CINEMA 4.5?

LEGACIES OF THIRD CINEMA AT THE AGE OF INFORMATIONAL CAPITALISM

by

Sourav Roychowdhury

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CINEMA TELEVISION - CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2010

Copyright 2010

Sourav Roychowdhury

Dedication

To all my friends who have supported me during hard times.

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Table of Contents
Dedication Abstract Introduction: Return of the Native Introduction References Chapter 1: The First Generation: Third Cinema and the Nation-State The Concept of National Culture International Lineage The National and the Nation-State The Aesthetics of Nation-State The Global Voice of Early Third Cinema Chapter 1 References Chapter 2: The Neo-Liberal Turn Capital and its Other Changes since the 70s Herbert (India, 2005) Cache (Hidden, France, 2005) Tribulation 99 (USA, 1991) City of God (Brazil, 2002) Chapter 2 References Chapter 3: Of City, Body and Children Chapter 3 References Conclusion: Death of Which Cinema? Conclusion References Filmography Bibliography ii iii 1 12 13 13 17 27 37 56 74 77 77 80 93 102 110 122 131 134 175 177 191 192 194

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Abstract
This dissertation studies continuities and changes in the praxis of Third Cinema over last two decades. I start from an analytic historiography of Third Cinema in the first generation, i.e. late 60s onwards, and try to rethink the politics and theoretical positions of contemporary filmmakers, vis--vis their call for de-colonization, quest for a new cinematic language as well as their use of national imageries. I argue that frequent conflation between the terms Third Cinema and Third World Cinema derives from a politics espousing the welfare state as the vehicle of regional development within the world capitalist system. This is a politics of domestic class alliance in the peripheral areas of global capitalism as a means of resistance to imperialist exploitation. Paradoxically, it is also a politics of regional capitalist development, rather than socialism. The dual thirst for a welfare state and regional prosperity finds expression in the positive utopias built around the imaginary/emerging nation state that Third Cinema projects in the early years, especially when assisting radical movements questioning Fordist capitalism around the world. The second part of this dissertation studies the structural changes global capitalism went through in the last few decades, particularly with rise of informational capitalism, globalization and receding power of the nation state. I argue that with diminished importance of nation state as an institution as well as disintegration of the Third World as a territorial referent, the new Third Cinema exercises a politics of absence questioning representations in the dominant mediascape, rather than proposing alternative positive imageries. This politics foregrounds processes of structural exclusions integral to neoiv

liberalism, alluding to the disavowed world outside globally connected spaces of flows. I focus on how in absence of other perspective or identities, the excluded physical bodies, especially of children, function as the precarious other of the global network space in these films. I also trace the locational shift in the diegetic space of these films from rural/natural landscapes to marginal urban spaces, a shift that correlates with the new urban explosion characteristic of late capitalism. I argue that even though the new Third Cinema does not have the emancipatory rhetoric of the 60s, it continues the critical function and politically informed formal innovation through strategies of

contextualization. In a way, lack of a positive referent makes the new Third Cinema more radical at a time when marginal positive identities are subject to be co-opted as niche markets in post-Fordist flexible accumulation.

Introduction: Return of the Native

To my knowledge, the last book length study on Third cinema was published in 2001. One of the inspiring factors behind Mike Waynes Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema was a statement by British filmmaker John Akomfrah made at a BFI sponsored conference on African Cinema in 1996. Akomfrah declared at the conference that Third Cinema was dead. While refuting that claim Wayne conceded that although Third Cinema as a practice is far from dead, One of the curious deficiencies of Third Cinema Theory has been its underdevelopment vis--vis First Cinema (dominant, Mainstream) and Second Cinema (art, authorial). To develop Third Cinema theory is to try and illuminate its relations with and what is at stake in the differences between First, Second and Third Cinema. (Wayne 2001: 2) Although scholars like Teshome Gabriel argued that Third Cinema was defined by its socialist politics and not geography, their field of study remained confined to the geographic Third World as a homogenous entity and as we will see in chapter 1, the premise of the socialist politics was defined in terms of binary opposition between the First and the Third World. Wayne was the first scholar to clearly spell out that socialist politics was a function of positionality within the socio-cultural milieu a film is addressing. He acknowledged the dialogical relationship between First, second and Third Cinema, placed Third Cinema within the long tradition of anti-capitalist political art, and roughly based his analysis on Third Cinemas investment in the social collective, rather than the individual. Waynes repertoire therefore includes films from all over the world, including Hollywood. Wayne also asserted that Third Cinemas allegiance was to a

politics of intervention rather than representation in the dominant cultural field and therefore it was not compatible with academic discourses like post-colonialism. However, Waynes analysis does not adequately explain the underlying reasons for recurrent conflation between Third Cinema and Third World cinema, or the frustration among filmmakers like Akomfrah when the Third World as a functional entity ceases to exist in late Capitalism. Commenting on Solanas and Getinos position on the national question, Wayne argues, The specific working-class tradition that Solanas and Getino were influenced by was a left-wing version of Peronism, which tried to bolt together the two great conflicting ideologies of the period of de-colonization: nationalism and socialism. In neocolonial situation two concepts of culture, art, science and cinema compete: that of the rulers and that of the nation. (Wayne 2001: 122)

Wayne sees this dilemma between the nation and trans-national socialism as a problem which the praxis of Third Cinema is fraught with. I believe this dilemma in fact explains the state of global capitalism in the late 60s, and can be understood from the perspective of contemporary capitalist world system. I argue in the first chapter therefore that the politics of de-colonization Third Cinema champions in its first generation did have a structural relationship with the Third World nation state, although not in the same terms as bourgeoisie national cinema. As Wallerstein has argued (see chapter 1), the dominance of Western Europe the core area of capitalist World System originated from converging interest of different power groups institutionalized in the machinery of nation-state. Analogically in the 60s, the developmental state in the newly independent Third World was perceived as a mechanism of domestic class alliance committed to regional development and a simultaneous deterrent to imperialist exploitation. The 2

combination of these two operations - i.e. catching up/welfare and an overall resistance - was expected by the contemporary left to facilitate a global systemic transformation, leading to socialism. The emancipatory rhetoric of Third Cinema in the first generation was informed by this positive utopia - structured around the developmental state and expressed in terms of national imaginaries. In spite of emphasis on regional specificities and popular culture in these imaginaries, the common denominator of underdevelopment and neo/colonial experience sustained a simultaneous rhetoric of Third World-ism, influenced by Non-Alignment Movement and the concept of Tri-continental revolution. The peripheral status provided a critical perspective of global capitalism. That is where the impetus for formal innovation - the vibrant, human rebellion against built environment- and the progressive element of Third Cinema lies. It must be noted here that by positive utopia I do not mean an essential identity, but identification with the dynamism of anti-colonial movements. Paradoxically, this positive utopia also shared a thirst for regional capitalist development, following a Third World version of Fordism. Another major problem in Waynes book is his understanding of neo-liberalism from a classical Marxist perspective, without recognizing the structural changes brought to global capitalism by advanced communication and information technologies since the late 70s. In the second chapter, I try to address these changes affected by transition from Fordism to Flexible accumulation. The new communication technologies have produced what David Harvey calls time-space compression (Harvey 1989) increasing fluidity and therefore freeing capital of its space bound constrains (See chapter 2). As a result, territorial nation states have lost their Fordist function as the mediator between labor and capital. While the global capitalist economy truly functions on a planetary scale today 3

and pockets of the former Third World - especially urban centers - have become integral parts of it, following the debt crisis in the 80s, IMF and World Bank have forced economic deregulation on the Third World nation states, promoting export based economies on the one hand, and receding welfare function on the other. Consequently, as Manuel Castells has argued, the contemporary world is polarized into spaces of global networks- connected by flows of information, capital and technology on the one hand, and a vast number of people who do not belong to and are excluded from this network. Castells writes, At this turn of the millennium, what used to be called the second World (the statist universe) has disintegrated, incapable of mastering the forces of the Information Age. At the same time, the Third World has disappeared as a relevant entity, emptied of its geopolitical meaning, and extraordinarily diversified in its economic and social development. Yet, the First World has not become the all embracing universe of neo-liberal mythology. Because a new world, the Fourth World, has emerged, made up of multiple black holes of social exclusion throughout the planet. ( Castells 1998: 167-168)

The Fourth World is dispersed around the world, and therefore does not have a regional identity. The welfare state which was seen as the medium of social upliftment for the disenfranchised in the 60s is powerless in face of forces of globalization. In fact, increasingly it maintains its legitimacy by facilitating the structural exclusion, as exemplified by stricter immigration laws in recent times. Todays political cinema, critical of capitalism, therefore does not have a positive utopia. Instead it foregrounds a politics of absence- a correlative of social exclusion- questioning representation in the dominant media. I was tempted to call this cinema Fourth Cinema, but the term has been used at least in two different contexts. Barry Barclay has used the term simply to mean Indigenous 4

cinema, indigenous with a capital I (Barclay 2003). In an essay written in 2003, based on a lecture at Auckland University he claimed Fourth Cinema (a medium of mechanical/digital reproduction) to have a position outside modern nation state/ national orthodoxy, which is the premise of the first three cinemas. Barclay claimed, We learn especially from the overall reaction to our films, how these may differ dramatically between Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. According to this outlook, we are not "One People". The One People theory, the One People paradigm, equates to extinction for Indigenous Peoples. (Barclay 2003: 3)

Significantly, he uses the term Third Cinema also as a national cinema category, without being sensitive to its political connotations. Barclays idea of fourth cinema framed around ancient roots1 therefore, is epistemologically identical to concepts of bourgeoisie national cinema, another variation of politics of representation that Third Cinema has resisted since its first generation (see chapter one). Secondly, Barclays idea of the national other is a problematic concept at a time when nation-state as an institution is losing its past relevance. Barclay mentions, for example, an incident where tribals in Orissa district of India were killed by the police while planning resistance to takeover an area of their dwelling for Bauxite mining. Barclays remedy to the situation is, One day, the tribesmen of Orissa State may hold the camera in their own hands. It will not be the camera of the ship's deck. (Barclay 2003: 9). The actual struggle that is currently taking place in India against mining at the cost of displacement of tribal people

Barclay writes, In some countries (and this is one of them) the Indigenous peoples have been converted to one of the world's major religions, at least, superficially. Their art forms may have changed somewhat, their diet, their work patterns, their instruments of governance. But in as much as the People and the culture survive at all, the ancient roots, the ancient outlook persist, an outlook with roots far back in time, an outlook to a greater or lesser extent outside the national outlook. (Barclay 2003: 7) 5

is between multinational corporations like the Vedanta group based in England and the tribal people under the leadership of Maoists2 (see chapter two), who shoot combat videos to distribute among cadres, but do not claim any position outside the modern nation state or globalization. I think this is a classic example of the difference between politics of intervention and representation. The second concept of Fourth Cinema a super 8mm experimental cinema movementdates back to 1968 in Mexico. Born out of the world wide political turbulence of that year, this movement was carried forward by activist filmmakers. The eventual influence of Solanas and Getino on the movement is clear from the title of their manifesto, Towards a Fourth Cinema. The manifesto shares most of the premise of Third Cinema, but identifies 8mm cinema as another cinema outside the normal triad, for the specificity of the format (Garcia 1999). The embrace of 8mm format was advocated for its easy accessibility and although this cinema was perceived to be experimental cinema circulated through alternative channels like cine clubs and festivals, there is an appeal towards simplicity of subjects in the manifesto. At the same time, Garcia argued that the problem lies in the fact that political cinema has become a cinema of propaganda, lacking in cinematographic language, except in a handful of cases (The Battle of Algiers). (Garcia 1999: 171) As we will see in chapter one, The Battle of Algiers has been criticized for its lack of political analysis and thriller structure. Other than the 8 mm format, politics or aesthetics of the movement for that matter remains ambiguous.

Recently, admitting that the growing support for Maoism in tribal India is a response to corporate plunder of forest and tribal land for mining, the central government, which had been indiscriminately signing MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with multinationals to attract foreign investment since the 1990s, has halted a proposed mining project in Niyamgiri of Orissa district.

I avoid neologism therefore. In Chapter three I focus on another major change in late capitalism, i.e. urban explosion. As Mike Davis has reported, the global urban population has surpassed its rural counterpart for the first time in history (Davis 2004). The new waves of urban migration since the 1990s are related to economic deregulation and its impact on subsistence farming. Growth of internationally competitive agro business, mechanized farming and retraction of agricultural subsidy by the state among other factors, have created a huge pull of rural surplus labor that has no other option but to migrate from their traditional habitat3 to the cities in search of livelihood. Unlike 19th and 20th century urbanization, this unskilled labor force cannot be absorbed by the demand for industrial labor for collapse of import substitution industries in developing countries and general deindustrialization in the traditional sectors. This population - whom Davis calls the informal proletariat- is left with no other identity except possession of physical bodies, in a paradoxical relationship with the environment of codification/decorporealization of informational society. I discuss therefore how bodies have replaced developmental state/landscapes as the critical referent in the new Third Cinema and the critique of annihilation of bodies as a structural condition of territorialization of urban space has become a recurrent theme of these films. One of the consequences of receding function of the welfare state is exposure of children/non-adults to capitalist exploitation. I explore this theme- exclusion/annihilation of children as bodies- as another symptom of emergence of a politics of non-identity, since children have functioned as the figure of immanence in cinema at least since Italian neo-realism.

This population includes tribal people, as exemplified by Freddy, the protagonist of Bolivia (see chapter three).

To the extent Third Cinema was a cultural wing of active social movements in the late 60s and early 70s, it foregrounded the emancipatory rhetoric embedded in the themes it was addressing. The vibrancy of its formal experiments marked an epoch in the history of cinema in general. During first few decades of flexible accumulation, when anti-capitalist discontents lacked the force of a visible systemic challenge, the strategy of Third cinema has remained rather subdued contextualization of dominant discourses, a strategy Wayne has described as the holding operation. I argue in the conclusion that cinemas power of contextualization retains its relevance as a worldview/ideology, if not as a medium, at a time when cinemas escapist/immersive tendencies are appropriated by Virtual Reality of computer games. At the same time, what seems like a lull period might not be the end of story. As long as periodic recession and systemic exploitation is integral part of capitalism, Third Cinema will remain alive as a critical practice. As I discuss in the first chapter, Solanas and Getino were criticized for abandoning their clandestine agit films and joining government propaganda after fall of dictatorship in 1973. Getino defended his position arguing that the form and statement of a political film is partly determined by the pulse of time, and mechanical adherence to any formula, no matter how radical it seems, exhausts its creative potential. It is true that the political stand of Solanas has been ambiguous just like the populism of Peronism, but for the same reason, it is worth taking a look at his Social Genocide (2004). Social Genocide is a documentary on the financial crisis of Argentina between 1999 and 2001, partially brought to an end by popular cacerolazo (banging pot and pans to call attention) protests which reached its peak on December 20th and 21st of 2001, and forced 8

President De la Rua to resign. Following the Latin American debt crisis of the 80s and rising inflation rate, the Argentine government under Carlos Menem adopted economic restructuring program suggested by IMF. This involved reduction of government budget, deindustrialization and privatization of state owned industries including profitable ones like the YPF oil and gas company. Rampant corruption, tax evasion and money laundering contributed to capital flight to offshore banks. The assumed antidote for inflation- the newly adopted fixed convertibility rate between peso and dollar eventually hurt the export oriented economy as regional trading partners Brazil and Mexico devalued their currency and dollar was revalued in the international market during this period. Diminished state expenditure triggered increasing unemployment, lowering of real wage and the number of people below poverty line. The situation reached a critical state when in order to stop capital flight bank accounts were frozen for a year in 2001 allowing only minor sums of cash to be withdrawn. Simultaneously, to balance the international debt payment austerity measures were declared cutting back more public service. The unions called nationwide strikes against these policies, and they were eventually joined by other sections of the society including pensioners, unemployed youth, and social organizations like Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (see conclusion) to name a few. After violent rioting, destruction of corporate property and clashes with the police, the public demand prevailed. Under President Nestor Kirchner Peso was devalued, the government encouraged import substitution industries, took an aggressive drive towards tax collection and social welfare. Finally Argentina was able to pay back their IMF debt

by 2006. Solanas4 called the popular movement the first victory of Argentina against globalization. Commenting on the opening scenes of protests at Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires, the voiceover of the film says, After years of apathy, the argentine people have awakened once more. Pot banging mingled with animated drumming by musicians present at the protest, interspersed with interviews and clashes with the police give the sequence a carnivalesque mood. As a parallel move, the innovative strategies of Hour of the Furnace (see chapter one) - staccato editing, inter-titles qualifying images, ironic usage of TV footage5, paintings, popular music including political rap and the episodic collage structure return in Social Genocide. The film starts and ends with documentary footage of protests and clashes. In between, ten short episodes historicize the crisis leading to the events of 20th and 21st December. Solanas does have a nationalist rhetoric in the film commensurate with his Peronist politics, but numerous shots of the Parliament actually depict its weakness vis-a-vis economic forces. At one point the voiceover refers to senate members as hand raisers in this context. In the episode called social genocide Solanas interviews representatives of a doctors association who joined the protest movement against austerity plans. The doctors say austerity plans mean a huge number of ailing, undernourished children would be brought to the hospitals. So, they came up with a slogan, Other people decide. We see them die.
Solanas was shot by an unknown gunman after filing lawsuit against Menem for privatizing YPF before making this film. Solanas contrasts music videos of scantily clad, dancing girls (in one of the clips Menem participates in a dance show) with a TV interview of Menem where he suavely accepts of his lover boy image. Later, with the same attitude he poses for a photograph with the IMF chief, although the chief lightly warns him of the consequence of this association, referring to himself as the devil.
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The doctors continue narrating their experience of working under anti-people economic policies. Most of these children are underweight, with low intellectual capabilities, even though they have feelings. It sounds ridiculous to suggest a diet including milk or chicken to a fourteen year old mother of such a child for permanent cure of diarrhea. Looking for medical solution to the problem they translated books from English for cheaper cure, but nothing worked in an overcrowded circumstance. Finally they read an Argentine book by Juan P. Garrahan which suggested undernourishment is a socio-economic and cultural disease that can be cured by giving everybody a job. The doctor insisted that the book didnt suggest giving food to everyone, and thats where they got their answer. As we will see in chapter three, social exclusion in absence of safety networks of the welfare state produces literal and discursive animalization of human beings, reducing them to biological entities outside the sphere of politics. Prescription of politics by doctors in that context is an attempt to make them political animal once more. Thus, in guise of older Peronism Social Genocide goes beyond inter textual reference to Hour addressing problems of late capitalism. I use the phrase cinema 4.5 rhetorically in the title to suggest contemporary political cinemas (uncomfortable) association with its software environment and also as a reference to earlier nomenclatures of Fourth Cinema. From examples like Social Genocide, it seems the number will need updates down the line.

