Counter-movement to Hollywood and European auteur cinema — political, decolonial filmmaking from Africa, Asia, Latin America. Theory by Solanas/Getino (1969).
Anyone on set in the 1960s and 70s quickly realized: there was a rebellion against the images themselves. Not just against Hollywood formulas, but against the entire Western way of thinking about cinema. Filmmakers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia began to invent their own visual grammars — not as an imitation of European auteur art, but as a direct weapon against colonialism and imperial image control. Solanas and Getino called this "Tercer Cine" — Third Cinema — in 1969. It was not a genre, but a political stance towards the medium itself.
The practical consequence was radical: the camera became a tool of liberation. Films were made with modest means, often in clandestinity, because the mere existence of such films was an act of insubordination. Editing became a form of argumentation — not emotional, but confrontational. The cut was not meant to flow, but to tear. Sound was political: colonized faces were shown, but not with the aesthetic gentleness that Western audiences expected. The image was meant to hurt. Filmmakers like Med Hondo (Mauritania), Glauber Rocha (Brazil), Ousmane Sembène (Senegal), or later Harun Farocki systematically refused "beauty" as complicity. They worked with graininess, with ruptures, with didactic intertitles — anything that classical cinema denigrated as "primitive."
This manifested most strongly at the editing table. While Hollywood and European auteur cinema strove for continuity in editing, Third Cinema consciously created disruptions. Jump cuts not as a stylistic device, but as a political statement. The montage revealed the construction — the viewer was not to forget that they were being manipulated, in order to understand precisely this: that the dominant media are also manipulation. This idea was not academic; it was existential for filmmakers whose countries were under direct or indirect Western control.
Today, the term is historically burdened and simultaneously alive. One no longer encounters "Third Cinema" as a coherent movement, but the logic persists: every independent project from the global South that refuses to meet Western expectations of "authenticity" or "exoticism" operates in its spirit. The technical consequence remains: if you work with a smaller budget, simpler equipment, local crews, and consciously detach yourself from the visual grammar of hegemonic cinema — you are making Third Cinema, whether you know the name or not.