Holston, James and Teresa P.R. Caldeira. "Democracy and Violence in Brazil."
Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1999): 691-729.
132

Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays
in Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983.

—. “On Magic Realism in Films” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 2 (Winter 1986) 301-325.
—. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991.

—. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1981.

Kinder, Marsha. "Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel's Legacy for
New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative." Film Quarterly 55, no. 4
(June 2002): 2-15.

Lem, Stanislaw. "Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature." Science Fiction Studies 1,
no. 4 (1974).

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital . New York: Monthly Review Press,
1968.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper Perennial,
2004.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Movies and Methods, edited by
Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976.

Murphet, Julian. "Pitiable or Political Animals?" SubStance 117, no. 37(3) (2008): 97-
116.

Osterweil, Ara. "Film Review: Cache." Film Quarterly 59, no. 4 (Summer, 2006): 35-39.
Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The work of film in the age of video.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down:Hip-Hop’s Hold on Young Black
Women. New York: NYU Press, 2007.

Sontag, Susan. "Notes on Camp." In Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York:
Dell Publishing, 1966.

Stam, Robert and Randal Johnson (Ed). Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995.
133

Stam, Robert. Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

134
Chapter 3
Of City, Body and Children
In City of God, Rocket sees a camera for the first time when the last member of the
‘tender trio’- the amateur criminal group- is killed by the police while trying to escape the
favela with his girlfriend, in search of a new life. This moment, when annihilation of the
dreaming body makes way for more entrenched and organized crime in the city is crucial
for the new Third Cinema. It is the time when the (dead) body is rendered transparent,
transformed into an image ready for media consumption by the photo-journalist. It is also
the time when Rocket starts using still photographs as punctuations in the frenetic
narrative of violence, as nodes from which alternative meaning can emerge, giving the
narrative critical interiority.
Before coming back to the significance of bodies in political cinema critical of neo-
liberalism, I’ll briefly discuss the discursive evolution of body as a socio-cultural artifact
in post/modernity. According to Cartesian dualism mind was an immaterial ‘thing’
substantiated by thought which constitutes subjectivity. Being ontologically distinct from
the material body, the mind or ‘animal spirit’ causally interacted with the body and in the
process, the body, as a subordinate entity extended in space, manifested the workings of
animal spirit. The sovereignty of the individual subject was paralleled here by
positionality of the body in absolute time and space. Perceptions of
subjectivity/physicality based on Newtonian time/space were challenged among many
others by structuralists. It came to be generally understood that, “The body
is…organically/biologically/naturally ‘incomplete’: It is indeterminate, amorphous, a
series of uncoordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering and long-
135
term ‘administration’, regulated in each culture and epoch by what Foucault has called
“the micro-technologies of power”. (Grosz 1992: 243)”
While Lacan pointed out that the formative psychic unity was bounded by the epidermic
surface of the body (as well as through the intervention of the [M]other’s body), Foucault
argued that with rise of the modern state since 18
th
century bodies were made over into
‘docile bodies’ by invasive disciplinary apparatus. ‘Biopower’, Foucault argued was a
practice that treated the ‘social body’ as the object of government, rather than the
individuals. It acted in preventive fashion through regulative mechanisms that are able to
account for aleatory and ‘unpredictable’ phenomenon. The legitimacy of biopower
derives from valorization of productivity of power that is partly realized through the
policies that allow for the formation of the individual (through the disciplinary
normalization plans) and bodies. Foucault wrote,
The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy
enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body – to the body that is
manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and
increases its forces…A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and
improved. The celebrated automata, on the other hand, were not only a way of
illustrating an organism; they were also political puppets, small-scale models of
power. (Foucault 1995: 136)

And later,
Through this new technique of subjection a new object was being formed; slowly,
it superseded the mechanical body – the body composed of solids and assigned
movements, the image of which had for so long haunted those who dreamt of
disciplinary perfection. The new object is the natural body, the bearer of forces and
the seat of duration…In becoming the target for new mechanisms of power, the
body offered up to new forms of knowledge. It is the body of exercise, rather than
of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority, rather than imbued with
animal spirits…This is the body Guibert discovered in his critique of excessively
artificial movements. In the exercise that is imposed upon it and which it resists,
the body brings out its essential correlations and spontaneously rejects the
incompatible [emphasis mine]. (Foucault 1995: 155)
136

Thus the mechanism Foucault describes here is, in short, manipulation/control through
naturalization, a process that neutralizes the unstructured ‘animal spirit’ that is
incompatible with the order of power.
Foucault’s concept of ‘docile body’ is important for our purpose since as we have seen in
chapter 1, in the emancipatory discourse of Third Cinema there was tremendous
investment in human capital. Distinctive/repressive separation of the colonized space
made the colonized subject question hegemonic values/equilibrium of the metropole and
as Fanon described, rebellion against domesticating values at least initially took a
corporeal expression. To reiterate Fanon’s illustration one more time, “The first thing the
colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the
dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of
aggressive vitality (Fanon 1963: 15)”. As opposed to docile bodies that were ‘political
puppets’, the rebellious body craved muscular transgression that was also a correlative of
decolonization
1
. The idea of bodily transgression of Fanon, especially in its affinity
towards spatial fluidity is similar to Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘Grotesque Body’. Stam writes,
Against the static, classic, finished beauty of antique sculpture, Bakhtin
counterposed the mutable body, the ‘passing of one form into another,’ reflecting
the ‘ever incompleted character of being’. The body’s central principle (like that of
language) is growth and change; by exceeding its limits, the body expresses its

1
The post-structuralist thrust of Fanon is underscored by the fact that enraging contemporary
Marxists and the ‘socialist camp’, he identified the revolutionary classes in terms of distance from
power in colonial regimes. For example, he wrote, “It has been pointed out repeatedly that, in
colonial territories, the proletariat is the core of the colonized people most pampered by the
colonial regime. The embryonic proletariat of the towns is relatively privileged. In capitalist
countries, the proletariat has nothing to lose; it has everything to win in the long run. In colonized
countries the proletariat has everything to lose. (Wallerstein 2000: 17)” Instead, Fanon placed his
hope on ‘casual, unskilled migrant laborers and seasonal workers in agriculture’ whom he called
lumpen proletariat and peasants respectively.
137
essence. The grotesque body is not a rigid langue, but a parole in constant semiosis.
As a shifting series of vortexes of energy, the site of unanchored polysemy and
radical differentiality, the grotesque body is given to excess, and thus to the
gigantism and hyperbole of its artistic forms – its outsized noses and swollen
buttocks, and the masks that emphasize metamorphosis and the ‘violation of natural
boundaries’. (Stam 1992: 158-9)

We have seen in chapter 1 that this concept of mutability becomes a recurrent theme in
Third Cinema, where bodies signify a larger than life utopia. Bodies as metonymy of the
welfare state multiply ceaselessly in cuts from protagonist Ranjit to wide shots of
processions and crowds in Interview, Manuel’s embodied run culminates in the
resplendent sea of prosperity in Black God, tableau shots of gun wielding Paulo envelop
the nostalgic dystopia of Land in Anguish, and the nameless young Naxalite narrates his
own death in Calcutta 71. Bakhtin’s emphasis on the ceaseless metamorphosis between
death and renewal as a shared collective human reality is further pronounced in the
contemplative duree over the photographed dead body of Che - his open eyes frontally
addressing the audience, accompanied by the voice-over “to choose death is to choose
life”- in the concluding shot of Hour. Sacrifice of the mortal/defiant body rhetorically
opens itself to the larger life force in the sequence, and in the process becomes
immortalized in the image celebrating the vivacious gaze. Disconnection with the masses
on the other hand renders the handsome body of Sergio paralytic, imploding within its
skeleton in Memories. Mutability in the above examples violates corporeal boundary, but
at another level connects individuals to a larger social entity, the developmental state,
which in turn becomes the legitimizing factor in social production of corporeality, the
corporeality Fanon described as the ‘new man, new humanity’.
138
The question of an imagined, de-colonized, social space corresponding to rebellious
bodies brings us to the second theme of this chapter, i.e. the city. Grosz wrote,
…the built environment provides the context and coordinates for most
contemporary Western, and today, Eastern forms of the body, even for rural bodies
insofar as the twentieth century defines the countryside, ‘the rural’, as the underside
or raw material for urban development. (Grosz 1992: 242)

The projected decolonized space perceived as the foundation for the emerging nation-
states in the first generation of Third cinema was rhetorically non-urban, or at least
contextualized by the underdeveloped natural economies, since the urban space in a
colonial or neo-colonial context was structurally integrated with circuits of colonialism.
While in some of the films we have discussed (like Black God) the developmental
politics directly played out from perspective of a peasant consciousness and as battle of
landscapes (between the backlands and the sea), in others, where city is the site of
contention, the non-urban functions as the critical outside. In Hour there are sequences of
police brutalities or assault on worker’s demonstrations, but when Solanas introduces
Buenos Aires to the audience, it is narrated as home for foreign banks and the place
where the pro-status quo, timid petty bourgeoisie live. The real narrative of poverty and
mal-nutrition on the other hand plays out in the countryside. Similarly, what makes
processions in the Mrinal Sen movies incisive
2
is the presence of tribals wielding bows
and arrows.
As we have seen earlier, Teshome Gabriel made distinctions between First and Third
World film theory/narrative in terms of different ‘family matrix’ and ‘face to face
tellings’ embedded in oral traditions as opposed to written, linear narratives. Gabriel’s

2
Calcutta being the most politicized city of India, political demonstrations are not out of the
ordinary spectacle otherwise.
139
concept of ‘family matrix’ is based on Metz’s argument that film spectatorship is
structurally voyeurism, analogous to the mechanism of Freudian ‘primal scene’ based on
separation of children and adult space
3
within the western family (a correlative of
separation between private and public space). The thrust of Gabriel’s argument is similar
to Jameson’s idea of the ‘political unconscious’ in the sense Jameson also argued that
while the radical split between private and public, or between the personal and the
political made the modernist novel inert, it was lack of alienation- typical of a capitalist
society - and immediacy of experience that made Third world literature political.
To the extent this public/private division does not exist in contemporary global capitalism
which actually functions on a planetory scale and highly mediated ‘face to face telling’,
has been taken over by interactive media (internet chat, social network websites, etc.), the
body politic of perception of the body as microcosm of a collective based on immediacy
of experience is not sustainable anymore. In fact mushrooming of innumerable real and
virtual communities as potential niche markets is an integral part of flexible accumulation
we have discussed in chapter 2. Rather, mutability of the body is part of dominant
discourse of late Capitalism. Being part of the interactive, increasingly automated built
environment structured by information flows, human beings become part of what
Deleuze calls the ‘humans-machines systems’.
4
Modern biology translates organisms as
problems of genetic coding – a move parallel to coding in communication sciences, a

3
For details see, Christian Metz. The imaginary signifier: psychoanalysis and the cinema.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).

4
Deleuze writes, “…cybernetic and informational machines form a third stage that reconstructs a
generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible ‘humans-machines systems’ replace the
non-recurrent and non-reversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the relation
between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage
or action. (Deleuze 1987: 458)”
140
move Haraway describes as, “a search for a common language in which all resistance to
instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly,
reassembly, investment, and exchange (Haraway 1991: 164)”. The human body like any
other object loses its integrity subordinated to these automated ‘expert systems’. Haraway
writes,
Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a
system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No
objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be
interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed
for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends
the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so
well…The cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates
politics, a much more potent field of operations. (Haraway 1991: 163)

The most prominent component of network society, the cyberspace, is a world without
bodies
5
. The absence of physical presence on the web enables exploration of multiple
selves simultaneously as well as morphing of selves with little effort. What was known as
multiple personality disorder when psychoanalysis commanded respect in the academia
therefore is the norm now for netizens who cycle through ‘society of minds’ and learn
how to "stand in the spaces between selves and still feel one, to see the multiplicity and
still feel a unity. (Turkle 1999: 645)" In the examples I have cited in this chapter, it is the
metonymic presence of the rebellious body that makes imagination of an alternative

5
Technology reduces the body to flesh here. Douglas Thomas describes how hackers exist in the
cyberspace as virtual beings. He describes the incorporeal nature of this being citing an example
from William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. The novel’s protagonist Case, a computer
cowboy, develops neurological problems that prevent him from interfacing with the computer
matrix. Gibson describes the protagonist’s now defunct relationship with the technological as
follows, “For Case, who had lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the
bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for
the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Thomas 2004: 221)”
Elsewhere, Zizek has compared surfers to the figure of astro-physicist Stephen Hawkings
suffering from motor- neuro degeneration, whose imagination travels across the universe, but
physical movement is limited to finger movements on the keyboard.
141
space possible. The exploration of desire manifested in the distributed identity on the
internet on the other hand is contingent upon scotomization of the body. Haraway points
out,
In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the western sense – a ‘final’ irony since
the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s escalating dominations
of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man
in space. An origin story in the ‘Western’, humanist sense depends on the myth of
original unity…represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must
separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths
inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism…The cyborg
skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense.
(Haraway 1991: 150-1)

Deleuze was probably the most forceful advocate of the ideology of decorporealization
among modern philosophers. Deeply influenced by the events of May 1968 like the
French new wave directors, Deleuze was responding (and over-reacting) to the
rigidity/homogeneity of Fordism when he wrote “The body without organ is desire; it is
that which one desires and by which one desires. (Deleuze 1987: 165)” Deleuzian politics
of desire is directed against the ‘state apparatus
6
’ and its overcoding mechanisms. Desire
for Deleuze is a notion of positivity that constitutes machines (like the body without
organs) that produce ‘the real’ without mediation
7
. While overcoding is a process of

6
Deleuze defines the state apparatus as “the assemblage of reterritorialization effectuating the
overcoding machine within given limits and under given conditions. The most we can say is that
the State Apparatus tends increasingly to identify with the abstract machine it effectuates.
(Deleuze 1987: 223)”