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Introduction References
Barclay, Barry. "Celebrating Fourth Cinema." July 2003. http://kainani.hpu.edu/hwood/HawPacFilm/BarclayCelebratingFourthCinema.doc. (accessed August 20, 2010). Castells, Manuel. End of Millenium. Malden, MA (Castells 1996) (Jameson 1991): Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Davis, Mike. "Planet of Slums." New Left Review 26 (March-April 2004): 5-34. Garcia, Sergio. "Toward a Fourth Cinema prologue: a marginal cinema." Wide Angle 21, no. 3 (July 1999): 70-175. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1989.

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Chapter 1

The First Generation: Third Cinema and the Nation-state

The Concept of National Culture

After making Hour of the Furnace Solanas wrote in his famous manifesto, The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third Cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognizes in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point- in a word, the de-colonization of culture. (Solanas and Getino 1976: 47)

Although he does emphasize the importance of revitalization of national culture as a countercurrent of neo-colonial consumer culture, he describes its strategy as, not fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or passively establishes a situation: rather, it attempts to intervene in the situation as an element providing thrust or rectification. To put it another way, it provides discovery through transformation. (Solanas 1976: 56)1 Thus while the legitimacy of the movement comes from a global perspective (world revolution), its practice derives from specific contemporary experience in course of socio-economic struggle. The concept of national culture (as is the case in any nationalIn a similar argument Fanon wrote, Seeking to stick to traditions is or reviving neglected traditions is not only going against history, but against ones people. When a people support an armed or even political struggle against a merciless colonialism, tradition changes meaning. What was a technique of passive resistance may, in this phase, be radically doomed. Traditions in an underdeveloped country undergoing armed struggle are fundamentally unstable and crisscrossed by centrifugal forces. (Fanon 1963: 160)
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cultural identity) in this context is oppositional, in the sense it is conceived as a socially conscious rebellion against imperialism as well as escapist Hollywood aesthetics. Furthermore, as part of this rebellion against Hollywood conventions of suture, continuity and closure which Solanas described as cinema of surplus value he argued, Our time is one of hypothesis rather than of thesis, a time of works in progress- unfinished, unordered, violent works made with camera in one hand and a rock in the other. (Solanas 1976: 57) His invocation of national culture therefore is more a faith in collective human agency2 as opposed to capitalist de-corporealization3 and quest for freedom rather than any essentialist identity politics4.

For example in the Political Violence section of Hour of the Furnaces the narrator informs that out of 20 recent governments in Argentina 17 were outcomes of rigged elections or military coup. People were politically exiled, so the task of the liberation was to win back that humanity. Authentic Third World culture in the 60s was equated with a new epoch of humanity for its nascent creative energy. Solanas quotes Fanon in the sequence titled models In Hour of the Furnace urging Let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies in its mould. Humanity expects more from us than caricature and generally obscene imitation. The commentary continues criticism of European modernity for racism and systems of slavery after this while the image track parades symbols of European high culture: portraits of Voltaire and Byron, Roman frescos and Parthenon, to name a few. Trained in European culture themselves, Solanas and Getino were not opposed to European culture per se. Their criticism was directed at sterile fetishization of high culture in consumer societies and transfer of that culture as cultural imperialism to the Third World. The images mentioned above disappear in lap-dissolves in the sequence, but the dissolves also highlight their beauty. We hear echoes of Solanas in Glauber Rocha and Julio Espinoza as well. Rocha wrote, Cinema Novo cannot develop effectively while it remains marginal to the economic and cultural process of the Latin American continent. Cinema Novo is a phenomenon of new people everywhereWherever one finds filmmakers prepared to film the truthwherever filmmakersplace their cameras and their profession in the service of the great causes of our time there is the spirit of Cinema Novo. (Rocha 1995: 71) Espinoza defined the task of imperfect cinema as, (it) must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicating in celebrating resultsthe opposite of a cinema which beautifully illustrates ideas or concepts we already possess. (The narcissistic posture has nothing to do with those who struggle.) (Espinoza 1997: 81)
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Solanas partially echoes Fanon in this formulation. For Fanon, the quest for a national culture prior to the colonial era is justified by the colonized intellectuals shared interest, in stepping back and taking a hard look at the Western culture in which they risk becoming ensnared. (Fanon 1963: 148) This quest according to Fanon is a drive to renew contact with their peoples inner essence, the farthest removed from colonial times. Thus we notice a post-structuralist impulse in both Fanon and Solanas. National cultures embodying the native human essence- as a peripheral space of capitalist built environment- enables a critical perception of the latter and therefore facilitates progressive intervention5. Recurring use of contrapuntal voice over in Hour of the Furnaces to re-contextualize the hegemonic connotation of images is one of the strategies that complement this politics. For example, an idealized painting celebrating political independence of Argentina is accompanied in Hour by accounts of financial deals that continued national debt. Later on another statement clarifies repeating the narration, What characterizes Latin American countries is, first of all, their dependence. In Fanons idea of violence- which according to him is the indispensible form of intervention- we hear a connotation of primordial vitality. Fanon writes, The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. (Fanon 1963: 15)

It is useful to remember Althusser here, who talked about the Ideological State Apparatus, i.e. the ideological system which recruits individuals as legal subjects in the bourgeois state and defines it by proscribed actions. The ISA assigns a predetermined place for the subject in the system defined by rights, norms and taboos, which is internalized by the subject, and that way it becomes impossible to think of alternatives, since the Bourgeois state is relatively hegemonic in the First world context.

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Thus, rather than a ruralist fantasy early theorists of Third Cinema opted for a rhetoric of becoming, where a new popular culture emerges in alignment with movements for political and economic liberation. The primary task for the filmmakers in this context was to address the existing situation in all its often contradictory and confusing intricacy with the maximum lucidity (Willemen 1989: 20) and provide critical understanding likely to assist the struggles in hand. Coming from a Europeanized left background, Solanas and Getino initially started their documentary with the idea of making a film about the working class in Argentina. Contemporary political and filming experience shaped their political position, and inflected their ideological trajectory in ways they never predicted earlier. The clandestine filming was accompanied by test screenings to political activists and trade union gatherings, feedbacks from which further determined its next episodes6. This discursive attitude is embedded in the essay format of the film where staccato intercutting between black frames, titles consisting of political commentary and images resist any impression of a homogenous diegetic space. Accompanied by voice over and direct address of the titles, images of dictatorial repression contrasted against the black frames strike the audience as a shock, to which a critical response is expected by the narrative logic of the film. To emphasize that this response is the guiding principle of the film Hour refuses closure at the end of the documentary. Instead it invites the audience to add their experience to the film and continue it. The demand of this critical response also includes a polarizing function in that it rejects passive, voyeuristic viewership (one of the titles quotes Fanon declaring, All spectators are cowards or
In a self reflexive move, this process is incorporated in the documentary by inclusion of the inter-title Time for discussion and debate at the end of the second part (An Act for Liberation) of the film.
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traitors). The significance of the national in this context is in the concreteness of the movements, i.e. in rendering a particular social situation intelligible to those engaged in a struggle to change it in a socialist direction. (Willemen 1989: 20)7

International Lineage
The emphasis on the national paradigm becomes further complicated if we examine the backgrounds of the early filmmakers of the Third Cinema movement. Influential figures like Tomas Alea, Fernando Biri, and Julio Garcia Espinoza studied at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome. Patricio Guzman collaborated closely with Chris Marker while

Fanon gives a somewhat over-deterministic summary of historic evolution of Algerian literature (which he generalizes as indigenous literature) under colonial rule as follows. After one or two centuries of exploitation the national cultural landscape has radically shriveled. It has become an inventory of behavior patterns, traditional costumes, and miscellaneous customsThere is no real creativity, no ebullienceculture becomes rigid in the extreme, congealed, and petrified. The atrophy of national reality and the death throes of national culture feed on one anotherColonial exploitation, poverty, and endemic famine increasingly force the colonized into open, organized rebellionThe crystallization of the national consciousness will not only radically change the literary genres and themes but also create a completely new audience. Whereas the colonized intellectual started out by producing work exclusively with the oppressor in mind- either in order to charm him or to denounce him by using ethnic or subjectivist categories- he gradually switches over to addressing himself to his people. It is only from this point onward that one can speak of a national literature. Literary creation addresses and clarifies typically national themes. This is combat in the true sense that it calls upon a whole people to join in the struggle for the existence of the nation. Combat literature, because it informs the national consciousness, gives it shape and contours, and opens up new, unlimited horizons. Combat literature, because it takes charge, because it is resolve situated in historical time. At another level, oral literature, tales, epics, and popular songs, previously classified and frozen in time, begin to change. The storytellers who recited inert episodes revive them and introduce increasingly fundamental changes. There are attempts to update battles and modernize the types of struggle, the heroes names, and the weapons used. The method of allusion is increasingly used. Instead of a long time ago, they substitute the more ambiguous expression what I am going to tell you happened somewhere else, but it could happen here today or perhaps tomorrow. In this respect the case of Algeria is significant. From 1952-53 on, its storytellers, grown stale and dull, radically changed both their methods of narration and content of their stories. Once scarce, the public returned in droves. The epic, with its standardized forms, re-emerged. It has become an authentic form of entertainment that once again has taken on a cultural value. Colonialism knew full well what it was doing when it began systematically arresting these storytellers after 1955. (Fanon 1963: 172-174)

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making and editing his seminal Battle of Chile (1975). The influence of Italian neorealism, Griersons notion of social documentary or the left bank of French new wave in the works of early Third Cinema is well documented8. With neo-realism and British documentary, Third cinema shares the artisanal, relatively low cost set up that enables the directors to work with a different degree of freedom compared to Hollywood and its various national-industrial rivals. Willemen also notes that, contrary to the unifying and homogenizing work of mainstream industrial cinemas, this artisanal cinema allowed, at least in principle and sometimes in practice, a more focused address of the national, revealing divisions and stratifications within a national formation, ranging from regional dialects to class and political antagonism. (Willemen 1989: 5) To illustrate the influence of neo-realism on Third Cinema it is useful to take a look at Mrinal Sens Interview (1970). The film is about how Ranjit, a middle class youth looking for job becomes politicized through his experience of an interview with a Scottish company. Ranjit travels through streets of Calcutta preparing for the interview. While he is on a tram on his way to collect his only suit from a professional laundry, one young lady next to him is seen flipping through pages of a popular film magazine. One of the pages carries a full spread picture of Ranjit, to which the camera zooms in, giving it a larger than life appeal. The lady is awestruck seeing the picture and then Ranjit in close proximity. Noticing her amazement Ranjit turns to the camera and as if gives an interview to the audience. He
For example Tomas Aleas Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) starts with homage to great masters of world cinema including Bergman, Fellini and Godard. Antonio Eguino, the cinematographer of Blood of the Condor (1969) said, The term (neo-realism) is suitable to describe our filmmaking. For us the term means filmmaking with a certain commitment toward the society we are involved in, with little money, shooting with non-actors, mostly outdoors. We dont even have the minimum infrastructureThe concern of filmmaking in Bolivia, at least for our group, is to make honest films that we hope will contribute to a better understanding of our country. In that sense, our filmmaking utilizes the same methods as the Neo-realists. (Burton 1986: 167)
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says he is not a star, just a regular young man working at a printing press looking for a better job. It is the director Mrinal Sen who decided to follow him with the camera on the day of his interview, since he deemed there might be some dramatic element. He also mentions that this strategy does not make this film a fiction since he is actually looking for a job, and his anxieties are stark reality. The only thing that is not true about the movie is the character of his mother in the film, who is a professional actress. Cut to a clip from neo-realism influenced Satyajit Rays Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road 1955), where the mentioned actress Karuna Bandopadhyaya is playing Apus (the child protagonist of the film) mother. In the sequence her husband returns to their village after a long sojourn. As Harihara, the husband, unaware of his daughters (Durga) demise, pulls out gifts from his bag, Karuna breaks into tears9. Thus in a self-reflexive move, the maternal suffering and its underlying humanism- one of the mainstays of neorealism, is invoked in a less idyllic environment featuring political processions and locked out factories (Ranjit finds the laundry closed after a strike by laundry workers later). The trope of the mother-actor in Sens film thus reworks the centrality of melodrama in Rays film in favor of political analysis. Third Cinemas formal experiment is a correlative of its alignment with movements for social change in the sense that it seeks to curve out a new social space through its critical
Ranjit continues the narration of his life after this. He introduces his sister whose husband abandoned her, then remembers he needs to get off the tram. In between there is a shot of the cinematographer shooting the scene. That the political reality is also cinematic is repeatedly emphasized in the film. For example, the tram sequence starts with Ranjits POV shots of film posters featuring popular stars as well as relatively non-mainstream director Tapan Sinha. After Ranjit finishes his speech to get off, one co-passenger, a middle aged man, reacts to the interview frontally to the camera. He asks, Do you call this cinema? These are my words, and may be even yours! Cut to another POV shot of another film hoarding featuring popular actress Madhavi Mukherjee, but a poster declaring strike by cinema employees union is pasted over it, covering half her face.
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understanding of the current power relations. In context of Capitalist social space Henri Lefebvre wrote, Capitalism and neo-capitalism have produced abstract space, which includes the world of commodities, its logic and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state. This space is founded on the vast network of banks, business centers and major productive entities, as also on motorways, airports and information lattices. Within this space the town- once the forcing-house of accumulation, fountainhead of wealth and center of historical space- has disintegratedhas state socialism produced a space of its own?...A social transformation must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and on space- though its impact need not occur at the same rate, or with equal force, in each of these areas (Lefebvre 1991: 53-54)

Quest for a new cinematic language in Third Cinema therefore is an integral part of the projected social imaginary beyond contemporary Capitalism. Here also, Third Cinema borrows from various schools of modernist, especially Marxist aesthetic precursors. To begin with, the history of quest for a new language in cinema goes back to the invention of the medium itself. The trick effects of Georges Melies were later carried forward by various avant-garde schools. The utopian hope of an emancipatory mass culture espoused by political avant-garde movements like futurism predates Third Cinema in this context. The surrealist attempt to adopt the language of the unconscious through bizarre juxtaposition- especially the belief in unleashing the repressed unconscious drives as a means of subverting hegemonic social order- finds resonance in Third Cinemas experiment with popular culture10. Leninist idea of agitprop gets re-articulated in Third Cinema when Solanas writes,

Unlike technological utopianism and its fascination with mechanical movements - which was eventually co-opted in the mass media culture - the significance of surrealism was in its sensuality, i.e. its investment in the human body, its subjectivity, fantasy and contradictions of human desire. The unconscious, like the natural Third World were seen by the Third Cinema theorists as uncorrupted domains outside networks of imperialism, which needed to be

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The new political positions of some filmmakers and the subsequent appearance of films useful for liberation have permitted certain political vanguards to discover the importance of movies. This importance is to be found in the specific meaning of films as a form of communication and because of their particular characteristics, characteristics that allow them to draw audiences of different origins, many of whom might not respond favorably to announcement of a political speech. Films offer an effective pretext for gathering an audience, in addition to the ideological message they contain. The capacity for synthesis and the penetration of the film image, the possibilities offered by the living document and naked reality, and the power of enlightenment of audiovisual means make the film far more effective than any other tool of communication. (Solanas 1976: 53)

The emphasis placed by techniques of montage on construction of meaning resonates with Third cinemas notion of critical understanding or discovery through transformation. Making a break with the nineteenth century mimetic tradition in art Dziga Vertov declared in this context that, up to today we have coerced the film camera and made it copy the work of our own eyesfrom today we are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite direction, furthest away from copying. (quoted in Wayne 2001: 28)

Self-reflexivity embedded in the idea of montage turns the attention of the spectator towards the materiality of the text, as a product of human labor, consisting of codes and conventions of the labor process under specific condition. Espinoza echoes this position when he writes,

to show the process of the problem is like showing the very development of the news item, without commentary; it is like multi-faced evolution of a piece of information without evaluating it. The subjective element is the selection of the
resurrected. For that reason landscapes as inscapes of national identity is a recurring trope in films made for example, by Glauber Rocha. Surrealist influence on Third Cinema is widespread. It is useful to remember the sequence in Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Tomas Alea, where the protagonist Sergio remembers his wife who has left the country after the revolution. Sergio wears his wifes stockings as a mask while a recorded conversation between him and his wife plays in the background. The sequence goes back and forth between past and present exploring interiority of a national bourgeoisie who has sided with the revolution.

