This article returns to the experimental theory and practice of Third Cinema as developed in the late 1960s in parts of Latin America. It focuses on two of its aspects that have not been systematically researched: Third Cinema as conceptualizations and maps of global capitalism. In doing so this article takes up and reconfigures Fredric Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping” and introduce the theory concept-cognitive mapping. This latter theory aims to contribute new thoughts and perspectives to ongoing debates on aesthetic forms capable of a critical grasp of the mechanisms of advanced capitalism.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Concept-Cognitive Mapping: Third Cinema as Cartography of Global Capitalism
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Cinéma & Cie
Jakob Nilsson
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Concept-Cognitive Mapping: Third Cinema as Cartography of Global Capitalism
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13
CONCEPT-COGNITIVE MAPPING
THIRD CINEMA AS CARTOGRAPHY OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM
Jakob Nilsson, Södertörn University




  Abstract
  This article returns to the experimental theory and practice of Third Cinema as developed in
  the late 1960s in parts of Latin America. It focuses on two of its aspects that have not been
  systematically researched: Third Cinema as conceptualizations and maps of global capital-
  ism. In doing so this article takes up and reconfigures Fredric Jameson’s notion of “cognitive
  mapping” and introduce the theory concept-cognitive mapping. This latter theory aims to
  contribute new thoughts and perspectives to ongoing debates on aesthetic forms capable of a
  critical grasp of the mechanisms of advanced capitalism.




Introduction

   Third Cinema theory developed in the late 1960s in parts of Latin America. This theory was
concerned with experimental filmmaking that aimed to conceptualize and contribute to the
liberation from neocolonial capitalist oppression. A key idea was to reveal, through cinematic
means, the complex transnational and intra-national soft structures that sustain a given neocolonial
situation. Third Cinema was written off during the 1990s – finally, it seemed, crumbled in an era
of defeat for grand revolutionary, emancipatory projects. The project of Third Cinema had been
conceived as a contribution to the goals of “national liberation,” Third World emancipation, and
socialist revolution at all levels of society. However, Third Cinema theory cannot only be reduced
to those larger goals. What I consider to be the core ideas of Third Cinema – cinematic “research”
and “conceptualization” of the deeper causes of neocolonial oppression – have lost none of their
relevance in today’s globalized world.
   Mike Wayne, who has written the only (widely) published monograph on Third Cinema since
1982, calls for the revival of its revolutionary spirit.1 Two recent edited volumes have instead aimed
to “rethink” the notion of Third Cinema.2 Most of their contributions do so by either contrasting –
often a stereotypical idea of – early Third Cinema to later films more concerned with postcolonial
issues such as diasporic or hybrid identities, or by perpetuating overly inclusive definitions that
risk diluting the term.3 The present article focuses instead on two aspects that have not been
systematically researched: Third Cinema as conceptualizations and maps of global capitalism. In


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Jakob Nilsson

doing so it will take up and reconfigure Fredric Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping” – which
deals with the problem of artistic forms capable of grasping the increasingly “unrepresentable”
nature of contemporary capitalism – and introduce in its place what I call concept-cognitive
mapping. This concept contributes new thoughts and perspectives to ongoing debates on aesthetic
forms capable of a critical grasp of the mechanisms of advanced capitalism.



