Exploring Third Cinema and Its Impact

speaker today briefly before we start before i give the floor over to her so So, the speaker, the guest that we have with us today is an extremely eminent scholar of film and media studies. That's Dr. Jasna Kapoor. Dr. Kapoor is the director of the University Honors Program and also professor of cinema and media studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She's also the author of two books, The Politics of Time and Youth in Grand India, Bargaining with Capital, which was published in 2013, and Coining for Capital, Movies, Marketing and the Transformation of Childhood, published in 2005. She's also the founding co-editor of the journal Studies in South Asian Film and Media, which publishes work on cinema and media studies focused on South Asia. Thank you. Dr. Kapoor has published widely on the subjects of Marxist feminist theory and media arts and culture, the politics of labor, class, race and sexuality in neoliberalism, documentary cinema and global children's media culture. I am really happy that Dr. Kapoor has made time from her very busy schedule to join us today. She has been my dissertation committee chair. for my own PhD. So I'm really excited that she can today talk to the students who are in my class and all of you as well. So please give a warm welcome to Dr. Kapoor and then we can start. Well thank you everyone for being here and thanks Namrata for the invitation. It always is very special you know to to speak to the class of one student. And it's lovely to see Namrata in her new academic home. So I'm delighted to be here. By way of introduction, Namrata was discussing with me the class she's teaching on popular culture. And while we were talking about, you know, what I could speak about, I thought we could... sort of make a distinction between popular culture and mass culture, mass culture and via cinema, because cinema was this and is remains this large mass medium. It's centralized. It's made by a few groups of people, by a few people, but it's made for the masses. Can cinema also be popular culture? So I thought, that would be a good way to approach this class on popular culture by setting up the difference between mass culture and popular culture. And by way of an example, I'm choosing to talk about Third Cinema, which was a film movement that developed in Latin America in the 60s, in the process of decolonizing. But it is a significant historical moment and a movement which is not only based in Latin America. And so we shouldn't think of it geographically, but think of it conceptually as a way to intervene and to think about the place of art and then cinema in society. So that's sort of the overall framework within which I'll talk with you today. And I would really appreciate your... questions. And if you have questions, you can put them also in the chat box or comments and, you know, we can have, make it a little more interactive. So at this point, I want to share my PowerPoint. So let's go to that. to be able to i don't need you to see all of the let's see if i can show it to you in a in the slideshow mode um so is that what you're able to see The slideshow mode? Yes, we can see the slides. Okay, great. All right. Okay. So third cinema. And like I said, I want to be talking about it, about this effort by these filmmakers to turn it into a popular art form. And one of the questions they ask there is, does cinema have some kind of cognitive power? Can it change the way in which we perceive the world, in which we understand? reality so can cinema create a new form of perception a new form of understanding the world and in this they think about cinema as as a kind of rehearsal um for engaging with reality so it's it's a way it's an object lesson it's a tool it's a way to engage with reality as well as turn reality into a spectrum into something that then you see and grasp and want to change. So and what is also very interesting about this film movement is that the filmmakers are also theorists. They're also participants, very active participants in the revolutionary movements of this time. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gattino, for example, write in what's one of the manifestos of this movement called Towards a Third Cinema. They say there's no knowledge of reality as long as it is not acted upon, as long as its transformation has not begun on all fronts of struggle. So they see the cultural struggle as very much part of an economic and political struggle. Its origins are in the 50s and what we call the non-aligned movement. This was one of the kind of important events in this is the Bandung Conference, which was held in Indonesia in 1955, where 29 Asian and African nations. These are nations which were. breaking out of colonialism, India being one, but then there were representatives from Cuba, Palestine, and African nations as well. And this movement, this non-aligned movement, develops during the Cold War when the two blocks are the capitalist block led by the United States and the so-called state. socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union. And within that, countries like India and Nehru in that period are able to sort of create an independent path to say we are aligned with a bloc of previously colonized countries and we want to forge our own economic, political, cultural development. So these are those principles. equality, political self-determination, and so on. Some of the leaders of this movement or icons of this movement, beginning from left of the screen, is Che Guevara, Argentinian, who fought alongside Fidel Castro, involved in not only the independence of Cuba, but also... other Latin American countries and was murdered or assassinated by the militia as well as the CIA in Bolivia. Next to him is Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese independence movement, first liberated, led the liberation of Vietnam from France in 1954 and then had a lifelong war which then the US could not win against Vietnam. And then the person on the right is Frantz Fanon, a psychoanalyst. a doctor and a political figure who's Argentinian and very active and involved in Argentina, sorry, Algeria, not Argentina, Algerian independence from France. And he talks about the fact that decolonization is not only something that's political that happens at the level of the state, but it's also deeply personal that you have that. One has to actually get rid of and throw out these colonial ideas, the ideas of the supremacy of the white or economic development along lines of capitalism, the ideas of radical individualism. So all these ideas are actually internalized and the process of decolonizing means actually getting rid of those ideas and becoming a new person. So these... three figures are very important to this movement. And then just geographically where it starts. So the preferred word is Latin America rather than South America, because if you were to think geographically, then you know, where is Mexico, where is South? So Latin America, because hey the result of colonizing I'll get in touch with you. All of these countries. I see that my internet is a little wonky, but hopefully. Now, Namrata? Yeah, we can hear you. I think you're back. Okay. Yeah, you are. And the people in this region are a mix of indigenous, native. uh people as well as afro latin american european and what are known as mestizos um that is of the the ethnicities um cinema although it originates from Latin America and in the 60s. It is not a geographical concept. We have something like that happening around the world in the 60s. As part of these reels, you had the, I'm not going to murder that word, General du Cinema François, British and Japanese film clubs. revolutionary movements in Turkey, Italy, and in India, the two people I think have come out of that movement are Anand Pardhan and Rakesh Sharma. So if you don't know their work, please look it up. This is unnecessary. So what is it that they understand about the nature of cinema? One, that it is... spatial, that means that it occupies space, which is the space of the movie screen and the exhibition space, right? Whether it's a university classroom like we're in right now, or could be a public space, could be a movie theater, could be a union hall. So it occupies space. It needs people or it stages itself and occupies space. It is temporal, meaning it occurs in time, so it has duration, like poetry. or music, spatial meaning like sculpture or theater. It is indexical. This is the significant thing about cinema and its movement from photography. Indexical means that it points the index. The word indexical comes from the index finger that it points to the existence of a certain reality. So the camera will record whatever. Now we know cameras lie and you can now through, of course, through editing as well as computer graphics, kind of construct a reality via desktop cinemas and so on. But there is this quality of the cinematic image that it can be a living, it can bear witness. So you're likely to believe me if I show you a film of myself. with, let's say, Biden. Whereas if I was to show you a painting, you wouldn't believe that. And the third thing is it's a mass medium. It can be broadcast widely. So there are a few things then within that, within these four kind of characteristics of cinema as a medium, that these filmmakers see its potential in two ways. as an art form one is montage montage as an editing technique that through relationships between shorts between sound and image screened you can actually use all of that to hide heightened conflict to show contradictions to show cracks and show oppositions to actually disrupt this idea that reality is somehow serious. And the second is that because cinema can allow you to bear witness, it allows you to see reality unfolding in time, in duration, sound. Give me a second, I'll just get in touch on phone and let them know that they can't hear okay. So just have patience for two minutes. The demonstrators. but it is also a canvas Thank you. Okay, sorry about all these technical troubles. Can you hear me now? yes yeah we can yes switch off the video it'll be better okay that makes sense uh dr kapoor uh you can switch off your video so you use less bandwidth and then we'll be able to hear you and see the powerpoint Okay, I think she's just joining in again. So yeah, there is an issue with her internet at her end which she told me in the morning but we still decided to go ahead with the lecture. So have a little, just a little patience. I've told her to switch off the video so that she can get back to us. okay i guess um you all will not be able to see the powerpoint but that's fine right i can just talk through it dr you can still share the powerpoint with us okay Anyway, coming to a film clip so we could. All right. Let's try that first. Yeah, sure. Sure. OK. Is that working now? yeah we can see the slides okay fantastic uh so i was at the second point about thinking of cinema as a canvas literally as something that you can paint over so here is an indexical material you can what they find really fascinating about this medium. So I actually want to stop at this point and share a clip from a film called Tire Die. It's one of the first films of this movement by Fernando Berri. Tire Die means give me a dime. And the film... was set in Brazil. And it's about these children who beg for money from a passing train. So Namrata, if you could show that, that would be great. Yeah. Let me just bring up that. Oh Look, look, look! Look, look, look! Look at this misery. These people live like this because they don't want to work. We can stop now, if you like. Yeah. Okay, we are back. So you can see the montage, the idea of the montage to show contradictions in realities is very much there, but it's also a window in that. the filmmaker is showing you what is going on, but through changes, switches and camera angles, you're able to see the same reality and see within that same reality, the existence of two oppositional realities, and