7
Criticizing the Freudian idea of desire being the chain of signifier deferring an original sense of
lack, Deleuze wrote, “Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by detour through
suffering; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the
continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though
desire was filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is
not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them
from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. (Deleuze 1987: 155)”
142
spatialization, Deleuzian life/BwO/ becoming is function of duration/ personal
temporality and rhizomatic movement. Therefore as May writes,
Incorporeality is…quality of life. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze discusses the
Stoic distinction between "states of things," which are corporeal and of the present
moment, and "events," which are incorporeal and occur as becomings in time (LS
4-6). Life is concerned not so much with the physical as with what occurs between
bodies, what changes pass across the surfaces of things that are not material but
immaterial transformations. (May 1991: 26)

Deleuzian body without organ has striking similarity with Castell’s description of
network space, or with nodes connecting the global network space to be precise. Deleuze
writes,
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by
intensities. Only intensities pass and ciculate. Still the BwO is not a scene, a place,
or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with
fantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it
produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking
extension. (Deleuze 1987: 153)

In other words, it is a mutable entity without context, facilitating and producing flows
within a network outside which nothing exists. It exists only as long as it remains part of
the flow, as the “field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire
(with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency,
whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it). (Deleuze 1987: 154)”
considering the above similarity Zizek has called Deleuze ‘the ideologist of late
capitalism’. Zizek writes,
The much celebrated Spinozan imitatio affecti, the impersonal circulation of affects
bypassing persons, is the very logic of publicity, of video clips, and so on, where
what matters is not the message about the product, but the intensity of the
transmitted affects and perceptions. Furthermore, recall hardcore pornography
scenes in which the very unity of the bodily self- experience is magically dissolved
so that the spectator perceives the bodies as a kind of vaguely coordinated
agglomerate of partial objects. Is this logic where we are no longer dealing with
143
persons interacting, but with the multiplicity of intensities, of places of enjoyment,
of bodies as a collective/impersonal desiring machine not eminently Deleuzian?
(Zizek 2004: 293)

Deleuze nevertheless has been an immensely influential figure among scholars in last
twenty years. I have briefly discussed in chapter 2 how identity based politics that find
representation in the late capitalist mediascape run the risk of being assimilated as
correlatives of niche markets. I’ll try to elaborate my point now through a quick look at
Elizabeth Grosz’s body politics in corporeal feminism as a case study. Proponents of
corporeal feminism agrue sexual difference has been produced through negation of the
body with the assumption that the body is feminine - the other of thought - in western
metaphysics. Corporeal feminists therefore contend that body is a crucial site of gender
construction. Grosz proposes her model of corporeality examining cultural meanings
associated with control of bodily fluids, i.e. pollution of the body. Bodily fluids attest to
the permeability of the body, and the control of their flow is a matter of vigilance. As
Mason-Grant writes, “Bodily fluids thereby affront the aspiration toward control and self-
containment and refuse consciousness its priority over body. Bodily fluids contravene
traditional notions of autonomy and self-identity that rely on metaphors of containment.
(Mason-Grant 1997: 215)”
Grosz argues that that while male seminal fluid is primarily understood as the causal
agent, transmitted through erection and ejaculation, women’s bodily fluids are
conceptualized as Passive: ‘leaking, uncontrolable, seeping’. Grosz argues that women’s
bodies are thus marked as inferior in terms of self-control and autonomy. Inverting this
hierachy where ‘men have cast out liquidity from their self-representations and projected
144
it onto women's representations’, Grosz proposes a body politics of ‘open materiality’, “a
set of (possibly infinite) tendencies and potentialities which may be developed, yet whose
development will necessarily hinder or induce other developments and other trajectories"
(Grosz 1994: 191).”
Grosz argues that ‘becoming woman’ means being incorporeal, defying the norms of
organisms. The unity of self that constitutes subjectivity is constituted by bodily sexual
differentiation; therefore the alterity of that difference emerges in her account as “the
very possibility and process of [feminine] embodiment. (Grosz 1994: 209)” Although
Grosz questions the unity of self, she accepts the construction of stable, hetero-normative
bodily contours relying upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and impermeability, as
Butler has pointed out.
8
In spite of claims otherwise, the body remains a pre-discursive
entity for her, upon which culture is inscribed. However, in her projection of male-female
binary opposition in terms of unity/multiplicity, she repeats the Deleuzian dyad of tree
and rhizome
9
, and at another level, logics of Fordism and flexible accumulation

8
Butler writes, “Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open
surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively re-inscribe the
boundaries of the body along new cultural lines. Anal sex among men is an example, as is the
radical re-membering of the body in Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. (Butler 1999: 169)”

9
“Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of rhizome can be connected to anything
other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.
(Deleuze 1987: 7)” The concept of corporeal ‘open materiality’ is derived from Deleuze’s
concept of BwO. Deleuze wrote, “…we treat the BwO as the full egg before extension of the
organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg
defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy
transformation and kinematic movement involving group displacement, by migrations: all
independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure
intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it changes gradient. ‘No organ is
constant as regards either function or position…sex organs sprout anywhere…rectums open,
defecate and close…the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second
adjustments. (Deleuze 1987: 153)”

145
respectively. Thus, the feminine embodiment advocated by Grosz in a way is the feminist
acknowledgement of the late capitalist dynamics. Significantly, Grosz is not interested in
struggles of any other group or the general category of ‘human’. While accepting the
broader premise of Deleuze, Grosz critics the broader scope of Deleuzian multiplicity as,
…The presumption that women’s molar struggles for identity are merely a stage or
stepping stone in a broader struggle must be viewed with great suspicion, for
Deleuze and Guattari begin to sound alarmingly similar to a number of (male)
political groups that have supported feminism on condition that it be regarded as a
stage, phase, element, or subdivision of a broader cause. These are very common
claims, claims which have been used to tie women to struggles that in fact have
little to do with them [sic], or rather, to which women have been tied through a
generalized ‘humanity’ which in no way represents their interests, which is a
projection or representation of men’s specific fantasies about what it is to be
human. (Grosz 1994: 179)

On the other hand, the embeddedness of Grosz’s position becomes clearer when she
precludes any possibility of structural social exclusion in her formulation of body-city
relationships. Grosz writes,
If bodies are not culturally pregiven, built environments cannot alienate the very
bodies they produce. However, what may prove uncondusive is the rapid
transformation of an environment, such that the body inscribed in one cultural
miliue finds itself in another involuntarily. This is not to say there are not
uncondusive city environments but rather there is nothing intrinsically alienating or
unnatural about the city. The question is not simply how to distinguish condusive
from uncondusive environments, but how different cities, different socio-cultural
environments actively produce the bodies of their inhabitants as particular and
distinctive types of bodies, as bodies with particular psychologies, affective lives,
and concrete behaviors. (Grosz 1992: 249-50)

Grosz acknowledges after Paul Virilio that the information revolution has given cities
hyper-real character where geographic space is replaced by screen interface, distance and
depth is transformed into pure surface, and interpersonal relations are increasingly
mediated by terminals and keyboards. She writes,
146
The increasing coordination and integration of microfunctions in the urban space
creates the city not as a body-politic but as a political machine – no longer a
machine modeled on the engine but now represented by the computer, facsimile
machine…a machine that reduces distance and speed to immideate, instantaneous
gratification. (Grosz 1992: 251)

Retrospectively, the concept of ‘open materiality’ inalienable from this environment of
instant gratification- where the body and city interface through the computer and body’s
limbs and organs become interchangeable parts with the computer
10
- is nothing short of
consumerism. On the other hand, Grosz does not recognize that the informational city she
describes is home for a minority population on a global scale. A vast majority of people
fail to be part of it, and that is where our interest in this chapter lies.
As Saskia Sassen has pointed out, the informational society does not exist in thin air.
Information networks require physical infrastructure, for which globally connected cities
play crucial roles as nodes in the network of flows (Sassen 2001). As centers of
managerial upper functions of the global economy, ‘mega-cities’ (currently with
population over 20 million in 2010) like Tokyo, Sao Paulo, New York, Shanghai,

10
In context of Virtual reality Lev Manovich writes, “The user was able to turn around and rotate
her/his head in any direction but s/he could not move away from the machine more than few
steps. Like today's computer mouse, the body was tied to the computer. In fact, the body was
reduced to nothing else — and nothing more — than a giant mouse, or more, precisely, a giant
joystick. Instead of moving a mouse, the user had to turn her/his own body. (Manovich 2002:
110)” Manovich gives a movie example as an illustration of this mechanism, which can be also
be read as a commentary on the relationship between Deleuzian BwO, the desiring machine, and
the physical body. Manovich writes, “The parodox of VR that requires the viewer to physically
move in order to see an image (as opposed to remaining immobile) and at the same time
physically ties her/him to a machine is interestingly dramatized in a "cybersex" scene in the
movie Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992). In the scene, the heroes, a man and a woman, are
situated in the same room, each fastened to a separate circular frame which allows the body to
freely rotate 360 degrees in all directions. During "cybersex" the camera cuts back and forth
between the virtual space (i.e., what the heroes see and experience) and the physical space. In the
virtual world represented with psychedelic computer graphics, their bodies melt and morph
together disregarding all the laws of physics, while in the real world each of them simply rotates
within his/her own frame. (Manovich 2002: 110-11)”
147
Bombay, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Paris, Rio de Janeiro etc. define the new spatial
form of the informational society. As Castells writes,
Mega-cities articulate the global economy, link up the informational networks, and
concentrate the world’s power. But they are also the depositories of all these
segments of population who fight to survive, as well as those groups who want to
make visible their dereliction, so that they will not die ignored by areas bypassed
by communication networks. Mega-cities concentrate the best and the worst…Yet
what is most significant about mega-cities is that they are connected externally to
global networks and to segments of their own countries, while disconnecting local
populations that are either functionally unnecessary or socially disruptive. I argue
that this is true of New York as well as of Mexico or Jakarta. It is this distinctive
feature of being globally connected and locally disconnected, physically and
socially, that makes mega-cities a new urban form. (Castelles 1996: 436)

An illustration of the dynamics of global connection and local disconnection can be seen
in the opening sequence of Pizza, Beer and Smokes (Argentina, 1998). The film is about
teenage criminal underworld of Buenos Aires, personified by a group of teenage boys and
Sandra, the pregnant girlfriend of Cordobes, one of the central characters of the film
11
.
The opening sequence pays homage to Hour of the Furnaces in its staccato editing where
snippets of the cityscape are intercut with title cards. The environment of crime is
underscored in the first shot featuring police cars, sirens and off screen police radio
transmission about a ‘car with suspicious characters’. This night shot is followed by a
series of discontinuous, handheld shots of the city accompanied by title music. The shots
contrast relative immobility of people – including long queues, people on wheelchair, a
lonely man presumably giving a political speech- with city traffic featuring different
kinds of transportation – cars, buses, trains and an airplane (signifying a global space).

11
Unable to make ends meet or secure steady employment, the group undertakes increasingly
risky projects of robbery. Eventually, after a botched operation of robbing a night club where they
are regularly denied entry as customers, they are pursued by the police and killed in the resulting
gun battle.
148
The movement of the vehicles is complemented by the pace of cuts and camera
movement. Pizza ‘quotes’ a sequence from Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (Mexico, 1950) later
in the film where a group of teenagers rob a handicapped man, but this frenetic pace and
in-your-face style framing, instead of static establishing shots - a consciousness of time as
velocity rather than lived time, situates the film in contemporary global economy.
Abetted by their cab driver boss, Cordobes and his friend Pablo rob a passenger in the
sequence. The passenger was headed for the airport to catch an international flight,
belonging to a world alien to these teenagers. Frustrated by the traffic jam, Cordobes
makes the mistake of getting embroiled in an argument with another cab driver during the
operation. Consequently, he is beaten up by the boss at the end of the day. The sequence
exemplifies how Cordobes, moving from Cordoba to Buenos Aires in search of a better
life is exploited by each of his boss and fails to figure out how to tread the streets of the
city
12
, while the passenger in the cab has only illegal, chance encounter with him.
The rate of global urbanization has surpassed all prediction in the last couple of decades.
According to Mike Davis, the global rural population has reached its peak at 3.2 billion
and will start shrinking after 2020. Global urban population on the other hand will absorb
most of the population growth which is supposed to peak at 10 billion in 2050 (Davis
2004). Ninety five per cent of this population growth is happening in the developing
world. While in some instances (like Shanghai) the population growth is accompanied by
vast inflow of foreign capital and export oriented manufacturing boom, most of this
urbanization is de-coupled from development or industrialization owing to ruined import

12
At one level Pizza is a road film, since most of its diegetic space is located on the streets, and
the narrative develops through a series of unsuccessful travels. The botched journeys set up the
relation of exclusion between the city and these characters.
149
substitution industries, shrinking public sectors and centrality of the service sector in
silicon capitalism. Instead, what Davis calls the ‘perverse’ urban boom, is driven by IMF
and WTO dictated agricultural de-regulation, consolidation of small into large holdings,
internationally competitive mechanized agro-business and subsequent ‘de-
peasantization’, and in some cases civil wars and natural calamities like floods or
draught. Thus, unlike the 19
th
and early 20
th
century urbanization in Europe, there is a
huge inflow of surplus agricultural labor without the complementary urban pull through
the industries
13
. Part of the surplus labor problem in Europe was solved through settler
colonies and transfer of populations away from the metropole. In neo-liberalism by
contrast, one of the major functions of the dilapidated nation-states has been regulating
legal and illegal immigration
14
, further weakening labor resistance against increasingly
mobile capital. As a result, Davis reports, “The primary direction of both national and
international interventions during the last twenty years has actually increased urban
poverty and slums, increased exclusion and inequality, and weakened urban elites in their
efforts to use cities as engines of growth. (Davis 2004: 11)”
Davis gives an interesting comparison of the historic periods before and after the rise of
welfare state as follows,

The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 is analogous to the
catastrophic processes that shaped a ‘third world’ in the first place, during the era
of late Victorian imperialism (1870–1900). In the latter case, the forcible

13
Freddy, the protagonist of Bolivia is a representative figure of this population. Immigrants,
legal or illegal, worked in the agricultural sector of Argentina until the 90s. Over last twenty years
their destination has been the urban centers in Buenos Aires (Sorrensen 2009).

