This important anthology addresses established notions about Third Cinema theory, and the cinema practice of developing and postcolonial nations. The 'Third Cinema' movement called for a politicised film-making practice in Africa, Asia and Latin America, one which would take on board issues of race, class, religion, and national integrity. The films which resulted from the movement, from directors such as Ousmane Sembene, Satyajit Ray and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, are among the most culturally signficant, politically sophisticated and frequently studied films of the 1960s and 1970s. However, despite the contemporary popularity and critical attention enjoyed by films from Asia and Latin America in particular, Third Cinema and Third Cinema theory appears to have lost its momentum. Rethinking Third Cinema seeks to bring Third Cinema and Third Cinema theory back into the critical spotlight. The contributors address the most difficult and challenging questions Third Cinema poses, suggesting new methodologies and redirections of existing ones. Crucially, they also re-examine the entire phenomenon of film-making in a fast-vanishing 'Third World', with case studies of the cinemas of India, Iran and Hong Kong, among others.

This volume is the first fully comprehensive account of film production in the Third World. Although they are usually ignored or marginalized in histories of world cinema," Third World countries now produce well over half of the world’s films. Roy Armes sets out initially to place this huge output in a wider context, examining the forces of tradition and colonialism that have shaped the Third World--defined as those countries that have emerged from Western control but have not fully developed their economic potential or rejected the capitalist system in favor of some socialist alternative. He then considers the paradoxes of social structure and cultural life in the post-independence world, where even such basic concepts as "nation," "national culture," and "language" are problematic. The first experience of cinema for such countries has invariably been that of imported Western films, which created the audience and, in most cases, still dominate the market today. Thus, Third World film makers have had to ssert their identity against formidable outside pressures. The later sections of the book look at their output from a number of angles: in terms of the stages of overall growth and corresponding stages of cinematic development; from the point of view of regional evolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and through a detailed examination of the work of some of the Third World’s most striking film innovators. In addition to charting the broad outlines of filmic developments too little known in Europe and the United States, the book calls into question many of the assumptions that shape conventional film history. It stresse the role of distribution in defining and limiting production, queries simplistic notions of independent "national cinemas," and points to the need to take social and economic factors into account when considering authorship in cinema. Above all, the book celebrates the achievements of a mass of largely unknown film makers who, in difficult circumstances, have distinctively expanded our definitions of the art of cinema. Roy Armes, who lives in London, has written nine books on film, his most recent being French Cinema. He spent more than three years researching this volume.

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestoes, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world. This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown. Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, includingTrinh T. Minh-ha's experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam;avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, andJanice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, andsexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang.

Is there an international film language? Are national, ethnic and cultural differences in how films are made and understood merely differences of dialect? Such questions have been increasingly debated in recent years with the emergence of the idea of a Third Cinema, which means not simply the films made by the so-called Third World countries, but any cinema which offers a radical challenge to entrenched Western notions of what the cinema is. In a wide-ranging series of essays, this book extends the debate about Third Cinema—in Britain and the United States as well as in Africa and Asia—and offers a provocative analysis of the political problems and aesthetic possibilities of a different kind of film-making.

Would there have been a Third World without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. Although most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are written in reference to the West, the interdependence of the Second World in the East and the Third World is evident not only from a common nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance around 1990. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism addresses this historical blind spot by recounting the story of two Cold War-era cultural formations that claimed to represent the Third World project in literature and cinema: the Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958-1991) and the Tashkent Festival for African, Asian, and Latin American Film (1968-1988). The inclusion of writers and filmmakers from the Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia and extensive Soviet support aligned these organizations with Soviet internationalism. While these cultural alliances between the Second and the Third World never achieved their stated aim - the literary and cinematic independence from the West of these societies from the West - they did forge what Ngugi wa Thiong'o called "the links that bind us," along which now-canonical postcolonial authors, texts, and films could circulate across the non-Western world until the end of the Cold War. In the process of this historical reconstruction, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism inverts the traditional relationship between Soviet and postcolonial studies: rather than studying the (post-)Soviet experience through the lens of postcolonial theory, it documents the multiple ways in which that theory and its attendant literary and cinematic production have been shaped by the Soviet experience.

Wayne (Brunel U.) analyzes The Battle of Algiers as an example of films that fall within the body of theory and filmmaking practice committed to social and cultural emancipation that emerged a decade after and was influenced by the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Then he traces the changing dialectics of the First, Second, and Third Cinema movements. Distributed in the US by Stylus. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In 1968, Argentinean Filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino first articulated the theory of a "Third Cinema" - a revolutionary genre of cinema that would counter oppression on a global scale. Intended to be a "guerilla cinema" geared at contesting the overwhelming dominance of Western cinema, Solana and Getino distinguished "Third Cinema" from other forms of cinema, classifying these other types as First Cinema (commercial cinema epitomized by Hollywood) and Second Cinema. "Third Cinema" was supposed to be a liberationary tool - particularly for the bulk of the world that was subject to European imperialism, such as Latin America, Africa and Asia. Spanning a wide geographical spread of cinemas ranging from Latin America, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, this book addresses the following questions: how can we rethink the concept of "Third Cinema" for today? How do new national cinemas - and their accompanying media industries - reflect the concerns of societies that are struggling with the implications of accelerated modernization - and how are these concerns configured in new genres of aesthetics? Is there still a "Third Cinema" component in contemporary cinemas, and if so, how can it be understood?

The book reviews nine decades of Indian popular cinema and examines its immense influence on people in India and its diaspora. Since it was published in 1998, Indian film has developed in new directions. As films today vie with Indian soap operas for popularity, film making in India has acquired 'industry status' and consequently has greater accountability to its public. All this is reflected in this new and extensively revised edition of "Indian Popular Cinema". It tracks the rise of "designer cinema," reviews the increasingly significant Tamil cinema, and considers films made by Indians in the diaspora.