that that's what needs to change. So it is not that these people are lazy or they don't work, but this is the work that is available to them. So teaching us in terms of that new form of cognition or becoming aware of reality is to see the existence of multiple oppositional. It's a it's a lesson in learning to see to see reality. Now, I want to show you another clip. which is from Hour of the Furnaces, which was the film made by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gattino from Argentina. And this is also in the 60s. So, Namrata, if you can show the second clip, please. Yes. Oh, you'll have to go out of screen sharing, Dr. Kapoor. Thank you. What characterizes Latin American countries is their dependence. Economic dependence, political dependence, cultural dependence. First Spain, then England, today the United States. The history of our countries is the history of an endless colonial slaughter. Without economic independence, there is no political independence. José Martí said, the people who want to be free, let them be first in business. In dependence, there is no possible form of development. The apparent development of some port cities, like Buenos Aires, translates only the growing expansion of the great powers in the center of our economies. Yesterday, Mitre... Pellegrini, Pinedo, today Prebysh, Frigerio, Al-Sogaray, loans, investments in loans, always served the same policy of submission. The presumed imperialist help is a help that always costs more to the one who receives it than to the one who gives it. For every dollar invested in Latin America imperialism is taken to four. Gold and coffee, meat and oil, wheat and tin, the work of a people converted into cheap labor, built the wealth of the great powers. Is this exploitation the cause of delay, misery, oppression? The one that allows the financing and the high level of life of the developed nations. The one that gave birth to that dark word invented by imperialism. Subdevelopment. I don't want to go, We can stop now. Yeah. So clearly you can see that dependency is shown as the utter, utter degradation of a nation and people. into simply what are also called banana republics and to the production of absolutely raw material to the point that they're just meat. And what is being sold is the labor power or time of people, of humans, young people being turned into labor for say information technology as we would think about in terms of India now. but turned completely into servicing global capital. So these dependency creates countries which are then reduced to only the production of raw material and which also creates then a deep sense of inferiority amongst people. And so you're sold this kind of prettified. picture of the coca-cola and you know uh adventure and uh youth and freedom and sexuality but at the same time you're being reduced to to meat now it's important in terms of cinema to see where how um solanus and uh gatino show that shift right we first get this um lecture on imperialism over you Buenos Aires and we see the the high rises and so on but from a distance it you you just see that from a uh from as if you were um you know in an airplane you're seeing you you're not really seeing the reality you aren't really coming to the ground you're seeing the seeing Buenos Aires from above and that's what it looks like like a very modern city and then we get this cut you where he says this is the obscure word introduced by imperialism is dependency. And then we see this slaughterhouse and we see this gate to the slaughterhouse being open. And then without any narrative, the film goes on to show what that means. Now, again, here I want you to look at camera angles. Look at also depth from the shift from foreground to background. You will see between now this shot is a very close shot, diagonally moving from left to right. And in the next shot, we are right into the face of the slaughtered animal. So these kinds of very sharp cuts. actually have a physiological effect. They are shocking. They will make you disturbed. But they're also, then they, so it's the change is physiological, literally physiological in that, you know, our blood runs fast or our heart starts to beat faster. And then of course, emotional. making you experience this reality with that very mellow classical sort of music but the reality that you're seeing is just so like you want to turn your eyes away from it and then the kind of intellectual shift that they want you to make which is to understand to experience and to see what actually imperialism or dependency is So Fernando Biri, so I'm going to intersperse here with, you know, some of their own writings. So Biri says there are basically two kinds of filmmakers. One invents an imaginary reality, not and. One invents an imaginary reality. The other confronts an existing reality and attempts to understand it, analyze it, criticize it, judge it, and finally translate it into film. So thinking, research, understanding, analysis is very, very important to... to these filmmakers. The revolutionary filmmaker acts with a radically new vision of the role of the producer. So what it means to be an artist, what it means to be a maker, teamwork, what does solidarity mean, what does it mean to work together, tools, what is cinema as a tool, and details. So it's like what... But Frantz Fanon is saying you have to actually reinvent yourself as a person, as an artist. You have to have a radically different vision of what it means to be a maker. Unlike the Hollywood cinema production line, which for them was first cinema, where you have the director. But even above the director, you have the producer. And even above the producer, you have. the studio or Wall Street investment in the making of the film. Here the filmmaker is a participant in a critical struggle. There is teamwork, teamwork to the extent that you, that every, in their understanding, everyone had to understand all of the roles of filmmaking. even though they were cinematographers and directors and writers, but everyone should know all of the aspects of filmmaking. So if one person is disappeared, then someone, then the other one can step in and the, the vision or the goals are shared, right? So solidarity here is at the level of risking one's life for one's comrades. So. Above all, he supplies himself at all levels, himself, herself at all levels, meaning the filmmaker should be able to do everything. So this is a very different orientation to learning how to make media, which I think has become even more very prevalent in our times. You know, with digital, with people are making, creating their own stories and broadcasting them. But the question there is, OK, we have the tools now, but. Do people have the politics? Do they have that understanding? So his most valuable possessions are the tools of the trade. So the tools of the trade, one can say, have now become democratized. You know, your iPhone can be or your computer can literally do everything. So you do own the sort of tool. But. Is there then the wider politics and the solidarity to create this kind of work would be then the question we should ask. The other thing that they discuss in terms of thinking about. Hello. So sorry about that. Wait a second. To production in secret of true solidarity, it has to be democratic distribution. So these films are obviously not shown in movie theaters. They were shown. Through people, in people's, through people's organizations, often sometimes seen by just a few people. So against centralized distribution. And then the third thing is really important, which is turn the screening itself into a rally or a meeting. So these films are, they are initiators. They're not the end. And another term that is useful to understand the concept of third cinema is imperfect cinema. By imperfect, they mean that a film is never completed if it is not seen. So a film is imperfect without. the spectator but then the spectator here is seen as a collaborator or as someone who will then become an ally um so i want to get uh get into now The question that I'd raised, sorry, I got thrown out again. Yeah, it's rained a lot here. And so the. the internet has been really uh really uh bad um should i continue uh namrata uh yes dr couple go ahead we can we can hear you fine now right um and materialist meaning you can find explanations for things that occur through evidence Like you can establish why something happens through evidence and not through some ideas of like supernatural or some sort of metaphysical ideas. So you can find the reason for things, explanations in things that in ways that can be proven so that others can also check and say, yeah, this is how things work. So. So what do these filmmakers then want the viewer to be? They want their viewers to be able to look through to peers'reality, that what appears is not what is, that what appears is actually in some ways a performance and that underlying it are relationships of power. to discover these kinds of myths, they call them myths, these social conventions or themes which govern us without our consent in that we haven't really consented to this. You know, there isn't a consent around the caste system, for example, it is not that people consent to be thought of as untouchables, but that is the lived ideology. And so So it is a performed ideology and they want their films to create this kind of cognition of reality itself as not harmonious. And they want to actually heighten the conflicts. Can you hear me now? Yeah, we can. And so they're also looking at the images of the third world, you know, in the first world. So here are two shots of Fidel Castro. One is the one on the left is from Life magazine, a U.S. magazine in the same same period in 1961. This was on the cover. Now you can see what Fidel looks like. Now, if we had more time, we would. analyze the image, but of course you can see the sort of racialized image here. It's a darker man. The teeth, you know, sort of opened up a sort of... We're losing you, Dr. Kapoor. We can't hear you completely. Okay, I'll get to it again. Yeah. or here were these other images of Cuba. Gordon Parks, who's actually a black photographer, has done wonderful work representing African-American reality, makes these images of Cuba. where you see these, where Cuba just becomes a background, right? It's just a stage for showing whiteness, the beauty of whiteness. And then the third world is this savage sort of primitive place. And this came out in Life magazine, 1958, this series. Here's another one from that same series by Gordon Parks. And so against the ruins, against these parrots and nature, as if there are no people there, right? There are no people, there are no human beings. It's just this stage against which imperialism or neocolonialism can stage itself. Edmundo, this knows. is a critic who writes about this kind of photographic image of underdevelopment that so visual culture is very important right culture is really important it's through culture that we internalize ideas of superiority and inferiority who's uh you know who's idealized and who is looked down upon so that's why media studies is so uh so so crucial um and this is just there's no one's talking about this Gordon Parks's image his series of photographs so he says you know he's talking about these people who create this illusion of beauty or they transform a stupid bottle of rum into an intensely decorative visual object Coca-Cola just you know a can or a bottle with a dark sugary drink becomes this symbol of romance and freedom and youth so he says these images project concrete profound social and psychological realities so they're not to be dismissed these images are actually they carry a psychological reality uh they they they transform people's desires or they channel people's desires for freedom towards you know wanting these uh commodities. So the women filmed by and were photographed in a romantic and dreamy style in the midst of the tropical colors and the historical splendor of Trinidad, Cuba. Now the lie was