Third Cinema

  Third Cinema theory was first made public in “Hacia un tercer cine” (“Towards a Third
Cinema”) published in 1969 in the cinema journal Tricontinental.4 The Argentinian filmmakers
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino wrote the essay reflecting on the making of their
theoretically driven landmark avant-garde documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de
los hornos, 1968). Third Cinema developed in light of some key inspirations. Frantz Fanon’s
analyses of the neocolonial condition were central, and so was a selection of Marxist aesthetic
theory – Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin – that was remixed and adjusted.5 The cinematic inspirations
included Santiago Álvarez, Fernando Birri, Jean-Luc Godard, Soviet Montage Cinema, militant
Cinéma Nôvo, Italian Neorealism, Joris Ivens, and Grierson’s notion of social documentary.
Although, as Paul Willemen pointed out, many of these inspirations, especially the latter three,
regarded ways of producing films rather than their “actual trajectories and philosophies.”6 It is
well known that early Third Cinema emphasized radical and experimental forms of production,
distribution, exhibition, and audience engagement. However, the actual filmmaking focused on
“discovering and inventing film forms and structures that serve a more profound vision of our
reality,” in which the “world is scrutinised, unravelled, rediscovered.”7
  Solanas and Getino continued to clarify and expand upon the concept in a series of articles and
interviews during the decade that followed.8 In an effort to straighten out some misconceptions,
Solanas, in a text published in 1978, explained that it is “the way the world is conceptualized and not
the genre nor the explicitly political character of a film which makes it belong to Third Cinema…
Third Cinema is an open category, unfinished, incomplete. It is a research category.”9 While still
often misconstrued as dogmatic, Third Cinema never offered universal aesthetic prescriptions:
Solanas and Getino regarded aesthetic forms to lack already given political functions independent
of historical and social context. Functioning forms must be developed through “methodical
exercise of practice, search, and experimentation” within a specific piece of social-political
reality.10 As the result of cinematic research and conceptualization of neocolonial Argentina in the
late 1960s, The Hour of the Furnaces merged various forms and genres: a new kind of Marxist
essay film, documentary, found footage, dialectical montage, satire, text quotations, etc. “[A]ny
militant form […] is valid,” write Solanas and Getino, as long as it constructs “a throbbing, living
reality which recaptures truth in any of its expressions.”11
  Third Cinema, as Paul Willemen writes, must “address the existing situation in all its often
contradictory and confusing intricacy with the maximum lucidity.”12 Central here is to examine
the causes. Shedding light only on effects is to fail to be sufficiently critical and analytical which
can lead to only slight reforms and not to any real transformations of society. On this point Lukács’
theories on art capable of analyzing the deep socio-historical causes that determine a situation was

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an important influence. Lukács held out a certain idea of realism against modernism. Since Third
Cinema (resonating with Brecht’s critique of Lukács) did not consider genres or forms to have
fixed functions, what is of relevance here is not the realism/modernism debates (which continued
to be central in the European militant cinemas of the 1960s and 1970s). Relevant are his ideas of
what it means to grasp the deeper causes that determine a given social situation. Lukács’ more
specific distinction between realism and naturalism is informative on this latter point. Naturalism,
he argued, accurately depicts historical details, but only the details of historical surface effects, not
their deeper causes. Instead of revealing social reality as an open process susceptible to change,
naturalism gives resigned depictions of a society already finished.
   Third Cinema was conceived in opposition to First Cinema – i.e. cinema based on the Hollywood
model, seen as perpetuating the ideology of U.S. finance capital – but also the shortcomings of
Second Cinema, i.e. art- or auteur cinema. Second Cinema, argued Solanas and Getino, only
succeed “in bearing witness to the decay of bourgeois values and testifying to social injustice”
and “dealt only with effects, never with cause.”13 Second Cinema at its most political therefore
risked institutionalization as “the youthful angry wing of society,” following how “virulence,
nonconformism, plain rebelliousness, and discontent are just so many more products on the
capitalist market” which “give an air of democratic broadmindedness to the Syste[m]” to which
Solanas and Getino contrasted the aim of Third Cinema: making “films that the System cannot
assimilate and which are foreign to its needs.”14