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problem, conditioned as it is by the interest of the audience-which is the subject. The objective element is showing the process- which is the object. (Espinoza 1997: 81)11 Espinozas call for Third Cinema to show the process which generates the problems can also be traced back to Gyorgy Lukacss idea of realism. Realism for Lukacs is exploration of the social dynamics lying beneath the surface appearance. He wrote, realist art must, uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society. (quoted in Wayne 2001: 35) Wayne identifies two concepts of Lukacs that are specifically pertinent to Third Cinema. They are typicality and totality. Lukacs defines type as, Convergence and intersection ofthe most important social, moral and spiritual contradictions of a timeThrough the creation of the type and the discovery of typical characters and typical situations, the most significant directions of social development obtain adequate artistic expression. (quoted in Wayne 2001: 36) The typical for Lukacs is different from the ordinary in the sense that the ordinary, in its naturalist obsession, is content with surface details while through the typical realism finds the nodal points through which major opposing forces converge. In Hans Weingartners Edukators (2004) we come across a particularly appropriate example of Lukacss typicality. The film is about two activists Jan and Peter on a mission to break into rich peoples homes and re-arrange their furniture, leaving a message that their days of plenty and security are numbered. In one of those operations Peter and Jans girlfriend Jule get romantically involved. Meanwhile the owner of the house returns

A perfect cinematic rendition of this position can be seen in the sequence of Patricio Guzmans Battle of Chile (1975) where the cinematographer is shot by a riot police while filming public protests against the Pinochet government. The sequence shows the policeman taking position and aiming his gun at the camera. After the shot is fired, the frame wavers before going dark. Repression of popular revolt and repression on cinematic expression converge here, given a partisan audience. Mediated through the camera, the audience finds itself in the firing line.

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and the trio is forced to kidnap him to a hill station. As Jan comes to know about Peter and Jules relationship their camaraderie in activism becomes strained. Meanwhile the kidnapped industrialist Hardenberg tells them about his own experience as a leftist activist in his youth and how responsibilities in life gradually made him conventional. Here symbolic rebellion against private property is conflicted with individual possessiveness manifested through norms of monogamy. The activists release Hardenberg in an apparent gesture of disillusion. Hardenberg, against his promise contacts the police. When the police raid the trios apartment, they find it emptied of all furniture except a note saying, Some people never change. Typicality is the central crisis in the narrative here, driving the activists to embrace the commune. Totality for Lukacs basically means microcosm. It is representation of a larger entity compressed into a smaller scale which contains all the essential features of the signified. A comparison between De Sicas Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Sens Calcutta 71(1971) illustrates how totality plays a significant role in Third Cinemas notion of critical understanding. Even though Ricci, the protagonist of Bicycle Thieves seems to be a representative face in post world war Italy, his narrative fails be interwoven with larger socio-economic forces at work. He is introduced in the film sitting on a pavement across the street, away from men clamoring outside the employment exchange. His journey through Rome and its various institutions remains eclectic, failing to draw their interrelationships. The film for that reason remains a story of individual plight without interrogating social processes. In contrast, the third episode of Calcutta 71 is a local train journey to Calcutta. In the train there are two groups of people, relatively well dressed middle class passengers and some underclass teenagers, carrying rice. During the journey 23

a burly middle class man complains of rowdiness when the boys sing in chorus. After an altercation he slaps the lanky protagonist of the episode, supported by his peer group. The boy resigns to one corner while the middle class group debate the proper way of handling these disgusting characters. Later, when the burly man is about to alight from the train, the boy trips him. The film informs earlier that these boys earn their livelihood smuggling rice to Calcutta at a time of food crisis, evading state regulations. This is a reference to Bengal in the late 50s, when as a policy of controlling food shortage, price was regulated by the government. Food crops were supposed to be bought by the government directly from peasants for redistribution through public rationing system. Owing to low production, lack of infrastructure and massive corruption of the state bureaucracy the rationing system did not function adequately to meet demands, especially for the expanding population of Calcutta. One of the consequences of this inadequacy was massive black marketing, where rice would be bought by middle men from peasants and hoarded for windfall profit. The rice smugglers in the film were mostly from peasant families, who delivered directly to the retail market in order to avoid exploitation by middlemen. The lyric of the song is a repetitive single sentence, chal chulo nei, bechal re, amra jotai chal. Using the word chal (which means rice, roof as well as proper behavior in Bengali) paronomastically, the lyric suggests we are poor/ we belong to improper culture/ we deliver rice. The tune of the song is akin to kirtan, a form of devotional music associated with Vaishnavite movement (a populist rebellion against elitist Brahminical Hindu religion in the sixteenth century).

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Thus in a twenty minute episode we can discern class conflict reflected in terms of antagonism between the dominant middle class culture of Victorian propriety and improper culture of expressivity, generational conflict that characterized the social upheavals of the late 60s globally, disconnection between the state authorities12 and life in rural sectors, invocation of a cultural form representative of a disenfranchised people in a semi-colonial nation (even though our protagonist sports long hair- a possible influence of Bollywood, the song belongs to resistant folk culture, generally neglected by cultural imperialism), a guerilla mode of resistance that characterized the antiestablishment struggles in the 60s, and the strategy of individual annihilation- the mode of struggle CPI(M-L) opted for in Bengal13. Of other international influences on Third Cinema Ill briefly touch upon Brecht and Walter Benjamin. While Lukacs was critical of (high) modernism on grounds of its lack of contact with popular culture, Brecht and Benjamin saw its potential in articulating experiences of the urban masses in industrial capitalism. Especially modernitys affinity towards making connections between spatially different phenomena, its skeptical attitude and innovations are significant in context of Third Cinema. Benjamin was probably the first critic who talked about politicizing art in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of mechanical reproduction. In Arcades Project he defined dialectical image as that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. Third Cinemas tendency towards contextualization in a way echoes that

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A police officer visits the protagonists house earlier to inform his mother of illegality of smuggling.

I will elaborate on policies of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) later in this chapter. Suffice it to say for now, that Calcutta 71 was ideologically sympathetic to CPI(M-L).

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idea both in the sense that as part of its critical practice it is interested in historical narratives14 as well as in its idea of active spectatorship. Willemen writes, Benjamins theory on dialectical images, although not mentioned in the manifestos, is present in their margins as they stress the relations with the viewer as being the productive site of cinematic significationit is not within the cinematic discourse but in the spaces between the referential world it conjures up and the real that the cognitive process is propelled. (Willemen 1989: 11) Also, in The Author as Producer Benjamin offers a critique of the German cultural movement called New Objectivity. New Objectivity arose in reaction to German Expressionism and its subjective, fantastic qualities. In its attempt to address areas of life marginalized or ignored by the dominant media, New Objectivity specialized in representing the working class in naturalistic manner. Benjamin argued in context of photography that the New Objective influence turned reportage into a modish fashion, by turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in atechnically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment (Quoted in Wayne 2001: 45). The contradiction in form and content identified here by Benjamin recurs in Espinoza later when he declared, Nowadays perfect cinema- technically and artistically masterful- is almost always reactionary cinema. Espinoza also echoes Brecht when he says, 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. Brecht defines realistic as,

In the way Jameson uses the term, not in a strict chronological sense. Jameson wrote, historicity is neither representation of the past nor the representation of the future (although its various forms use such representation): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is as relation to the present which somehow de-familiarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized by the historical perspective (Jameson 1991: 284).

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discovering the causal complexes of society/unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power/ writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up/emphasizing the element of development/making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it. (Brecht 1988:82)

Other than political commitment Brecht does not recommend any specific aesthetic strategy here like Espinoza. Benjamin praised Brechts clarity and communicativeness in his essay on Brechts Epic Theatre. Benjamin uses the word pellucid in the essay, which prefigures Espinozas call for lucid cinema for a lucid people. In order for this lucidity to be interventionist its ratio of emotional and intellectual stimulation needs to be different from Hollywood (whose motto is desire is real, i.e. emotional manipulation at the expense of understanding). Benjamin wrote on Brechts theatre that it eliminated the Aristotelian catharsis, the purging of the emotions through empathy with the stirring fate of the hero. (quoted in Wayne 2001: 43) Epic theatre produces alienation and astonishment rather than empathy. In the sequence described earlier featuring Rays clip in Interview we have seen this process at work.

The National and the Nation-State

I have argued so far that the embrace of national culture (and its intermittent conflation with continental culture) as a strategy of de-colonization has been framed by preceding left wing cultural traditions, and in the process repeated warnings has been registered by ideologues of Third Cinema against the romanticism (that) can idealize the past taken as essence, as national mythical origin, as an experience of the lost union between human beings and nature. (Xavier 1997:14) Nevertheless, the tendency of celebrating national 27

mythology remains a strong current in the praxis of Third Cinema. Fanon wrote while elaborating the role of national culture in anti-colonial struggle, perhaps this passion and this rage are nurtured or at least guided by the secret hope of discovering beyond the present wretchednesssome magnificent and shining era that redeems us in our own eyes and those of othersReclaiming the past does not only rehabilitate or justify the promise of a national culture. It triggers a change of fundamental importance in the colonizeds psycho-affective equilibriumthe final aim of colonization was to convince the indigenous population it would save them from darknessin this context the colonized intellectual who wants to put his struggle on a legitimate footing, who is intent on providing proof and accepts to bare himself in order to better display the history of his body, is fated to journey deep into the very bowels of his people. (Fanon 1963: 148)

While Fanon does talk about dangers of nostalgic revivalism elsewhere as we have mentioned earlier, the ambivalence of his position and the drive towards forging a new hegemony in light of fusion of western and eastern cultural elements or in terms of otherness to the west recurred in form of conflation of Third Cinema and Third World Cinema. For example, Teshome Gabriel defines Third Cinema as, The principal characteristic of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is made, or even who makes it, but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays. The Third Cinema is that cinema of the Third World which stands opposed to imperialism and class oppression in all their ramifications and manifestations. (Gabriel 1982: 2)

He follows up this definition later with construction of the following binary opposition. First, contemporary film theory and criticism is grounded in a conception of the viewer (subject or citizen) derived from psychoanalytic theory where the relation between the viewer and the film is determined by a particular dynamic of the familiar matrix. To the extent that Third World culture and familiar relationships are not described through psychoanalytic theory, Third World filmic representation is open for an elaboration of the relation viewer/film on terms other than those founded on psychoanalysis15. The Third World relies more on an appeal to social
This is not a defensible position, since psychology is not absent in Third Cinema viewers, and in spite of differences in family structure and corresponding psychoanalytic models,
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and political conflicts as the prime rhetorical strategy and less on the paradigm of oedipal conflict and resolution. Second, on the semiotic front, the western model of filmic representation is essentially based on a literary or written conception of the scenario which implies a linear, cause/effect conception of narrative action. However, Third World oral narratives, founded on traditional culture, are held in memory by a set of formal strategies specific to repeated, oral, face-to-face tellings (Gabriel 1982: 39-40).

As Paul Willemen argued, since Hollywood established its dominance in the world film market in the 1920s, it has been a strategy of various national bourgeoisies to cynically invoke films rooted in national culture to protect their domestic market, often co-opting authorial cinema in its constellation. Fanons search for legitimacy in a glorious past or Gabriels projection of pre-modern oral traditions as the model for all of an anachronistic Third World thus becomes the local answer to imperial stereotypes. Even though scholars like Mike Wayne have argued against Gabriel, the precise appeal behind the conflation between Third Cinema and Third World Cinema has not been discussed in details. I will argue that this under-explored area is crucial to theorization of the Third cinema movement since not only it shapes the political imaginary of first generation of the movement, it helps us understand the shift-that political cinema critical of capitalism went through from the last decade of twentieth century. We need to take a look at the political movements to which early Third Cinema was affiliated for that reason. During formation of the Bourgeoisie Nation State i.e. Italian and German unification, Marx argued that the working class did not have a nation. It was mercantile regional

psychoanalytic theories have been applied to Third World Cinema, for example, by Ashish Nandy and Sudhir Kakkar in case of Indian Films. Fanon was a trained psychoanalyst as well. Interestingly, Stam has described the revolt of early proponents of Third Cinema against their earlier generation just like the French New Wave authors, as Oedipal.

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capital which needed its protected national market, as unhindered circulation of capital within that region could ensure further accumulation. As capitalism matured, it broke down national boundaries and through imperialism, globalized its reach. Wallerstein identifies three structural positions in the history of development of world Capitalism in this context, namely- core, semi-periphery and periphery. He argues that owing to a series of historical, ecological and geographic accidents North-west Europe emerged as the core area of world-economy in the sixteenth century. The defining characteristic of this core area was that the interests of various local groups converged here leading to the development of strong state mechanisms which was not the case in the peripheral areas (i.e. the location of Third World).16 Apart from superior means of production, because of this differential power of the state-machineries, we get operations of unequal exchange17 enforced by the strong states on the weak ones. Thus, Wallerstein writes, Capitalism involves not only appropriation of surplus value by an owner from a laborer, but an appropriation of surplus of the whole world by the core areas. (Wallerstein 2000: 86)

Wallerstein elaborates this with two reasons. He writes, In peripheral countries, the interests of the capitalist landowners lie in an opposite direction from those of the local commercial bourgeoisie. Their interests lie in maintaining an open economy to maximize profit from world market trade (no restrictions in exports and access to lower-cost industrial products from core countries) and in elimination of the commercial bourgeoisie in favor of outside merchants (who pose no local political threat). Thus, in terms of the state, the coalition which strengthened it in core countries was precisely absent. The second reason, which has become ever more operative over the history of the modernworld system, is that the strength of the state-machinery in core states is a function of the weakness of other state-machineries. Hence the intervention of outsiders via war, subversion, and diplomacy is the lot of peripheral states. (Wallerstein 2000: 88-89)
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Detailed elaboration of unequal exchange is beyond the scope of this chapter. For further details see Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

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After World War II United States emerged as the hegemonic power in the world system owing to several factors18, the most immediate being freedom from major military expenditure until 1941 and absence of wartime destruction of its infrastructure. In his famous speech known as fourteen points earlier in 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed self-determination of nations, implying collective political right to sovereignty for the colonies. One of the fourteen points of the speech was The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance. In other words, in place of direct political control of the former colonies, the Third World was invited to participate voluntarily in the global market under its own political leadership, whose other responsibility would be national development. Around the same time Lenin identified the age of imperialism as the age of monopoly and finance capital, where Capitalism had exhausted its potential for development of productive forces for saturation of the world market, and therefore was dependent on the colonies for export of finance capital instead of investment in new production. For that reason, the struggles for national liberation against colonial powers was seen as crucially important in the overall struggle against moribund capitalism. To explain the crisis of capitalism according to his formulation, he wrote, Hilferding rightly notes the connection between imperialism and the intensification of national oppression. In the newly opened-up countries, he writes, the capital imported into them intensifies antagonisms and excites against the intruders the constantly growing resistance of the peoples who are awakening to national
Wallerstein argues in this context that The US and the USSR engaged in a highly structured, carefully contained, formal (but not substantive) conflict, in which the USSR acted as a subimperialist agent of the United States. (Wallerstein 1995: 10)
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consciousness; this resistance can easily develop into dangerous measures against foreign capital. The old social relations become completely revolutionized, the age-long agrarian isolation of nations without history is destroyed and they are drawn into the capitalist whirlpool. Capitalism itself gradually provides the subjugated with the means and resources for their emancipation and they set out to achieve the goal which once seemed highest to the European nations: the creation of a united national state as a means to economic and cultural freedom. This movement for national independence threatens European capital in its most valuable and most promising fields of exploitation, and European capital can maintain its domination only by continually increasing its military forces. (Emphasis mine)19

Although belonging to opposing political ideologies, according to both Wilsonian as well as Leninist models the path for emancipation of the Third World was first a political change that would establish sovereignty (either overthrowing colonial rule or actually implementing independent policies in so-called semi-colonies), then acquiring economic prosperity through industrialization and creation of social infrastructure (education, health etc.) overseen by a benevolent state. Thus, during the period 1945-70, socialism was a secondary goal to the Third world nations. Development of means of production was a question of accumulating domestic capital to eliminate dependence on the First World. For that reason Maos concept of neo-democratic revolution envisioned a four class alliance (National bourgeoisie, Petite Bourgeoisie, peasants and the industrial Proletariat) in their struggle against imperialist forces, comprador bourgeoisie and feudal landlords20. It was assumed by the