complete. Trinidad's ruins had become inhabited by modern nymphs. So this is that side of colonialism, neo-colonialism, where the sugar coat. of the bitter pill. So the first, in terms of cognition, just to reiterate, is a sense of critical thinking and understanding of opposition in society. And the second that I want to go into now is historical consciousness of the ability to understand oneself as a historical agent living in history. So what you do matters because you live in history and what you do in the present matters. Right. So that's very important for the revolutionary cognition or revolutionary consciousness. These filmmakers are after and hear the moving image, the materiality of the moving image, its indexicality and that it happens in duration and has sound. is very important. So a few things. that these films, and obviously I cannot, you know, introduce you to the enormous range of work that happens and that continues to happen in this period, but just a few sort of key points in the ways they create the sense of history or historical consciousness. One is the idea that the past does not remain static. What this means is that although the past is past. It has already happened. It does not just remain static because you can change the meaning of the past. To take an example from India, we just can't say, okay, the partition is over and that has happened. It's not static. It is some of us want to be reunited. And then there are others who want that partition in a... again, right? So the past is not something that is just left behind. It lives very much in the present and struggles in the present can change the meaning of what happened in the past. You cannot change the past, but you can change its meaning. So that is why the present matters. But in the present, the outcome is uncertain. You don't really know. what the result will be. So another word for that is contingent. The outcome is uncertain. It is open to alternatives. And that is why there is this space of action. Now, cinema is uniquely capable of showing that, showing the present as not completed, but showing it as a place of possibilities. Now think of this as this is totally the opposite of the Hollywood narrative where there is closure. Everything in the script is supposed to tie, tie up. You're not supposed to have any open ends. There has to be an ending, mostly a happy ending or second cinema, which for these filmmakers was the cinema made by authors or what we call independent cinema. in the first world, the advanced capitalist countries, which, again, tended to favor the author, the individual making the films, and was not so much about people, right? It was about people as a subject. And that is where you can see the change from a mass medium, which is made for people's consumption, to a popular medium in which people become subjects. And in, say, people's songs, similarly, there is, or we say people's movements, there's a people's cinema in which people are the subject, not individuals, not heroes. So the present then for them is something that is palpably something that where it's that space for action. So here I just want to talk about one filmmaker. one of his films and I really really encourage you to see this filmmaker's work his name is Patricio Guzman who made uh this film called Battle of Chile and it is part one part two and part three and this film is another canonical text of third cinema so I don't know how much you know about Chile's history but on September 11 1973 you There was a coup in Chile where the democratically elected president, who was a socialist by a man by the name of Salvador Allende, was removed by an armed coup. And the coup was led by factions of the Chilean army supported by the CIA. Now, 11 months prior to the coup, so starting in January of that year. not January, it would be the previous year. So let's say October, October 72. These filmmakers, so Patricio Guzman, who's actually at this point, the only one who has had some film education in France, brings together a crew of two other people. There is a sound person and the camera person. Guzman is the audio person and this crew of three start to film and they do this for 11 months. as to what is happening in that moment. Because they feel that they are now facing three possible alternatives. So they see that film is really useful at this point. They say it's really important to record what we are seeing right now. Why? Because there are three alternatives that can happen. One is... We're headed towards a fascist coup d'etat. If that happens, that means that's the defeat of the popular struggles of the Chilean people. But we would at least have a record of the struggle. And this record then will go into history and we'll be able to actually pay tribute to the struggles that were fought. You know, there's this misperception. especially in the United States, that, oh, everybody in Germany just gave in to the Holocaust and, you know, it just happened. But there were immense struggles against it. And so this and people laid down their lives and so on, trying to avoid that from happening. And so here we see these filmmakers living in history, thinking of, you know, the outcome as uncertain. but planning their work with that uncertainty in mind. So if there's a defeat, we'll have this film as evidence that we fought. Second option, second possibility was that there would be a civil war. So the militias were, of course, arming themselves. And Allende, Salvador Allende was saying that he will not arm the revolution because he'll go by the constitution. and respect the constitution. But civil war certainly seemed a possibility. There were factions on the left who were also saying, no, we need to arm against this preparation that the right wing is making in that period. So had there been a civil war, they say, well, either it would be a victory or defeat of the popular forces. In case there's a victory, it would help us understand what had gone before. So how to construct a socialist state that is democratic, right? They're very, very much wedded to the idea of having socialism with democracy, being very critical of what has happened by then in the Soviet Union. So how do you reconcile democracy with socialism? So in case of victory, then we can see those struggles. This is a record of those struggles, those ideas of constitutionalism and democracy. In case of defeat, of course, then this just becomes a record for future struggles, right? So it's not just to pay tribute, but for the future generations, they'll know this was the fight that was put up. So they say none of us believe that the existing situation would sustain itself for long. And I think that that very palpable sense that you're living in a moment which is not going to last very, very long. And so here they understand that what film allows to us to experience is that it allows us to have an experience and be an observer of that experience. So these filmmakers are going through this period of dramatic transformation, but they're also observing it at the same time. They're not sitting down, you know, and writing about it. They're recording it as it is happening. So they're observing what is going on. And that is very, very important dimension of human thinking. It gives us freedom. it gives us the freedom to at least make a choice in terms of how we are going to respond to a particular situation. So I want to show you how then, you know, how they do this cinematically. This is from Battle of Chile Part 2, a sequence where General Arturo Araya, who was very close to Salvador Allende. The man in the middle is Salvador Allende here. And so the army by this time in Chile had split into a right... and the left, or what were called constitutionalists. Those who supported the constitution of Chile as a democratic country versus those who were, you know, preparing for a coup, but they were still doing it in secret. It was not blatantly obvious. Like they weren't doing this openly, but they were conspiring secretly. But General Arturo Araya was... was the leading army man who was a constitutionalist and he was murdered on July 27, 1973. And that murder or assassination is a, you can see as a turning point. But at this time, like I said, it's still a conspiracy. And these filmmakers go to the funeral and they record that funeral. So as you see the the recording see how they're teaching us to look for signs in history to stop and to read uh the signs now namrata i don't know do you have this third uh link i think i do i can yeah you can share it because i don't want to risk showing it from here okay It had become the main link between the government and the constitutionalist officers of the navy. Ayende is arriving at the funeral. The same day, the remains of the Edekan are taken to the Palacio de la Moneda and then they are transported to Valparaíso to be buried with military honors. This is Valparaíso, this is the preparation, this is where the rally will be. go through. And this is the scene I want you to look at. These are the generals. What are they talking about? Who will go where? Officers? You know, cinema gives us a pause, right? It stops the movement of time. And to look at this period. And it becomes poetry, right? The gloves. This man becomes an important figure in the punta. What's under those velvet gloves? Months later, in his exile from Buenos Aires and before being assassinated, General Carlos Prats declares that one of the reasons to eliminate Commander Araya was to prevent Allende from being informed of what was happening in the military circles of Valparaíso. This is where a sector of the officialdom begins to plan the coup d'état with the advice of the North American government. Here is a section of the officers who start to openly plan a coup assisted by the United States. This man you'll see later on in the home turn. Okay, we can stop here. so literally stopping time which is not possible in our everyday life right you cannot slow slow down uh the movement of time you cannot go back you cannot freeze frame or fast forward or rewind or just pause right but cinema can do that and in that way you By elongating this meeting where they've come, they're pretending to be in mourning for the murder of a general, but they're also planning behind. And so learning to identify, learning to realize the time that one is living in is something that one imbibes, you know, through films like this. So you saw this person, for example, his name is Merino, this guy. Oops, sorry. You know, and now, and this is Pinochet. So they then emerge fully as the part of Pinochet's cabinet. But in the film, we see a previous moment where they have still... the mask has still to be taken off, for example. That's another way of talking about it. Or this is again Pinochet's Junta 20 years later. This is Merino and then of course Pinochet. So I want you to think about then when you, so learning to watch films is actually learning to live in a way. What we mean by texture. is how that time feels to experience and to be aware of the movement of time, that that is actually palpable, you know, in sort of this increasing busyness of one's life. And I think also over social media, when you forget the movement of time, but these film texts teach us to experience time itself as a material experience. As a physical experience. This scene, I'm not going to show it to you. It's one of the hardest scenes to see. It's from Battle of Chile, part one, towards the end, where is the first coup, which was done in June. It was a coup by a smaller brigade of the army. And in this, it's very grainy because it's handheld. The filmmaker who took this shot was shot. And so he dies on film. And so here is the soldier who's coming towards him, Corporal Hector Busmante, who's coming towards him with a gun. The filmmaker stands present. in the face of this man trying to take a photo of this, creating an image in posterity about fascism, right? The face of the fascist and then is assassinated. So this is Patricio Guzman. These are a