Maps, nations, globalization

   First, Second, and Third Cinema are (non-dogmatic) theoretical categories, not the cinemas of
the First, Second and Third world. Third Cinema can be produced anywhere – within or across
nations. Nonetheless we should be wary of misuses of the term: Third Cinema filmmaking can
be far removed from its geographical points of origin, but not from its basic principles. There
are political films made in the West that are clearly related to militant Third Cinema – especially
those explicitly concerned with mapping global capitalism, from Luc Moullet’s Origins of a
Meal (Genèse d’un repas, 1978) to Noël Burch and Allan Sekula’s The Forgotten Space (2010).
Remarkably, in discussions of these kinds of films the connections to Third Cinema are seldom if
ever acknowledged.
   In an article from 2012 Audrey Evrard describes Moullet’s Origins of a Meal as having invented
approaches that in many regards actually originated much earlier with Third Cinema. She argues
that Moullet’s film had a broad international outlook on exploitation which differed significantly
from “the militant agenda that motivated France’s political documentary cinema throughout the
1960s and early 1970s” with its “self-serving focus on European working classes.”15 Moullet’s
film investigates instead “an intricate network of local, regional, national and international
mechanisms” in which “multinational corporations pursue financial profits.”16 Evrard describes
the films as “tying together issues of colonialism, imperialism and globalization” and writes
that “the intellectual significance and continued relevance of the film to today’s debates lies in
Moullet’s persistent reliance on colonialism as an ideological grid relevant to the understanding
of globalization.”17 By including the South Luc Moullet is argued to undertake “a geographical,

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social and political repositioning of the filmmaker as engaged global citizen,”18 without references
to Third Cinema. Evrard, however, very pertinently references Jameson’s notion of cognitive
mapping in her description of Origins of a Meal as “an attempt to demystify the unfathomable
dimension of global capitalism” at the outset of neoliberal globalization in the late 1970s. There
is a tendency in her discussion of this aspect to hold up as most important the scenes in which
the Western filmmakers self-reflexively turns the camera “on their own hypocrisy” as an “ethical
responsibility.”19 In a lot of scholarly writing in which there is a reference to cognitive mapping,
the latter is equated with reflexivity of some kind – often in the sense of forms that are reflexive
about the unfathomability of the world system. But the concept – despite Jameson’s own somewhat
broad use of the term – entails going far beyond reflexivity. Therefore I would like to revisit the
notion of cognitive mapping.
   Capitalist society has become so intricate that it is no longer possible for individuals to make
a mental map of their place within the world system. We may know it through abstract concepts,
but we are unable to grasp the world system within the realm of subjective psychological
experience – conscious representation is replaced by a vague geopolitical unconscious. This
creates a sense of social disorientation, which cripples progressive political agency and utopian
imagination. Jameson writes about a “need for maps” – social and spatial – that could organize
the “totality” into a coherent experience.20 Traditional forms of Marxist art, while developed in
line with principles of elucidation and orientation, are no longer sufficient to map this complex
terrain. Jameson also sees a more general “crisis of representation” – no existing forms of
figuration seem capable of the task. So what can radical political art achieve? Keep finding new
forms for expressing the very absence of that which cannot be represented? Jameson argues that
already in the time of imperialism capitalism had become complex enough to cause difficulties
for realism, since “the truth of [an] experience no longer coincided with the place in which it
takes place,” which caused the emergence of “the various modernisms” that were concerned
with “forms that inscribe a new sense of the absent global colonial system on the very syntax
of poetic language itself.”21 But cognitive mapping – which relates to the era of globalization
in which capitalism has taken a quantum leap in intricacy and abstraction – is irreducible to
such reflexive inscriptions of absence. For Jameson, however, successful cognitive mapping is
a speculative idea: he cannot himself imagine the aesthetic forms of such a map – although he
prescribes the continued relevance of allegory, given that the whole system could not possibly
be mapped in all its literal extensiveness.22
   A Third Cinema theory relevant for the intricate globalized world cannot avoid grappling
with the basic problem of cognitive mapping. However, Jameson’s own somewhat traditional
understanding of the parameters involved seems to lead to a deadlock. In the section below
titled “Concept-cognitive mapping,” I will supplant much in his understanding as I introduce a
different approach. Suffice it to say at this point that I will introduce concept-cognitive mapping
through a dialogue with Gilles Deleuze’s theory of what a concept is, as well as with the idea of
conceptualization in Third Cinema. Concept-cognitive mapping, as we will see, conceptualizes
and regards films that constitute autonomous critical thought. This approach to the problem is
thereby less about instrumentally representing the (unrepresentable) world system for a viewing
mind and more about the ability of the film itself to think the system. The concept-cognitive map
should not aspire to some (hardly imaginable) depiction – allegorical or otherwise – of the totality.