14
Davis writes, “Today surplus labor, by contrast, faces unprecedented barriers—a literal ‘great
wall’ of high-tech border enforcement—blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries.
Likewise, controversial population resettlement programs in ‘frontier’ regions like Amazonia,
Tibet, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya produce environmental devastation and ethnic conflict without
substantially reducing urban poverty in Brazil, China and Indonesia. (Davis 2004: 28)”
150
incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and
Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions
more from traditional tenures. The end result, in Latin America as well, was rural
‘semi-proletarianization’: the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-
peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence (As a result,
the twentieth century became an age, not of urban revolutions as classical Marxism
had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national
liberation.) Structural adjustment, it would appear, has recently worked an equally
fundamental reshaping of human futures. As the authors of Slums conclude:
‘instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a
dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and
low-wage informal service industries and trade.’ ‘The rise of [this] informal sector,’
they declare bluntly, ‘is . . . a direct result of liberalization. (Davis 2004: 19)

Fanon’s faith on the peasantry as more of a revolutionary class than the organized urban
proletariat in a colonial context, its demand for a non-aligned nation state and rural
landscape as the national imaginary can be explained by the above understanding. The
new ‘informal proletariat’ on the other hand does not have any rooted identity owing to
displacement from the traditional environment, neither a new identity as part of the
organized working class, and obviously they cannot be integrated into the skill based
network space either as consumers or workers. The receding function of the welfare state
therefore means that the labor power of one billion people is simply expelled from the
world system. Davis writes,
But if the informal proletariat is not the pettiest of petty bourgeoisies, neither is it a
‘labor reserve army’ or a ‘lumpen proletariat’ in any obsolete nineteenth-century
sense. Part of it, to be sure, is a stealth workforce for the formal economy and
numerous studies have exposed how the subcontracting networks of Wal-Mart and
other mega-companies extend deep into the misery of the colonias and chawls. But
at the end of the day, a majority of urban slum-dwellers are truly and radically
homeless in the contemporary international economy. (Davis 2004: 26)

Not surprisingly, the dwelling place of this radical ‘homeless’- the slums – are illegally
occupied in eighty five per cent of cases in the developing world (Davis 2004: 15). Slums
151
of various nomenclatures constitute a third of global urban population. While national or
local political machines acquiesce in informal settlements for electoral loyalties or
extraction of bribes, without formal ownership slum dwellers are forced into quasi-feudal
dependency on local officials. Disloyalty to patrons or real estate business interest often
results in eviction of people or razing of entire districts
15
.
Slums in most of the world define the dual-city landscape. Davis writes,
The building blocks of this slum planet, paradoxically, are both utterly
interchangeable and spontaneously unique: including the bustees of Kolkata, the
chawls and zopadpattis of Mumbai, the katchi abadis of Karachi, the kampungs of
Jakarta, the iskwaters of Manila, the shammasas of Khartoum, the umjondolos of
Durban, the intra-murios of Rabat, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo,
the gecekondus of Ankara, the conventillos of Quito, the favelas of Brazil, the villas
miseria of Buenos Aires and the colonias populares of Mexico City. They are the
gritty antipodes to the generic fantasy-scapes and residential theme parks—Philip
K. Dick’s bourgeois ‘Offworlds’—in which the global middle classes increasingly
prefer to cloister themselves. Whereas the classic slum was a decaying inner city
16
,
the new slums are more typically located on the edge of urban spatial explosions
17
.
(Davis 2004: 19)

For abandonment from all institutional support, the informal proletariat can only be
identified by precarious possession of their physical bodies. While Deleuze and Grosz
celebrate de-corporealization and metaphoric Bodies without organs, selling body parts is
actually a means of subsistence for a section of this population as attested by the rise of
international organ trading rackets (Castells 1998: 181). The urban poor are almost

15
Davis writes, “The disenfranchised communities of the urban poor, in addition, are vulnerable
to sudden outbursts of state violence like the infamous 1990 bulldozing of the Maroko beach
slum in Lagos (‘an eyesore for the neighboring community of Victoria Island, a fortress for the
rich’) or the 1995 demolition in freezing weather of the huge squatter town of Zhejiangcun on the
edge of Beijing. (Davis 2004: 17)”

16
United States and England are exceptions in this general trend.

17
Thus, as Castells has argued, the new urban processes are defined by increasing differentiation
in social terms and simultaneous functional interrelation beyond physical contiguity.
152
everywhere forced to settle on hazardous terrains (Davis 2004: 16). For lack of any other
opportunities they also populate the lower rungs of global criminal economy engaging in
Darwinian competition for a short-lived existence of ‘individualized hyper-consumption’.
In most cases the life of hyper-consumption is just a dream seen on TV. As it is depicted
in Pizza, the kids fantasize about bumping into actresses they have seen on TV
18
while
planning to rob a swanky restaurant, but actually work for daily bread, i.e. Pizza, beer and
cigarettes. Elsewhere, after being exploited repeatedly by their criminal bosses they
contemplate other career options. Cordobes remembers his job as a railway worker, but
concludes in context of recent privatization and lay off, life as a criminal is more
acceptable. Cordobes and his group try to learn robbing techniques watching gangster
films (while watching the movies Ruben, a friend of Cordobes remarks, “See, they take
all the money and leave unlike us”), like the Tender Trio in City of God mimicking
western heroes while robbing gas trucks. Consumable, fetishized violence of the
mainstream media is contrasted in Pizza by its symptomatic treatment. Pablo, Cordobes’
accomplice, suffers from asthma attacks during their operation and once needs help from
an old lady they are supposed to rob. After they take revenge on their boss for all his
mistreatment by robbing him instead of the lady, she takes pity on Pablo, offering him
her inhaler. In another occasion, all the money they get snatching wallets from a crowd
goes into Pablo’s treatment in a hospital.

18
While waiting outside, they mistake a girl coming out of the restaurant for an actress, Calajon.
When they realize that the girl had a smaller bottom, one of the kids suggest may be she had
undergone a surgery since she does not need the older body anymore. Thus we confront here the
idea of body as an artifact, the mutability of which is the privilege of the rich, from an outsider’s
perspective.
153
At another level, presence of unwanted, material bodies are disruptions in the coded
network space
19
. The new Third Cinema is replete with examples where visualization of
the cityscape is worked through annihilation of bodies. In La Haine (France, 1996), when
the trio is visiting Paris on a RER train, they bypass a billboard depicting a globe
accompanied by the caption, ‘the world is yours’. In the very next shot the prohibitive
relationship of the city with these suburban teenagers becomes clear through a camera
technique reminding of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Starting from a long shot of a downtown
skyscraper, the boys are visually introduced to the city through a simultaneous zoom-
in/track out camera movement that evokes Scottie’s acrophobia in Vertigo. Not only the
shift in focus from the skyscraper to Said and Vinz establish an either/or relationship
between the city and the trio, the camera movement in context of La Haine gives the feel
of a ghostly, incorporeal emergence. This shot prefigures the series of exclusions the trio
will go through in the city, culminating in the final gunfight.
Carandiru (Brazil, 2003) opens with a shot of the cityscape of Sao Paulo from an aerial
view. The camera speeds down from here to focus on the prison ‘Carandiru’ within the
cityscape, after which the title card appears. The film is about this overcrowded prison,
from where many inmates don’t want to get out for they have no place in the outside
world. At another level, the prison itself functions as a body in the narrative. The number
of inmates grows in number, the characters change; there is various moods- festive,
riotous, family. Like an organism the prisoners have their own governing rules,
organizations like church, body building group, vendors etc. Most importantly, the

19
In a rather humorous example, one obese accomplice of Ebony dies in Carandiru getting stuck
in a tunnel dug in the prison by some inmates as an escape route. In the sequence his companions
ask him to suck himself in to reduce his physical volume, which can’t. Frustrated, one of the
companions knifes him to death.
154
nuances of the prison that make it humane through the film is discovered and narrated by
the doctor who comes to the prison for an AIDS prevention campaign. As the healer in an
environment of precarious existence of bodies he acknowledges towards the end of the
film that he would never have the experiences he had unless he was a doctor. Thus the
alternative vision we have discussed throughout this dissertation is enacted in the film by
shifting of perspective from juridical to clinical
20
. The prison, the largest in Latin
America with over 7500 inmates, will be demolished after a riot among the inmates and
its brutal suppression by the state, for a new wave of urban planning.
In City, as Lil Ze takes over the drug business killing older dealers after turning eighteen,
Rocket’s narration describes the new power formation of the city through a map bordered
with blood. These borders are stable only as long as one boss is in complete control of the
territory, and as we learn through the film, temporary success of one boss motivates
others to emulate the success story through a similar cycle of violence.
In Bolivia (Argentina, 2001), the Buenos Aires café where protagonist Freddy briefly
works, functions as the microcosm of the global city
21
. The cosmopolitan character of the

20
Clinical in this context is different from Foucault’s idea of the new medical epistemology 18
th

century forward. For Foucault the new dominant conception of the disease was inclusive. In the
new system of ‘pathological life’, he wrote, “disease is hooked onto life itself, feeding on it and
sharing in that ‘reciprocal commerce of action in which everything follows everything else,
everything is bound together.’ It is no longer an event or a nature imported from the outside; it is
life undergoing modification in an inflected functioning…disease is a deviation within life.
(Foucault 1973: 188)” In our case, the dominant discourse is exclusion of the prison as something
extra-bodily or inhuman. The medical vision as a minority discourse on the other hand, is
rediscovery of unacknowledged vitality. During the Rita Cadillac show in Carandiru the doctor is
referred to as the ‘medical alchemist’ therefore.

21
Bolivia starts with a television broadcast of a soccer game between Argentina and Bolivia,
where soccer giant Argentina scores multiple goals against a hapless Bolivian side. The narrative
celebrated in the simulated space of television is given ironic treatment in the diegetic space of
the film where goals parallel systemic (since just like an opponent is indispensible for victory in a
game, illegal immigrants are integral part of megacities like Buenos Aires) exclusion/obsoletion
155
space is signified by nearby streets named after different countries (Nicaragua, Uruguay,
etc.), American movies on television, half-Paraguayan origin of the waitress Rosa,
reference to gypsies and Turks for professional reasons by regular patrons of the café,
and frequent visit by a gay salesman (who is subject to ridicules, just like his fellow
‘other’, illegal immigrant Freddy). The contemporary economic crisis of Argentina
22
is
reflected by the plight of patron Oscar, who is not able to pay the bills having lost
possession of his Taxi cab. Freddy becomes victim of xenophobia- common during times
of crisis among the vulnerable sections of societies- in this milieu of desperation
23
. The
flow of immigration is outlined in the film through job postings on the café window
looking for cooks at the beginning and end of the film. It is evident that Enrique, owner
of the café has hired people like Freddy earlier for immigrants are willing to work for less
than minimum wage. The last posting also suggests that the vacuum left by Freddy will
be filled soon, in spite of the warning by the policemen right before Enrique posts the
new advertisement. In between, Freddy has to die. The manager of the hotel affirms to
Rosa that it is a common experience for him when guests don’t return after paying in
advance, and even though it is a monetary gain, he has to fold their clothes and store their
luggage.

of people like Freddy. Thus the film sets up a thematic opposition between the network space and
place of the people.

22
One of the hardest hit sections by the crisis was the lower middle class represented by
Oscar in Bolivia. In the worst moments of the economic crisis between 1999 and 2001, the
government virtually froze all bank accounts for twelve months to impede capital flight, and
unemployment rose to near 25% (Sorrensen 2009).

23
Oscar vents his frustration on Freddy regularly through insults and racist abuse, since Oscar
holds immigrants responsible for loss of ‘Argentine’ jobs and lower wages. One day, Oscar hits
Freddy after getting drunk, forcing Freddy to retaliate. Infuriated by the audacity of a foreigner,
Oscar kills Freddy.
156
In the last sequence of Pizza, Cordobes sends Sandra away from Buenos Aires to his
hometown Cordoba with the money robbed from a night club. As the ferry is tugged
away from the dock, Cordobes falls on his knees succumbing to the bullet wound he
received
24
. Shot from behind through a netted fence, he sits as a nameless body, at the
margin of land and water as the cops approach him. Cut to a wide, long shot, as his body
is carried away. As the camera zooms out bringing the city skyline into view, Cordobes
or the cops carrying the body becomes unnoticeably tiny in the frame, giving the shot a
look of inanimate architecture. The dock, surrounded by landmasses and the skyline on
one side, and framed by the camera on the other, itself looks like an open wound, given
perspective by the zoom out. The narrative continues hereafter through the police radio
transmission we were introduced to in the first shot of the film. The communication
confirms it is a ‘young male, no ID, probably killed by a bullet wound’ and requests a
hearse from the headquarters for dead Pablo lying in the car he was driving. The
communication stops here, establishing the city as a network of communication through
enveloping of the film by radio transmissions, and counterweighing the network space by
exclusion of living bodies.
Another salient aspect of urbanization in last twenty years is explosion of over-exploited
children. Davis informs that at least half of the slum population in most developing cities
is under the age of twenty. According to 1996 ILO report, about 250 million children
between ages of 5 and 14 were working for pay in developing countries, of which 120
million were working full time. Castells writes,
Out of reach of statistical observation, large numbers of children, both in developed
and developing countries are involved in income generating activities linked to the

24
This impossibility of return to an older identity is another defining feature of the Fourth world.
157
criminal economy, particularly drug traffic, petty thefts, and organized begging.
Much of the proliferation of street children is linked to these activities. Thus,
studies in Brazil, whose cities, and particularly Rio de Janeiro, have been
highlighted as the most striking example of thousands of children living in the
street, show that, in fact, most of them return to their poor homes at the end of the
day, bringing their meager gains to the family. (Castells 1998: 154)

The surge in child labor results from the crisis of subsistence economies that force
impoverished families into survival strategies of increasing number of income earners
immediately. On the demand side, child labor is easy to exploit for its defenselessness,
i.e. lack of awareness of rights, obedience, disposability and low absentee rate. Global
networks of subcontracting and receding state power makes bypassing government
regulations on child labor laws easier. As Castells writes,
On the side of society at large, the crumbling of social institutions, behind the
façade of repetitive formulas on the virtues of traditional families that, by and large,
has ceased to exist, leaves individuals, and particularly men, alone with their
desires of transgression, with their power surges, with their endless search for
consumption, characterized by immediate gratification pattern. Why then not prey
on the most defenseless section of the society? (Castells 1998: 164)