series of, you know, the films that he's made. They all sort of return to that moment. in Chile to that formative moment in his life. And, you know, please do see them if you can. So in another film, he comes back 20 years later after Pinochet has stepped down and shows Battle of Chile to the people who were in it who are now older who have escaped being disappeared or killed. And this is from Chile, obstinate memory. And these people are trying to recognize themselves. So again, film as a record of history, right? So by visiting that moment again, there are ways to understand the present. It's not just out of like nostalgia for something. Oh, that's the past, but it is okay. Chile in 1998. What does that mean? So not forgetting, not forgetting the dreams of a previous generation. Again, another scene from Chile Obstinate Memory and the importance of sound in memory. Guzman's very, very conscious of the role music and sound plays in memory. So here he restages the scene. And these men... used to be the guards for Salvador Allende and they would walk next to his car and you know Allende would be waving at people and so on. So now they're of course much older men and some have been tortured and so they're you know not physically very healthy either but he stages this walk with them they restage that. and the body remembers. Sorry, I got thrown out. I'm putting myself back in again. So I think in Guzman's work, we see this understanding of history or historical consciousness as one at the individual level, that is the person, the social, that is the social relationships that they're part of. Third is. Third level is the historical. It's that historical context of Chile in 1973. But then that historical context becomes bigger and bigger, expands to the cosmic or where in his later films, Guzman is also relating what happened in 1973 Chile in terms of. of justice or oppression to what went on with the native people in Chile and so on. And also the sense that the individual is temporary, but there is a longer history of time, right? So your actions in the present have consequences for the future, even to the point of beyond the human future, as it were. So we see that sort of deep history or sense of deep time in these films, I think. The third cinema invites us to or teaches us to think in those ways, but in very materialistic ways, in that your actions will have a consequence, not in sort of metaphysical ways in that it's all an illusion, you know, the sort of concepts of Maya and so on that this is. simply an illusion and there is some other world somewhere which is more permanent or concepts of heaven and hell but that it's a sense of cosmic time in which one's actions have consequences um in uh therefore this idea of time as malleable um and the human capacity to think of past and future in the present. Guzman plays with that in another film which is called Salvador Allende. He made that in 2004. He has this poem by Gonzalo Millán, a Latin American poet, and Millán reads this poem. And this is the sort of reversal of history in a way that we can imagine. So the human imagination can defeat power. So the poet says, the disappeared reappear, the dead leave their graves, the airplanes fly backwards, the missiles rise into the airplanes. So they had attacked with missiles from the airplanes. They'd attacked Allende's home or the government home. Allende fires. The flames go out. He takes off his helmet. So there is this. debate on whether Allende was killed or he killed himself, but he was shot in the head. He takes off his helmet, the moneda, that is the government residence of Allende. The moneda is rebuilt like new. His skull reassembles itself and on. So history can be reversed. The movement of history can be reversed in the present. And therefore, this is a cinema of hope. It's not a cinema of despair or defeat. it remains a cinema of hope. And I wanted to end this today by talking about this concept of art and how third cinema relates in a very certain particular way to the history of art. And here I'm taking the help of Ernst Fischer, who's an Austrian critic, historian. And his book, The Necessity of Art, which came out in 1963. So he says art in the dawn of humanity had little to do with beauty. So he's talking about the cave paintings, for example. It had little to do with beauty. It was a magic tool or weapon of the human collective in the struggle for survival. So in those cave paintings, the painters, the cave painters, maybe are preparing and hoping that they will win. the fight with the animals. Maybe they're learning how to deal with their own absence. They're leaving their handprints for the future. They're learning that they're actually, by painting those pictures, they're learning that they're different from the animals. They're learning, they're getting alienated from their animals. So there's also, they're from the animals. So there's also a sense of pain. in that, but they're also learning to belong to a culture. Then the collective in the cosmos is the repressed unconscious of art. And I think this is a very important point here, that actually as human beings, we desire solidarity. We desire to belong, to transform our conditions. And that is the repressed unconscious of art. So if we are to really understand the power of art is that it touches that unconscious. And music, of course, is a way in which, you know, you can deeply be touched by music. That's why people in protest, you know, during the American civil rights movement, they join hands and they face bullets and water cannons by singing songs like We Shall Overcome. They become then a collective. Art must uncover new relationships in ways that others can recover them too. So show us new relationships so that those who are also seeing or experiencing this art can discover them as well. And I think leading from this, artists are not distinct from humans. Actually, they're deeply human and they can touch us in a deeply human way. But as viewers, we also have to develop ourselves. We have to rise to meet that art. And finally, art must show the social world as changeable and help to change it. And I think that is a core feature of popular art, that it shows that the social world is changeable. You can change the world. You don't have to accept it as it is. And art can give us the courage to do so, but also understanding by showing the world is. is changeable. So that's all I had for you today. And I, I'm really, really sorry for all these technical, uh, troubles. Um, but I'd love to hear your comments or questions. Thank you Dr. Kapoor for that lovely talk on 3rd Cinema and thank you all for your patience through all the technical issues. We also lost electricity and came back, it was dark, it was light, it was a lot of things. Anyway, please if you have questions, do let me know, raise your hand and I'll bring a mic to you. And those who are on Zoom can also ask their questions. We have a few minutes. Yes, okay. Hello. My question is still sort of forming in my brain as I think about it, but it's primarily concerned with This question of whether third cinema can exist now within our current landscape. So as far as I've understood third cinema and what they write about in their manifesto towards the third cinema, it's meant to inherently be revolutionary. Like in every single aspect down to audience members, having like the very act of watching a movie or watching a film is revolutionary. It is against, it goes against the system. But today, I think there seems to be this trend in terms of mainstream cinema, or just in terms of art in general, where every aspect of our culture and our identity can be quantified in a sense. And it's like every part of our existence can be sort of linked to this over-capitalistic system. And a specific example might be Barbie. which just came out and it's, it's, it's themes are very, are, do critique this like, this over-capitalistic system, but it is also a film that is produced by Mattel, a toy company, and the film does exist as primarily marketing for a band, which has since boomed post. the film coming out and I think there are a lot of other instances of this as well. So is it possible within today's current climate to create cinema that is truly revolutionary? Does that make sense? No, that makes complete sense and that is totally the question for today, right? You're completely right about Barbie. And, you know, so capitalism has, capitalistic culture has also evolved to offer its own critique. And one can say that's, you know, kind of different from that, the period in the 60s. And in a way, capitalistic culture has learned from that time, right? So they learn to incorporate that critique and then give it back to us as... critique so that then we can enjoy it and then go on living um you know so so you're really right to identify um the the current moment uh what i would say is uh that the current moment whether one can describe it as revolutionary it's it's hard but it is certainly very crisis ridden like the period that we're talking about you There isn't, but yet we don't, we have, we have had glimpses of people's movements. So in the United States, Black Lives Matter. And one could say in India, the farmers movement, for example, or the anti-CA protests. um these things have occurred um but is there um is there this kind of revolutionary art that is being made uh there are works and then those you know and then there's very very severe repression um but i would so i think in that sense is there a Is there a movement that is aligned with people's movements? I think Kuvan and Patwadan's work, for example, they're much aligned with the people he works with. He works with people for years. So it's not just somebody coming in and making a piece of work. So here is a filmmaker who's very aligned. with people's movements. And so that kind of movement, you know, we'd of course want to see it grow, but there's also severe repression against it. I do want to like kind of think more on your question, even with like Black Lives Matter. So, you know, it was a 15 year old who stood there and recorded Mr. George Floyd's murder by the police. on her iPhone. And, you know, and you have to think about what it takes for a 15 year old to stand there, right, to stand and to record it. And when she was asked, and they gave her a Pulitzer Prize recently for it. And, and when they asked her, why did you do it? How did you do it? She said, I could see my father, my brother, my uncles. And I think That's a revolutionary situation, that moving out of oneself and being able to see oneself in solidarity with others and see what is happening to other people as something that can happen to you. I think the moment, like that's certainly part of Black consciousness in the United States. Here, I mean. I think it's very, very polarized. And there is the sense that it's happening over there. It's happening to someone else or these people, you know, these people are anti-national or whatever. So that is that unconscious. Has that unconscious been like tapped into this ability that we have to identify with others? But capitalist culture, of course. individualizes us to the point that, you know, we face the risks that we face individually. And this is sort of, I'm not answering your question about, you know, the possibility of third cinema, but I'm trying to understand from your question, the context that we're in, and whether third cinema, you know, the obstructions to that, and the obstruction is this ability to experience what is happening. as something that is both personal as well as collective and that collective consciousness i think is is still to to be built if that answers your question yes i thought that was a very interesting answer yes any other questions So, we can wind up and thank you so much Dr. Kapoor for sharing your time with us and sharing this wonderful information with us. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you for coming here and thank you all as well for attending this talk.