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Rather, it conceptualizes the junctures between a specific political situation and the system of
intricate globalized causes. This is demanding but not unimaginable.
  Third Cinema tends to focus on the junctures between the nation, the nation state and global
capitalist forces. While neoliberal globalization has famously made nations states relatively
powerless, the analysis of the relation between the infrastructure of the state and global capitalist
forces has lost none of its pertinence. Even the old Third Cinema focus on national culture remains
relevant – although the national resistance movements of the times have faded. According to the
stereotype, early Third Cinema had an essentialist appreciation of national culture. Ella Shohat and
Robert Stam argue that they “assumed the fundamental coherence of national identity.”23 Informed
by Fanon, however, national culture means in Solanas and Getino the creation of a new culture,
not a step back to some pre-existing essence. In Fanon the people is described in multitude-like
terms as “a dense, subterranean life in perpetual renewal,” and national culture as “the outcome
of tensions internal and external to society as a whole and its multiple layers.”24 Decolonialization
and liberation means removing what obstructs culture from functioning as a living process. Fanon
hereby opposes not only the colonial system itself and the empty nationalisms propagated by the
national bourgeois – the caretakers of the old colonial structures of exploitation – but also certain
“colonized intellectuals.” They all tend to glorify a static fantasy image of the past – focused on
exotic rituals, traditions, costumes, etc. – that freezes the present.25 The intellectual in favor of
the liberation of culture must instead breath real life into the past so as to open up the present – a
“present no longer turned inwards but channeled in every direction.”26 While these directions
clearly extend to the international plane in Fanon’s speculations around a new humanism and a
“new man,”27 a first step entails liberation from the restricting neocolonial national infrastructure.
The neocolonial economic structure – which is basically still intact – does not invest in or develop
the neocolonized country as a whole. It enriches only a small corrupt “national bourgeoisie” in
service of exploiting European companies. One way of upholding this system was (is) to divide
and conquer among ethnic groups in order to curb any real, productive and democratic national
unity from occurring that could threaten the – international – economic setup. The neocolonial
infrastructure has not in essence been altered by neoliberal globalization for most of the countries
in the Global South.
  Third Cinema’s Fanon-inspired concern with the nation is a perspective that is simultaneously
global. “Testimony about a national reality,” Solanas and Getino wrote, “is also an inestimable
means of dialogue and knowledge on the world plane,” with the aim of “breaking out of the
Balkanization on the international, continental, and national planes which imperialism is striving
to maintain.”28 In this sense Third Cinema may be seen as a defined subcategory of radical “world
cinema.”29 Solanas and Getino wrote this in the late 1960s and not in our age of “Empire” in which
nation states have become increasingly powerless. This does not however change the fact that
testimony about national reality is still needed, given the remaining neocolonial infrastructures.
Powerlessness, furthermore, is not necessarily the same as irrelevance.
  Despite their decreased autonomy, nation states continue to be a key element for the analysis of
global capitalism also in the era of neoliberal globalization. As David Harvey argues, while their
institutions and practices have been subjected to a “radical reconfiguration” that has made them
“porous (particularly in relation to capital flow)” and “profoundly anti-democratic,” the state still
“plays a crucial role” as repressive “territorial systems of political administration.”30 This entails