V. I. Lenin, Critique of Imperialism in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imphsc/ch09.htm Mao wrote, It is an era in which the world capitalist front has collapsed in one part of the globe (one-sixth of the world) and has fully revealed its decadence everywhere else, in which the remaining capitalist parts cannot survive without relying more than ever on the colonies and Semi-colonies, in which a socialist state has been established and has proclaimed its readiness to
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contemporary left that in spite of this apparently bourgeoisie-democratic drive21 resisting imperialist interests in the Third World would topple global capitalism in general because of the latters dependency on the colonies22 and therefore as Ismail Xavier writes, In the

give active support to the liberation movement of all colonies and semi-colonies, and in which the proletariat of the capitalist countries is steadily freeing itself from the social-imperialist influence of the social-democratic parties and has proclaimed its support for the liberation movement in the colonies and semi-colonies. In this era, any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed against imperialism, i.e., against the international bourgeoisie or international capitalism, no longer comes within the old category of the bourgeois-democratic world revolution, but within the new category. It is no longer part of the old bourgeois, or capitalist, world revolution, but is part of the new world revolution, the proletarian-socialist world revolutionAlthough such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes. Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism (Mao, On New Democracy 1940 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_26.htm). Similarly, Fanon wrote, The colonial subjects are militant activists under the abstract slogan: Power to the proletariat, forgetting that in their part of the world slogans of national liberation should come first. (Fanon 1963: 22) Even Fidel Castro was not a socialist at the beginning of the Cuban revolution. His turn to socialism later was largely motivated by the necessity of Soviet support in case of a possible US military campaign. This is also a reason why in the Third World context often concepts of people and class get conflated. For example for Alea, the term popular, used in its authentic sense, can only exist when the interests of the people are the same as those of the state. According to Alea this congruence implies socialism. The people are those who embody the desire to improve social conditions. (Ramsay 1988: 270) On the other hand, Roy Armes who identified Third Cinema as Third World Cinema itself, criticized Satyajit Rays universal humanity as, far from being a neutral artistic quality, this humanity, too, can be seen most properly as the product of a tradition created initially by a middle class that has come in terms with colonization. (Armes 1987: 242) Thus there was an implicit consensus among theorists of Third Cinema about the progressive Third World consciousness resonated by the aesthetics of Third Cinema, being innately anticolonial, and therefore socialist.
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The Dependence section in the first part (Violence and Liberaion) of Hour of the Furnaces addresses this issue in a famous montage sequence. Influenced by Eisensteins Strike (1924) and to some extent Andy Warhols usage of pop culture, this section intercuts between scenes from a slaughterhouse (Argentinas one of the biggest export is beef) and glossy advertising boards featuring bikini clad women and luxury cars. Various stages of meat processing including hammering the cattle to death is juxtaposed here with seductive looks of presumably First World models, suggesting the source of consumerist affluence in the First World coming from the

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1960s there were great expectations in all Latin America, when the movement in world history seemed to elect the so-called Third world as the epicenter of change. (Xavier 1997: 8) Although this model of development was laid down by the two emerging superpowers and bought by the Third world countries, the actual mode of struggle against the North lied in its pacing. The colonial powers were strongly opposed to forcing of the pace by the Third World in this process of catching up23. But in the post world war scenario the old model of direct political control was not economically or ideologically sustainable. By late 1960s decolonization had been achieved almost everywhere, but when it came to actual national development, by the early 70s the world economy had already reached a phase of stagnation which according to Wallerstein, still continues. The relationship between the political movements I have tried to understand with early Third Cinema becomes clear if we examine the backgrounds of the writers of its best known manifesto Towards a Third Cinema. Although Solanas wrote- A war in which national liberation can only succeed when it is simultaneously postulated as social

suffering of the Third World. At another level, the advertisements are also ideological attacks of the consumerist ideology on workers who can barely afford the meat they produce. Dipesh Chakrabarty summarizes this situation as follows. The temporal structure of modern History (defined in terms of progress, industrialization and democracy) has been first in the west, and then elsewhere. Following this historicism Marx wrote, Country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. (Chakrabarty 2000: 7). In turn, this historicism legitimized saying not yet to the colonies. The colonizers who took pride over ethos of democracy in the metropole could say that Indians or Africans were not civilized enough to enjoy the same yet. Mills historicist argument thus consigned Indians, Africans and other rude nations to an imaginary waiting room of history. (Chakrabarty 2000: 8) Against this historicism defined by Johannes Fabian as denial of coevalness, the national liberation movements adopted the strategy of now. The colonial nation-states appropriated the imaginary waiting room for themselves as a metaphor of space, and turned it against the temporal narrative of imperialism.
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liberation- socialism as the only valid perspective of any liberation process- Solanas was admittedly Peronist24. Solanas criticized the argentine Communist party and Stalinism in general in the Notes on Neo-colonialism section of Hour of the Furnaces. Referring to historian Jorge Abelardo Ramos, Solanas argued that while the socialist party followed the path of social democracy influenced by Euro-communists, Stalinists followed the diktats of Third International which suggested collaboration with colonial powers in war against Fascism (after Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in 1941). The goal of Peronism, Solanas declared was economic independence, political sovereignty and social justice which would eventually transform semi-feudal, rural Argentina into an independent nation. Robert Stam describes Peronism as a version of Latin American populism (which also included some Fascist tendencies). Stam writes, In this version, populism represents a style of political representation by which certain progressive and nationalist elements of the bourgeoisie enlist the support of the people in order to advance their own interests. Latin American populists, like populists everywhere, flirt with the right with the one hand and caress the left with the other, making pacts with god and devil. Like the inhabitants of Alphaville, they manage to say yes and no at the same time. As a tactical alliance, Peronism constituted a labyrinthine tangle of contradictions; a fragile mosaic which shattered, not surprisingly, with its leaders disappearancewholeheartedly anti-imperialist, Peronism was only half-heartedly anti-monopolist, since the industrial bourgeoisie allied with it was more frightened of the working class than it was of imperialismthere is ambiguity in theconcept of Third Cinema. The third, while obviously referring to the Third World, also echoes Perons call for a third way, for an intermediate path between socialism and capitalism. That The Hour of the Furnaces seems more radical than it in fact is largely derives from its skillful orchestration of what one might call the revolutionary intertext, that is, its aural and visual evocation of tri-continental revolution. The strategically placed allusions of
Robert Stam writes, Should there be any doubt about the Peronist allegiances of the film, one need only remember the frequent quotations of Peron, the interviews with Peronist militants, and the critiques of the non-Peronist left. In 1971, Solanas and Getino made a propaganda film for Peron: Peron la revolucion justicialista (Peron: The Just Revolution). The Cine-Liberacion group which made the film, according to Solanas served as the cinematic arm of General Peronupon Perons death, Solanas and Getino made public declaration supporting the succession of his wife Isabel. (Stam 1998: 267)
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Che Guevara, Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, and Stokely Carmichael create a kind of effect de radicalite rather like the effet de reel cited by Roland Barthes in connection with the strategic details of classical realist fictionPerons contradiction has to do with its constant swing between democracy and authoritarianism, participation and manipulation. With populism, a plebian style and personal charisma often mask a deep scorn for the masses. Egalitarian manners create an apparent equality between the representative of the elite and the people who are object of manipulation. The film, at once manipulative and participatory, strong-armed and egalitarian, shares in this ambiguity. It speaks the language of popular expression (your ideas are as important as ours) but also resorts to hyperbolic language and sledgehammer persuasion. (Stam 1997: 265-266)

The group Cine Liberacion to which Solanas and Getino belonged was formed in the late 60s in response to popular resistance movements against the military government. Defining feature of these movements was collaboration between the middle and working classes, the principle agenda being democratization of Argentina. The movement culminated in electoral victory of Perons party Frente Justicialista de Liberacion in 1973. During the movement Cine Liberacion called for creation of a guerrilla cinema but after 1973 joined the democratic process renouncing production of clandestine agit films. Getino was appointed the director of the film classification board under Peron where his achievements included abolition of censorship, the stimulation of production, and renewed efforts to limit the influence of foreign films in the domestic market. (Barnard 1986: 53) As it is evident, all of the above were initiatives for development of the domestic mainstream film industry25, and when questioned by what Getino called the

Similarly, Glauber Rocha said in an interview that, personally, I believe that the common objective for the Third World must be emancipation of the market from imperialist domination. Of course it is obvious that imperialism of the cinema would prefer it if we were to close ourselves off into a kind of ghetto for pure and uncontaminated artists and surrendered the market. But we must understand that the economic emancipation of a nation in the cinema, as well as in other more important fields, is the first condition of political emancipation. Paradoxically, I would say that in Europe and the United States the left wing wants to destroy the consumer society, whereas in the Third world the left wing wants to create it. (Rocha 1971: 71)

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far left about his transformation, Getino defended himself in terms of popular support. Getino wrote, They saw in our work a supposed retreat into pro-Government propaganda, not distinguishing between support for the armed forces and support for a government elected by 70% of the people. (Getino 1986: 107) Thus, we have seen so far that The Third World in the 60s was striving for economic development (development of regional capital, means of production and infrastructure) the nature of which was bourgeoisie democratic, although there was a consensus that elimination of underdevelopment and dependence on the colonial powers would eventually give the world a socialist turn altering geo-political power relations (and hence the idea of tri-continental revolution). In order to match the strong state mechanisms of the First World, a populist state was projected to be the agency in this development project, popular broadly meaning domestic class alliance in this context. The state was supposed to undertake social welfare and protect its people against external exploitation. Deficiency in technology or resources was thought to be overcome by utilization of hitherto untapped human capital (hence Fanons idea of violent, muscular dream).

The Aesthetics of Nation-state

The emphasis on human capital reflects in the praxis of Third Cinema through its fascination with popular culture and its reworking into mass media technology of cinema26. Gabriels invocation of oral tradition as the defining character of Third world
26

The genealogy of the title Hour of the Furnaces will be a relevant example in this context. The first Spanish explorers sailing along the southeastern coast of South America reported seeing fires by the hundreds blazing out from the dark silhouette of the land. For that reason the area what is known as the present day Argentina, was named Tierra del Fuego- the land of fire. Those fires were actually hornos, or cooking fire set up by the Native inhabitants. The site of those fires

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can be explained by this tendency. Willemen identifies several other precursors of this practice including Brazilian Athropophagia manifestos and works of Oswald de Andrade. The most important theme in Third Cinema in conjunction with the anti-imperialist movements however was the emerging populist state, generally visualized in terms of national characteristics. Willemen mentioned earlier that admiration for a strongly centralized but benevolent state is a shared characteristic of Third Cinema with Griersonian documentary. The two tendencies of disseminating stable (in terms of stereotypes) or emerging (defined in terms of the dynamics of the anti-imperialist movements) national culture therefore reflects two aspects of this projected nation-state. On the radical side, it had a critical function against capitalist exploitation of the underdeveloped periphery of global capitalism. On the conservative side, it was the vehicle of capitalist development itself, and therefore conceived in terms of totalized, positive utopia. Homi Bhabha summarizes the process of conceptualization of the people (the legitimacy of the populist nation state) in a nation space as a double narrative movement. He writes, the people are the historical objects of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on a pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past; the people are also the subjects of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity: as that sign of the
blinking on one by one to form a whole new constellation caught the imagination of the explorers, and eventually la hora de los hornos (the hour of the cooking fire) became a popular expression for Latin American poets and historians. Che Guevara gave it a revolutionary connotation when, in context of Latin American anti-imperialist movements, he proclaimed Now is la hora de los hornos; let them see nothing but the light of the flames. (MacBean 1970: 31) We see visualization of Ches call in the Notes on Neo-colonialism section of Hour of the Furnaces where supporters of Peron listen to his last speech in 1955 before his ouster by a military coup. During the nocturnal speech, the supporters hold up torches, while the aerial camera pans over them. The shot continues and after a zoom-in the frame is literally filled with flames.

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present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive processIn the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. (Bhabha 1994: 145)

The rhetoric of visualization has been a crucial strategy for naturalization of utopias as national pedagogy. Citing Bakhtins discussion of Goethes realist narrative in Italian Journey Bhabha notes, The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity emphasizes the quality of light, the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its form of collective expression. (Bhabha 1994: 143) The quality of light especially in context of classical realism has been discussed extensively as a bourgeoisie perspective27. The politics of visualization takes a new twist in Aleas perception. We have seen earlier in our discussion that in Third Cinema the Brechtian strategy of alienation resists purgation of emotions through vicarious identification with the protagonist. In place of the immersive/escapist practice in Aristotles catharsis, it evokes distance for a critical perception. In his essay La dialectica del espectador, Alea questions the conventional interpretation of the term catharsis and argues that distancing in Brecht is not a cold detachment but occurs through emotion, a particular emotion that leads to discovery (cognition and learning), which is a
As Baudry wrote in his famous essay about cinematic reproduction of the renaissance perspective and its consequent construction of the transcendental subject The world is no longer only an open and indeterminate horizon. Limited by the framing, lined up, put at the proper distance, the world offers up an object endowed with meaning, an intentional object, implied by and implying the action of the subject which sights it. At the same time that the worlds transfer as image seems to accomplish this phenomenological reduction, this putting into parenthesis of its real existence (a suspension necessary, we will see, to the formation of the impression of reality) provides a basis for the apodicity of the ego. (Baudry 2004: 361) Similarly Guy Debord wrote, By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of powers totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and between classes. (Debord 1995: 19)
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concept close to Aristotles catharsis. Alea uses a relatively new translation of Aristotles Poetics (1981) by Leon Golden where Golden translates catharsis as clarification instead of purgation/purification. Golden bases this translation on Aristotles arguments explaining the function of tragedy as a catharsis of the emotions of pity and fear, and this according to Golden places Aristotle in the same league as writers of modern aesthetic theory like James Joyce, who used the term epiphany to describe vision of truth. Golden does acknowledge that the dominant trend of Hollywood is to exploit emotions for sensationalism but he argues that this practice is closer to Platonic mystification than of poetics. Plato opposed poets who exposed the way rulers really are, whereas Aristotle advocated poets (like Homer) who exposed the gods true character as vindictive rather than benign. (Ramsay 1988: 271) If we remember that Alea was discussing problems of spectatorship in popular cinema of post-revolutionary Cuba in the essay, where he defined the popular as a concept where the interests of the people converged with that of the state, it becomes clear that the objective of pedagogic discovery through clarification was to assess and catalyze the proper benevolent function of the nascent, projected socialist state. Alea summarizes his vision of this project of critical clarification in an interview with Julianne Burton as follows. Describing the character of Sergio in Memories, the protagonist of the film, who also embodies what Jameson calls the national allegory Alea said, In my view, the Sergio character is very complex. On one hand, he incarnates all the bourgeois ideology that has marked our people right up until the triumph of the revolution and still has carryovers, an ideology that even permeates the proletarian strata. In one sense Sergio represents the ideal of what every man with that particular kind of mentality would like to have been: rich, good-looking, intelligent, with access to the upper social strata and to beautiful women who are very willing to go to bed with him. That is to say, identify to a certain degree with him as a 40

character. The film plays with this identification, trying to ensure that the viewer at first identifies with the character, despite his conventionality and his commitment to bourgeois ideology. But then what happens? As the film progresses, one begins to perceive not only the vision that Sergio has of himself but also the vision that reality gives to us, the people who made the film. This is the reason for the documentary sequences and other kinds of confrontation situations that appear in the film. They correspond to our vision of reality and also to our critical view of the protagonist. Little by little, the character begins to destroy himself precisely because reality begins to overwhelm him, for he is unable to act. At the end of the film, the protagonist ends up like a cockroach- squashed by his fear, by his impotence, by everythingBecause the spectators feel caught in a trap since they have identified with a character who proceeds to destroy himself and is reduced to nothing. The spectators then have to re-examine themselves and all those values, consciously or unconsciously held, that have motivated them to identify with Sergio. They realize that those values are questioned by a reality that is much stronger, much more potent and vital. (Burton 1986: 118-119)

Clarification performs a dual operation in this context by first establishing and then demystifying bourgeois values, much in line of a projected two stage socialist revolution. Few years later however, like Getino, Alea renounced the vision of the second socialist stage. When asked in context of his The Last Supper (1976) why his later films were more linear and conformed to conventional forms compared to Memories, Alea replied, I believe that we are guilty of having overindulged our interest in historical topics, despite their great importance at this state in our national development. We are very much involved in re-evaluating our past. All of us feel the need to clarify a whole series of historical problems because that is a way of also reaffirming our present reality. It is a genuine necessity. It has, however, led us to neglect our contemporary situation a bit. Clearly the challenge that we now confront is to develop a penetrating vision of our contemporary situation and to make more films dealing with current problems. (Burton 1986: 120)

In other words, the poststructuralist impulse we have mentioned earlier as the radical aspect of Third Cinema, i.e. the tendency to historicize and therefore look at the present as de-familiarized history, for which new devices of communication/interrogation

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becomes necessary is given up at least in two occasions when the filmmakers (Alea and Getino) are working under state patronage28. Before going into further discussions of the nation- state oriented aesthetics I must make it clear that Jamesons idea that the Third World is constituted by colonial and imperialist experience and therefore all Third World literature must be read as national allegory29 has been criticized on various fronts. My argument is not repetition of Jameson but quite the opposite. Recourse to national allegory and popular culture can be a conscious totalizing strategy motivated by capitalist aspiration where anti-realist forms carve out a domestic otherness without having a direct critical function. As we have seen earlier, Glauber Rocha was an avowed advocate of consumer society and emphasized the necessity of a successful domestic film industry in terms of economic emancipation of a nation in
28