She's also the author of two books, The Politics of Time and Youth in Grand India, Bargaining with Capital, which was published in 2013, and Coining for Capital, Movies, Marketing and the Transformation of Childhood, published in 2005. She's also the founding co-editor of the journal Studies in South Asian Film and Media, which publishes work on cinema and media studies focused on South Asia. Thank you. Dr. Kapoor has published widely on the subjects of Marxist feminist theory and media arts and culture, the politics of labor, class, race and sexuality in neoliberalism, documentary cinema and global children's media culture.

I am really happy that Dr. Kapoor has made time from her very busy schedule to join us today. She has been my dissertation committee chair. for my own PhD.

So I'm really excited that she can today talk to the students who are in my class and all of you as well. So please give a warm welcome to Dr. Kapoor and then we can start. Well thank you everyone for being here and thanks Namrata for the invitation.

It always is very special you know to to speak to the class of one student. And it's lovely to see Namrata in her new academic home. So I'm delighted to be here. By way of introduction, Namrata was discussing with me the class she's teaching on popular culture. And while we were talking about, you know, what I could speak about, I thought we could...

sort of make a distinction between popular culture and mass culture, mass culture and via cinema, because cinema was this and is remains this large mass medium. It's centralized. It's made by a few groups of people, by a few people, but it's made for the masses. Can cinema also be popular culture?

So I thought, that would be a good way to approach this class on popular culture by setting up the difference between mass culture and popular culture. And by way of an example, I'm choosing to talk about Third Cinema, which was a film movement that developed in Latin America in the 60s, in the process of decolonizing. But it is a significant historical moment and a movement which is not only based in Latin America. And so we shouldn't think of it geographically, but think of it conceptually as a way to intervene and to think about the place of art and then cinema in society. So that's sort of the overall framework within which I'll talk with you today.

And I would really appreciate your... questions. And if you have questions, you can put them also in the chat box or comments and, you know, we can have, make it a little more interactive.

So at this point, I want to share my PowerPoint. So let's go to that. to be able to i don't need you to see all of the let's see if i can show it to you in a in the slideshow mode um so is that what you're able to see The slideshow mode?

Yes, we can see the slides. Okay, great. All right. Okay.

So third cinema. And like I said, I want to be talking about it, about this effort by these filmmakers to turn it into a popular art form. And one of the questions they ask there is, does cinema have some kind of cognitive power?

Can it change the way in which we perceive the world, in which we understand? reality so can cinema create a new form of perception a new form of understanding the world and in this they think about cinema as as a kind of rehearsal um for engaging with reality so it's it's a way it's an object lesson it's a tool it's a way to engage with reality as well as turn reality into a spectrum into something that then you see and grasp and want to change. So and what is also very interesting about this film movement is that the filmmakers are also theorists.

They're also participants, very active participants in the revolutionary movements of this time. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gattino, for example, write in what's one of the manifestos of this movement called Towards a Third Cinema. They say there's no knowledge of reality as long as it is not acted upon, as long as its transformation has not begun on all fronts of struggle. So they see the cultural struggle as very much part of an economic and political struggle.

Its origins are in the 50s and what we call the non-aligned movement. This was one of the kind of important events in this is the Bandung Conference, which was held in Indonesia in 1955, where 29 Asian and African nations. These are nations which were.

breaking out of colonialism, India being one, but then there were representatives from Cuba, Palestine, and African nations as well. And this movement, this non-aligned movement, develops during the Cold War when the two blocks are the capitalist block led by the United States and the so-called state. socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union. And within that, countries like India and Nehru in that period are able to sort of create an independent path to say we are aligned with a bloc of previously colonized countries and we want to forge our own economic, political, cultural development.

So these are those principles. equality, political self-determination, and so on. Some of the leaders of this movement or icons of this movement, beginning from left of the screen, is Che Guevara, Argentinian, who fought alongside Fidel Castro, involved in not only the independence of Cuba, but also... other Latin American countries and was murdered or assassinated by the militia as well as the CIA in Bolivia. Next to him is Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese independence movement, first liberated, led the liberation of Vietnam from France in 1954 and then had a lifelong war which then the US could not win against Vietnam.

And then the person on the right is Frantz Fanon, a psychoanalyst. a doctor and a political figure who's Argentinian and very active and involved in Argentina, sorry, Algeria, not Argentina, Algerian independence from France. And he talks about the fact that decolonization is not only something that's political that happens at the level of the state, but it's also deeply personal that you have that.

One has to actually get rid of and throw out these colonial ideas, the ideas of the supremacy of the white or economic development along lines of capitalism, the ideas of radical individualism. So all these ideas are actually internalized and the process of decolonizing means actually getting rid of those ideas and becoming a new person. So these... three figures are very important to this movement.

And then just geographically where it starts. So the preferred word is Latin America rather than South America, because if you were to think geographically, then you know, where is Mexico, where is South? So Latin America, because hey the result of colonizing I'll get in touch with you.

All of these countries. I see that my internet is a little wonky, but hopefully. Now, Namrata?

Yeah, we can hear you. I think you're back. Okay.

Yeah, you are. And the people in this region are a mix of indigenous, native. uh people as well as afro latin american european and what are known as mestizos um that is of the the ethnicities um cinema although it originates from Latin America and in the 60s.

It is not a geographical concept. We have something like that happening around the world in the 60s. As part of these reels, you had the, I'm not going to murder that word, General du Cinema François, British and Japanese film clubs.

revolutionary movements in Turkey, Italy, and in India, the two people I think have come out of that movement are Anand Pardhan and Rakesh Sharma. So if you don't know their work, please look it up. This is unnecessary. So what is it that they understand about the nature of cinema? One, that it is...

spatial, that means that it occupies space, which is the space of the movie screen and the exhibition space, right? Whether it's a university classroom like we're in right now, or could be a public space, could be a movie theater, could be a union hall. So it occupies space.

It needs people or it stages itself and occupies space. It is temporal, meaning it occurs in time, so it has duration, like poetry. or music, spatial meaning like sculpture or theater.

It is indexical. This is the significant thing about cinema and its movement from photography. Indexical means that it points the index.

The word indexical comes from the index finger that it points to the existence of a certain reality. So the camera will record whatever. Now we know cameras lie and you can now through, of course, through editing as well as computer graphics, kind of construct a reality via desktop cinemas and so on.

But there is this quality of the cinematic image that it can be a living, it can bear witness. So you're likely to believe me if I show you a film of myself. with, let's say, Biden.

Whereas if I was to show you a painting, you wouldn't believe that. And the third thing is it's a mass medium. It can be broadcast widely.

So there are a few things then within that, within these four kind of characteristics of cinema as a medium, that these filmmakers see its potential in two ways. as an art form one is montage montage as an editing technique that through relationships between shorts between sound and image screened you can actually use all of that to hide heightened conflict to show contradictions to show cracks and show oppositions to actually disrupt this idea that reality is somehow serious. And the second is that because cinema can allow you to bear witness, it allows you to see reality unfolding in time, in duration, sound.

Give me a second, I'll just get in touch on phone and let them know that they can't hear okay. So just have patience for two minutes. The demonstrators.

but it is also a canvas Thank you. Okay, sorry about all these technical troubles. Can you hear me now?

yes yeah we can yes switch off the video it'll be better okay that makes sense uh dr kapoor uh you can switch off your video so you use less bandwidth and then we'll be able to hear you and see the powerpoint Okay, I think she's just joining in again. So yeah, there is an issue with her internet at her end which she told me in the morning but we still decided to go ahead with the lecture. So have a little, just a little patience.

I've told her to switch off the video so that she can get back to us. okay i guess um you all will not be able to see the powerpoint but that's fine right i can just talk through it dr you can still share the powerpoint with us okay Anyway, coming to a film clip so we could. All right.

Let's try that first. Yeah, sure. Sure. OK.

Is that working now? yeah we can see the slides okay fantastic uh so i was at the second point about thinking of cinema as a canvas literally as something that you can paint over so here is an indexical material you can what they find really fascinating about this medium. So I actually want to stop at this point and share a clip from a film called Tire Die.

It's one of the first films of this movement by Fernando Berri. Tire Die means give me a dime. And the film... was set in Brazil.

And it's about these children who beg for money from a passing train. So Namrata, if you could show that, that would be great. Yeah.

Let me just bring up that. Oh Look, look, look! Look, look, look!

Look at this misery. These people live like this because they don't want to work. We can stop now, if you like.

Yeah. Okay, we are back. So you can see the montage, the idea of the montage to show contradictions in realities is very much there, but it's also a window in that. the filmmaker is showing you what is going on, but through changes, switches and camera angles, you're able to see the same reality and see within that same reality, the existence of two oppositional realities, and that that's what needs to change.

So it is not that these people are lazy or they don't work, but this is the work that is available to them. So teaching us in terms of that new form of cognition or becoming aware of reality is to see the existence of multiple oppositional. It's a it's a lesson in learning to see to see reality.