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that international corporations and institutions like the IMF, which are outside democratic control,
frequently influence state policymaking directly. From The Hour of the Furnaces to Memories of
a Plunder (Memoria del Saqueo, 2004), Third Cinema has an established tradition of dealing with
transnational capitalist forces that through the help of a small local administration – i.e. the corrupt
national bourgeois – exploits relatively weak nations, and is thereby fundamentally attuned to map
and conceptualize such relations.
   Solanas filmmaking is normally divided into three periods: The Hour of the Furnaces was
made during his first militant period, in which the nation was at the center of the analysis of
neocolonial structures. In his second period Solanas made “neobaroque” fiction films like Sur
(1987) with a somewhat more vague political content. Kathleen Newman argues in a 1993 article
that Sur revealed “the extent to which globalization ha[d] already erased the nation as a viable
political ensemble.”31 In a later film like Memories of a Plunder, which marks out the third phase
in his oeuvre, Solanas not only returns to a more militant documentary-based cinema, but also
to the analysis of the mechanisms of neocolonial global capitalism through the prism of a – now
neoliberalized – nation.32
   While lacking its avant-garde audacity, Memories of a Plunder openly aligns itself with The
Hour of the Furnaces in both form and content. The connection between the films underlines the
many continuities between the 1968 and 2004 regarding neocolonial structures of exploitation
– debt traps, exploitation through foreign finance capital with the aid of corrupt local elites,
ideological warfare, etc. Memories superimposes itself over Hour to form a more historically
layered map of neocolonialism. A Third Cinema grasp of global capitalism must entail a grasp
of its colonial and neo-colonial history – a progressive keeping-alive of memory in opposition to
static or narrow renditions of the past that freezes the present.
   Katerina Kitidi and Aris Hatzistefanou’s Debtocracy (2011) compares the situation in Greece
after the 2008 financial crisis to what happened in Argentina a decade earlier. The film aligns itself
with Memories of a Plunder – most directly by reusing some of its footage. Argentina is held out
as “Greece’s mirror image on the other side of the Atlantic,” that had been turned by outside forces
“into yet another experimental laboratory for Neoliberalism.” In both cases, huge, and actually
illegitimate, debts are created and upheld by the “vicious workings of financial markets” and
institutions like the IMF. Of particular interest here, I argue, is Greece’s relay-like position at the
geographical and economical “periphery” of Europe. Greece is an example of how parts of Europe
are starting to resemble countries in the Global South, just as many countries in the Global South
are moving in the opposite direction.
   The Global South is for many reasons key for any mapping of contemporary global capitalism.
There is the centrality of colonialism in the genealogy of globalization. There is also the need to
map the material “Real” of informational capitalism – i.e. the outsourcing of material production
to the South as the West has become increasingly “immaterial.” But other kinds of ongoing
transformations add new reasons. George Soros, the famous financier, predicted in 2008 that “the
current financial crisis” was “less likely to cause a global recession than a realignment of the
global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other countries in the
developing world.”33 And indeed, many previous peripheries are now more clearly turning into
new economic centers.