Alea said, For someone like Andrew Sarris it must be difficult to understand, but I have to say that for me what I might achieve as an individual director is no more important than what the whole group of us here at ICAIC achieves togetherIn a situation like ours, the collective achievement is just as important as the personal oneFor me to fulfill my individual creative needs as a director, I need there to be a Cuban cinema. To find my own personal fulfillment, I need the existence of the entire Cuban film movement as well. (Burton 1986: 130)
29

See Fredric Jameson. Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986) 65-88. Jamesons main argument here was that the typical determinant of capitalist culture was its radical split between private and public. The political being in the realm of the public, capitalist culture, especially the modernist novel did not reflect social dynamics. Since this split did not exist in the Third World because of immediacy of experience and lack of alienation, Third World literature embodied the political unconscious. Since the resistance to imperialism was generally conceived in form of nationalism, all Third World literature could be read as national allegory. Aijaz Ahmed in his famous response to this argument of Jameson wrote, For, if one argues that the Third World is constituted by the experience of colonialism and imperialism, one must also recognize the two-pronged action of the colonial/imperialist dynamic: the forced transfer of value from colonialized/imperialized formations, and the intensification of capitalist relations within those formations. And if capitalism is not merely an externality but also a shaping force within those formations, then one must also conclude that the separation between the public and the private, so characteristic of capitalism, has occurred there as well, at least in some degree and especially among the urban intelligentsia which produces most of the written texts and which is itself caught in the world of capitalist commodities. (Ahmed 1987: 12-13)

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cinema. Solanas criticized Cinema Novo in this context as a movement within the system lacking significant political edge30. Interestingly, commenting on Cinema Novo Solanas agreed that (in Brazil) the forces of the national and popular culture are very strong, stronger than they are in Argentina, but he attributes this difference to a relatively developed national bourgeois in Brazil. Solanas said in an interview, The Argentine bourgeois is a fairly marginal one, dependent on the bourgeois on the oppressor countries, many of whom live in the capital. The typical cultivated Argentine intellectual is better informed of the situation in Europe than in the rest of Argentina31. The opposite is true for Brazil. (Solanas 1969: 25)

A discussion of Rochas Black God, White Devil (1964) and Land in Anguish (1966) will make this point clearer. Black God, a film made during the brief democratic phase before the military coup of 1964, is organized around a peasant couple, Manuel and Rosa. The opening sequence of the film shows the arid backland in a top shot, intercut with closeups of skulls of cattle, suggesting draught. The final shot is an aerial view of a distant resplendent sea- the destination of Manuels flight. Within this teleological journey towards national development the film speaks about the representative couples social
Solanas wrote, The first alternative to this type of cinema, which we could call the first cinema arose with so called authors cinemanouvelle vague, cinema novo, or, conventionally, the second cinema. This alternative signified a step forward inasmuch as it demanded that the filmmaker be free to express himself in non-standard language and inasmuch as it was an attempt at cultural de-colonization. But such attempts have already reached, or are about to reach, the outer limits of what the system permitsThe search for a market of 200000 moviegoers in Argentina, a figure that is supposed to cover the costs of an independent local production, the proposal of developing a mechanism of industrial production parallel to that of the system but which would be distributed by the system according to its own norms, the struggle to better the laws protecting the cinema and replacing bad officials by less bad, etc., is a search lacking in viable prospects, unless you consider viable the prospect of becoming institutionalized as the youthful, angry wing of the society- that is, of neo-colonialized or capitalist society. (Solanas 1976: 52)
31 30

It needs to be remembered in this context that majority of the population in Argentina is immigrant European.

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condition, hopes and representations, their encounters with messianic cults as well as social banditry (Cangaco), culminating in negation of both forms of contestations into pursuance of what Lucia Nagib calls the most famous social/national utopia in Brazilian cinema. The film consists of four loosely connected episodes. The first episode depicts the life of the couple on a backland plantation, where Manuel lives as a cowherd. After being cheated by a landowner (Colonel Morais) Manuel kills him and in turn the colonels henchmen kill Manuels mother. Hounded by the henchmen Manuel seeks refuge joining the followers of a miracle working saint (beato), Sebastiao (the Black God). The second episode of the film is about Manuels experience in the cult where he places his destiny in Sebastiaos hands, performs purification rituals ignoring Rosas objections. The increasing following of Sebastiaos cult eventually alarms the local landowners and the Catholic Church who assign Antonio das Mortes- killer of the cangaceiros to repress the movement. The third episode begins after Antonio massacres the beatos and Rosa slays Sebastiao ending his domination of Manuel. Blind singer Juliao leads the peasant couple- the lone survivors of the massacre- to Corisco (the White Devil), survivor of another massacre by Antonio, that of cangaceiro Lampiao and his band. Manuel transfers his faith to Corisco this time, accepting him as another divine emissary. Corisco- a practitioner of violence in the struggle to master ones destiny tries to convince Manuel and his other companions of the superiority of his path over Sebastiao. Finally in the last episode, Antonio fulfills his promise by killing Corisco, opening up the Sertao to the headlong flight of Manuel and Rosa. In the otherwise discontinuous episodes, the leitmotif the backlands (sertao) will turn to sea, and the sea will turn into backlands is reiterated by all major characters of the 44

movie including Sebstiao, Corisco, Juliao, Antonio and Manuel. Although the referent of the film remains the underdeveloped backlands of north-eastern Brazil and the aspirations of its inhabitants, the film never reproduces historical events. The acting and compositions within the mis-en-scene remains theatrical with folkloric overtone. The dilated time, relative immobility, silence of the frames, and editing to the rhythm of the cordel song playing in the background- instead of illusions of continuity, recreates a chronotpoic constellation. The experience of scarcity and the desire for opulence reflected in the opposition between the backlands and the sea finds expression in the structure of the narrative through dialectics of rarefaction and excess32. Xavier claims this chronotopic strategy conforms to principles of Aesthetics of Hunger in that the texture of the film expresses the condition of its production, and turns its technical precariousness into a source of signification. He argues that the mediation of the filmic discourse by a poet (Juliao) belonging to the oral tradition of the diegetic universe of the film is part of this strategy33. He writes, This mediation, if not the only source of the films cavalier attitude towards historical data, at least partially explains the fact that the film speaks of Corisco, Lampiao, Antonio Conselheiro, and Padre Cicero without seeking any rigorous fidelity to the official history of dates and documents. The figural method of the film transforms history into a referential matrix covered with layers of imaginary constructions. The mediation operates as a kind of permeable membrane that allows passage only to selected fragments and transfigured characters. This precipitate of the popular imagination takes the form of exemplary tales whose
Xavier gives an example of this temporality in the following sequence, extremely brief shots render the agitation and fall of the devout under the relentless fire of an Antonio das Mortes multiplied in a montage effect that recalls Eisensteins October and even quotes images from the Odessa steppes sequence of Potemkin. The massacre completed, the film reverts to slow camera movements over the victims, as shots of pensive Antonio install a new phase of reflection. (Xavier 1995: 137-138)
33 32

It should be noted here that this strategy is Brechtian too, although in this particular film it is not a vehicle of alienation.

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purpose is not fidelity to fact but rather the transmission of a moral. The historic process is represented as a parable that retains only what the narrator sees as essential, in a style reminiscent, in its criteria of selection and its narrative poetics, of cordel literature. (Xavier 1995: 139)

At another level, this narrative proclaims a peasant consciousness. Victim of alternative draughts and deluge, and most immediately a fraud, Manuel fails to understand the structural nature of his oppression. He seeks emancipation in available modes of antiestablishment movements. Firstly, availability of Sebastiao at the moment of his personal rebellion against the semi-feudal hierarchy encourages Manuel to adopt his interpretive system, attributing the tragedy to a divine plan which requires devotion to the saint for remedy. After failure of the messianic cult, he aligns himself with existing collective peasant rebellions34 embodied by Lampiao and later Corisco. When these unorganized local rebellions fail as well, he is forced to look beyond his familiar cosmology. Both Sebastiao as well as Corsico express anti-republican sentiments in the film. This is where the last sequence of the film is particularly interesting for our argument. After Antonio kills Corisco in the final battle of the backland, the Cordel singer concludes his ballad singing this world is ill divided- it belongs to Man, and not to God or the Devil. Thus in a classic modernist move, the legitimacy for the republic derives here from its projected populism, while its inharmonious elements, including regional rebellions against the state backed by landowners who hired Antonio is dismissed as inhuman. The dilated time that has defined the films temporality so far changes dramatically in the sequence as Manuel and Rosa start running away from the scene of

It was a common practice among colonial powers to mark rebelling areas or groups-even if they were demanding tax relief for natural calamities as criminals or bandits. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: Laurel Editions, 1969).

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battle under somewhat parental oversight of Antonio behind them. The speed of camera movement gradually increases in the tracking shot along the sertao, and at one point it overtakes Manuel in order to reach the sea. Perhaps to emphasize the frenzy of the flight further, Rosa fails to keep up with Manuel and falls over at one point. Manuel continues his run without looking back as long as he is seen. Elaborating on the genealogy of maritime utopia in Brazilian cinema, Lucia Nagib refers to three influences that are of relevance to our discussion. Glauber Rocha was inspired by accounts of a rebellion led by messianic leader Antonio Conselheiro in the hinterlands of Bahia in 1896-7, whose prophecy announced that the backlands will turn into seacoast, and the seacoast into backlands.35 The prosperous seacoast is clearly an economic imaginary for the backland people in this context. Rocha also mentioned what he calls the primal obsession of the backland man, is to see the sea. Combining these two fantasies of vision (and the photogenic qualities of water) and economic prosperity through a slippage Rocha interpreted Conselheiros prophecy as a revolutionary idea, the sea being the symbol of liberation.36 The aesthetic influence of the last sequence in Black God however comes from a foreign source. Rochas motif of the sea as liberation was inspired by Francois Truffauts famous final sequence in The 400 Blows (1959) where the child protagonist Antoine Doinel runs

See Lucia Nagib. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 6. Rocha wrote, The northeastern migrants always move towards the shore. As for the The backlands will turn into sea, and the sea will turn into backlands, this was Antonio Conselheiros widespread prophecy, and while it does not really contain such an idea, it gives you the liberty to interpret it in a revolutionary way. I appropriated the symbol and used it in my film. (Quoted in Nagib 2007: 5) Significantly, Rocha misquotes the original prophecy here, using the word sea in place of seacoast.
36

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away in search of freedom, from the reformatory where he was doing time for misdemeanors. The original title of the film was La Fugue dAntoine alluding to the musical form of fugue as a metaphor for the protagonists flights. After a long stretch of run depicted in a series of sequence shots, physically exhausted Antoine reaches the sea tormented by inhospitable wintry climate and immediately recoils after touching the water. The sequence ends in a frozen close-up of his face, with his back to the ocean emphasizing the realm of individual psychology over the physical world that surrounds him. In Black God on the other hand, Manuel does not reach the sea as an individual. After the camera surpasses him in the race, the sea itself emerges as an animated mass as the social teleology of backlands turning to sea is realized cinematically through editing. Xavier writes, The moving camera shows us the sea from above, in such a way as to avoid the composition of a smooth surface, delimited by the horizons stable line. The sea affirms itself as a living mass, with the ebb and flow of the waves. (Quoted in Nagib 2007: 11)

Manuel as the symbolic representative of impoverished backland people and as a cursor in the making of a prosperous republic finds expression by displacement in the visualized social utopia here. Both Nagib and Xavier identify this statement as revolutionary since the emerging, vibrant sea as a metaphor of social transformation consummates the immolation of the individual. (Nagib 2007: 12) 37

Nagib quotes Rocha in context where he writes, the politics of a modern author is revolutionary: nowadays one neednt even qualify an auteur as revolutionary, because the word auteur is a totalizing noun. To say that an auteur is reactionary, in cinema, is the same as saying he is a commercial director: this is situating him as craftsman: as non-auteur. (Quoted in Nagib 2007: 12)

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This social-individual binary through which two different modes of authorship, that of Truffaut and Rocha, claim artistic legitimacy becomes further complicated if we take a closer look at the history of French New Wave. Like Rocha, Truffaut also envisioned French New Wave to be the form of commercially viable French national cinema in future. Jeff Menne has defined the French New Wave movement as a function of antagonism between the apparatus of the nation-state and the appeals of national culture. He summarizes Richard Neupert who describes French New Wave as less an individualist coup than a feature of a youth culture with burgeoning visibility. Menne writes further that, The auteurist descriptions of cinema only served to put individual faces on a population segment that was becoming a demographic synecdoche for the nation, if not yet the body politic. Neuport notes the involvement of Godard and Truffaut in the protest to the ouster of the film programmer Henri Langlois at the cinemathequeThe fact that the Cinematheque protest was, then, a precursor to the May 1968 marches of nine million in Paris suggests that arguments about the cinema available to this demographic had become equal to arguments about the politics of the period. Youth movements in France (and other postwar European countries like Czechoslovakia) called for national reform, using cinema as a significant forum. Thus, cineastes within these new waves insisted that the means of culture could impinge on those of politics, that filmmaking could be thought of as an organ of the state. (Menne 2007: 71)

To contextualize the antagonism between the nation-state and national culture in Europe in the 60s, we need to remember it was also the transitory phase from Fordist to Toyotist mode of production in the history of capitalism. Fordism was characterized by place bound large industries, organized trade unions and the nation-state as the mediator between capital and labor. Because of this system of tripartite check and balance, Fordist mode of production was relatively stable, especially during the phase of economic boom after World War 2. The rigidity of the system however- in its requirement of large 49

physical infrastructure, and lack of flexibility in face of changing demands or product differentiation- involved a homogenizing tendency, somewhat reflected in the Hollywood assembly line production. Protest movements of 1968 were largely directed against this homogenization (Ill elaborate this point further in the next chapter). In cinema, the figure of outlawed individual (Michael Poiccard in Godards Breathless or Antoine in 400 Blows for example) in a way embodied that protest in its defiance of the nation-state. At the level of authorship, the politics of the individual was pitched against Hollywood assembly line in the same political environment. Glauber Rocha was not more radical than Truffaut in the sense his visualization of the photogenic sea in Black God does not suggest any aspiration beyond a hard earned economic prosperity at the level of GNP (gross national product- if it is acceptable to borrow the economic terminology). It is doubtful if Manuels solo run forgetting his fallen wife contains any major collective impulse. Where Truffaut and Rocha do differ though, is in their attitude towards the state. Nagib suggested in her description of the last sequence from Black God that, rather than being the focus of interest, the hero is summarily abandoned in a brusque cut, while the sertao miraculously turns to sea by the editors sleight of hand. The filmmaker, who a while ago was keen to free his hero from the influences of god and the devil, becomes God himself, imposing a solution through editing and provoking revolution through art. (Nagib 2007: 11) The mediating function in context of national development that Rocha cinematically assumes for himself was also the function expected of the state projected by various populist alliances in the 60s in Latin America. Thus unlike Truffaut, Rochas authorship found expression in its

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identification with the republic, whose precarious existence was marked by repeated USbacked military coup. To conclude this argument, a brief look at the character of Antonio das Mortes will be helpful. As Xavier writes, in spite of his initial ambiguity it is Antonio who consummates the teleological scheme of Black God through his infallible actions, i.e. through elimination of the symbolic father figures38 oppressing Manuel (Sebastiao and Corisco) and releasing the latent Dionysian popular energy39 into the progressive process of national development. According to Xavier, Antonio relinquishes all personal ambitions, seeing himself as merely the doomed agent of a predestined scheme. In Rochas Antonio das Mortes (1969) Antonio is initially hired by the landowners, but eventually switches affiliation to fight for the peasants assisted by the left wing intelligentsia represented by the character of a professor. Ernest Callenbach interpreted Antonio as the figurative army which has traditionally been an open instrument of the Latin American ruling classes, but in a revolutionary context could potentially play a progressive role like in the case of disintegration of the Tsarist army during Russian revolution (Callenbach 1969). Refuting
Rocha wrote, The father-figure in my films is power. South American dictatorship has been traditionally, not only in Brazil but elsewhere, paternal. And to this extent some of my characters may be considered as father-figures, but not in any Freudian way. These are political paternalists, demagogic figures, who have posed traditionally in political terms as messiahs. And any revenge that my characters take upon themhas not been due to any personal existential revenge on my partInstead, these are political actions. (Hitchens 1970: 30) Rocha defines Antonio as follows in his interview with Gordon Hitchens. In Antonio, there is a strong admixture of traditional religious symbols, used in a current contemporary political context. To understand this, one must realize that all of Latin America is marked by mysticism. Above all in Brazil, there is a very strange mixture of Christianity and African religionsThe popular culture, the popular music, the popular theater in Brazil- all are based on an emotional Dionysian behavior, which comes from this mixtureThis mixture, is more emotional than critical. There are faults and qualitiesinvolved in such a situation, especially that involving the alienation of the people from everyday reality. But the energy- which is found in the people- this energy will eventually resist oppression. (Hitchens 1970: 30) Rocha is clearly referring to the Bakhtinian carnivalesque here, another example of investment in human capital.
39 38

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Callenbachs claim, Rocha argued that Antonio is a primitive man, whose conscience derives out of real life suffering and not Marxism. Rocha wrote, the conflict in Antonio, the conflict in my film, does not have these direct symbolic overtones in terms of international politics. They are conflicts along the lines of professional and moral obligations that get their possessor into trouble. Antonio, in my film, reverses his own past; he goes against the man he once was, against the class which he has served in the past, to create his own future. His only way to make a future is to cut himself off from alliances he had in the past. (Hitchens 1970: 28)

In this obvious personification of the welfare state we can locate unquestioning faith in the primacy of geo-political interest and its concomitant pro-people, class neutral functioning. In Land in Anguish- a film by Rocha made after the 1964 coup during the second phase of cinema novo- we can see the disintegration of this utopia. The sea that emerges as the euphoric symbol of a prosperous republic in Black God reappears in Land in Anguish, but from there alights the character of Porfirio Diaz40 along with his three companions. Diaz carries the cross of Portuguese navigators in one hand and a black flag of inquisition in the other, referring to the imperial origin of Brazil. They walk away from the sea in the reverse direction of Manuels dash in Black God. The ceremonial (accompanied by extra-diegetic candomble drumming) arrival of the elite to the deserted beach shot from an aerial angle underscores the groups disconnection from the people. This lack of connection (which was the source of legitimacy for Antonios populism in Black God, as Rocha claimed) is further elaborated in the propaganda film Biography of an Adventurer made by the protagonist of Land in

40

The name is borrowed from the famous Mexican dictator alluding to similarity in Latin American history. Stam also suggests that the character of Diaz in Land in Anguish parallels Brazilian politician Carlos Lacorda, whose political career ranged from being a leftist student leader, to staunch anti-communist.