Now, I want to show you another clip. which is from Hour of the Furnaces, which was the film made by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gattino from Argentina. And this is also in the 60s. So, Namrata, if you can show the second clip, please.

Yes. Oh, you'll have to go out of screen sharing, Dr. Kapoor. Thank you. What characterizes Latin American countries is their dependence. Economic dependence, political dependence, cultural dependence.

First Spain, then England, today the United States. The history of our countries is the history of an endless colonial slaughter. Without economic independence, there is no political independence. José Martí said, the people who want to be free, let them be first in business. In dependence, there is no possible form of development.

The apparent development of some port cities, like Buenos Aires, translates only the growing expansion of the great powers in the center of our economies. Yesterday, Mitre... Pellegrini, Pinedo, today Prebysh, Frigerio, Al-Sogaray, loans, investments in loans, always served the same policy of submission.

The presumed imperialist help is a help that always costs more to the one who receives it than to the one who gives it. For every dollar invested in Latin America imperialism is taken to four. Gold and coffee, meat and oil, wheat and tin, the work of a people converted into cheap labor, built the wealth of the great powers. Is this exploitation the cause of delay, misery, oppression?

The one that allows the financing and the high level of life of the developed nations. The one that gave birth to that dark word invented by imperialism. Subdevelopment. I don't want to go, We can stop now.

Yeah. So clearly you can see that dependency is shown as the utter, utter degradation of a nation and people. into simply what are also called banana republics and to the production of absolutely raw material to the point that they're just meat. And what is being sold is the labor power or time of people, of humans, young people being turned into labor for say information technology as we would think about in terms of India now.

but turned completely into servicing global capital. So these dependency creates countries which are then reduced to only the production of raw material and which also creates then a deep sense of inferiority amongst people. And so you're sold this kind of prettified.

picture of the coca-cola and you know uh adventure and uh youth and freedom and sexuality but at the same time you're being reduced to to meat now it's important in terms of cinema to see where how um solanus and uh gatino show that shift right we first get this um lecture on imperialism over you Buenos Aires and we see the the high rises and so on but from a distance it you you just see that from a uh from as if you were um you know in an airplane you're seeing you you're not really seeing the reality you aren't really coming to the ground you're seeing the seeing Buenos Aires from above and that's what it looks like like a very modern city and then we get this cut you where he says this is the obscure word introduced by imperialism is dependency. And then we see this slaughterhouse and we see this gate to the slaughterhouse being open. And then without any narrative, the film goes on to show what that means. Now, again, here I want you to look at camera angles.

Look at also depth from the shift from foreground to background. You will see between now this shot is a very close shot, diagonally moving from left to right. And in the next shot, we are right into the face of the slaughtered animal. So these kinds of very sharp cuts.

actually have a physiological effect. They are shocking. They will make you disturbed.

But they're also, then they, so it's the change is physiological, literally physiological in that, you know, our blood runs fast or our heart starts to beat faster. And then of course, emotional. making you experience this reality with that very mellow classical sort of music but the reality that you're seeing is just so like you want to turn your eyes away from it and then the kind of intellectual shift that they want you to make which is to understand to experience and to see what actually imperialism or dependency is So Fernando Biri, so I'm going to intersperse here with, you know, some of their own writings. So Biri says there are basically two kinds of filmmakers. One invents an imaginary reality, not and.

One invents an imaginary reality. The other confronts an existing reality and attempts to understand it, analyze it, criticize it, judge it, and finally translate it into film. So thinking, research, understanding, analysis is very, very important to... to these filmmakers. The revolutionary filmmaker acts with a radically new vision of the role of the producer.

So what it means to be an artist, what it means to be a maker, teamwork, what does solidarity mean, what does it mean to work together, tools, what is cinema as a tool, and details. So it's like what... But Frantz Fanon is saying you have to actually reinvent yourself as a person, as an artist. You have to have a radically different vision of what it means to be a maker.

Unlike the Hollywood cinema production line, which for them was first cinema, where you have the director. But even above the director, you have the producer. And even above the producer, you have.

the studio or Wall Street investment in the making of the film. Here the filmmaker is a participant in a critical struggle. There is teamwork, teamwork to the extent that you, that every, in their understanding, everyone had to understand all of the roles of filmmaking.

even though they were cinematographers and directors and writers, but everyone should know all of the aspects of filmmaking. So if one person is disappeared, then someone, then the other one can step in and the, the vision or the goals are shared, right? So solidarity here is at the level of risking one's life for one's comrades.

So. Above all, he supplies himself at all levels, himself, herself at all levels, meaning the filmmaker should be able to do everything. So this is a very different orientation to learning how to make media, which I think has become even more very prevalent in our times. You know, with digital, with people are making, creating their own stories and broadcasting them.

But the question there is, OK, we have the tools now, but. Do people have the politics? Do they have that understanding?

So his most valuable possessions are the tools of the trade. So the tools of the trade, one can say, have now become democratized. You know, your iPhone can be or your computer can literally do everything.

So you do own the sort of tool. But. Is there then the wider politics and the solidarity to create this kind of work would be then the question we should ask.

The other thing that they discuss in terms of thinking about. Hello. So sorry about that.

Wait a second. To production in secret of true solidarity, it has to be democratic distribution. So these films are obviously not shown in movie theaters.

They were shown. Through people, in people's, through people's organizations, often sometimes seen by just a few people. So against centralized distribution.

And then the third thing is really important, which is turn the screening itself into a rally or a meeting. So these films are, they are initiators. They're not the end.

And another term that is useful to understand the concept of third cinema is imperfect cinema. By imperfect, they mean that a film is never completed if it is not seen. So a film is imperfect without. the spectator but then the spectator here is seen as a collaborator or as someone who will then become an ally um so i want to get uh get into now The question that I'd raised, sorry, I got thrown out again.

Yeah, it's rained a lot here. And so the. the internet has been really uh really uh bad um should i continue uh namrata uh yes dr couple go ahead we can we can hear you fine now right um and materialist meaning you can find explanations for things that occur through evidence Like you can establish why something happens through evidence and not through some ideas of like supernatural or some sort of metaphysical ideas. So you can find the reason for things, explanations in things that in ways that can be proven so that others can also check and say, yeah, this is how things work.

So. So what do these filmmakers then want the viewer to be? They want their viewers to be able to look through to peers'reality, that what appears is not what is, that what appears is actually in some ways a performance and that underlying it are relationships of power.

to discover these kinds of myths, they call them myths, these social conventions or themes which govern us without our consent in that we haven't really consented to this. You know, there isn't a consent around the caste system, for example, it is not that people consent to be thought of as untouchables, but that is the lived ideology. And so So it is a performed ideology and they want their films to create this kind of cognition of reality itself as not harmonious.

And they want to actually heighten the conflicts. Can you hear me now? Yeah, we can.

And so they're also looking at the images of the third world, you know, in the first world. So here are two shots of Fidel Castro. One is the one on the left is from Life magazine, a U.S. magazine in the same same period in 1961. This was on the cover.

Now you can see what Fidel looks like. Now, if we had more time, we would. analyze the image, but of course you can see the sort of racialized image here.

It's a darker man. The teeth, you know, sort of opened up a sort of... We're losing you, Dr. Kapoor.

We can't hear you completely. Okay, I'll get to it again. Yeah.

or here were these other images of Cuba. Gordon Parks, who's actually a black photographer, has done wonderful work representing African-American reality, makes these images of Cuba. where you see these, where Cuba just becomes a background, right? It's just a stage for showing whiteness, the beauty of whiteness.

And then the third world is this savage sort of primitive place. And this came out in Life magazine, 1958, this series. Here's another one from that same series by Gordon Parks.

And so against the ruins, against these parrots and nature, as if there are no people there, right? There are no people, there are no human beings. It's just this stage against which imperialism or neocolonialism can stage itself.

Edmundo, this knows. is a critic who writes about this kind of photographic image of underdevelopment that so visual culture is very important right culture is really important it's through culture that we internalize ideas of superiority and inferiority who's uh you know who's idealized and who is looked down upon so that's why media studies is so uh so so crucial um and this is just there's no one's talking about this Gordon Parks's image his series of photographs so he says you know he's talking about these people who create this illusion of beauty or they transform a stupid bottle of rum into an intensely decorative visual object Coca-Cola just you know a can or a bottle with a dark sugary drink becomes this symbol of romance and freedom and youth so he says these images project concrete profound social and psychological realities so they're not to be dismissed these images are actually they carry a psychological reality uh they they they transform people's desires or they channel people's desires for freedom towards you know wanting these uh commodities. So the women filmed by and were photographed in a romantic and dreamy style in the midst of the tropical colors and the historical splendor of Trinidad, Cuba. Now the lie was complete.

Trinidad's ruins had become inhabited by modern nymphs. So this is that side of colonialism, neo-colonialism, where the sugar coat. of the bitter pill.