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  Concept-cognitive mapping

   Nevertheless the problem remains: How can political art critically grasp the deeper mechanisms
of advanced global capitalism? This is a problem in need of new ideas and perspectives in order
to get out of the impasses of reflexivity and the sense of impossibility. While the basic problem
of cognitive mapping remains, many of the parameters of Jameson’s theory must be bracket or
fundamentally reconfigured in order to find productive solutions. Jameson’s basic concern is to
regain a lost sense of linear history, and a phenomenological grounding of knowledge, and the
restoration of a representational function in art vis-à-vis global capitalism. What I call concept-
cognitive mapping, in contrast, conceptualizes advanced capitalism through film forms that think.
   The theory of concept-cognitive mapping has one foot in debates on how to find aesthetic forms
capable of mapping contemporary capitalism, and the other foot in a “minor” tradition within film
theory of regarding film as its own kind of thinking or intelligence, in which Deleuze is central.34
I should add here that there have been efforts to rethink cognitive mapping through other aspects
of Deleuze’s thought. Regarding film, Steven Shaviro has aptly suggested the need for “affective
mapping.” In his conception, this regards maps of “what it feels like to live in the early twenty
first century,” and films that express “a kind of ambient free-floating sensibility that permeates
our society today.”35 I argue that such expressions are mere reflections of precisely the state that
requires mapping. They mirror contemporary capitalisms most given forms and affects without
providing any new critical orientation.
   Jameson on his part contrasts concepts to cognitive mapping. He equates concepts with scientific
concepts, which he describes as abstract “ideal discourse, like a mathematical equation” that
“model the real independent of its relations to individual subjects.”36 Concept-cognitive mapping
refuses the premise that concepts are necessarily abstract in this “mathematical” sense, and partly
aligns itself instead with a Deleuzian understanding in which “the concept speaks the event, not
the essence or the thing.”37 Deleuze and Guattari emphasize differences between philosophical
concepts and science/social science. Philosophy creates concepts while science/social science
produces “functives” [fonctives]. Functives establish functions on the actual plane of reality, while
concepts are created from penetrations into reality’s deeper, more “problematic” registers. Jameson
can thereby be said to oppose social scientific functives and phenomenological experience/affect.
This Jamesonian opposition does not have the same relevance for concept-cognitive mapping
given its different understanding of the very notion of concepts. However, there are elements of
functives included in concept-cognitive mapping. Its filmic concepts rigorously crystallize aspects
spanning analytic rationality, affects, events, functions, potentials, and problematic multiplicities.
   Concept-cognitive mapping in this sense has more affinity with the Latin American avant-garde
of or around Third Cinema. Cuban filmmaker/theorist Tomás Gutiérrez Alea discussed political
films as a “creative elaboration” of real events that “emphasize a deeper meaning with an analytic
objective” in which “the cognitive aspect takes primacy.”38 But this is a primacy of cognition and
reason that must remain intertwined with the affective. In opposition to the culture industry’s
masterful ability to orchestrate emotionality at the cost of lucidity and understanding, Third
Cinema, as Paul Willeman wrote, had to reverse “the hierarchy between the cognitive and the
emotive, while of course maintaining the need to involve both.”39
   In Jameson, it seems, the cognitive map would not think. Rather, it would cure the sense of

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disorientation in the individual viewer, which would set free her utopian imagination and lead
her to think. In contrast, concept-cognitive mapping emphasizes the film itself as imaginative
cognition – i.e. film-thinking. In his 1969 Third Cinema related manifesto, “For an Imperfect
Cinema,” Julio García Espinoza wrote about art as “having its own cognitive power” and film
more specifically as having to be the “opposite of a cinema which ‘beautifully illustrates’ ideas or
concepts which we already possess.”40 Solanas and Getino themselves wrote about the importance
of avoiding “film language as a mere idealized illustration of a fact.”41 Of course, the concepts of
a Third Cinema film are developed in dialogue with already existing theory. The concepts are still
the film’s own – even a voice-over, such as Solanas’ in The Hour of the Furnaces, is a filmic voice-
act that is also inseparable from its complicated relation to the moving images. The film is in this
sense not merely a practice but also its own kind of theoretical contribution. It is only with these
caveats in place that we can agree with Shohat and Stam’s description of the “persuasive power”
of The Hour of the Furnaces as deriving “from its ability to visualize ideas, to give abstract
concepts clear accessible form.”42
   Third Cinema’s forms and concepts must first of all emanate from experimentation and research
within the depths of a specific situation. Correspondingly, Deleuze and Guattari understand
concepts as “connected to problems without which they would have no meaning” – and since the
problems that give meaning to concepts are multiple and variable, one must create new “concepts
for problems that necessarily change.”43 “Problems” also contain potentials that must be grasped
by the concepts. What’s more, when Solanas and Getino write about constructing “a throbbing,
living reality” through film they mean conceptualizing its hidden revolutionary capacities. For
Third Cinema and Deleuze alike, conceptualizations must grasp the inherent potentials for
transformation within social reality, but they must also themselves be acts that contribute to its
transformation. Deleuze and Guattari even understand concepts as providing “the contour, the
configuration, the constellation of an event to come.”44 Solanas and Getino argue that the film must
attempt “to intervene in the situation as an element providing thrust or rectification,” which they
also describe as “discovery through transformation.”45
   Concept-cognitive mapping must be able to grasp not only the literal determining causes, but
also the problematic registers of reality. Alea defines “cinematic realism” as the creation from
the filmed material of “a ‘new reality’” that has the “ability to reveal […] deeper, more essential
layers of reality itself.”46 Concept-cognitive mapping is irreducible to a “realism of abstractions.”
It requires film-concepts capable of a realism of problematic multiplicities – the latter regards
the realm of potential as well as certain “delirious” causes such as finance capital47 – that are
simultaneously uncompromisingly critical, analytical and pedagogic on the level of causes (and
not just effects). How to put together forms capable of both a realism of problematic multiplicities
and a critical pedagogy of causes on a global scale? This is certainly quite a challenge. So while
concept-cognitive mapping alters the parameters of cognitive mapping, it must perhaps remain
partly speculative. The theory and practice of Third Cinema, however, as I have tried to show, is
one of the most cogent resources. Not only for its rich tradition of aesthetic-political approaches,
but also because of its long concern with the economic-political relations between the North and
the Global South as well as the increasingly central South-South relations.