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Anguish, Paulo Martins, which shows how Diaz made his political career through a series of alliances with dictatorial regimes of Eldorado, the symbolic Brazil in the film. Diaz finally manages a successful coup with help of Explint (company of international exploitation, signifying imperial forces) after which Paulo is shot by the police. The character of Paulo Martins does parallel Antonio das Mortes in Land in Anguish. Like Antonio Paulo starts his career as a poet protg of Diaz, then in spite of his bourgeois background switches affiliation (partly because of his love for the communist militant Sara, who worked as Vieiras secretary) to the populist liberal alliance headed by Vieira. Through his intellectual/romantic hunger for the absolute (Paulo quotes the line from Chateaubriand to Sara) he seeks identification with the environment of physical hunger of the people in Saras company. He reminds Governor elect Vieira about his electoral promises to the peasants (which Vieira, because of his ties with absentee landlords fails to fulfill, and unleashes his police for repression of political protests). Paulo also makes a pact with nationalist media magnet Fuentes before making his film about Diaz, hoping development of domestic industries and creation of jobs (this is the logic Fuentes gives Diaz in defense of his position before Diaz wins him over to his side, scaring Fuentes about a possible left wing capture of power if the popular alliance that he was supporting got elected, instead of the imperialist backed party Diaz led. Diaz asserts in the sequence to Fuentes, class struggle exists) would keep both Fuentes and the popular alliance happy. Affirming his personified state-like character Stam has compared Paulo with Hamlet. Stam wrote, Paulo represents the poet abroad in the world of class struggle and coups dtat. His habitual mode of speech, simultaneously frenetic and solemn, is poeticHis poetry, ubiquitous in Terra em Transe, punctuates, interrupts, and counterpoints the 53

action. Most often, however, it expresses his inner voice, rather like the soliloquies in Hamlet. Paulo recurrently appears in close-up with voice off, in a technique reminiscent of the Orson Welles adaptations of Shakespearean tragedies. Paulo, furthermore, shares significant traits with Hamlet- an overheated imagination, a perverse virtuosity of language, a rigorous skepticism coexisting with exasperated idealism, and the view of himself as the legitimate heir of power. Like Hamlet, he is the more or less lucid critic of an ambient corruption in which he himself participates. (Stam 1995: 152-153)

The narrative structure of Land in Anguish establishes Paulo as a subject of distant nostalgia. The film begins at the palace of the governor of Alecrim, a province in Eldorado. Felipe Vieira, the governor refuses to resist an ongoing coup led by Porfirio Diaz arguing there will be too much bloodshed, then gives orders to disperse any spontaneous resistance by the people. Paulo confronts Vieira, gives a revolutionary speech, reminds Vieira about the role of students, workers and peasants in bringing the popular alliance to power, but fails to convince the crowd present there. Afterwards, he flees the palace accompanied by Sara in a car, jumps a police check point and as a result gets shot by the pursuing policemen. As his life ebbs away, he recalls the events that led to his personal and political defeat. From here, the film explores the political developments of last four years in Eldorado culminating into the news of the coup once more. Cross-cutting alternates Paulos final dying moments with the coronation of Diaz and the final shot shows Paulo in a tableau composition, silhouetted with an uplifted rifle in hand. This enveloping of the narrative through flashback and doubling of the sequence establishes Paulos demise as the films central theme of contemplation. At the same time, the film is about demystification. Both in prologue and epilogue of the film Paulo speaks of the impossibility of his nave and impotent political faith. Stam refers to this 54

strategy as the Quixotic formula of systematic disenchantment. (Stam 1995: 151) Through his journey in the film he is disaffected with all the bourgeois leaders be it rightist Diaz, nationalist Fuentes or liberal Vieira. Paulo embodies the decadence of the bourgeois himself. Disillusioned by political betrayals, he wallows in upper class, hysterical sex orgies. While clinging to his romantic notion of the people, he shows only contempt for them in everyday life. At another level, as the poetic representative of the people himself, he is victim of populism. Stam writes, Populism sets a trap for the people. It offers the illusion of participation. It incites the people to speak, but represses them when their voices of protest become too strident. It invites the people into the palace, but murders them if they become too militant. In the populist zigzag between democracy and authoritarianism, paternalistic encouragement often precedes brutal repression. (Stam 1995: 160)

Like Rochas idea of aesthetics of hunger Paulo also talks about new poetic forms to talk about politics. He is a poet, journalist as well as filmmaker himself. But unlike in Black God where the filmmaker becomes God (or the state) according to Nagibmediating in the imaginary social transformation through editing- Paulo fails to master his narrative in Land in anguish. The failure of Paulo and the vision of a peoples state can be summarized by the poem that comments on Paulos death in the film. He failed to sign the noble pact between the pure soul and the bloody cosmos a gladiator defunct but still intactso much violence, yet so much tenderness. - Mario Faustino Epitaph of a Poet 55

The Global Voice of Early Third Cinema

It has been argued that although it was most comprehensively theorized as a movement in Latin America, Third Cinema even in its first generation was not exclusively a geographic phenomenon. Filmmakers across the world responded to global capitalist developments in the late 60s with a diverse range of political commitments. Certain films like The Battle of Algiers (1966) has been canonized in the historiography of Third Cinema that did not reflect the interventionist politics early theorists of Third Cinema called for41. On the other hand, owing to minimal international exposure, the Calcutta trilogy by Mrinal Sen has never been discussed within the Third Cinema paradigm42. A
41

Although Battle of Algiers is a film about anti-colonial struggle it mobilizes the thriller format in its superficial treatment of violence. In a way the dramatic actions and identification with the central character Ali-la-Pointe in the film conforms to conventions of Hollywood aesthetics without delving into political analysis. As Robert Stam has argued in his discussion of the famous restaurant bombing scene by Algerian women dressed as Europeans, the narrative strategies of the film make the audience identify with the FLN cause, but that is not because of political sympathy. The identification remains cinematic manipulation, an inverted version of Hollywood western where the spectator is located inside the besieged wagon train or fort and therefore sutured into the colonial perspective looking down the barrel of a gun and watching the native American fall from his horse as another settlers bullet hits the mark (quoted in Wayne 2001: 17). Discussions of Third Cinema in context of Indian films have been mostly focused on politics of representation with an overtone of post-colonial theory. For example, Geeta Kapur in her discussion of Ritwik Ghataks Jukti Takko ar Gappo (Reason, Debate and Story, 1974) came up with a completely de-radicalized definition of Third (World) Cinema when she wrote, Alternative cinema, with some of its major practitioners representing the Third Word, has battled to represent imperialism, hunger and the preconditions of praxis. The Indian experience of cultural politics suggests that the Third Cinema, as it has come to be called, is equally about selfrepresentation. It is about the articulation of the colonized individual, the absent subject, into history. (Kapur 1989: 179) Ashish Rajadhyaksha on the other hand has dismissed Sens Calcutta trilogy as Latin American cinema inspired street films. Apparently criticizing Sens version of Third Cinema in somewhat vague terms he wrote, A Third Cinema made under pre-revolutionary political conditions almost inevitably sets the filmmaker/viewer in an antagonistic relationship with the reality sought to be portrayed. The way certain aspects of reality are privileged over othersusually the conventionally radical ones- all too often presents a discursive hierarchy that unconsciously duplicates what it is apparently opposing. The question of revolutionary identityas distinct from identifying with the revolution- is necessarily a question of political choice. But
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comparative analysis of Sens Interview (1970), Calcutta 71 (1971) and Padatik [The Guerilla Fighter] (1973) with the films we have reviewed so far suggest that beyond the catch all rubric of anti-imperialism there were films made outside Latin America marked by striking thematic and structural similarity with styles of Solanas or Rocha. As Moinak Biswas wrote, Mrinal brought cinema directly into the political debate. By its spirit of pamphleteering, his work freed film going to some extent of its ritual aura. (Quoted in Mitra 2000: 38) It is not clear how much exposed he was at the time with the Third Cinema movement per se, but Sen, an erudite cinefile, functional in the distinctively politicized intellectual circle of Calcutta (known as the cultural capital of India since the British rule) was familiar with Latin American cinema and was a personal acquaintance of Miguel Littin43 when he started making his Calcutta trilogy. Deeply

it is not a choice of this or that alternative within a given framework: the more given the political framework, indeed, the more it accepts the basic premises of the system it is supposed to oppose, the system that we by proxy are therefore also supposed to oppose. (Rajadhyaksha 1989: 171) It is not clear where Rajadhyaksha is deriving his idea of a given framework in context of Third Cinema since all the major theories on the subject emphasize imperfection and interventionist creativity. If he means by given framework the partisan positioning of political films, then the question remains that how without a critical position imagination of alternative articulation is at all possible? Ironically, Jukti, the film Rajadhyaksha eulogizes in this discussion as a chronicle of the contemporary, but also refuses to endow the contemporary with a privileged position in history. Instead, the film presents what is seen to be a process, alongside the processes that shape our seeing. (Rajadhyaksha 1989: 173) is formally way more conventional than Sens trilogy. Rajadhyakshas argument reminds one of the famous sequence of Memories where Sergio is looking at the cityscape of Havana through a telescope. As Alea mentioned in an interview later, that sequence precisely depicts the argument Rajadhyaksha misses in the radical gesture of Third cinema, i.e. Sergios take of post-revolutionary Cuba as well as his distance from the masses owing to his bourgeoisie background. What both Kapur and Rajadhyaksha overlook in their discussion is that most of the canonical works of Third Cinema (particularly films like Memories, Padatik, or Land in Anguish) are fascinated by subjective processes and the complexity of their subjectivity is a function of self-critique (which again is a co-relative of social critique, a derivative of positioning) that gives those films more interiority than mere selfrepresentation. 43 Littin even praised Sen for his visuals in these films. See, Mrinal Sen. Over the Years: An Interview with Samik Bandyopadhyay (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2003) 66-69.

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influenced by 400 Blows like Rocha, he also talked about having an infantile enthusiasm (Sen 2003: 49) for freeze frames. He was already one of the pioneers of the Indian New Wave cinema for his humorous and formally innovative Bhuvan Shome (1969), but like the US backed military dictatorship for Solanas, the real inspiration for the Calcutta trilogy came from the contemporary politically turbulent environment of Calcutta. Calcutta was part of the social upheavals that shook the world around 1968. In February 1967, the Indian National Congress, the party which led India to independence44, was defeated for the first time in twenty years in West Bengal by a coalition of left parties called the United Front. Within the federal structure of the Indian state this strained the relationship between the central government where the Congress party was in power and the provincial government of West Bengal, the capital of which is Calcutta. The left parties accused the central government of stepchild like treatment of West Bengal45. United front was an uneasy alliance between various factions of Communist Parties debating their focus and modes of class struggle. Under the first Prime Minister of India, Jawahar Lal Nehru, Indian National Congress had formed strategic alliance with the Soviet Union in the emerging world order of cold war. As a result CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) urged CPI to adopt a moderate collaborationist policy towards the
The independence of India in 1947 was assessed as false by the undivided communist party which saw the Congress party as representatives of Bourgeoisie and feudal lords. This tension between the central government in Delhi and Calcutta is reflected in the second episode of Calcutta 71 where a government employee in Delhi comes to Calcutta for work and visits his distant relatives during the famine of 1943. While on the train, he is reminded by a copassenger of his privilege as a resident of Delhi. He discovers all the women in his relatives family have turned part time prostitute pimped by their mother- the head of the establishment. Although the episode is framed by the visitors outsiders perspective, after the revelation he leaves disgusted, just saying goodbye.
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Indian State. That policy meant undermining domestic class struggle, and finding ways of adding the vector of class consciousness into the dominant discourse of nationalism, following a parliamentarian path. This line was not well accepted in the ranks of CPI. Especially following the criticism by Communist Party of China (CPC) of CPSU for turning revisionist in the early 60s, at the Tenali convention in 1964 the Bengal based pro-Chinese group presented their own draft program characterizing India as predominantly semi-feudal where the big bourgeoisie was collaborators of imperialism. The draft argued that because of this class characteristic of the ruling coalition, class struggle could not be put in the backburner to facilitate Soviet foreign policy. The undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) thus broke up giving birth to Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI(M). By the 60s the mainstream Communist parties had moved away from organizing peasant struggles46. The newly formed CPI(M) did not give up the parliamentary path, and in 1966 adopted a tactic of broad electoral alliance with all non-reactionary parties, including the disgruntled offshoots of the Congress party. Their movements were confronted with state repressions, but generally focused on trade unions in the urban areas and around regional politics against the central government policies. Within a
There was an epoch of armed peasant rebellions led by the Communist party around the time of independence of India, the most notable of them being Telengana movement (1946-1951) in the current state of Andhra Pradesh and Tebhaga movement (1946) in Bengal. Historically the tribal/peasant rebellions in India have been more militant than urban political movements because of abject poverty, extra economic coercions by the landlords and their colonial allies, and concentration of the democratic institutions/culture in the urban areas. Sen addresses the failure of communication between the rural and the urban in his film Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1980) where a shooting unit goes on location to make a film on famine. The unit- having romantic ideas of rural suffering- increasingly finds itself conflicted with the village, where conservative feudal values and actual memory of famine was borne in peoples minds.
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fortnight of the United Front in power, an armed peasant struggle against the landlords was reported in North Bengal, in a village called Naxalbari. It was followed by several similar uprisings in places like Debra and Gopiballabhpur. In 1969, in tune with the contemporary global trend of rebellion by the new left against the old, a new Communist party, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was born under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar. After the village Naxalbari, they came to be called Naxal (or Naxalites in English), since the official political line of CPI(M-L) was armed rural revolution against the feudal system, following Mao47. After Lenin, they declared Parliament is a pigsty, and practiced a strategy of annihilation of the class enemy48. Sumanta Banerjee has summarized the CPI(M-L) evaluation of the Indian situation as follows, Because of (the) collective exploitation by imperialism headed by US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, The CPI(M-L) was wont to describe India as a semi-colony. It said instead of two mountains- British imperialism and feudalismthe Indian people are now weighed down under four huge mountains, namely, imperialism headed by US imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, feudalism, and comprador-bureaucrat capital. (Quoted in Mitra 2000: 50)

Indeed, the late 60s in India was marked by food crisis, nation wide recession, record level of unemployment and an overall crumbling of the bureaucratic system. The inefficiency of the bureaucracy was especially evident in the system of higher education in Calcutta, where corruption and internal mismanagement became so rampant that mass

47

One of the slogans adopted by CPI(M-L) was The Chinese Chairman is our Chairman.

48

Charu Mazumdar wrote, The annihilation of a class enemy does not only mean liquidating an individual, but also means liquidating the political, economic and social authority of the class enemy (Quoted in Mitra 2000: 47). Although the Naxals were not directly influenced by Fanon, it is not difficult to feel the Fanonian pulse of the time in this position- the colonized man gains self-awareness through violence.

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cheating during University examinations, leaking of exam questions and lack of employment after securing university degrees was everyday reality.49 The initial support for CPI(M-L) among students50 and urban intellectuals owed largely to the resultant frustration with the system, or in other words, the state. To differentiate themselves from the mainstream left, CPI(M-L) abandoned all legal forms of political activities including over-ground propaganda, mass organizations, participation in struggles for economic demands and representative institutions. Especially in urban areas, their activity was solely limited to individual assassinations executed by secret action squads. Naxal actions were retaliated by brutal state repression of the movement, and as the beginning of Calcutta 71 suggests, (fake) encounter killing of Naxal activists dominated news headlines throughout the movement. Sen was arrested around 1970 for his connection with the communists51. After his unexpected success with Bhuvan Shome52 two producers approached him for making a film for each of them, just like Bhuvan. Sen refused the offers, since admittedly he was
49

We can see portrayals of this scenario in Padatik when in radio news broadcast a meeting with the university vice-chancellor about mass cheating is announced. In another sequence a student enters an empty classroom with a torch, presumably to set it on fire. The voice over is critical of the act for its anarchism, but sympathetic with the lack of faith in the system in general.