On the other hand, in case of child soldiers used in various wars, gangs or insurgencies
around the world, it is the feeling of power, of ‘becoming a man’ – avenues of which are
otherwise closed - are motivations for being fierce, to kill and be ready to die.
Becoming a man and its achievement through varying degrees of violence can be seen in
City where the Tender Trio is happy only robbing the motel, but being snubbed by them,
younger Lil Dice asserts his fierceness by killing the guests at the hotel without any
purpose of direct material gain. The new level of ferocity in turn marks the emergence of
a new economy and spatial organization of the favela.
158
This motif gets ironic treatment in Pizza when the boys discuss a phallic watch tower in
the central city and connect it to a fictional character Obelix, whose penis acts as the
magnet of all masculine forces in the vicinity. In order to sense the power associated with
the bird’s eye view of the watch tower
25
, the boys climb the tower, only to see Sandra –
who could not join them for her advanced stage of pregnancy- being taken away by the
police for loitering (or some other undisclosed charge).
In context of our discussion, particularly interesting is the figure of rebel teenager which
is characterized by liminality, i.e., on the one hand, by its disjunction with the
family/domestic space, simultaneous inheritance of an excluded urban space, and on the
other, its proximity and simultaneous lack of access to the larger adult world (i.e.
consumer culture). The construction of masculine identity in La Haine illustrates this
positionality most forcefully among the films discussed in this chapter. La Haine is a
banlieue (industrial suburb) film about structural exclusion of post-colonial young
immigrants in the outskirts of Paris, featuring 24 hours of a diegetic span, a day after riots
break out in a government housing project following brutal battering of an Arab teenager
in police custody. As Castells writes,
The suburban world of European cities is a socially diversified space; that is,
segmented in different peripheries around the central city. There are the traditional
working class suburbs, often organized around large, public housing estates…There
are the new towns, French, British or Swedish, inhabited by a younger population
of the middle classes, whose age made it difficult for them to penetrate the housing
market of the central city. And there are also the peripheral ghettos of older public
housing estates, exemplified by Paris’s La Courneuve, where new immigrant
populations and poor working families experience exclusion from their ‘right to the
city’. (Castells 1996: 432)

25
For a detailed discussion of the contrast between the bird’s eye view of power and its
subversion by people on the ground level altering and individualizing mass culture, see Michel de
Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
159

As it surfaced during the riots of 2005, in a post-industrial context unemployment is a
huge problem in the working class housing projects owing to shrinking manufacturing
sectors. As a consequence, many older males, i.e. the father figures, survive on
unemployment benefits, unable to support their families. Functional absence of the father
is reflected in La Haine by the absence of any adult male in the families of the three lead
characters. While Said’s family is never seen in the film, Vinz lives with his grandmother
and sister. Hubert, the most balanced of the three, supports his mother and sister dealing
Hashish. There is also reference to his incarcerated brother in the film underscoring
prevalence of criminal connections in the suburbs. The absence of a male role model is
substituted in the banlieue by the hip-hop culture and Hollywood movies. Hip-hop being
a product of post-industrial inner city culture of America resonates well with the
perspective of banlieue, and the masculine themes of crime, guns, or individualized
opposition to the police disseminates without friction among the teenagers lacking other
frames of perspective beyond their cramped lives in the suburbs
26
. The media saturated
ambience of the banlieue is foregrounded in the film as Vinz (and his excessive energy)
is introduced in the film through an extra diegetic performance of acrobatic hip-hop
dancing. As a symbolic protest against police brutality the day before, a friend of the trio

26
The lack of mobility, social or otherwise, and ghettoized existence is marked in the film
repeatedly. One of the strategies Kassovitz employs to this end is marking of time in black frames
between sequences. Spatialization of time contextualizes the social space of the ghetto. It also
produces the banlieue as a territory outside passage of dominant time. As Schroeder writes, “The
use of the time markers is a strategy of narration, but it also plays ironically at particular moments
when the markers surround shots of idle time as experienced by the main characters. The
progression of time contrasts sharply with the lack of outlets and activities in the protagonists’
lives, and the markers are particularly effective in illustrating the duration of the night the trio
spend waiting for the morning RER train back to the banlieue. In addition, the entire film takes
place in the lull or idleness after the spectacular “event” of the riots. (Schroeder 2001: 171)”
160
practices DJ-ing, playing N.W.A’s 1988 hit ‘fuck the police’ on a turn table in front of a
window, as if making the whole banlieue his audience. Said narrates a gangster movie
sequence to Vinz with great excitement where the protagonist says, “You are my friend, I
won’t kill you for money, if I have to, I’ll kill you for free”. While they refuse to be
interviewed by the TV crew from the city after the riot, the characters live an imaginary
existence as movie characters (and hence, the aphorism in the film, ‘choose your
characters carefully’). In a remarkable scene, Vinz does a Robert DeNiro performance
from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) in front of a mirror (and the camera, therefore
emphasizing the theatricality) holding the gun stolen from the police uttering, “you
talking to me?” Appropriation of these pastiche identities
27
is in fact, failed attempts to
mask the lack of orientation for Vinz. When Hubert tries to pacify his aggressiveness,
Vinz replies, ‘why do you talk as if you know what you are talking about?’
The precarious nature of this craving for power through appropriation of media-image
induced ferocity is de-constructed through the narrative of La Haine, especially when the
trio is in the city. Vinz fails to gather courage to shoot when Said’s friend, Snoopy,
provokes him to do so in his apartment, only to realize later Snoopy had already removed
the bullets by sleight of hand, exposing the inexperience of Vinz with guns. Said also
loses his money as a consequence of this confrontation. Later, when his acquaintance

27
Schroeder writes, “… as Vinz imitates Travis Bickle’s “you talkin’ to me?” performance in the
mirror, how are we to read this gesture in terms of the Taxi Driver character’s fixation on the
scum of New York City, clearly defined at times in heavy eyeline matches between Bickle and
anonymous black men on the sidewalk? If La Haine offers a space of performance that harnesses
some of Bickle’s rage, Taxi Driver’s diagnosis of the urban condition and its promise of a
vigilante solution that secures the fame of its white male savior sits uneasily in La Haine’s
universe. (Schroeder 2001: 167)” It is a fact that Vinz being of Jewish background identifies
himself with Arabs, ‘the ultimate other’ in the film, but Schroeder misses the point that it is the
very irony of assuming such a de-contextualized position that defines the non-identity of Vinz.
161
from the suburb actually shoots a bouncer after being denied entry to a dance club, Vinz
finds it disturbing.
Finally, the trio is actually snubbed for their aggressive, macho attitude and lack of
symbolic capital of high culture at the middle class party they crush. Said, who is
obsessed about clothes and haircuts, requests Hubert to introduce him to two girls that
walk in to the party. While Hubert tacitly describes Said as a ‘shy poet who wants to talk’
to the ladies, Said immediately asks for their phone numbers. When the girls sarcastically
remind Said of Hubert’s introduction, Said assertively retorts arguing, ‘off course, I’m
shy’. The boys are politely driven out after the ensuing altercation; an elderly man closes
the door on them, and remarks, ‘malaise of the ghetto’.
Thus, Castells concludes,
…We are witnessing a dramatic reversal of social conquests and children’s rights
obtained by social reform in mature industrial societies in the wake of large-scale
deregulation…What is different is the disintegration of traditional societies
throughout the world, exposing children to the unprotected lands of mega-cities’
slums…What is new is the disintegration of patriarchalism, without being replaced
by a system of protection of children provided either by new families or the state
28
.
And what is new is the weakening of institutions of support for children’s rights,
such as labor unions or the politics of social reform, to be replaced by moral
admonitions to family values which often blame the victims for their plight…At the
roots of children’s exploitation are the mechanisms generating poverty and social
exclusion throughout the world…With children in poverty, and with entire
countries, regions, and neighborhoods excluded from relevant circuits of wealth,
power, and information, the crumbling of family structures breaks the last barrier of
defense for children (Castells 1998: 162-3).

28
This theme is recurrent in Pizza as Cordobes is unable to provide for Sandra or the unborn
baby. Sandra initially runs away from her abusive father before meeting Cordobes, but she has to
return because of the precarious existence of the group and her pregnancy. Cordobes secretly
brings her useless gifts like a pack of cotton (Sandra asks him what was that for to which
Cordobes replies “you’ll soon be leaking a lot. This will keep you dry” as a hopeless romantic.
Cordobes keeps assuring Sandra that things are ‘almost under control’ until his death, after which
Sandra has to leave Buenos Aires on a ferry, all by herself, and bearing the child.
162
A parallel trajectory in the changing status of children can be traced in the history of
political cinema after World War two. In neo-realist films (made during execution of
Marshall Plan and post-war reconstruction) the figure of the child functions as
embodiment of ‘immanence’, passionately eulogized by critics like Bazin. This
immanence is incorruptible. By the narrative logic therefore, the child undergoes
hardship, but never dies. This survival in turn becomes the politics of neo-realism
29
. By
the time Hector Babenco made Pixote (Brazil, 1981), there were already 3 million street
children in Brazil. As a result we do see children being killed and raped, and even an
aborted fetus addressed as ‘meat’ in the film. However, there is still nostalgia about
innocence around the figure of child, as exemplified by the character of Pixote. The
original title of the film was Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco, the second phrase meaning
‘survival of the weakest’. The title refers to a social space where weakness of state
institutions, absence of adequate welfare networks, poverty and unpredictable
chaos/violence falsifies the scientific hypothesis of Darwin
30
. Survival of Pixote, the
weakest of the group portrayed in the film, is therefore a magical possibility. Babenco is
aware of the precariousness of this politics
31
, as it is apparent in the penultimate sequence
of the film, where prostitute Sueli frustrates Pixote’s fantasy of maternal reunion by

29
This is significant since, some early theorists of Third Cinema, like Glauber Rocha, Fernando
Biri or Julio Espinoza, were heavily influenced by neo-realist aesthetics.

30
Actually the phrase “survival of the fittest” was first used by Herbert Spencer, inspired by
Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Spencer used the term to criticize theories of ‘Free Market
Economy’, proposed by classical economists like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus and
characterized Laissez-faire as ‘Social Darwinism’. Whatever relevance and sustainability free
market economy had in context of the First World, in Third World contexts absence of social
welfare has simply meant depriving vast populations of basic human rights. Therefore, if by the
logic of social Darwinism in Europe the weakest should be most vulnerable, the lack of social
order in the Third World, especially among street children, makes survival a matter of chance.

31
The boy playing Pixote in the film was actually killed in street violence after the film.
163
pushing suckling Pixote away from her breast, after initial nurturing. Pixote has to take to
the streets after this, depending on his gun for survival, but at least as a negated desire the
fantasy exists. On the other hand, in films made during high times of neo-liberalism I
have discussed so far, death of children is the very condition for progression of
narratives. As attested in the concluding sequence of City of God, while Rocket struggles
to establish himself as a news photographer, the link between the scene and the
disavowed, his subjects turn out to be increasingly younger children playfully planning to
kill each other wielding real guns.
I have tried to illustrate in this chapter how physical bodies including children stand in a
relation of exclusion in the neo-liberal cityscapes. On one hand we have cyborgs
connected to computer terminals and the global network space. On the other, we have an
unprecedented influx of people possessing only their bodies who are denied ‘right to the
cities’. The informal proletariat is therefore analogous with Agamben’s idea of Homo
Sacer (Agamben 1998). Agamben borrows the term from Roman law which means
‘sacred man’. Agamben defines the figure of Homo Sacer as someone who can be killed
with impunity but may not be sacrificed (i.e. killed according to some lawful ritual)
32
.
The ‘sacred man’ is left with only ‘Zoe’ or ‘bare life’ but no politics. The existence of the
‘sacred man’ demonstrates according to Agamben how politics constitutes itself through
exclusion that nevertheless binds the excluder to the excluded. As we have already seen,

32
In an interesting analogy, Hector Babenco in his introduction to Pixote (1981) reports that most
children in the favela, especially those without known family origins take to crimes (or lured into
it by adults) knowing they can not be prosecuted and if they are sent to reformatories, they will
soon be released for overcrowding of those institutions. However, this impunity exposes the street
children to violence both from the state as well as the world of crime.
164
the informal proletariat, although excluded from the world system, left only with physical
bodies and no organized politics, is creation of neo-liberalism at the same time.
Perhaps the visualization closest to Agamben’s description of Homo Sacer can be seen among the
films we are discussing in Carandiru, after the riot squad regains control of the prison through a
bloodbath. In the sequence, the organized brutality of the police surpass all violence witnessed in
the film so far, the policemen behave just like the criminals as they steal things, give prisoners
false hope of life before killing them for pleasure, and torture surrendered inmates (In the actual
riot of 1999 after which the film is made, 111 inmates died without any injury on part of the
security forces). The remaining alive inmates are made to come out of their wings naked after the
riot shouting eulogy for the riot squad, and then seated heads between knees in the field outside.
This is the last time we see the inmates in human form, before the metaphoric demolition of the
prison in the last scene. As the inmates sit waiting for the next order, or a possible bullet, their
‘bare life’ is emphasized in the sequence by its long duration, shots from multiple angles
including top-shots, and an overarching silence.
Relevant to this discussion is the recurring theme of individuals without IDs in the five films I
discuss in this chapter. We have already seen Cordobes is reported as ‘young male, without ID’
after his death in Pizza. Similarly, being an illegal immigrant the protagonist of Bolivia avoids
encounters with policemen and remains metaphorically anonymous even after his death. In La
Haine radio transmission in front of an attacked police station announces arrest of a teenager with
no ID towards the beginning of the film and later Vinz, while in Paris, runs away when asked for
ID. On the contrary, in the sequence where Clipper miraculously survives police firing on his way
to church in City, the child worker accidentally killed is identified by his worker’s ID, but
realizing their mistake the policemen decide to report him as a person with no ID implying a
criminal identity. These examples of bodies without legal identities that may be killed with
impunity attest the disavowed presence of the fourth world dispersed around the world, as
165
Castells has argued. Ironically, the doctor in Carandiru, the narrator and the mismatched figure of
healing/life in the abandoned prison of death, is asked to wait until he is identified by a prison
guard, illustrating the inanimate apparatus of classification.
33
Realizing the exceptional presence
of welfare in the territory of exclusion, Ebony, one of the inmates, asks after the first day,
“Doctor, will you come back?”
Agamben expands his idea of the sacred man in The Open: Man and Animal, focusing on
how the animal as the figure represents ‘bare life’, especially late twentieth century
forward. Agamben argues that “the caesura between the human and the animal passes
first of all within man (Agamben 2003: 16)”. Since Aristotle human beings have been
defined isolating them from animals, but since ‘bios’, the human form of political life
cannot be separated from the ‘zoe’, the animal of the man takes up the same position as
the Roman ‘sacred man’. Agamben argues therefore that in the biopolitical era, “The total
humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man (Agamben 2004:
77).” Agamben, after Heidegger, makes the distinction between humans (as ‘world
forming’) and animals (‘the poor in the world’) as, “the difference between a being who
relates to the world through a matrix of unbreakable instinctual interactions and a being
that, precisely by rejecting such a matrix, is one for whom the world can begin to take on

33
The guard later apologizes to the doctor saying, “Don’t take it personally. It is their job to
escape, and mine not to let them.” Agamben writes in this context, “It is not easy to say whether
the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality
is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by de-
ciding every time between man and animal… (Agamben 2003: 77)” The strategy we see in
Carandiru as a critic of this decision/exclusion/animalization is searching signs of the ‘open’.
One example of this search is the scene where Chico, an inmate for many years flies a giant
balloon he made as a hobby. The balloon rises high, beyond the boundaries of the prison, as the
doctor watches it from his office window. We learn later in the film the flying balloon is also his
metaphoric dream to unite with his children after finishing his term. As an exception to the norms
of the prison, it actually happens one day.

