More, perhaps, than in other regions of the world, culture in Latin America inhabits a politicized zone, for Latin American artists and intellectuals acknowledge how profoundly history and politics inflect creativity….Those Latin American artists and intellectuals who, in their commitment to transform society, have turned to film as the most promising instrument have also become engaged win transforming that instrument. They have not only developed new contents and new forms but also processes of production, diffusion, and reception. This double commitment to artistic innovation and social transformation accounts for both its interests and the importance.-Julianne Burton, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America
The Third Cinema, using inventive artistic practices to support “a new historical situation,” the decolonizing of the third world, and its citizens, envisioned a utilitarian, national project that put extra-textual conditions ahead of formal commitments. “A new poetics for the cinema will, above all, be a ‘partisan’ and ‘committed’ poetics, a ‘committed’ art, a consciously and resolutely ‘committed’ cinema–that is to say, an “imperfect’ cinema,” writes Julio Garcia Espinosa. Understanding traditional “cinema” as both commodities and vessels of corporate and imperial domination, they imagine a third cinema built upon people’s representations of their reality, and interpretations of it. “Cinematic realism does not lie in its alleged ability to capture reality ‘just like it is,’” explains Tomas Gutierrez Alea, ” (which is ‘just like it appears to be’), but rather lies in its ability to reveal, through associations and connections between various isolated aspects of reality–that is to say, through creating a ‘new reality’–deeper, more essential layers of reality itself.” Artists and theorists attempted to understand the interrelated roles of audience, artist, media education, film screening, popular culture, and American cultural domination. Bringing the utopian and Marxist zeal of the soviets to the practical considerations of the cinema of the popular front, these theorists explain how cinema can contribute to a political and personal process of decolonalization within the continuing political economy of neo-colonialism. They are as committed to realism as to mass art forms. “The cinema of revolution is at the same time one of destruction and construction,” write Solanas and Getino in their “Toward A Third Cinema,” destruction of the image that neocolonialism has created of itself and of us, and construction of a throbbing, living reality which recaptures truth in any of its expressions.”