The stereotypical Naxal was a romantic, brilliant student, who gave up a bright career for revolution, became de-classed and went to rural areas for organizing peasants. Alternatively he/she functioned in the city, and was pursued by the police like Sumit- the protagonist of Padatik. Sumanta Banerjee elaborates this atmosphere as, Intellectual frustration with the prevailing academic atmosphere led them to the political conviction that the atmosphere was a part of general socioeconomic crisis, to escape from which was to change the social order. (Quoted in Mitra 2000: 49)
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Sen was never a party member, but was involved with communist influenced IPTA (Indian Peoples Theater Association). He called himself a private Marxist.
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The film was a dangerous venture for its unorthodox form. Initially no producer was interested in it, but to everybodys surprise, it did well in the box office.

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compelled to respond to the terrible time (Sen 2003: 66). Like Solanas, he was shooting footage of processions, political meetings, and police atrocities since 1968 for his conceived future projects53. Padatik for example, was a result of his personal interaction with a Naxalite fugitive whom Sen escorted to a hide out in order to evade arrest and eventually found out he was abandoned by the party for revisionist attitude. The theme of Interview is a critique of colonial hangover (or in Naxal terminology, semicolonial culture) that prevents Ranjit from getting his desired job. The film starts with shots of colossal pillars emblematic of colonial architecture in Calcutta, and then cuts to a sequence where the statue of a British general is carried away in an armored truck54. Ranjit tries to procure a suit through the film, since his contact at the office suggested smart appearance would be the most important criteria for the salesmans post (Ranjit would be selling products of Richardson and Co., a Scottish mercantile farm wearing

Sen spoke in several interviews about incidents when political activists were arrested while waiting in long queues outside cinema halls, for watching Calcutta 71. During one of the shows he was approached by two young men, who asked him about the timing of his shoot. When he replied he started shooting the movie in September 1971, they accused him of lying. Later he realized that they had seen a friend of theirs in the film who was later murdered by the police. Since that happened earlier than 1971, they were enraged for Sens fictionalization of the events. The accusation reminded Sen that he had used documentary footage he shot earlier than the actual film (Sen 2003: 67). Among the documentary footage, in both Interview and Calcutta 71, there are clips of tribal processions on streets of Calcutta, brandishing traditional weapons (bows and arrows, etc.). For lack of other reference to the contemporary peasant struggles that were one of the mainstays of the Naxal movement, those clips in a way reflect the urban sensibility of the films as well as of the Naxal ideologues. They were sensitive to and inspired by those struggles, yet the actual mass struggles remained outside the purview of the city. The middle class Calcutta could perceive the tribal struggles largely through their sign of otherness, i.e., bows, arrows or beating drums. Treatment of the statues in Interview is similar to the ones seen in Hour of the Furnaces. In Hour, in a similar sequence where the camera zooms out from an equestrian statue of one of the founding fathers of Argentina, Carlos de Alvear, the off screen voice describes it as, Here monuments are erected to the man who said: These provinces want to belong to Great Britain, to accept its laws, obey its government, live under its powerful influence.
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business suits if he got the job- the stereotypical dream of a petite bourgeoisie in a semicolonial set up) he was applying for. After he finds the laundry- where his only suit is stored for lack of proper space in his apartment- closed for a strike, he tries different options of borrowing a suit that fits him. He manages to get one from a friend, but while on the bus on his way back home, he happens to witness a pickpocket55 stealing an old mans purse. In the process of taking the pickpocket to the police station with the crowd and filling the paperwork, he forgets the suit in the bus. Having no other option he goes to his interview wearing traditional Bengali attire (Dhoti-Kurta) against the advice of his contact and fails to win the job. Calcutta 71 consists of four episodes and five discrete days in a span of forty years depicting the miserable socio-economic conditions around Calcutta leading to the early 70s, enclosed by narration of a twenty year old Naxalite youth- whose murder features in the opening sequence of the film. Padatik, Like Rochas Land in Anguish reflects skepticism about the efficacy of the movement as the protagonist Sumit, after escaping police custody, takes shelter in an apartment belonging to an upper class, divorced woman- Simi. In his almost solitary confinement, which symbolizes the alienation of the movement from the masses, Sumit begins to question his own beliefs and the method of staging struggle. His questioning puts him in an uncomfortable position with the party as the secretive organization demanded unfaltering loyalty for functioning. Finally, Sumit, following the news of his mothers critical illness returns home to find her dead. At the house he meets his father again who has also been a leftist activist in his youth but critical of the wanton anarchic violence by the Naxalites.
In yet another instance of cinematic reflexivity, after the pickpocket is nabbed, one shot portrays him in a poster as a Bollywood villain, wearing turban. Ironically, the incidence does work as an escapist diversion for Ranjit as a spectator. Instead of living up to the star persona of a hero, he forgets the packet containing the suit.
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His father informs him that he refused to sign a bond at his work recently which took away the workers right to strike. Thus the film suggests an infusion between Sumits dream and dedication with his fathers (the old left) mass organization, as a possible future trajectory of struggle. Calcutta trilogy shares the characteristics of 60s aleatory art that attempted confluence of life and aesthetics like in works of Solanas and Rocha. Like Solanas, there is call for tricontinental revolution in Padatik. Along with documentary footage of the Vietnam War and armed struggles in Mozambique, Simi narrates a letter in the film from her brotheranother revolutionary who left home. In the letter his brother writes that Simi need not worry about him, since he is not alone. People from all over Africa, Asia and Latin America are with him. Emphasizing the force of time, shots of newspaper reports, radio broadcast, and stills of poverty stricken people permeate the narrative like in Hour of the Furnaces. The city of Calcutta- with its over population emphasized by multiple shots of crowded public spaces superimposed on each other, its skyline as the symbolic collective, its narrow alleys traversed by handheld, shaky POV shots of fugitive Naxals, or its streets where political confrontations take place,56 its luxury hotels where the rich consume in their trendy international outfits, or the damp, insect infested attic in Ranjits apartment where his shoes lose texture- function in the films as the temporal matrix that determines
The streets are spaces of mainstream politics, of strikes, hoardings of blockbuster movies and legitimate political demonstrations. The alleys on the other hand are subterranean spaces of urban guerilla warfare. In a way Calcutta trilogy reenact strategies suggested by Brazilian guerilla fighter Carlos Marighella. We will see in our discussion of Herbert in the next chapter that Naxalites were familiar with Marighellas work. Marighella wrote, The police pursue the urban guerrilla blindly, without knowing which road he is using for his escape. While the urban guerrilla escapes quickly because he knows the terrain, the police lose the trail and give up the chase. See, Carlos Marighella. Mobility and Speed Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urban-guerrilla/ch13.htm
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narrative options for the characters. The cine-ecriture style of Solanas finds parallel in Sens Calutta 71 when the film begins with the following title as well as voice over, I am twenty years old. With twenty years of age, I have been walking one thousand years. Moving aside piled up poverty, squalor and death, I have been striding through one thousand years.57 For thousand years I have seen history, history of poverty, history of deprivation, history of exploitation

In the fourth episode of the film these inter-titles are put to contrapuntal use, as anti-thesis of the visuals that depict an upper class party at a five star hotel. The star attraction of the party is a political leader (presumably belonging to the Congress party, suggested by the tri-color scurf he wears) who lectures his adulators about his political vision. While he talks about his dream of a party that will take the nation forward, Sen cuts to symbols of different parliamentary parties interspersed with exclamation marks at the center of the screen. Accompanied by the Rock and Roll music played by the band at the hotel and psychedelic lighting of their stage, the symbols are sutured into a metaphoric electoral performance having the solo purpose of garnering vote. Later on, when the leader asserts

The fresh vitality of the twenty year old is used as an emancipatory rhetoric here- one more instance of faith in human capital. This vitality, according to the narrative logic, transcends physical mortality in its spirit of sacrifice for the collective like Che. Therefore, like Land in anguish the film is enveloped by posthumous narration. After the introductory narration, music accompanies the title sequence in an extended montage consisting of shots of colonial architecture, children swimming in the river Ganga, the Calcutta race course, one recording session of Indian classical music followed by rock and roll dancing at a discothque, stills of famine, city traffic, police firing etc. Thus, after establishing the allegorical life-world of the city, Sen cuts to a radio news broadcast (The opening logo tune of Calcutta Radio is a reference to city popular culture. Inhabitants of Calcutta woke up to that tune of the State owned radio station in the 70s). Against the close-up of a middle aged woman who plays the mother of the teenage rice smuggler in the third episode of the film, the death of the narrator-naxalite is announced. It is declared as a street accident, even though the report says there are bullet marks on the body of the deceased. The woman continues her ominous glance at the camera. The initial titles are superimposed on her face once more, without the voice over this time- giving the writing a phantom quality. The doubling of the narrator with the teenage smuggler suggested by the maternal relationship is also significant in context of celebration of youth culture in the film.

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his optimism about a new India, the screen is filled with the word khatam (annihilation) ironically referring to Naxalite ideology. Like the reservations about politically inert high brow culture registered by Solanas in Hour, Sen critiques abstract paintings practiced and appreciated by the elite in Calcutta trilogy. The Congress leader in Calcutta 71 refers to a painting depicting the famine of 1943 he owns58. He swanks about having the painting in the dining room so that people can have a reaction to it before having food, and apparently laments his assistants apathy towards it. His assistant walks away from the conversation and informs another acquaintance at the party that his boss actually became rich during the war exporting scrap iron- a typical business for the Indian comprador bourgeoisie. In Interview Ranjits girlfriend is a fine arts student. When Ranjit visits her on the day of his interview, she is talking on the phone with her friend who just came back from an art excursion. The friend is never seen, but during the conversation, a series of sketches, mostly landscapes done during the trip, appear on screen. Anjana, Ranjits girlfriend, comments during the conversation that she prefers still life to landscapes. As Ranjit enters the room impatient of waiting, Anjana asks if he remembers her friend describing her as fair, slim, and tall. Another series of paintings comprising of geometric shapes accompany the adjectives, drawing parallel between the two superficialities, and in conclusion of the sequence the dialogue I like still life recurs non-diegetically as voice over. Later, Anjana shares the middle class dream of a consumerist lifestyle with Ranjit

It is argued that the he famine of Bengal in 1943 was artificially caused by the World War, since the British government sent off a large share of domestic agricultural produce for the troops in Europe. The famine cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the undivided Bengal province.

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assuming Ranjit was going to get the job. She tells Ranjit their luxury apartment would be refurnished every few months, since she wanted all her items to be latest in vogue. The politics of domestic class alliance and the consequent skepticism towards the middle class is one of the central themes of Calcutta trilogy. On the one hand, the middle class is the leadership- the de-classed, enlightened revolutionaries like in Calcutta 71 and Padatik, but on the other, they are the section most susceptible to allures of social mobility offered by the status quo- like Anjana and Ranjit, or the passengers with condescending attitude towards the poor in the local train in Calcutta 7159. The assumption in the beginning of Calcutta trilogy- like the protest movements of 1968- was eventually the inertia of the movement would sway the vacillating middle class into a progressive role. This projected process is visualized in Interview through interaction of Ranjit with the audience. Stretching the voyeuristic conventions of cinema by conjoining the space of representation with that of the spectator is not unheard of in Third Cinema, as we have seen in Hour. What distinguishes Interview within this oeuvre is that the interrogation of the character comes from an imaginary audience. It is Ranjit who breaks the wall with the audience earlier in the film claiming what the audience is observing is his life, and the director is following him anticipating dramatic elements in it. After he fails to win the job, however, he becomes cynical and tells his mother that he does not care about the interview and he will continue his present job like many other common people in Calcutta. Ranjit is seen walking away from the camera after this- framed

We have seen similar dilemma in our discussion of Land in Anguish and Memories as well. Solanas phrases this dilemma most explicitly in Hour when the commentary on a panoramic view of bustling Buenos Aires disengages its class structure and defines the middle class and the petite bourgeoisie respectively as eternal in-betweens, both protected and used by the oligarchy and eternal crybabies, for whom change is necessary, but impossible.

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against complete darkness in limbo lighting, he is totally cut off from all social contexts. This is where off screen voice of two spectators follow him. They remind him that his life has been on camera since the morning. Ranjit initially ignores the address, but the voices remain persistent. They keep asking if Ranjit really does not care about the job, if not, why he spent the whole day trying to get the suit. Repeating his conversation with his mother about the lucrative salary this job offered the spectators ask if he was trying to upgrade his status and if he managed to get the job would he still identify with the common people he is referring to now? The questions are followed by a split frame sequence where Ranjit wearing traditional Bengali attire visualizes himself in the other half of the frame- having the job, wearing a suit in his office corridor approaching the camera in a series of jump cuts. He realizes the irrationality of the system where appearance rather than qualification determines success. He addresses the audience once more about his realization that if he had more than one suit, and a proper wardrobe to store them without worrying about insects damaging the fabric, he would get the job. He urges the audience that this system should be changed. His realization brings him back in tune with the contemporary social unrests as a montage- comprising of documentary footage of Vietnam, police firing and armed tribal processions- follows it. Ranjit imagines himself in front of the show window of a garment store he passed by in the morning. The show window features a mannequin wearing a designer suit and fedora hat. Ranjit imagines himself in place of the mannequin, abhors the idea, picks up a rock (it is not clear if Sen was familiar with the Third Cinema manifesto, but this sequence seems straight out of the Solanas essay. Ranjit clenches his fist in front of the show window; we see the close up of his hand and in the 68

next shot the hand holding a brick. Is this a queue from the idea camera in one hand, and a rock in the other?), and smashes the window. He strips the mannequin tearing the suit away from its body. Thus in the process of decolonization of Ranjits consciousness, the plastic body of the mannequin stands bare inside the broken window in the last shot of the film. Resonance of the politics of nation-state as seen in Black God till Land in Anguish can be traced in Calcutta trilogy not only in the themes but sporadically in the structure of the narratives. Sens sensibility and subjects are unquestionably urban. Although Calcutta 71 is episodic like Black God, the episodes are arranged chronologically, marking calendar years of the events at the beginning of each episode from 1933 till 1971. In that sense, even though a fiction, the film contains a strong sense of historic truth claim- different from the allegoric style of Black God. While Black God is mostly shot in natural light, Sen uses a wide range of lighting schemes- low light, especially in the night shots emphasize poverty and imperfection, chiaroscuro lighting at the party of Calcutta 71 allude to an environment of conflict, limbo lighting gives characters centrality when they address the audience. Sens exploration of the medium- quoting other art forms like painting, jump cuts, freeze frames, stop motion cinematography60- are more akin to Solanas than relatively conventional images of Rocha. However, Black God and Calcutta 71 do come together in their desire for a modernist transformation. We have already discussed how the dilated time in the world of Sebastiao and Corisco - reflecting peasant

In Interview there is a sequence where Ranjits mother is helping her find his formal shoes to match his suit. The shoes are found in a trunk kept in the damp attic, damaged and discolored. After they are brought out in the sun to Ranjits disgust, in stop motion photography they start walking on their own, suggesting autonomy of appearance in the job market.

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consciousness according to Xavier- gives way to euphoric linear progression in the flight of Manuel in Black God. A similar narrative scheme works in the first episode of Calcutta 71. There late at night, a family fights their losing battle against rain under a broken roof. They place utensils under multiple holes in the ceiling to keep the floor dry, so that there is space for everybody to sleep. Periodically the daughter, the oldest of the children, has to throw out water as buckets and pans fill up under incessant monsoon shower. The mother oversees the process and alerts the girl when specific utensils begin to overflow. At one level this episode depicts failure of traditional/feudal patriarchy61 since the role of the father throughout the scene is passive and his repeated attempts to assert authority, including physical threat, remains futile. The conversation between the mother and the daughter wakes him up. Frustrated with the situation, as stormy wind blow away even more tiles from the roof and renders the room inhabitable, he proposes to wake up one of the little boys- the last member still managing to sleep. The father assumes the boy is putting up an act, since it is impossible to sleep in this circumstance. When his wife protests, he tries to silence her raising his voice and threatening to throw a lamp at her. His wife- sharing a leaking umbrella with her daughter- reminds him in reply that he has lost his moral authority to yell, as he is not able to provide for the family. The patriarch, sticking to his ego, initially refuses to take his family to a rich neighbors outhouse as proposed by his wife. As the situation deteriorates, quarrel between family members intensify and finally a dog starts scratching the door for shelter, he gives in. The

Womens liberation comes across as one of the important agendas of the proposed neodemocratic revolution in Calcutta trilogy. In Padatik, there is a series of interview taken by Simi, with professionally successful women who argue that to complete the unfinished project of social equality of women a revolution is necessary. These interviews are yet another parallel between Hour and Sens trilogy.

