ABSTRACT
Oppositional cinemas in both the First and Third Worlds have explored a wide spectrum of alternative esthetics. This spectrum includes films and videos that bypass the formal conventions of dramatic realism in favor of such modes and strategies as the carnivalesque, the anthropophagic, the magical realist, the reflexive modernist, and the resistant postmodernist. These alternative esthetics are often rooted in non-realist, often non-Western or para-Western cultural traditions featuring other historical rhythms, other narrative structures, other views of the body, sexuality, spirituality, and the collective life. Post-Third Worldist, they interrogate nationalist discourse through the grids of class, gender, sexual, and diasporic identities. Many incorporate paramodern traditions into clearly modernizing or postmodernizing esthetics, and thus problematize facile dichotomies such as traditional/modern, realist/modernist, modernist/postmodernist. Like the sociology of "modernization" and the economics of "development", the esthetics of modernism often covertly assume a telos toward which Third World cultural practices are presumed to be evolving.