166
significance or meaning (Dienstag 2006: 150).” The possibility of significance is the
‘open’ for Heidegger. Agamben writes,
The open is nothing but a grasping of the animal not-open. Man suspends his
animality and, in this way, opens a “free and empty” zone in which life is captured
and a-bandoned …in a zone of exception (Agamben 2003 (Deleuze 2003): 91)

For our purpose, if the ‘free and empty’ zone is the network space and suspension of
animality is de-corporealization, then being trapped in one’s body and being defined by it
is the very process of animalization
34
.
The most hardened criminals, inmates in the yellow wing of Carandiru, have lost all
desire for the ‘open’, in all sense of the term. They are content with the darkness of their
cells like subterranean creatures. They don’t want to see the sun anymore. Freddy in
Bolivia is subject to the burden of ‘total management’ of animality that humanity of man
has to bear. First, he is displaced from Bolivia and removed from his family after the
American troops burn down the cocoa fields he worked on. In Buenos Aires he is
regularly ridiculed for his indigenous looks and thick accent (Oscar once accuses him of
mumbling in the film). His anonymity is attested in the first sequence when the initial job
negotiation between him and Enrique happens off screen against the detailed visuals of
the functional space of kitchen, of which he would be a part only for a short while.

34
It should be noted here that this animalization is different from the animalization Deleuze
celebrates. For Deleuze, animalization is releasing the ‘autonomous’ animal spirit in the process
of realization of body as ‘meat’. Commenting on paintings by Francis Bacon Deleuze writes,
“What happens is that an animal, a real dog for example, is outlined as the shadow of its master;
or conversely the shadow of the man assumes an autonomous and unspecified animal existence.
The shadow escapes from the body like an animal to which we give shelter. Instead of formal
correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of the indiscernible, of the
undecidable, between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but he does not become so without
the animal simultaneously becoming spirit, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented
in the mirror as Eumenides or fate. (Deleuze 2003: 16)” The animalization Agamben talks about
is the forced, structural political/juridical exclusion.
167
Finally when Freddy is shot, the film goes silent. Absolute silence is a disruption by the
norms of sound films that needs to be cleaned up, i.e. a new advertisement must be
posted for another live Freddy. The silence denies Freddy of speech reducing him to the
status of an animal, but at the same time ensures his metaphoric, ‘peaceful death’ that an
animal deserves from human beings, according to Agamben.
A more direct process of animalization is alluded to in the opening sequence of City of
God. The high speed block montage sequence that establishes the carnivalesque cook out
at Lil Ze’s rooftop is interspersed with shots of chickens giving terrified looks as various
stages of slaughtering, skinning and barbequing meat takes place in a festive ambience
accompanied by samba music. This look is presumably the instinctive response to the
high strung tone of the sequence set by the initial close-ups of a shining knife being
sharpened against a dark surface, intercut with short black frames. The flashy, high pace
contrast between light and darkness gives a sense of cold, viscerally jarring inanimate
violence to which the chickens react. When one of the chickens manages to escape this
scene, Lil Ze orders his boys to get the chicken, and they run after the animal, firing guns,
as if playing a hide and seek game. The position of the fleeing chicken is paralleled here
with that of Rocket who always wanted to escape the hood since ‘he was scared to be
shot’. As Rocket re-enters the hood in search of a picture that would get him a newspaper
job - an escape route out of the city - his path meets with the fleeing chicken. Both the
chicken and Rocket are caught between the police car that arrives at the scene and the
‘hoods’ led by Lil Ze. Simulating the tied chickens on the rooftop, Rocket turns his head
back and forth in directions of the police and Lil Ze respectively. This is where his
narration of the film begins. This convergence is significant from the perspective of
168
adaptation of City of God since the chicken sequence is a trivial episode in the novel by
Paulo Lin. Similarly Rocket as a photographer is not central to its theme. Part of the
politics of City, the film, therefore is foregrounding of this animal vision, which is also a
photographic gaze. Murphet writes,
The cinema’s amoral magic was always to have presented movement-images,
recognizable as “human” through resemblances of various kinds, from which the
ethical assumption of subjectivity was miraculously suspended. The cinematic gaze
was one that voyeuristically encountered mobile human forms shorn of interiority,
depth, and the returning gaze in a way unmatched by any previous representational
medium. The sense of “humanity” it conferred upon a massed spectatorship was
thus achieved via the spectacle of its own serial flattening and dehumanization. The
gigantic two-dimensional images of human faces, gaits, gestures, seemed always
already to have drifted into the territory of the “non-man,” the automated machine
proxy or animal domain of deathless doubles, since every aspect of this uncanny
movement was perfectly repeatable and invariable, embalmed in a timeless
mechanical continuum out of all synch with the stochastic durations of “real” social
bodies. (Murphet 2008: 101)

If the decisive political conflict of our time is ‘between the animality and the humanity of
man’ as Agamben has argued, then the return of this animal subjectivity, aided by the
prosthetics of camera is the counterpoint that returns history into its own making. By
witnessing/contextualizing one’s own animalization, the gaze confronts the symptomatic
inanimate/post-human, i.e. proliferation of global criminal economy
35
.
Similar politics can be seen in Carandiru, when towards the end of the riot, Dada- the
young soccer player- saves his life lying still, along a row of dead bodies. After the
policemen leave, a dog walks along the way sniffing the bodies, and meets a cat coming

35
As Castells describes, the growth of organized crime and violence is a direct result of advanced
communication technologies which makes access to sophisticated small arms like Uzi made in
Israel possible in the favela, mediated through corrupt policemen and arms dealers. In the
documentary on City of God, the favela, featured in extra section of the DVD of the film, an ex-
police chief of Rio suggests in order to curb the drug trade in the favelas, arms industries in
Switzerland and America must also be curbed simultaneously, since as Rocket narrates in the
film, “more drugs means more guns, and more guns mean more drugs”.
169
from the opposite direction half way through. The two animals look at each other
peacefully, as if they have seen something (i.e. the animality of human beings) that unites
them. The animalized inmates on the other hand, address the camera documentary style
and narrate their experience/perspective of the riot adding a politics of truth claim.
Thus combinations of these animal and clinical visions add interiority to the excluded
characters and return the relational identities of their past lives, humanizing them. The
narrative of Carandiru starts from the yellow wing of the prison, where the most
hardened criminals like dagger live. As the doctor sees more patients and meets the
motley crowd in the process, smaller micro-narratives of personal lives told in interview
style and flashbacks defines the layered social space of the prison. Deusdete, for example
comes to jail for killing two men who molested her sister Franci. After Deusdete reported
the crime to the police, those men start harassing him. For self-defense Deusdete acquired
a gun from Zico, and eventually used it. Zico, the orphaned boy who grew up with
Deusdete’s family became a small time drug dealer. He is surprised to see Deusdete
serving a longer term, in spite of not being a criminal. Highness, a stolen car dealer,
comes to jail following arson caused by one of his two jealous wives. Ebony, who had
always kept his son away from crime scenes witnesses one day his arrival as an inmate.
Just like the outer world, happiness and tragedy take place simultaneously in the prison.
Zico loses sanity from smoking crack and pours boiling water on Deusdete, his alter ego
in the film. This takes place at the time when Lady Di and his gay partner ‘no way’
undergo their festive marriage ceremony under supervision of the doctor, in a different
170
wing. This strategy of diminishing distance between the inside and outside
36
culminates
in the visitor’s day sequence. Part of the sequence is shot from Dagger’s perspective.
Dagger is the ultimate outcast. He never had a family. Admittedly, the only thing he
learned in life was to kill, and all he possesses is his well built body. In the sequence,
Dagger finishes his daily work out at the improvised gym and climbs down the ladders
into the courtyard where visitors for the inmates have gathered to see their loved ones. As
the camera tracks Dagger’s lonely walk across the courtyard, snippets of family life,
togetherness and partnership unfold from his perspective. A group of children perform a
song on a makeshift stage. One inmate gives Dagger a scared look while doing tattoo on
his partner’s arm. Highness is interrupted while having sex with his wife Delva (and
simultaneously doing commentary of his kid’s soccer game in the corridor) as his other

36
A brief comparison between Babenco’s earlier film Pixote and Carandiru makes this strategy
clearer. There are several structural similarities between the two films. Both films are about
marginal groups with criminal connections, street children and prisoners respectively. Part of
Pixote is about the reformatory where Pixote lives, while Carandiru is a prison. Both films feature
transvestite central characters, Lilica in Pixote and Lady Di in Carandiru. Both films include
close-ups of toilets. However, treatments of their respective subjects give the films different
political positions. The toilet scene in Pixote is sensational, featuring Pixote cleaning feces
floating on water, leading to a dream sequence of him escaping the reformatory naked, pursued
by a police car. The toilet scene in Carandiru on the other hand introduces us to a tender facet of
Highness, who screams bitten by a rat, while trying to hide his drugs inside the toilet. This is the
same Highness, as Lula reminds us in the next scene, who doesn’t make a sound being hit by iron
bars. Although half of Pixote takes place in the reformatory and the rest in cities of Rio and Sao
Paulo, the two segments remain mutually impermeable, leaving characters one-dimensional. In
Carandiru on the other hand, inside and outside, past and present interweave with each other in a
process of contextualization. Pixote features many close-ups, while in Carandiru shots are wider-
emphasizing the perspective. Pixote centers on a single, even if symptomatic, character. The
narrative logic follows his path and tries to hold on to the precarious utopia of survival.
Carandiru in contrast, makes the social space its theme and gives a critical perspective to
collective social exclusion. Pixote and Carandiru therefore illustrate politics of Third Cinema
from two different eras.

171
partner arrives. A church
37
choir chants a hymn from the Bible. Alien to these spectacles
of tenderness, Dagger makes his way to the yellow wing to inform a sobbing inmate that
his partner lied to him about being HIV positive. For a change, Dagger smiles noticing
the change of expression on his friend’s suffering face.
Carandiru does not take the route of sociological analysis to roots of crime. Neither does
it glamorize crime
38
like in gangster films or hip-hop culture. Rather, through layering of
the characters and their social space with density, which is flattened in the dominant
discourse as single dimensional criminal space, Babenco questions procedures of social
exclusion materialized through the institution of the detention center. At the same time
through conflating the prison space with the outer world through contextualization, he
locates the roots of violence in larger power relations. Consistent with the claim of the
film being based on real events, the film does not give any judgmental reasoning for the
breakout of the riot. The doctor informs us the atmosphere was festive around a soccer
tournament when he left. Later in the narration, the governor’s decision to deploy the riot
squad was seen as a gimmick for quick resolution before the upcoming elections. In the
sequence where this narration happens, the riot squad is seen doing their combat drills in
the courtyard, inmates dropping their knives from the windows following a request by the
prison chief, and some demands for better living conditions being chanted. In an
interview style address to the audience one of the inmates later says, “We might be
ignorant robbers, but we are not stupid. We wouldn’t fight them with knives and sticks.”

