Guerrilla Cinema
Five essential films from Third Cinema, the militant movement that turned filmmaking into anti-imperialist struggle.
(Wikimedia Commons)
In 1969, Argentine filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas published “Toward a Third Cinema,” a manifesto that rejected both Hollywood spectacle (“first cinema”) and European art house auteurism (“second cinema”) in favor of something new: films made as acts of political struggle, screened clandestinely, and designed to turn spectators into participants. It became the theoretical spine of a movement that swept the decolonizing world. Here are five essential films from Third Cinema, the militant movement that turned filmmaking into anti-imperialist struggle.
The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo
1966
Shot in the Casbah with nonprofessional actors, including actual FLN veterans, Pontecorvo’s re-creation of the Algerian independence struggle is so convincingly staged that the Pentagon screened it in 2003 to study insurgency (clearly it didn’t do much to help Team America). As revolutionary in its politics as it is thrilling in its cinematic language, the film recently made a cameo as the movie Leonardo DiCaprio’s character watches on TV in One Battle After Another.
The Hour of the Furnaces
Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas
1968
This is the movement’s founding artifact: a four-hour agitprop epic on Argentine neocolonialism, smuggled between union halls under the dictatorship. Screenings typically paused mid-film for audience debate, but this practice also might have had something to do with the film’s 260-minute runtime.
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