So the first, in terms of cognition, just to reiterate, is a sense of critical thinking and understanding of opposition in society. And the second that I want to go into now is historical consciousness of the ability to understand oneself as a historical agent living in history. So what you do matters because you live in history and what you do in the present matters.

Right. So that's very important for the revolutionary cognition or revolutionary consciousness. These filmmakers are after and hear the moving image, the materiality of the moving image, its indexicality and that it happens in duration and has sound.

is very important. So a few things. that these films, and obviously I cannot, you know, introduce you to the enormous range of work that happens and that continues to happen in this period, but just a few sort of key points in the ways they create the sense of history or historical consciousness.

One is the idea that the past does not remain static. What this means is that although the past is past. It has already happened.

It does not just remain static because you can change the meaning of the past. To take an example from India, we just can't say, okay, the partition is over and that has happened. It's not static. It is some of us want to be reunited. And then there are others who want that partition in a...

again, right? So the past is not something that is just left behind. It lives very much in the present and struggles in the present can change the meaning of what happened in the past. You cannot change the past, but you can change its meaning. So that is why the present matters.

But in the present, the outcome is uncertain. You don't really know. what the result will be.

So another word for that is contingent. The outcome is uncertain. It is open to alternatives. And that is why there is this space of action. Now, cinema is uniquely capable of showing that, showing the present as not completed, but showing it as a place of possibilities.

Now think of this as this is totally the opposite of the Hollywood narrative where there is closure. Everything in the script is supposed to tie, tie up. You're not supposed to have any open ends. There has to be an ending, mostly a happy ending or second cinema, which for these filmmakers was the cinema made by authors or what we call independent cinema. in the first world, the advanced capitalist countries, which, again, tended to favor the author, the individual making the films, and was not so much about people, right?

It was about people as a subject. And that is where you can see the change from a mass medium, which is made for people's consumption, to a popular medium in which people become subjects. And in, say, people's songs, similarly, there is, or we say people's movements, there's a people's cinema in which people are the subject, not individuals, not heroes. So the present then for them is something that is palpably something that where it's that space for action.

So here I just want to talk about one filmmaker. one of his films and I really really encourage you to see this filmmaker's work his name is Patricio Guzman who made uh this film called Battle of Chile and it is part one part two and part three and this film is another canonical text of third cinema so I don't know how much you know about Chile's history but on September 11 1973 you There was a coup in Chile where the democratically elected president, who was a socialist by a man by the name of Salvador Allende, was removed by an armed coup. And the coup was led by factions of the Chilean army supported by the CIA. Now, 11 months prior to the coup, so starting in January of that year.

not January, it would be the previous year. So let's say October, October 72. These filmmakers, so Patricio Guzman, who's actually at this point, the only one who has had some film education in France, brings together a crew of two other people. There is a sound person and the camera person.

Guzman is the audio person and this crew of three start to film and they do this for 11 months. as to what is happening in that moment. Because they feel that they are now facing three possible alternatives.

So they see that film is really useful at this point. They say it's really important to record what we are seeing right now. Why?

Because there are three alternatives that can happen. One is... We're headed towards a fascist coup d'etat. If that happens, that means that's the defeat of the popular struggles of the Chilean people. But we would at least have a record of the struggle.

And this record then will go into history and we'll be able to actually pay tribute to the struggles that were fought. You know, there's this misperception. especially in the United States, that, oh, everybody in Germany just gave in to the Holocaust and, you know, it just happened. But there were immense struggles against it.

And so this and people laid down their lives and so on, trying to avoid that from happening. And so here we see these filmmakers living in history, thinking of, you know, the outcome as uncertain. but planning their work with that uncertainty in mind.

So if there's a defeat, we'll have this film as evidence that we fought. Second option, second possibility was that there would be a civil war. So the militias were, of course, arming themselves. And Allende, Salvador Allende was saying that he will not arm the revolution because he'll go by the constitution.

and respect the constitution. But civil war certainly seemed a possibility. There were factions on the left who were also saying, no, we need to arm against this preparation that the right wing is making in that period.

So had there been a civil war, they say, well, either it would be a victory or defeat of the popular forces. In case there's a victory, it would help us understand what had gone before. So how to construct a socialist state that is democratic, right?

They're very, very much wedded to the idea of having socialism with democracy, being very critical of what has happened by then in the Soviet Union. So how do you reconcile democracy with socialism? So in case of victory, then we can see those struggles. This is a record of those struggles, those ideas of constitutionalism and democracy.

In case of defeat, of course, then this just becomes a record for future struggles, right? So it's not just to pay tribute, but for the future generations, they'll know this was the fight that was put up. So they say none of us believe that the existing situation would sustain itself for long. And I think that that very palpable sense that you're living in a moment which is not going to last very, very long.

And so here they understand that what film allows to us to experience is that it allows us to have an experience and be an observer of that experience. So these filmmakers are going through this period of dramatic transformation, but they're also observing it at the same time. They're not sitting down, you know, and writing about it. They're recording it as it is happening. So they're observing what is going on.

And that is very, very important dimension of human thinking. It gives us freedom. it gives us the freedom to at least make a choice in terms of how we are going to respond to a particular situation.

So I want to show you how then, you know, how they do this cinematically. This is from Battle of Chile Part 2, a sequence where General Arturo Araya, who was very close to Salvador Allende. The man in the middle is Salvador Allende here.

And so the army by this time in Chile had split into a right... and the left, or what were called constitutionalists. Those who supported the constitution of Chile as a democratic country versus those who were, you know, preparing for a coup, but they were still doing it in secret.

It was not blatantly obvious. Like they weren't doing this openly, but they were conspiring secretly. But General Arturo Araya was... was the leading army man who was a constitutionalist and he was murdered on July 27, 1973. And that murder or assassination is a, you can see as a turning point.

But at this time, like I said, it's still a conspiracy. And these filmmakers go to the funeral and they record that funeral. So as you see the the recording see how they're teaching us to look for signs in history to stop and to read uh the signs now namrata i don't know do you have this third uh link i think i do i can yeah you can share it because i don't want to risk showing it from here okay It had become the main link between the government and the constitutionalist officers of the navy.

Ayende is arriving at the funeral. The same day, the remains of the Edekan are taken to the Palacio de la Moneda and then they are transported to Valparaíso to be buried with military honors. This is Valparaíso, this is the preparation, this is where the rally will be. go through. And this is the scene I want you to look at.

These are the generals. What are they talking about? Who will go where?

Officers? You know, cinema gives us a pause, right? It stops the movement of time. And to look at this period. And it becomes poetry, right?

The gloves. This man becomes an important figure in the punta. What's under those velvet gloves?

Months later, in his exile from Buenos Aires and before being assassinated, General Carlos Prats declares that one of the reasons to eliminate Commander Araya was to prevent Allende from being informed of what was happening in the military circles of Valparaíso. This is where a sector of the officialdom begins to plan the coup d'état with the advice of the North American government. Here is a section of the officers who start to openly plan a coup assisted by the United States. This man you'll see later on in the home turn. Okay, we can stop here.

so literally stopping time which is not possible in our everyday life right you cannot slow slow down uh the movement of time you cannot go back you cannot freeze frame or fast forward or rewind or just pause right but cinema can do that and in that way you By elongating this meeting where they've come, they're pretending to be in mourning for the murder of a general, but they're also planning behind. And so learning to identify, learning to realize the time that one is living in is something that one imbibes, you know, through films like this. So you saw this person, for example, his name is Merino, this guy.

Oops, sorry. You know, and now, and this is Pinochet. So they then emerge fully as the part of Pinochet's cabinet.

But in the film, we see a previous moment where they have still... the mask has still to be taken off, for example. That's another way of talking about it.

Or this is again Pinochet's Junta 20 years later. This is Merino and then of course Pinochet. So I want you to think about then when you, so learning to watch films is actually learning to live in a way. What we mean by texture.

is how that time feels to experience and to be aware of the movement of time, that that is actually palpable, you know, in sort of this increasing busyness of one's life. And I think also over social media, when you forget the movement of time, but these film texts teach us to experience time itself as a material experience. As a physical experience. This scene, I'm not going to show it to you. It's one of the hardest scenes to see.

It's from Battle of Chile, part one, towards the end, where is the first coup, which was done in June. It was a coup by a smaller brigade of the army. And in this, it's very grainy because it's handheld.

The filmmaker who took this shot was shot. And so he dies on film. And so here is the soldier who's coming towards him, Corporal Hector Busmante, who's coming towards him with a gun.

The filmmaker stands present. in the face of this man trying to take a photo of this, creating an image in posterity about fascism, right? The face of the fascist and then is assassinated.

So this is Patricio Guzman. These are a series of, you know, the films that he's made. They all sort of return to that moment.

in Chile to that formative moment in his life. And, you know, please do see them if you can. So in another film, he comes back 20 years later after Pinochet has stepped down and shows Battle of Chile to the people who were in it who are now older who have escaped being disappeared or killed. And this is from Chile, obstinate memory.