37
The inmate’s church is going to be Dagger’s future refuge as for some ambiguous reason he
will start feeling guilty and lonely, perhaps from witnessing these spectacles.
38
Before leaving the prison Chico tells the doctor when asked about his reason for coming to
Carandiru, “You want to hear another story? Everybody lies about their reason for coming to
jail.”
172
Other than that, the narrator concludes that “Only God, the police and the inmates knew
what happened”. Therefore, putting the events in the larger context of the narrative, the
demolition of the prison monumentalized through slow motion shots of dynamite
explosions can be safely read as structural dispossession integral to the dominant
discourse of neoliberal capitalism.
A reverse process of animalization takes place in La Haine when Hubert and Said, two
boys from the suburban housing project are taken to a police station in Paris. They are
seated on chairs next to each other facing the camera, handcuffed, and used for training
another policeman how to torture criminals without ‘going too far’. Although they are not
indicted for any specific criminal charge except ‘making trouble’ in front of a middle
class building, officers treat them as guinea pigs who could be held at the police station
until they missed the last train, beat them black and blue, keep Hubert’s hashish for
personal use and with great enthusiasm demonstrate the trainee (vicariously that is also
the audience, since the scene is shot from the trainee’s POV, and the officers speak
directly to the camera) how to carry out their job. Criminality is equated in the scene with
not being proper French since Said and Hubert are of Arab
39
and African descent
respectively. Thus through a series of displacement of stereotypes, non-Parisian/non-
French/non-adult/criminal is also assigned an animal status whose physical torment
40
can
be displayed as a scientific/management procedure. The animalization is confirmed by

39
After asking for Said’s name the officer remarks, “Is that a French name, you Arab son of a
bitch?”

40
Murphet has argued that increasing sensitivity about cruelty towards animals on screen in
mainstream Hollywood is a correlative of complementary humanization of animals and
animalization of human beings. However, citing examples of bodily harm to animals as a counter
strategy of humanization in Haneke films, Murphet argues that the statement Haneke makes by
this choice is that ‘only humans suffer’. Director Kassovitz adopts a similar politics in La Hanie.
173
the change the process induces on the boys, since Said who was obsessed with the ‘cool
gangster’ image disseminated by the dominant Hip-hop culture of the suburb so far,
breaks into tears. Hubert, who has been the voice of sanity
41
so far, turns spiteful on the
other hand after the experience. Even visually, the boys are seen framed through bars
resembling a cage in the following shot begging to be freed, so that they could catch the
train home.
Hubert is involved in a gunfight with the police at the end of the film trying to save Vinz.
The outcome of the fight is unknown since the screen goes black (perhaps because the
ultimate conflict between humanity and animality of man has not been solved yet). The
conflict does suggest however, the increasing polarization between the human and the
animal territorially segregated between the central city and the suburban housing projects,
since throughout the narrative Hubert had occupied the liminal in-between status.
We have seen in the second chapter, that the political cinema critical of informational
capitalism does not have an emancipatory rhetoric like Third Cinema in the first
generation. They belong to the tradition of Third Cinema in their interest in analytic
contextualization, what Espinoza described as ‘showing the process of the problem’, but
at the same time, they retain certain skepticism/confusion about resolution,
commensurate with the pulse of our time. La Haine strongly foregrounds this politics as

41
In an earlier sequence when the boys are running away from the police, the trio comes face to
face with a policeman in the basement of an apartment complex. Vinz, seeing the opportunity to
get even with the ‘pigs’ who brutally beat up their friend while in custody, points the gun he had
stolen during the ensuing riot the day before towards the unarmed policeman, but Hubert stops
him.

174
it begins with the aphorism, ‘the question is not how you fall, but how you land’
42
. While
the film illustrates the process through which confrontation with the post-industrial state
as an apparatus of exclusion becomes inevitable, and Hubert accuses a man coming down
the escalator with a suitcase in hand as the ‘worst kind of racist’, happy to be transported
through life with ‘so far, so good’ attitude, outcome of the confrontation suggested in La
Haine remains a mystery. La Haine was made in 1995 in response to an urban riot similar
to the one alluded in the film. Contemporary relevance of the theme was re-attested when
an almost identical in form, but much larger scale riot broke out in 2005. However, only
time can tell if these acts of rebellions can factor into a progressive intervention
facilitating long term qualitative change in the current world order.

42
La Haine begins with an image of a globe shot from a top angle, on which a petrol bomb
descends as if from outer space. As the bottle lit at the neck drops, the narrator tells the story of a
man who fell of a skyscraper. As each floor passes the man kept saying ‘so far so good’. The
aphorism mentioned above comes after that as the bomb crushes on the globe and lights up the
frame before the screen goes black. The antagonistic relationship between the petrol bomb and
the globe is displaced onto Hubert and Paris later in the film when Hubert is traveling to Paris
with Vinz and Said as we see a similar globe through the train on an advertisement board
accompanied by a caption, ‘the world is yours’. It is learned through the experience of the trio in
Paris that the central city is not theirs but the relationship between these suburban boys with the
city is that of exclusion.
175
Chapter 3 References

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1998.

—. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, 2003.
Butler, Judith. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York:
Routledge, 1999.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture, Volume 1). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

—. End of Millennium. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life . Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

—. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003.

Davis, Mike. "Planet of Slums." New Left Review 26 (March-April 2004): 5-34.

Dienstag, Joshua Foa. "Review: The Open: Man and Animal, by Giorgio Agamben."
Political Theory 34, no. 1 (February 2006): 148-152.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage,
1995.

—. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Routledge,
1973.

Grosz, Elizabeth. "Bodies/ Cities." In Sexuality and Space, edited by B Colomina, 241-
254. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.

—. Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century." In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature, 149-181. New York: Routledge, 1991.
176

Mason-Grant, Joan. "Review: Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. By
Elizabeth Grosz." Hypatia 12 no. 4 (Autumn, 1997): 211-217.

May, Todd G. "The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze." SubStance 66,
20(3), (1991): 24-35.

Metz, Christian. The imaginary signifier: psychoanalysis and the cinema. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1977.

Osterweil, Ara. "Reviwed Work: Cache by Michael Haneke." Film Quarterly 59, no. 4
(Summer, 2006): 35-39.

Sassen, Saskia. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001.

Schroeder, Erin. "A Multicultural Conversation:La Haine, Raï,and Menace II Society."
Camera Obscura 46, no. 16(1) (2001): 142-179.

Sorrensen, Cynthia. "Film Review." Journal of Latin American Geography 8, no. 2
(2009): 225-228.

Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film . Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Thomas, Douglas. "Re-Thinking the Cyberbody: Hackers, Viruses and Cultural Anxiety."
In Technological visions: the hopes and fears that shape new technologies, edited by
Douglas Thomas, Marita Sturken and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, 219-239. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2004.

Turkle, Sherry. "Cyberspace and Identity." Contemporary Sociology 28, no. 6 (November
1999): 643-648.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Essential Wallerstein. New York: The New Press, 2000.

Žižek, Slavoj. "The Ongoing "Soft Revolution"." Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter,
2004): 292-323.

177
Conclusion
Death of Which Cinema?
The debate around death of cinema centers on apparatus theory. Lev Manovich has
defined five characteristics of new media, i.e. numerical representation, modularity,
automation, variability and transcoding (Manovich 2002). Broadly, all these
characteristics are functions of computer
1
mediation. Numerical representation implies all
new media objects are composed of digital code that can be described mathematically
and subjected to algorithmic manipulation. Consequently, new media consists of two
distinct layers, cultural (plot, aesthetics etc.) and computer. Transcoding implies
translation of the cultural layer into computer language and commonality of the computer
layer, i.e. data structure puts into question specificities of the previously independent
mediums. Modularity is defined by the ‘fractal structure of new media’. New media
elements (image, shape, sound etc.) are represented as collection of discreet samples that
can be organized at different scales, but the smaller units (pixels, voxels etc.) do not lose
their separate identity in the process. Possibility of alternative assembly therefore makes
new media objects variable, rather than fixed in a particular version. Numerical coding
and modular structure of the new media objects also makes automation of operations
involving media creation, manipulation and access possible. Thus, as Manovich argues,
“human intentionally can be removed from the creative process, at least in part.
(Manovich 2002: 53)”

1
Manovich writes, “All digital media (text, still images, visual or audio time data, shapes, 3D
spaces) share the same the same digital code. This allows different media types to be displayed
using one machine, i.e., a computer, which acts as a multimedia display device. (Manovich 2002:
66)”

178
In context of the dramatic changes brought to consciousness by industrial time and space,
Bazin perceived the optical/chemical recording of physical reality without human
intervention to be the power of cinema, since it preserved unity of time and space,
revealing the immanent humanist meaning of reality. Ironically, one of the outcomes of
proliferation of digital technology in cinema has been opening up possibilities of creating
film like scenes by computer programs (i.e. partly circumventing human intentionality)
without recording pro-filmic reality. Since digital images, regardless of their origin
(analogue or otherwise), are edited by pixel management, Manovich has argued, “Born
from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular
case of animation in the end. (Manovich 2002: 255)” Manovich also argues that
Beginning in the 1980s, new cinematic forms have emerged which are not linear
narratives, which are exhibited on a television or a computer screen, rather than in a
movie theater — and which simultaneously give up cinematic realism. Anne Friedberg
attributes the popularity of non-linear narratives to advent of time-shifting
institutions/mechanisms like multiplex cinema
2
and VCR (and later DVD players) which
recasts the ‘virtual mobile gaze’- which she asserts is the essence of cinematic spectation
– into a more accessible and repeatable exponent (Friedberg 1991), making spectators
‘time tourists’. She concludes, “The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema
have gradually become causes for what is now blithely described as the postmodern

2
Friedberg writes, “Multiplex cinemas metonymize the cinema screen into a chain of adjacent
shop windows. The screens in a shopping-mall cinema transform the stillness of the shop
mannequin into the live action of film performance, as if the itinerary through the mall to reach
the cinema theater reenacts the historical impulse from photography to film. (Friedberg 1991:
427)” The remote control of the VCR on the other hand enables the spectator to ‘stop, accelerate,
and reverse time’.
179
condition. In short, our prior theorizations of the cinema have been burst asunder.
(Friedberg 1991: 428)”
The problem of contemporary apparatus theory seems to be insensitivity to
politics/aesthetics and essentialization of the dominant ideology. Although Friedberg
notes that the ‘virtual mobile gaze’ was a parallel development of departmental store
shopping that turned the gaze of modernist flanerie into that of a consumer-spectator, a
practice of consumption through vision, she portrays it as the only cinematic practice.
What she defines as the cinematic vision ends up being affirmation of escapist Classical
Hollywood codes in the process
3
. Friedberg writes,
As many film theorists have argued, the cinematic apparatus provides the illusion
of a present as well as of a different, absent time. Jean-Louis Baudry describes the
"artificial psychosis" produced in the "cine-subject" by the "simulation apparatus":
"It can be assumed that it is this wish which prepares the long history of cinema:
the wish to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject
perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions"
("Apparatus" 315; my emphasis). This epistemological twist - representations
mistaken for perceptions - is, as Baudry argues, the locus of the apparatus's
ideological power. And, in Baudry's analysis, the pleasure found in this
misapprehension is precisely the wish that "prepares the long history of cinema."
The cinematic apparatus provides a desired psychosis in its mechanically
reproducible construction of another place and time. One of the essential properties
of cinema is its temporal displacement of the spectator: the time of a film's
production, the time of its fiction, and the time of its projection are all conflated
into the same moment in viewing. The reality effect, created by cinematic
conventions of narrative and by illusionistic construction, works to conceal this
conflation, to produce representations that are taken for perceptions or-as Christian
Metz would have it-discours that is taken for histoire. (Friedberg 1991: 427)

3
The position of Avant-garde as the harmless outside in this understanding becomes clear when
Manovich writes, “When the avant-garde filmmakers collaged multiple images within a single
frame, or painted and scratched film, or revolted against the indexical identity of cinema in other
ways, they were working against "normal" filmmaking procedures and the intended uses of film
technology. (Film stock was not designed to be painted on). Thus they operated on the periphery
of commercial cinema not only aesthetically but also technically. (Manovich 2002: 258)”
Manovich, although more inclusive of marginal cinema than Friedberg, takes ‘normality’ of
Hollywood for granted.

180

It is worth noting here that Baudry’s apparatus theory was a critic of naïve realism that
fails to take into account of the power relations embedded in mechanisms of
representation. Baudry wrote,
Everything [in the ideology of representation and specularization] happens as if, the
subject himself being unable – and for a reason – to account for his own situation, it
was necessary to substitute secondary organs, grafted onto replace his own
defective ones, instruments or ideological formations capable of filling his function
as subject. In fact, this substitution is only possible on the condition that the
instrumentation itself be hidden or repressed. Thus disturbing cinematic elements –
similar, precisely to those indicating the return of the repressed – signify without
fail the arrival of the instrument ‘in flesh and blood’, as in Vertov’s Man with the
Movie Camera. Both spectacular quality and the assurance of one’s own identity
collapse simultaneously with the revealing of the mechanism, that is, of the
inscription of the film-work. (Baudry 1985: 540)

Most major cinema movements critical of Hollywood has therefore taken up self-
reflexivity in one form or another to reveal the working of the apparatus. In case of Third
Cinema formal innovation is integral to the quest for an alternative social matrix that can
only be achieved through violation of linear time and space. As it is evident from the
episodic structure of Hour, City and Calcutta 71 and their call for audience participation
in continuing the narrative (at least in principle), Third Cinema is not opposed to modular
structure or variability
4
that Manovich defines as characteristics of new media. As Wayne

4
Not only we see this in Solanas, but the 8mm experimental short movement in Mexico heavily
influenced by the praxis of Third Cinema - which was called 4
th
cinema by its practitioners -
exemplifies this in their manifesto. Sergio Garcia concludes their manifesto “Toward a Fourth
Cinema” as follows, “… I would like to list the solutions I believe are decisive for the
continuance and development of the 8mm Cinematographic Movement:
1. Create a national network for projection, using the universities as the main center for action.
This, on the basis of exchange.
2. Create specialized criticism to comment on everything that has to do with this Movement,
trying to do so in a mass circulation newspapers or magazines.
3. Create (and this is the most important) an audience of followers, who enthusiastically support
this type of cinema.
4. Try to find an accessible language, as a work is made with someone in mind.
181
has pointed out, its strongest claim being a place in the tradition of international political
art, Third Cinema has always shown affinity towards media convergence; be it in form of
inter-titles, still photographs or paintings in City and Hour, theatrical staging in Black
God, stop-motion photography in Interview, found footage in Tribulation, Television
images in Cache or cinematic use of local culture in numerous other films. In fact,
platforms like Youtube on the internet can potentially solve the problem of distribution of
political cinema through mainstream channels. Cinema being an interface of three
dimensional moving images in the general environment of digital media therefore is not a
death sentence for Third Cinema.
However, the characteristic of new media Third Cinema is least compatible with is
automation
5
, i.e. removal of human intentionality, at least in production of the media.
While Third Cinema is not a tradition of passive celebration/consumption of indexicality,
its premise is defined by the repressed social referent. Its creativity celebrates the human
hand as the outsider’s perspective, as the rebellion against ‘machinic’, structural

5. Use familiar and already existing elements, with the aim of simplifying the understanding and
comprehension of the films. For example, a “Santo” in 8mm who, instead of fighting mummies
and monsters, fights large estate owners, black marketeers, gringos and other exploiters (this is
for the interested in working with peasants and marginal classes, that is, the majority of the
country).
6. Organize frequent projections, festival and cine-clubs.
7.
8.
9.
Etc.
(Numbers 7, 8, 9, etc. are for additional points that each reader may want to add). (Garcia 1999:
175)”

