Against a Third Cinema: The non‐revolutionary revolution of Ian Gabriel’s Forgiveness

Abstract

The intellectual challenge of addressing the “political” role of cinema is of pronounced historical and cultural significance in African film discourse. Yet what critical tools permit us to measure out a film’s political content, let alone assert the causal relation between a filmic politics and an audience’s political reaction? By assessing the significance of Mike Wayne’s dialectical adaptation of Solanas and Getino’s infamous category of “Third Cinema”, and further unpacking Wayne’s own subsequent theoretical presuppositions, this paper unravels many of the core problems which face any attempt to speak constructively of any such “revolutionary” cinema category.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• political film
• socialism
• Third Cinema
• Mike Wayne
• revolution

Notes

1. Emerging liberal political feeling, in resistance to the military dictatorship that had ruled from 1955, had gripped much of contemporary Argentine culture. Both Solanas and Getino were founders of the Grupo Cine Liberación, a film movement defined by its socialist politics, through which they sought to break away from what they saw as the pseudo‐political, bourgeois efforts of establishment cinema.

2. See Hartley, Dovey and Deleuze for a variety of interesting examples of the critical exploration of the political in film.