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1    Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, Pluto, London 2001.
2    Anthony R. Guneratne, Wimal Dissanayake (eds.), Rethinking Third Cinema, Routledge, London-New
     York 2003; Frieda Ekotto, Adeline Koh (eds.), Rethinking Third Cinema: The Role of Anti-colonial
     Media and Aesthetics in Postmodernity, Lit, Berlin 2009.
3    Jonathan Buchsbaum shows that already in the 1980s – referencing the influential texts of Teshome
     Gabriel and the Edinburgh conference on Third Cinema in 1986 in which supposedly the term no longer
     even referenced the Latin American films and theories – the term had in some cases become so inclusive
     that it basically signified “all films with social and political purpose.” Jonathan Buchsbaum, “A Closer
     Look at Third Cinema,” in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 21, no. 2, 2001, pp.
     153ff.
4    Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, “Hacia un tercer cine,” in Tricontinental, no. 14, October 1969, pp.
     107-132. The term Third Cinema, however, appeared a few months earlier in an interview in the Cuban
     film journal Cine Cuban, in March of 1969. The non-abbreviated English translation is reprinted as
     Towards a Third Cinema, in Michael T. Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices,
     and Transcontinental Articulations, vol. 1, Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1997, pp. 33-58.
5    For an informative discussion of the differences and continuities between the Marxist tradition and
     Third Cinema, see Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, cit., pp. 25-46; and
     Paul Willemen, The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections, in Jim Pines, Paul Willemen (eds.),
     Questions of Third Cinema, British Film Institute, London 1989, pp. 10-14.
6    Paul Willemen, The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections, cit., p. 5.
7    Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, cit., pp. 48, 56.
8    Getino gives a certain overview of their subsequent texts in Some Notes on the Concept of “Third Cinema”,
     in Michael T. Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental
     Articulations, cit., pp. 99-103.
9    Solanas quoted in Paul Willemen, The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections, cit., p. 9 (emphasis).
10   Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, cit., p. 48.
11   Idem, pp. 47, 46.
12   Paul Willemen, The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections, cit., p. 20.
13   Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, cit., p. 33.
14   Idem, pp. 39, 42.
15   Audrey Evrard, “Framing the World Economics in a Tuna Can: Luc Moullet Tracks the Origins of a
     Meal/Genèse d’un repas (1978),” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 54, Fall 2012, http://
     www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/evrardMoullet/text.html, last visit 8 August 2013.
16   Ibidem.
17   Ibidem.
18   Ibidem.
19   Ibidem.
20   Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in New Left Review, no.
     146, July-August 1984, p. 91.
21   Fredric Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, in Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the
     Interpretation of Culture, University of Illinois Press, Urbana/Chicago 1988, p. 349.
22   The world system is described as “a being of such enormous complexity that it can only be mapped
     and modelled indirectly.” Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World
     System, Indiana University Press, Bloomington-Indianapolis 1995 (1992), p. 169.
23   Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, Routledge, London-New York 1994, p. 318.
24   Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove, New York 2004, p. 177.
25   Idem, pp. 154f, 168f, 158f.
26   Idem, pp. 167, 174.
27   Idem, p. 178f.
28   Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, cit., p. 46. On the level of (clandestine)
     production, Solanas and Octavio wrote about a need for “Group-level co-operation between different


