ABSTRACT
For a long time, the various “Third World” and “Third” cinemas which collectively form the majority cinema in the world were largely ignored by standard film histories as well as by cinema studies curricula. The two decades since the heady days of the early radical third-worldist formulations (Rocha, Solanas-Getino, Espinosa) have witnessed a number of very complex developments, both positive and negative. These years have also witnessed an increasingly sophisticated debate concerning Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, and multi-culturalism, as well as a kind of terminological crisis swirling around the concept of a “Third World” and consequently of “Third World Cinema.” While Willemen’s introductory essay disclaims any simple identity between “third cinema” and “third world cinema,” in fact the book as a whole reveals considerable slippage between the two concepts. Willemen develops a programmatic and polemical view of third cinema as a cinema of research and experimentation, equidistant from both mainstream and auteurist cinema.