5
Automation is a blanket term beyond the scope of elaboration in this conclusion. Manovich
reminds us that there are variable degrees of automation the lower levels of which could simply
be the spell-check function of word processing softwares. The automation which is problematic in
context of Third Cinema is where human choices are subordinated to pre-given options of a
program.
182
standardization. The search for a common code/language in new media is a parallel
move of quest for universal translation/exchange value affected by globalized capitalist
markets
6
. In neo-liberalism that quest has transcended/assimilated its former peripheries –
the geographic Third World, people of marginal identities and nature. As long as cinema
retains the legacy of a humanist art form, and the integrity of human body resists this
codification/obsoletion (even if precariously), Third Cinema has the simultaneous
obligation of resisting automation. This is where we have to address the question of
cinema being an ideology.
It has been argued that Virtual Reality is a step forward towards realization of what Bazin
called the originary myth of total cinema, i.e. reproduction of nature in its own image
7

‘snatching it away from time’ (i.e. by de-contextualization) (Bazin 1960). Significantly,
what Bazin considers striking in this realization is the ‘obstinate resistance of matter to
ideas rather than any help offered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers
(Bazin 1967: 17).’ If the ‘mummy complex’, the dream of individualized, inert existence

6
If classical Hollywood conventions were correlatives of Fordist assembly line production, then
new media reflects the logics of flexible accumulation. As Manovich writes, “The logic of new
media thus corresponds to the post-industrial logic of "production on demand" and "just in time"
delivery which themselves were made possible by the use of computers and computer networks in
all stages of manufacturing and distribution. Here "culture industry" (the term was originally
coined by Theodor Adorno in the 1930s) is actually ahead of the rest of the industry. The idea
that a customer determines the exact features of her car at the showroom, the data is then
transmitted to the factory, and hours later the new car is delivered, remains a dream, but in the
case of computer media, it is reality. Since the same machine is used as a showroom and a
factory, i.e., the same computer generates and displays media -- and since the media exists not as
a material object but as data which can be sent through the wires with the speed of light, the
customized version created in response to user’s input is delivered almost immediately. Thus, to
continue with the same example, when you access a Web site, the server immediately assembles a
customized Web page. (Manovich 2002: 56)”

7
Bazin wrote, “In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation
of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound,
color and relief (Bazin 1967: 20)”.
183
is one of the mythological inspirations behind cinema, there is also the aspiration of
connection with matter - the outer, social world through vision (see Alea’s definition of
Third Cinema on pg. 61). Similarly, as Arnheim has argued, limitations of a medium can
be the very strength of its enunciation
8
. If Virtual Reality offers immersion (i.e. collapse
of the distance between the diegetic and spectatorial space
9
), Television offers immediacy
of live images and the so-called interactive media offers physical participation
10
, then the
time-lag between production and reception of cinema, not to mention the anti-illusionist
narrative strategies consciously employed by political filmmakers can return the critical

8
Arnheim famously wrote, “Not until film began to become an art was the interest moved from
mere subject matter to aspects of form. What had hitherto been merely the urge to record certain
actual events, now became the aim to represent objects by special means exclusive to film. These
means obtrude themselves, show themselves able to do more than simple reproduce the required
object; they sharpen it, impose a style upon it, point out special features, make it vivid and
decorative. Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off, where the conditions of
reproduction serve in some way to mold the object (Arnheim 1957: 57).

9
On the other hand, Manovich writes, “In VR, either there is no connection between the two
spaces (for instance, I am in a physical room while the virtual space is one of an underwater
landscape) or, on the contrary, the two completely coincide (i.e., the Super Cockpit project). In
either case, the actual physical reality is disregarded, dismissed, abandoned. (Manovich 2002:
113)”

10
Manovich warns about the following limitations of interactive media in this context. He writes,
“When we use the concept of “interactive media” exclusively in relation to computer-based
media, there is danger that we interpret "interaction" literally, equating it with physical interaction
between a user and a media object (pressing a button, choosing a link, moving the body), at the
sake of psychological interaction. The psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming,
recall and identification, which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all, are
mistakenly identified with an objectively existing structure of interactive links. (Manovich 2002:
71-72)”
And more significantly,
“Now interactive computer media asks us instead to click on an image in order to go to another
image. Before we would read a sentence of a story or a line of a poem and think of other lines,
images, memories. Now interactive media asks us to click on a highlighted sentences to go to
another sentence. In short, we are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing
associations. Put diffidently, in what can be read as a new updated version of French philosopher
Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation," we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody's
else mind for our own. (Manovich 2002: 74)”

184
distance necessary for a historical perspective. We have already seen in the first chapter
how foregrounding of the imperfect conditions of production has been in itself an
aesthetic and political statement, not only in Third Cinema but neo-realism as well.
At a time when the tradition of suturing of the spectator into the classical narrative has
given way to even more immersive virtual reality of video games, and shorter life span of
video games have made filmmakers like George Lucas shift their attention to the latter as
more lucrative financial venture, I believe, cinema’s power of distanciation has become
crucial for its significance as an art form. Against the logic of mass production, Avant-
garde cinema claimed its status as an ‘artisanal’ practice. But as Manovich describes,
In a post-industrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle
and "select" her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices. Rather
than pushing the same objects/information to a mass audience, marketing now tries
to target each individual separately. The logic of new media technology reflects this
new social logic. Every visitor to a Web site automatically gets her own custom
version of the site created on the fly from a database. (Manovich 2002: 60)

Consequently, the dominant cultural logic also shifted from linear narratives to more
variable, customized cultural forms
11
. The changes Manovich and Friedberg point out
since the 1980’s can be explained by this switch. Manovich therefore acknowledges that,
“One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies
became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In
short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer. (Manovich 2002: 258)” It is
not possible to claim an alternative status or even elitism only on basis of formalism any
more. In context of the age of mechanical reproduction Benjamin argued that, while
fascism aesthetisizes self-destruction, communists politicize art (Benjamin 1936). At the

11
Commenting on the ever changing surface of flexible accumulation and its cultural forms Zizek
has therefore asked the question, “How can we revolutionize a society that is constantly
revolutionizing itself?”
185
age of post-humanism and digital reproduction/codification politicization of cinema
therefore seems to be even more relevant. An example will clarify this point.
Manovich has argued database is the symbolic form of the computer age just like the
linear form in modern age (Manovich 2002). Our perception of the world in form of
databases is reflected in increasing popularity of the database narrative, as we have seen
in our discussion of City and Herbert. A brief comparison of these films with Run Lola
Run
12
(Germany, 1998) by Tom Tykwer will suggest that while celebrating the database
form and media convergence (use of animation, computer graphics, speeding of the
micro-narratives, etc.) Run Lola Run (the novelty of its narrative structure has been later
known as Nintendo narrative) ultimately conforms to the classical convention of closure
as possible crisis presented in the first two runs of the film is resolved in the Third as
Lola and her boyfriend Mani walk away with a bag of money at the end of the thriller.
The film starts with some deep philosophical contemplation about humanity concluding
in the end of the sequence that “the ball is round, and the game is ninety minutes long”.
At another level, the three possibilities of the narrative that the film presents simulating a
computer game structure remain distinct from each other except for some overlapping
characters and locations. In the films we have discussed earlier on the other hand, the
database structure contextualizes earlier assumptions about images or segments to add

12
The film explores several possible outcomes of a single event – the consequences of Mani,
Lola’s boyfriend, losing 100,000 marks after a diamond smuggling deal. The film consists of
three separate runs following Mani’s call to Lola informing her about the loss. The episodes more
or less follow norms of the gangster genre depicting actions of the couple trying to win back their
money. In the first run, Lola is shot by a policeman at a store Mani was robbing. After Mani asks
Lola if she wanted to live, she says no and then ‘stop’. The movie goes back to the beginning
from this point. In the second run, Mani is run over by an ambulance. Lying on the ground he
remembers a time when he asked Lola what she would do if Mani died. After some deliberation
Lola replies they were not dead yet. The movie goes back for its third run here. At the end of the
third run their operation becomes successful, and they end up having more money than expected.
186
new connotation and thereby weave a spatial understanding of the theme. Thus, while
Herbert and City are not linear narratives, they are interested in sequential connections
for an historical understanding and intervention.
So far I have discussed structural social exclusion as one of major themes of the new
Third Cinema where the physical body and children/teenagers are the new frontiers of the
global network space. To conclude on an optimistic note, I will now discuss a different
trend of contextualization in contemporary political cinema where children are
reconnected to a repressed political history in context of the last dictatorship in
Argentina. During the military dictatorship during 1976-1983, the period known as the
‘Dirty War’, over 30000 left wing activists were abducted by government agents. They
were tortured, many of them killed, and according to the military record itself, 9000 of
them are still unaccounted for. 500 children born during that captivity were given to
military related families with false birth certificates, of whom 74 have been found later. A
movement in search of those ‘disappeared’ children was started by their surviving
mothers and grandmothers through an association called Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,
named after a main square (known for being the focal point of political life of the city) in
downtown Buenos Aires, where the bereaved mothers first gathered for a political
demonstration. As we will see in the following discussion, this entry of the
maternal/bodily connection into political public space will have bearings in the political
staging of Cautiva (Argentina, 2003) by Gaston Biraben. A body of fiction [Like The
Official Story (1985)] as well as documentary [Spoils of War (2000), Histories of
Everyday life (2001), H. I. J. O. S: the soul split in two (2002) etc.] films have been made
on the subject, and their proliferation during or after the financial crisis during 1999-2001
187
suggests that the theme resonates with the contemporary anti-neoliberal thrust of the
Argentine left.
Cautiva is a film about Christina/Sofia, one of the ‘disappeared’ teenager’s reconnection
with her biological family. A federal judge under the civilian government orders a secret
blood test of Christina (actually Sofia) following an appeal filed by her biological
grandmother. As the test attests the genetic continuity between Sofia Lombardi and her
‘nana’, Sofia is taken away from her foster parents, a retired policeman and his wife. As
Sofia goes through the period of distrust and confusion over the newly revealed identity,
a parallel secret history of repression of the biological connection and by default, the
radical politics surfaces in the film. Having to choose between the repressed past and pro
status quo present (the inter title at the end of the film reminds us that the collaborators of
the dictatorship are protected by laws recently created for their benefit) Sofia chooses the
former.
Like Bolivia (and metaphorically Cache) the film starts from the simulated space of
television where Argentina plays Holland in the World Cup Soccer final of 1978.
Argentina scores a goal in the sequence against which the Dutch defenders appeal for
handball, but the referee overrides it. As Argentina wins the cup controversially, the
military generals are seen celebrating this national victory in company of notorious US
diplomat Henry Kissinger. The celebratory mood carries over to the next shot where
Christina is dancing with her ‘father’ in a family gathering on her fifteenth birthday. It is
revealed through the film later that the actual birthday of Christina/Sofia was the day
188
Argentina won the World Cup, when her mother delivered her blindfolded
13
in a secret
prison hospital. Thus the opposition between pseudo nationalist discourse of dictatorship
and radical politics is framed in the film as a parallel opposition between the ob/scene
and the repressed unseen, a recurrent strategy we have seen in this dissertation. After the
birthday sequence Christina is called for a blood test apparently as a routine check up.
The association of the unseen with the visceral is emphasized in the sequence through a
close-up of the syringe drawing blood, doubling the medical examination as an optical
procedure. The strategy is repeated in the child birth sequence where close-up of the
delivery in a way establishes a sound bridge between screams of labor pain (which
sounds like long, distant screams under torture) and the first cry of the child. Thus
politics of a non-mutable body and genetic continuity counters the dominant narrative of
specular manipulation (falsification of documents, or the concealed handball in the TV
footage) in the film. Contrast of the body with the image (“the perpetual present”) evokes
the second association with the unseen, which is ghostly (the past)
14
.
The secret prisons where the abducted were confined are referred to as ‘concentration
camp’ in the film reminding us once more of Homo Sacer or the animalized human. This
analogy is visually alluded to in the film when Sofia coincidentally meets her friend
Angelica, another child of disappeared parents at a volleyball game. Angelica was
expelled from their earlier school for making radical comments in a class on constitution.

13
To emphasize the parallel temporality both the television sequence and the secret delivery
scene is given blue tint in the film.

14
Like Herbert, Sofia’s biological nephew tells her on their first meeting that he has seen a ghost
which is big like the moon. In a way, that confirms her own vision of seeing her mother on a
rocking chair as part of a fantasy sequence. The nostalgic still photographs and memories of
family members are other ghostly traces of the unseen in the film.

189
When Sofia tells her in the shower room both of them had similar background, the two
girls stare at each other naked under the shower in a wide shot, reminiscent of gas
chamber scenes of holocaust films. In other words, they embody the ghostly, their
parents.
The parents and the daughters are denied history in two different ways by the dominant
discourse of dictatorship. Popular animalized/demonized perception of left wing politics
Sofia grows up with
15
breaks down with gradual discovery of the history of repression.
Simultaneously, her body goes through biological renewal. Thus when politics returns to
the zoe, the embodied bare life, it becomes bios once more
16
.
In a conversation Sofia’s grandmother recalled her daughter liked large windows and
natural light from all directions. At the end of the film Sofia asks her, if her parents’
disappearance was forever, before giving her a passionate hug. Accompanied by choir
music, dissolve to a slow pan across the memory laden bedroom leading to the balcony
outside. Sofia is looking at the night sky leaning on the railing there. In a reverse shot, the
camera zooms out from here following her eye line. She becomes smaller gradually,
before the house is recognizable only by its lights amid surrounding darkness. The shot
dissolves to another aerial night shot of Buenos Aires, recognizable by its crisscrossing
strings of light.

15
Her friend tells her while smoking in the bathroom that communists blow up priests. Her foster
father initially claims she was abandoned in a train after birth, then unable to defend that position
argues that “they are not the angel you are thinking”.