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     countries,” and “international gatherings to exchange experience, contributions, joint planning of work.”
     Idem, p. 51.
29   For a theoretically astute orientation on the various meanings of the concept of world cinema, from
     the most commercial to the more radical, see Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah (eds.),
     Theorizing World Cinema, I.B. Tauris, London 2012.
30   David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development,
     Verso, London 2006, pp. 28, 106, 27, 43, 105.
31   Kathleen Newman, “National Cinema after Globalization: Fernando E. Solanas’ Sur and the Exiled
     Nation,” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 14, no. 3, 1993, pp. 69-83.
32   Joanna Page notes how many contemporary Argentinian films reflect a new “radical critique of
     neoliberalism that […] involves a reassertion of the nation as a strategy of resistance,” in Crisis and
     Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, Duke University Press, Durham-London 2009, p. 6.
     This is not necessarily the same as the analytic or conceptual rigor aimed for by Solanas: The “New
     Argentine Cinema” that was established in mid 1990s strongly reacted against the didactic aspects of
     Third Cinema. Many of these films therefore tend to refuse to provide for the viewer with a sense of
     knowledge in favor of a focus on subjective experience with vague or indirect connections to larger
     structures.
33   George Soros quoted in Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and
     Empire, Pluto, London 2013, p. 1.
34   Thomas Elsaesser, Working at the Margins: Film as a Form of Intelligence, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.),
     Harun Farocki. Working on Sightlines, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2004. Gilles Deleuze,
     Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Roberta Galeta, University of Minnesota
     Press, Minneapolis 2003.
35   Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, O-Books, Winchester-Washington 2010, pp. 2-6, 36-38.
36   Fredric Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, cit., p. 358.
37   Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, Columbia University Press, New York 1994, p. 21.
     The restricted space here does not allow a discussion of the complex questions of whether/in what sense
     Deleuze’s film books – which charts the many different ways that films can think – finally finds films to
     be capable of forming concepts.
38   Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, The Viewers Dialectic [1984-1986], in Michael T. Martin (ed.), New Latin
     American Cinema: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, cit., p. 117.
39   Paul Willemen, The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections, cit., pp. 12-13. See also Tomás
     Gutiérrez Alea, The Viewers Dialectic [1984-1986], cit., p. 120.
40   Julio García Espinoza, For an Imperfect Cinema, translation reprinted in Michael T. Martin (ed.), New
     Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, cit., pp. 73, 81.
41   Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, cit., p. 47. Illustrating already given
     concepts, albeit in very dynamic ways, was arguably the case with the intellectual montage cinema
     of Eisenstein – an approach that Third Cinema is often inaccurately understood to merely copy when
     utilizing its montage techniques.
42   Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, cit., p. 263.
43   Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, cit., pp. 16, 28.
44   Idem, pp. 32-33.
45   Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, cit., p. 47 (in italics in the original).
46   Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, The Viewers Dialectic [1984-1986], cit., p. 122.
47   Capital itself can be described as what Deleuze calls a “problematic multiplicity.” The connection
     between this concept and Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of capital is made by Daniel Smith in his
     “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou and Deleuze Revisited,” in The Southern Journal
     of Philosophy, vol. 41, no. 3, 2003, p. 435.




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