And these people are trying to recognize themselves. So again, film as a record of history, right? So by visiting that moment again, there are ways to understand the present. It's not just out of like nostalgia for something. Oh, that's the past, but it is okay.

Chile in 1998. What does that mean? So not forgetting, not forgetting the dreams of a previous generation. Again, another scene from Chile Obstinate Memory and the importance of sound in memory.

Guzman's very, very conscious of the role music and sound plays in memory. So here he restages the scene. And these men...

used to be the guards for Salvador Allende and they would walk next to his car and you know Allende would be waving at people and so on. So now they're of course much older men and some have been tortured and so they're you know not physically very healthy either but he stages this walk with them they restage that. and the body remembers. Sorry, I got thrown out. I'm putting myself back in again.

So I think in Guzman's work, we see this understanding of history or historical consciousness as one at the individual level, that is the person, the social, that is the social relationships that they're part of. Third is. Third level is the historical.

It's that historical context of Chile in 1973. But then that historical context becomes bigger and bigger, expands to the cosmic or where in his later films, Guzman is also relating what happened in 1973 Chile in terms of. of justice or oppression to what went on with the native people in Chile and so on. And also the sense that the individual is temporary, but there is a longer history of time, right? So your actions in the present have consequences for the future, even to the point of beyond the human future, as it were. So we see that sort of deep history or sense of deep time in these films, I think.

The third cinema invites us to or teaches us to think in those ways, but in very materialistic ways, in that your actions will have a consequence, not in sort of metaphysical ways in that it's all an illusion, you know, the sort of concepts of Maya and so on that this is. simply an illusion and there is some other world somewhere which is more permanent or concepts of heaven and hell but that it's a sense of cosmic time in which one's actions have consequences um in uh therefore this idea of time as malleable um and the human capacity to think of past and future in the present. Guzman plays with that in another film which is called Salvador Allende. He made that in 2004. He has this poem by Gonzalo Millán, a Latin American poet, and Millán reads this poem. And this is the sort of reversal of history in a way that we can imagine.

So the human imagination can defeat power. So the poet says, the disappeared reappear, the dead leave their graves, the airplanes fly backwards, the missiles rise into the airplanes. So they had attacked with missiles from the airplanes.

They'd attacked Allende's home or the government home. Allende fires. The flames go out.

He takes off his helmet. So there is this. debate on whether Allende was killed or he killed himself, but he was shot in the head.

He takes off his helmet, the moneda, that is the government residence of Allende. The moneda is rebuilt like new. His skull reassembles itself and on.

So history can be reversed. The movement of history can be reversed in the present. And therefore, this is a cinema of hope.

It's not a cinema of despair or defeat. it remains a cinema of hope. And I wanted to end this today by talking about this concept of art and how third cinema relates in a very certain particular way to the history of art. And here I'm taking the help of Ernst Fischer, who's an Austrian critic, historian. And his book, The Necessity of Art, which came out in 1963. So he says art in the dawn of humanity had little to do with beauty.

So he's talking about the cave paintings, for example. It had little to do with beauty. It was a magic tool or weapon of the human collective in the struggle for survival.

So in those cave paintings, the painters, the cave painters, maybe are preparing and hoping that they will win. the fight with the animals. Maybe they're learning how to deal with their own absence.

They're leaving their handprints for the future. They're learning that they're actually, by painting those pictures, they're learning that they're different from the animals. They're learning, they're getting alienated from their animals.

So there's also, they're from the animals. So there's also a sense of pain. in that, but they're also learning to belong to a culture. Then the collective in the cosmos is the repressed unconscious of art.

And I think this is a very important point here, that actually as human beings, we desire solidarity. We desire to belong, to transform our conditions. And that is the repressed unconscious of art. So if we are to really understand the power of art is that it touches that unconscious. And music, of course, is a way in which, you know, you can deeply be touched by music.

That's why people in protest, you know, during the American civil rights movement, they join hands and they face bullets and water cannons by singing songs like We Shall Overcome. They become then a collective. Art must uncover new relationships in ways that others can recover them too. So show us new relationships so that those who are also seeing or experiencing this art can discover them as well.

And I think leading from this, artists are not distinct from humans. Actually, they're deeply human and they can touch us in a deeply human way. But as viewers, we also have to develop ourselves.

We have to rise to meet that art. And finally, art must show the social world as changeable and help to change it. And I think that is a core feature of popular art, that it shows that the social world is changeable.

You can change the world. You don't have to accept it as it is. And art can give us the courage to do so, but also understanding by showing the world is. is changeable. So that's all I had for you today.

And I, I'm really, really sorry for all these technical, uh, troubles. Um, but I'd love to hear your comments or questions. Thank you Dr. Kapoor for that lovely talk on 3rd Cinema and thank you all for your patience through all the technical issues.

We also lost electricity and came back, it was dark, it was light, it was a lot of things. Anyway, please if you have questions, do let me know, raise your hand and I'll bring a mic to you. And those who are on Zoom can also ask their questions.

We have a few minutes. Yes, okay. Hello. My question is still sort of forming in my brain as I think about it, but it's primarily concerned with This question of whether third cinema can exist now within our current landscape. So as far as I've understood third cinema and what they write about in their manifesto towards the third cinema, it's meant to inherently be revolutionary.

Like in every single aspect down to audience members, having like the very act of watching a movie or watching a film is revolutionary. It is against, it goes against the system. But today, I think there seems to be this trend in terms of mainstream cinema, or just in terms of art in general, where every aspect of our culture and our identity can be quantified in a sense. And it's like every part of our existence can be sort of linked to this over-capitalistic system. And a specific example might be Barbie.

which just came out and it's, it's, it's themes are very, are, do critique this like, this over-capitalistic system, but it is also a film that is produced by Mattel, a toy company, and the film does exist as primarily marketing for a band, which has since boomed post. the film coming out and I think there are a lot of other instances of this as well. So is it possible within today's current climate to create cinema that is truly revolutionary? Does that make sense? No, that makes complete sense and that is totally the question for today, right?

You're completely right about Barbie. And, you know, so capitalism has, capitalistic culture has also evolved to offer its own critique. And one can say that's, you know, kind of different from that, the period in the 60s.

And in a way, capitalistic culture has learned from that time, right? So they learn to incorporate that critique and then give it back to us as... critique so that then we can enjoy it and then go on living um you know so so you're really right to identify um the the current moment uh what i would say is uh that the current moment whether one can describe it as revolutionary it's it's hard but it is certainly very crisis ridden like the period that we're talking about you There isn't, but yet we don't, we have, we have had glimpses of people's movements.

So in the United States, Black Lives Matter. And one could say in India, the farmers movement, for example, or the anti-CA protests. um these things have occurred um but is there um is there this kind of revolutionary art that is being made uh there are works and then those you know and then there's very very severe repression um but i would so i think in that sense is there a Is there a movement that is aligned with people's movements? I think Kuvan and Patwadan's work, for example, they're much aligned with the people he works with.

He works with people for years. So it's not just somebody coming in and making a piece of work. So here is a filmmaker who's very aligned. with people's movements. And so that kind of movement, you know, we'd of course want to see it grow, but there's also severe repression against it.

I do want to like kind of think more on your question, even with like Black Lives Matter. So, you know, it was a 15 year old who stood there and recorded Mr. George Floyd's murder by the police. on her iPhone. And, you know, and you have to think about what it takes for a 15 year old to stand there, right, to stand and to record it. And when she was asked, and they gave her a Pulitzer Prize recently for it.

And, and when they asked her, why did you do it? How did you do it? She said, I could see my father, my brother, my uncles.

And I think That's a revolutionary situation, that moving out of oneself and being able to see oneself in solidarity with others and see what is happening to other people as something that can happen to you. I think the moment, like that's certainly part of Black consciousness in the United States. Here, I mean. I think it's very, very polarized. And there is the sense that it's happening over there.

It's happening to someone else or these people, you know, these people are anti-national or whatever. So that is that unconscious. Has that unconscious been like tapped into this ability that we have to identify with others?

But capitalist culture, of course. individualizes us to the point that, you know, we face the risks that we face individually. And this is sort of, I'm not answering your question about, you know, the possibility of third cinema, but I'm trying to understand from your question, the context that we're in, and whether third cinema, you know, the obstructions to that, and the obstruction is this ability to experience what is happening.

as something that is both personal as well as collective and that collective consciousness i think is is still to to be built if that answers your question yes i thought that was a very interesting answer yes any other questions So, we can wind up and thank you so much Dr. Kapoor for sharing your time with us and sharing this wonderful information with us. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you for coming here and thank you all as well for attending this talk.

Transcript for:Exploring Third Cinema and Its Impact

Transcript for:
Exploring Third Cinema and Its Impact