16
A brief comparison with The Official Story (Argentina, 1985) made on a similar theme of
disappearance with make this point clearer. In The Official Story, made at the height of Reaganist
era, the child is almost an infant, lacking critical or cognitive capabilities. The narrative of guilt
therefore unfolds from the foster mother, Alicia’s perspective. In Cautiva, made at a different
political juncture, the teenager has active agency.
190
The relation of exclusion between bodies, children and cities we have discussed in the
earlier chapters is altered here by a politics of emplacement in the city, by returning the
power of history to the animalized captive (Cautiva).
Beginning at the turn of Twenty- first century neo-liberalism has survived a series of
slumps. The East Asian Financial crisis of 1997 has come back in a much larger scale
with bursting of the housing market bubble, leading to ironic state intervention
worldwide through bail out of corporations. In face of global recession, left leaning
governments have returned in countries like Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia. Local or
indigenous populations have put up glorious struggles against neoliberal assault in places
as diverse as Amazonia in Peru to Nandigram and Dantewada in India. Political parties
(like CPIM, see chapter 2) implementing anti-people policies to facilitate foreign
investment have been routed in elections. US military policies in Iraq and Afghanistan
have been far from fruitful. Perhaps, the confidence expressed in the politics of Cautiva
reflects these changes.

191
Conclusion References

Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1957.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. Ideological effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Vol. II,
in Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nicholes, 531-542. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1985.

Bazin, Andre. "The Ontology of Photographic Image." Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960):
4-9.

—. What is Cinema. Vol. I. II vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1967.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Marxists.org. 1936.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
(accessed August 2010).

Garcia, Sergio. "Toward a Fourth Cinema prologue: a marginal cinema." Wide Angle 21,
no. 3 (July 1999): 70-175.

Friedberg, Anne. "Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition."
PMLA 106, no. 3 (May 1991): 419-431.

Manovich, Lev. "The Language of New Media." 2002.
http://andreknoerig.de/portfolio/03/bin/resources/manovich-langofnewmedia.pdf
(accessed August 2010).
192
Filmography

Memories of Underdevelopment. Directed by Tomas G. Alea. 1968.

Carandiru. Directed by Hector Babenco. 2003.

Pixote. Directed by Hector Babenco. 1981.

Tribulation 99. Directed by Craig Baldwin. 1991.

Cautiva. Directed by Gaston Biraben. 2003.

Los Olvidados. Directed by Luis Bunuel. 1950.

Bolivia. Directed by Adrián Caetano. 2001.

Pizza, Beer and Smoke. Directed by Adrián Caetano. 1998.

A Movie. Directed by Bruce Conner. 1958.

La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Primera parte: La insurreción de
la burguesía ["The Battle of Chile, Part 1"]. Directed by Patricio Guzman. 1975.

La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Segunda parte: El golpe de
estado ["The Battle of Chile, Part 2”]. Directed by Patricio Guzman. 1977.

La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Tercera parte: El poder popular
["The Battle of Chile, Part 3”]. Directed by Patricio Guzman. 1979.

Cache ["Hidden"]. Directed by Michael Haneke. 2005.

La Haine ["Hate"]. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. 1995.

City of God. Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. 2002.

Herbert. Directed by Suman Mukhopadhyaya. 2006.

The Official Story. Directed by Luis Puenzo. 1985.

Pather Panchali ["The Song of the Little Road"]. Directed by Satyajit Ray. 1955.

Black God, White Devil. Black and White. Directed by Glaubar Rocha. 1964.

Antonio das Mortes. Directed by Glauber Rocha. 1969.

193
Land in Anguish. Black and White. Directed by Glauber Rocha. 1967.

Akaler Sandhane ["In Search of Famine"]. Directed by Mrinal Sen. 1980.

Calcutta 71. Directed by Mrinal Sen. 1971.

Interview. Directed by Mrinal Sen. 1971.

Padatik ["The Guerrilla Fighter"]. Directed by Mrinal Sen. 1973.

The Bicycle Thieves. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. 1948.

Hour of the Furnaces. Black and White. Directed by Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio
Getino. 1968.

Social Genocide. Directed by Fernando Solanas. 2004.

Run Lola Run. Directed by Tom Tykwer. 1998

The Edukators. Directed by Hans Weingartner. 2004.
194
Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1998.

—. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, 2003.

Ahmed, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory". Social Text
17(Autumn 1987): 3-25.

Alea, Thomas. G. "Beyond the Reflection of Reality" in Cinema and Social Change in
Latin America, edited by Julianne Burton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Armes, Roy. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987.

Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1957.

Badiou, Alain. The Century. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.

Barclay, Barry. "Celebrating Fourth Cinema." July 2003.
http://kainani.hpu.edu/hwood/HawPacFilm/BarclayCelebratingFourthCinema.doc.
(accessed August 20, 2010).

Barnard, Tim. "Popular Cinema and Populist Politics" in Argentine Cinema, edited by
Tim Barnard. Toronto: Nightwood Editions, 1986.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 126-133. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983.

—. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" in
Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and M. Cohen, 355-365. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Bazin, Andre. "The Ontology of Photographic Image." Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960):
4-9.

—. What is Cinema. Vol. I. II vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1967.

195
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Marxists.org. 1936.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
(accessed August 2010).

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994.

Bordwell, David. "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures."
In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 17-
34. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Brecht, Bertolt. "Against Georg Lukacs" in Aesthetics and Politics, edited by R. Taylor.
London: Verso, 1988.

Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1969.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Burton, Julianne. "Antonio Eguino (Bolivia): Neorealism in Bolivia" in Cinema and
Social Change in Latin America: Conversation with Filmmakers edited by Julianne
Burton, 161-170. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Butler, Judith. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York:
Routledge, 1999.

Callenbach, Ernest. "Anatomy of Folk-Myth Films: Robin Hood and Antonio das
Mortes." Film Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Winter 1969-70): 42-47.

Carvalho, Jose Jorge de. “Review: The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of
Brasilia by James Holston.” Current Anthropology 32, no.3 (June 1991): 359-362.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture, Volume 1). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

—. End of Millennium. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life . Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe" in
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton &
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.

196
Colas, Santiago. “The Third World in Jameson’s Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of
late capitalism” Social Texts 31/32, (Third World and Postcolonial Issues, 1992) 258-
270.

Davis, Mike. "Planet of Slums." New Left Review 26 (March-April 2004): 5-34.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

—. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995.

Dienstag, Joshua Foa. "Review: The Open: Man and Animal, by Giorgio Agamben."
Political Theory 34, no. 1 (February 2006): 148-152.

Dulac, Germaine. "The Avant-Garde Cinema." In The Avant-Garde Film, edited by P.
Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Emmanuel, Arghiri. Unequal Exchange. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Espinoza, Julio G. "For an Imperfect Cinema" in New Latin American Cinema edited by
M. T. Martin, 71-82. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Friedberg, Anne. "Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition."
PMLA 106, no. 3 (May 1991): 419-431.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage,
1995.

—. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Routledge,
1973.

Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation.
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982.

Garcia, Sergio. "Toward a Fourth Cinema prologue: a marginal cinema." Wide Angle 21,
no. 3 (July 1999): 70-175.

Getino, Octavio. "Some Notes on the Concepts of a Third Cinema" in Argentine Cinema
edited by Tim Barnard. Toronto: Nightwood Editions, 1986.

197
Grosz, Elizabeth. "Bodies/ Cities." In Sexuality and Space, edited by B Colomina, 241-
254. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.

—. Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994.

Gupta, Udayan. "Introducing Mrinal Sen." Jump Cut (12-13) (December 1976): 9-10.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1989 .

—. The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford university Press, 2003.
Holston, James and Teresa P.R. Caldeira. "Democracy and Violence in Brazil."
Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1999): 691-729.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century." In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature, 149-181. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hitchens, Gordon. "The Way to Make a Future: A Conversation with Glauber Rocha."
Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1970-71): 27-30.

Hobsbawm, E. J. Bandits. New York: Laurel Editions, 1969.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991.

—."Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15
(Autumn 1986): 65-88.

—. “On Magic Realism in Films” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 2 (Winter 1986) 301-325.

—. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in
Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983.

—. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1981.

Kapur, Geeta. "Articulating the Self into History: Ritwik Ghatak's Jukti, Tokko ar
Gappo" in Questions of Third Cinema edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines.
London: British Film Institute, 1989.

Kinder, Marsha. "Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel's Legacy for
New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative." Film Quarterly 55, no. 4
(June 2002): 2-15.
198
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1991.

Lem, Stanislaw. "Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature." Science Fiction Studies 1,
no. 4 (1974).

Lenin, V. I. "Critique of Imperialism" in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital . New York: Monthly Review Press,
1968.

MacBEAN, J. R. "La Hora de los Hornos." Film Quarterly 24, no. 1, (1970-71): 31-37.

Manovich, Lev. "The Language of New Media." 2002.
http://andreknoerig.de/portfolio/03/bin/resources/manovich-langofnewmedia.pdf
(accessed August 2010).

Marighella, Carlos. "Mobility and Speed." in Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, 1969
from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urban-
guerrilla/ch13.htm.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper Perennial,
2004.

Mason-Grant, Joan. "Review: Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. By
Elizabeth Grosz." Hypatia 12 no. 4 (Autumn, 1997): 211-217.

May, Todd G. "The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze." SubStance 66,
20(3), (1991): 24-35.

Menne, Jeff. "A Mexican Nouvelle Vague: The Logic of New Waves under
Globalization." Cinema Journal 47, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 70-92.

Metz, Christian. The imaginary signifier: psychoanalysis and the cinema. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1977.

Mitra, Ananda. "Imaging of the 1970s: Calcutta and West Bengal" in The Enemy Within:
The Films of Mrinal Sen edited by Sumita Chakravarty. London: Flick Books, 2000:
37-65.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Movies and Methods, edited by
Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976.

Murphet, Julian. "Pitiable or Political Animals?" SubStance 117, no. 37(3) (2008): 97-
116.
199

Nagib, Lucia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. New York: I. B.
Tauris, 2007.

Osterweil, Ara. "Film Review: Cache." Film Quarterly 59, no. 4 (Summer, 2006): 35-39.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. "Debating the Third Cinema" in Questions of Third Cinema
edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines, 170-178. London: British Film Institute,
1989.

Ramsey, Cynthia. "Review: Third Cinema in Latin America: Critical Theory in Recent
Works." Latin American Research Review 23, no.1 (1988): 266-275.

Rocha, Glauber. "An Esthetic of Hunger" in Brazilian Cinema edited by Randal Johnson
and Robert Stam, 68-71. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Rocha, Glauber. "Propos Political Cinema." in Afterimage 3 (Summer 1971).

Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The work of film in the age of video.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Sassen, Saskia. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001.

Schroeder, Erin. "A Multicultural Conversation:La Haine, Raï,and Menace II Society."
Camera Obscura 46, no. 16(1) (2001): 142-179.

Sen, Mrinal. Over the Years: An Interview with Samik Bandyopadhyay. Calcutta: Seagull
Books, 2003.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down:Hip-Hop’s Hold on Young Black
Women. New York: NYU Press, 2007.

Sontag, Susan. "Notes on Camp." In Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York:
Dell Publishing, 1966.

Solanas, Fernando. "Cinema as a Gun: An Interview with Fernando Solanas." Cineaste 3,
no. 2, (Fall 1969): 18-26.

200
Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. "Towards a Third Cinema" in Vol. 1 of Movies
and Methods edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of
California Press. 1: 44-64.

Sorrensen, Cynthia. "Film Review." Journal of Latin American Geography 8, no. 2
(2009): 225-228.

Stam, Robert. "Land in Anguish" in Brazilian Cinema edited by Randal Johnson and
Robert Stam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

—. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film . Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992.

—. "The Two Avant-gardes" in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of
Documentary Film and Video edited by B. K. Grant and J. Sloniowski, 254-268.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

—. Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003.

Thomas, Douglas. "Re-Thinking the Cyberbody: Hackers, Viruses and Cultural Anxiety."
In Technological visions: the hopes and fears that shape new technologies, edited by
Douglas Thomas, Marita Sturken and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, 219-239. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2004.

Tse-tung, Mao. "On New Democracy" in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Peking,
China: Foreign Languages Press, 1940.

Turkle, Sherry. "Cyberspace and Identity." Contemporary Sociology 28, no. 6 (November
1999): 643-648.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press, 1995.

—. The Essential Wallerstein. New York: The New Press, 2000.

Wayne, Mike. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press,
2001.

Willemen, Paul. "The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections" in Questions of
Third Cinema edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines, 1-29. London: British Film
Institute, 1989.

201
Xavier, Ismail. Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern
Brazilian Cinema. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Žižek, Slavoj. "The Ongoing "Soft Revolution"." Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter,
2004): 292-323.

—. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Studios before the system: architecture, technology, and early cinema

PDF

Japan in transnational Hollywood: industry and identity, 1985-1995

PDF

Special cultural zones: provincializing global media in neoliberal China

PDF

Animation before the war: nation, identity, and modernity in Japan from 1914-1945

PDF

¡Que naco! Border cinema and Mexican migrant audiences

PDF

Transnational film remakes: time, space, identity

PDF

A cinema of anxiety: American experimental film in the realm of art (1965–75)

PDF

Sick cinema: illness, disability and the moving image

PDF

Dead zones: human mobility and the making of media nationalism

PDF

A taste for trash: the persistence of exploitation in American cinema, 1960-1975

PDF

The vicissitudes of postnational affects: visuality, temporality, and corporeality in global east Asian films

PDF

Medusan optics: film, feminism, and the forbidden image

PDF

Co-producing the Asia Pacific: travels in technology, space, time and gender

PDF

Video camera technology in the digital age: Industry standards and the culture of videography

PDF

Animating documentary

PDF

Riddles of representation in fantastic media

PDF

Existential surplus: affect and labor in Asian diasporic video cultures

PDF

A cinema under the palms: the unruly lives of colonial educational films in British Malaya

PDF

Performance unleashed: multispecies stardom and companion animal media

PDF

The traces of Jacques Derrida's cinema

Asset Metadata

Creator Roychowdhury, Sourav (author)

Core Title Cinema 4.5? Legacies of third cinema at the age of informational capitalism

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 09/13/2010

Defense Date 09/03/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag bodies and cities,death of cinema,Globalization,informational capitalism,nation-state and cinema,neo-liberalism.,OAI-PMH Harvest,political art,third cinema,urbanization

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Hoskins, Janet (committee member), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member)

Creator Email sourav_rc@hotmail.com,souravroychowdhurynew@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3432

Unique identifier UC1224978

Identifier etd-Roychowdhury-4077 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-392018 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3432 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Roychowdhury-4077.pdf

Dmrecord 392018

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Roychowdhury, Sourav

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu