Exhibición y Distribución Del Tercer Cine En Latinoamérica

Exhibition and Distribution of Third Cinema in Latin America

The films made in Latin America during the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s that are part of the “Third Cinema” movement, are not classified as such only for their content and message, or the particular way in which they were produced, but also due to the way they were exhibited and distributed, and how they found anaudience. Third Cinema rejects personal expression as it is dedicated to society and part of a whole, and its objective is to present the truth and inspire some kind of proaction. At the same time that it rejects other models of film production, it also chooses the same for its exhibition and distribution. (Straccia)

The term “Third Cinema” appears for the first time when Argentinean filmmakersFernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, members of Grupo Cine Liberación, wrote in 1969 the manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” published in the cinema journal Tricontintental. Solanas and Getino refer to the cinema that follows the rules and model of Hollywood, and that promulgates the values of the bourgeoisie to an audience that is mainly passive, as “First Cinema.”

Michael Channan explains inhis article “The Changing Geography of Third Cinema,”
“This kind of film, made for exhibition in large theatres, with a standardised duration (feature-length or blockbuster) and hermetic forms that are born and die on the screen, is not only designed to satisfy the commercial interests of the production companies: it also leads to the absorption of forms which necessarily imply a bourgeoisWeltanschauung inherited from the nineteenth century, in which the capacity of the subject to participate in making history is denied to all except the heroic and exceptional individual, and history is present only as an external force and an object of contemplation. Moreover, American cinema not only imposes its models of form and language, but also industrial, commercial and technical structureswhich include the festivals, magazines and even film schools which perpetuate its values.” (Chanan)

The film industry in a country such as Argentina was too weak to compete and exist in a structure as industrialized as the American, or “First” cinema.
Second Cinema would be the European auteur cinema, where the director expresses himself individually, and goes against all the rules of Hollywoodfilms. Second Cinema also created its own strucure and pattern of distribution and exhibition, along with its own ideologies and criticism. But “a misplaced ambition to develop a parallel film industry to compete with First Cinema, could only lead to its own institutionalisation within the system, which was more than ready to use Second Cinema to demonstrate the democratic plurality of itscultural milieu.” (Chanan)

This kind of cinema in Argentina was made by and for the Argentinan “dilettante elite,” which wouldn’t create any real change. So the alternative was “either to make films that the system could not assimilate because they were foreign to its needs, or to make films that directly and explicitly set out to fight the system.” (Chanan)

Solanas and Getino argue that notonly the production and content of the films had to change, but the traditional exhibition models had to be avoided as well. According to them, these films should be distributed and screened clandestinely, not only to avoid being censored and massified, but also to force the viewer to take a risk. (Solanas, Getino)

“Mass communications tend to complete the destruction of a national awareness andof a collective subjectivity on the way to enlightenment, a destruction which begins as soon as the child has access to these media, the education and culture of the ruling classes. In Argentina, 26 television channels; one million television sets; more than 50 radio stations; hundreds of newspapers, periodicals, and magazines; and thousands of records, films, etc., join their acculturating role...