third cinema

just needing to think through some ideas

this summer i have been taking a film class, which mostly focuses on censorship. it’s been interesting to watch classic Hollywood films that were shaped in some form or fashion by the Hayes code or the Code era run by Joseph Breen. even films after the dissolution of the Code, after Breen’s retirement in 1954. i might publish my treatment on Herbert Biberman’s Salt of the Earth. i actually remember watching that film as an undergraduate at UT Austin, in a Mexican American studies class. it was paired with a documentary about organizing in East Austin against the Holly Street Power Plant, which was opened around 1958 in a predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhood near the Colorado river. it wouldn’t be decommissioned until nearly 2010, long after I had graduated from college. but i remember the struggle from neighborhood coalitions to get it closed down, because of the chemical spills and environmental hazards it posed. this included higher cancer rates, pollution seeping into Town Lake, etc. it reminded me of the equally long struggle against ASARCO, a smelter plant located near the Rio Grande in El Paso, which also occurred while I was in my MFA there. so I often think about place and environmental racism in my work because of these experiences. The documentary coupled with Salt of the Earth helped raise my awareness of labor and environmental struggles (intersecting with class and racism). We also watched another documentary about colonias in South Texas where houses, mostly Mexican and Mexican American families, were built in flood zones. The lands were knowingly sold and marketed as part of “the American Dream” to families wanting their own homes, despite being located in flood zones and not having to adhere to city zoning laws, or even having basic water access.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those families losing everything because they were lied to, in contrast to what’s happened in Kerr County with the recent flooding. What if Kerr County had used funding for public safety instead of policing?

So right now, I am annotating an article about the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, and reading this article from Michael B. Gillespie, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: “I’m Gonna Say a Black Ave Maria For You,” found on The Criterion Channel website. Gillespie mentions third cinema:

“[Peebles] also demonstrates a collateral nod to Third Cinema, an idea first proposed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in 1969. If First Cinema was Hollywood and Second Cinema the work of bourgeois art cinema, then the concept of Third Cinema was a call for work devoted to the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggle: ‘The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third Cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognizes in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point—in a word, the decolonization of culture.’”

There is another position that Gillespie proposes, that Sweetback, who he notes, “moves with the perpetual motion of fugitive cartography, mapping Los Angeles with a renegade fury. Blackness propelled across the cityscape under the vigilant surveilling of police cruisers and helicopters acts as an absurdist and abstracted commentary on the quotidian precarity of Black life.” Gillespie proposes that Sweetback makes his way South, towards the Mexican border. I have been thinking about this moment because several friends work on/think about, formerly enslaved African people who created their own liberated communities in Mexico. One poet who explores these connections is the brilliant Ariana Brown, in her collection, We Are Owed, which braids connections between Esteban Dorantes and Gaspar Yanga with the poet’s own family history. I know of another scholar, Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil, who “Specifically, [aims] to create a sociolegal history of borderland diplomacy and security through Mexico Independence through the Mexican-American War, exploring how these developments shaped claims to Black citizenship and belonging, as well as how Black individuals navigated the shifting Atlantic slave systems.” Both their work should be checked out and supported. And for work related to aesthetics (which Gillespie also talks about), I recommend Tina Post’s Deadpan and Rizvana Bradley’s Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form.