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episode has a real time feel, i.e. the duration of over fifteen minute- where there is no exterior shot- accentuates the crisis known to the viewer from the beginning. Intercut between establishing medium shots and close-up of characters, the sequence explores the unprotected, yet claustrophobic space- the cynicism of the father as he looks up at the sky through the holes, lets the water dribble down his face and suggests the family should enjoy the music of raindrops in resignation; the helplessness of the girl as she is unable pacify her belligerent parents who vent their despair on her; the rational composure that her mother struggles to keep up. This stagnation breaks down when having no other option the family heads out for their neighbors outhouse at the end of the episode. They walk forming a straight line along a narrow alley full of potholes. This journey- the transition into linear progression typical of modernist narrative- is monumentalized through low angle shots framing only their legs and accompaniment of background music that was absent inside the room. The episode does not have a utopian closure like Black God. When the family reaches their neighbors place, they find the place already crowded, including the dog that irritated the father earlier. However, the spirit of this faltering struggle against poverty carries over to the next episodes of the film. In the third episode of Calcutta 71 direct criticism of the state is voiced when the young rice smuggler is on his way to the railway station. He passes by a house where a little boy is doing his homework reading aloud the sentence It is important to learn the administrative system of Bengal, since Bengal is a state in the sovereign republic of India. The smuggler stops by the verandah and deliberately disturbs the kid offering him

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a biri (country made cigarette). As the boy complains to his father, the smuggler runs away scoffing at the boy. Interestingly, like Rochas aesthetics of hunger Sen talked about dialectics of hunger or poverty in an interview. He said,

What we wanted to do in CALCUTTA-71 was to define history, put it in its right perspective. We picked out the most vital aspect of our history and tried to show the physical side of hunger is the same But there is a marked change in the peopletheir perception changes. In a way I call this the dialectics of hunger, the dialectics of poverty. How people move from resignation and callousness to cynicism and finally to anger and violence which can become very creative in the processThis is what we wanted to saylike a Greek chorus this young man appears and tries to explain the situation and how at the end hungry people become violent and the process creates something new. (Gupta 1976: 9-10) The journey initiated in 1933 thus culminates in the run of the young Naxalite for his life along alleys of Calcutta in 1971. He is chased and gunned down by the police, but like Che in Hour62 by then he has chosen life, by choosing death. In his address to the audience he says he was killed because he has seen suffering and wanted to change it63. His photographic presence at the end of the film thus becomes the perpetual present of something new- the possibility of a benevolent state. Naxal activity spread beyond Bengal in the early 70s to states of Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Tamil Nadu. Facing several other simultaneous student movements (the most

Like Ches photograph in Hour, there is a shot of the Naxalite falling dead after being shot in Calcutta 71. His posthumous address to the audience, where he urges the spectators to stop being passive looks like a photograph as the camera zooms into close-up of his face, framed in limbo lighting.
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This argument strangely echoes Aleas definition of Third Cinema. Alea wrote, Looking is the means by which the subject appropriates and internalizes reality in order to act back upon it. Some spectacles will encourage an internalization that is critical and questioning, so that the subject acts back upon the world in a way to change it for the better. This is of course the type of spectacle and spectatorship that Third Cinema seeks to foster

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prominent being led by Jayprakash Narayan) and massive industrial strikes around 1974, emergency (The Indian equivalent of dictatorship?) was declared in India in 1975. The aftermath of emergency saw the electoral routing of Congress once more (largely as popular response to draconian measures taken by the government between 1972 and 1977 to repress protest movements) in Bengal, when CPI(M) led left front came to power in 1977. In an environment of political stalemate and eventual neo-liberal turn the romanticism of Naxal movement died out for next three decades. Mrinal Sen did not make overtly militant films afterwards much like Solanas and Getino. The process which started with politicization of Ranjit in Interview, found glorious embodiment in the young Naxalites death (Calcutta 71), and self-critical introspection in alienated Sumit (Padatik), reflects tides and ebbs of global anti-capitalist movements of the late 60s. Wayne has argued, revolutionary conjunctures are the womb from which Third Cinema emerges (Wayne 2001: 8). To the extent the juncture (whether it was revolutionary is a different debate) of the 60s was about deeper penetration of global capitalist networks into its periphery, tensions of the transition were manifested in form of nation-state/global capital antagonism. In spite of regional differences the nation-state in context of Third Cinema was perceived as the instrument of inclusive development and therefore its emergence (and grand failure) a new epoch of human exuberance. In visualization of the sea for Rocha, or bodies of fallen revolutionaries as memories of future for Solanas and Sen, we see the creative celebration of this emergence. In the next chapter we will notice absence of such celebration, even in form of nostalgia.

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Chapter 1 References

Ahmed, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory". Social Text 17(Autumn 1987): 3-25. Alea, Thomas. G. "Beyond the Reflection of Reality" in Cinema and Social Change in Latin America, edited by Julianne Burton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Armes, Roy. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Barnard, Tim. "Popular Cinema and Populist Politics" in Argentine Cinema, edited by Tim Barnard. Toronto: Nightwood Editions, 1986. Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" in Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and M. Cohen, 355-365. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. Brecht, Bertolt. "Against Georg Lukacs" in Aesthetics and Politics, edited by R. Taylor. London: Verso, 1988. Burton, Julianne. "Antonio Eguino (Bolivia): Neorealism in Bolivia" in Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversation with Filmmakers edited by Julianne Burton, 161-170. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Callenbach, Ernest. "Anatomy of Folk-Myth Films: Robin Hood and Antonio das Mortes." Film Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Winter 1969-70): 42-47. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe" in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995. Emmanuel, Arghiri. Unequal Exchange. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Espinoza, Julio G. "For an Imperfect Cinema" in New Latin American Cinema edited by M. T. Martin, 71-82. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

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Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982. Getino, Octavio. "Some Notes on the Concepts of a Third Cinema" in Argentine Cinema edited by Tim Barnard. Toronto: Nightwood Editions, 1986. Gupta, Udayan. "Introducing Mrinal Sen." Jump Cut (12-13) (December 1976): 9-10. Hitchens, Gordon. "The Way to Make a Future: A Conversation with Glauber Rocha." Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1970-71): 27-30. Hobsbawm, E. J. Bandits. New York: Laurel Editions, 1969. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. ."Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): 65-88. Kapur, Geeta. "Articulating the Self into History: Ritwik Ghatak's Jukti, Tokko ar Gappo" in Questions of Third Cinema edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines. London: British Film Institute, 1989. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1991. Lenin, V. I. "Critique of Imperialism" in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963. MacBEAN, J. R. "La Hora de los Hornos." Film Quarterly 24, no. 1, (1970-71): 31-37. Marighella, Carlos. "Mobility and Speed." in Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, 1969 from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urbanguerrilla/ch13.htm. Menne, Jeff. "A Mexican Nouvelle Vague: The Logic of New Waves under Globalization." Cinema Journal 47, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 70-92. Mitra, Ananda. "Imaging of the 1970s: Calcutta and West Bengal" in The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Sen edited by Sumita Chakravarty. London: Flick Books, 2000: 37-65. Nagib, Lucia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007.

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Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. "Debating the Third Cinema" in Questions of Third Cinema edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines, 170-178. London: British Film Institute, 1989. Ramsey, Cynthia. "Review: Third Cinema in Latin America: Critical Theory in Recent Works." Latin American Research Review 23, no.1 (1988): 266-275. Rocha, Glauber. "An Esthetic of Hunger" in Brazilian Cinema edited by Randal Johnson and Robert Stam, 68-71. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Rocha, Glauber. "Propos Political Cinema." in Afterimage 3 (Summer 1971). Sen, Mrinal. Over the Years: An Interview with Samik Bandyopadhyay. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2003. Solanas, Fernando. "Cinema as a Gun: An Interview with Fernando Solanas." Cineaste 3, no. 2, (Fall 1969): 18-26. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. "Towards a Third Cinema" in Vol. 1 of Movies and Methods edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press. 1: 44-64. Stam, Robert. "Land in Anguish" in Brazilian Cinema edited by Randal Johnson and Robert Stam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. . "The Two Avant-gardes" in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video edited by B. K. Grant and J. Sloniowski, 254-268. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Tse-tung, Mao. "On New Democracy" in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1940. Wallerstein, Immanuel. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press, 1995. . The Essential Wallerstein. New York: The New Press, 2000. Wayne, Mike. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Willemen, Paul. "The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections" in Questions of Third Cinema edited by Paul Willemen and Jim Pines, 1-29. London: British Film Institute, 1989. Xavier, Ismail. Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 76

Chapter 2

The Neo-Liberal Turn

Capital and its Other
As we have seen in chapter 1, the Third World being a liminal space for global capitalism was crucial to theorization of Third Cinema as a post-structuralist movement. Classical Marxist theorists of imperialism like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg saw the internal contradiction of capitalism to be under-consumption, i.e., lack of adequate demand to absorb the growth in output that capitalism generates within its core area. Since the working class is exploited, workers receive lesser value as wage than what they produce. The capitalists on the other hand are obliged to reinvest a sizeable part of their surplus, unlike consumption patterns of closed pre-capitalist societies. Thus, at both ends the effective demand for consumption remains smaller than the supply at any given point. According to Luxemburg, for closing this gap between demand and supply, trade with pre-capitalist economies becomes indispensible for stabilization of the system (Luxemburg 1968). Colonial repression is a useful tool in this process since pre-capitalist territories need to be forced open for trade if they are reluctant to participate in it voluntarily (opium wars in China are one of the many examples in this context). (Harvey 2003) David Harvey suggests one of the underlying assumptions of Lenin, Luxemburg and (derivatively) Fanon in their understanding of imperialism was these non-capitalist territories needed to be kept in their pre-capitalist stage for maintenance of the imperialist

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equilibrium1, since not only capitalist development in the colonies threaten the territorial hierarchy of the metropolis, industrialization reduces dependence on the colonizer for manufactured products (and finance capital) in exchange of cheap raw materialsshrinking the dumping grounds for over-production in the capitalist countries2. While this assumption is not without merit, keeping colonies underdeveloped is self-defeating in the long run. Harvey compares British imperialism in India and North America in this context. Harvey writes, Fear of emulation led Britainto prevent India from developing a vigorous capitalist dynamic and thereby frustrated the possibilities of spatio-temporal fixes3 in that region. The open dynamic of the Atlantic economy did far more for Britain than did the repressed colonial empire in India, from which Britain certainly managed to extract surpluses but which never functioned as a major field for deployment of British surplus capital (Harvey 2003: 140).

This is the reason the politics of Third Cinema in its first generation was in favor of domestic capitalist development, but anti-imperialist at the same time.
2

Interestingly, Deleuze conforms to this understanding which in a way informs his concepts in favor of the nomadic or rhizomatic movements. Deleuze writes, Central capitalism needs the periphery constituted by the Third World, where it locates a large part of its most modern industries; it does not just invest capital in these industries, but is also furnished with capital by themthroughout a vast portion of the Third World, the general relation of production is capitalist- even throughout the entire Third World, in the sense that the socialized sector may utilize that relation, adopting it in this case. But the mode of production is not necessarily capitalist, either in the so-called archaic or transitional forms, or in the most productive, highly industrialized sectorsthe polymorphy of the Third World states is partially organized by the center, as an axiom providing a substitute for colonization. (Deleuze 1987: 465) Harvey describes the concept of spatio-temporal fix as the contradictory dynamic of territorial and mobile capital. Production of capitalist space requires investment in infrastructure whereby capital is locked in one place yielding long term surplus. Geographic expansion helps in absorption of that surplus elsewhere. However, rapid geographic expansion and the following reorganization of the expanded capitalist space threaten the embedded, but not yet realized value of the initial infrastructure- diminishing its territorial advantage. Vast quantities of capital fixed in one place on the other hand impede profitable investment elsewhere. In order to defer the ensuing crisis in both cases, capitalism needs to come up with periodic solutions. Either expansion has to be continued, or re-investment has to be temporally deferred through activities like social expenditures, depending on specific situations. In case of colonial India, imperial regulations mostly restricted geographic expansion, and the concomitant discriminatory measures frustrated the National bourgeoisie.
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The formation of closed empires in the 30s after First World War did not solve the crisis of contemporary global capitalism. Eventually the territorial arrangements gave way to capitalist aspirations, another World War had to be fought among colonial powers for redistribution of the globe, which in turn led to de-colonization by the 70s. Especially in context of current globalization it is generally accepted that the fundamental crisis of capitalism is over-accumulation rather than under-consumption (Harvey 2003). The molecular logic of capital (as opposed to the territorial logic, which is place bound) continuously seeks opportunities for profitable investment. The lack of effective consumer demand, the gap Luxemburg points out, can be covered by reinvestment which opens up its own demand for capital goods. Geographical expansion opens up demand for capital goods along with a wider market, even if at the risk of possible change in territorial hegemony (as was the case in shifting of political power from Britain to the US in the 20th century). Falling rate of profit can also be deferred in face of stagnant demand if the cost of inputs decline either through technological innovation or access to cheaper land, raw material or labor. Moving industries to locations favorable to cheaper inputs is therefore a well known strategy since the 70s. Such movements inevitably change the pre-capitalist local economies, also benefitting global capitalism simultaneously. Luxemburgs suggestion of indispensability of a pre-capitalist outside of Capitalism therefore is not significantly relevant anymore. However, this does not discredit the broader argument that Capitalism needs some sort of an external solution to the problem of its inner contradiction. For example, Harvey mentions Marxs idea of an industrial reserve army. Capitalism can use its power of technological change to induce 79

unemployment which in turn may exert a downward pressure on wage rates, opening up new opportunities for redeployment of capital. Induced unemployment (lay-offs) in this case is throwing workers out of the system so that they can be made available at another point of time. In the following section Ill discuss modes of manufacturing this outside in perspective of changes in the world economy since the 70s. This will be important for my argument about new Third Cinema, since it is this outside that keeps the politics of Third Cinema alive, and perhaps, given the increasing disparity between the global North and South4, makes it more relevant.

Changes Since the 70s

After the catastrophic depression of the 30s the role of state took a new dimension in stabilization of western capitalism, especially in the US. As Harvey summarized, The state had to take on newroles and build new institutional powers; corporate capital had to trim its sails in certain respects in order to move more smoothly in the track of secure profitability; and organized labor had to take on new roles and functions with respect to performance in labor markets and in production processes. The tense but nevertheless firm balance of power prevailed between organized labor, large corporate capital, and the nation statewhich formed the power basis for the post-war boom. (Harvey 1989: 133)

The great depression was a crisis of effective demand which needed to be overcome by some external stimulus package. The new deal programs under President Roosevelt were designed for this purpose following Keynesian policy of dig holes and build

As of 2003, The assets of the worlds top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries and their 600 million people. (Steger 2003: 105)

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pyramids5. State regulation of banking, investments in infrastructural projects like railroads and subsidies in agriculture in the first phase, followed by social welfare programs like promotion of labor unions, social security act, or aid to tenant farmers and migrant workers in the second phase instilled new energy into the market and set up an elaborate system of checks and balance for efficient flows of production/consumption. Harvey writes, The problem, as an economist like Keynes saw it, was to arrive at a set of scientific managerial strategies and state powers that would stabilize capitalism, while avoiding the evident repressions and irrationalities, all the war mongering and narrow nationalism that National Socialism implied. It is in such a context that we have to understand the highly diversified attempts within different nation-states to arrive at political, institutional and social arrangements that could accommodate the chronic incapacities of capitalism to regulate the essential conditions for its own reproduction (Harvey 1989: 129)

The system of Fordism among many other things was breaking each labor process into component motions and organizing fragmented work tasks according to rigorous standards of time and motion studies6 (Harvey 1989: 125) broadly known as assembly line production. Rationalization of this technology through detailed division of labor increased labor productivity significantly. Organization of this sort required relatively unskilled but large number of workers, making full employment easier. Most importantly, Fordism was based on the assumption that mass production primarily meant mass

Keynesian remedy was based on the understanding that during periods of crisis expenditure in one sector generates employment, which derivatively increases consumption and demand, boosting other sectors. Cumulative effect of such chain reactions revives the economy as a whole.
6

Not only this system was adopted in Hollywood, the correlation between cinema as an invention at the age of mechanical reproduction and contemporary industrial developments can be seen among other examples in Muybridges fascination with motion studies and his consequent experiment in series photography analyzing gaits of horses.

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consumption in the domestic market, where workers were potential consumers. Harvey writes, The purpose of the five-dollar, eight hour day was only in part to secure worker compliance with the discipline required to work the highly productive assemblyline system. It was coincidentally meant to provide workers with sufficient income and leisure time to consume the mass-produced products the corporations were about to turn out in ever vaster quantities. (Harvey 1989: 126) Having a strong domestic market was also an immediate goal for corporations at this point. With onset of great depression, Ford actually increased wages in the belief that this would boost effective demand, revive market and restore business confidence. His attempt remained inadequate in face of stiff competition until the government stepped in with similar measures at a larger scale. Additionally, the subsequent war time mobilization necessitated large scale planning, boosted demands further and made rationalization of the labor process acceptable. Thus, the capitalist fear of centralized control and worker resistance to alienating assembly line production was quelled at both ends. As Manuel Castells suggests, The mass production model was based on productivity gains obtained by economies of scale in an assembly line based, mechanized process of production of a standardized product, under the conditions of control of a large market by a specific organizational form(Castells 1996: 166)

As long as domestic markets remained predictable, Fordism flourished further during the post-war period assisted by investment opportunities in the reconstruction projects of Europe and Japan through programs like Marshall Plan. The reconstruction boom following Marshall Plan after Second World War reached its apogee by 1970. By the mid-60s the West European and Japanese recovery was

complete. The saturation of internal market in those regions triggered drives to create 82

their own export markets. Maturity of Fordist rationalization, i.e., optimization of labor productivity further implied displacement of a section of workers from manufacturing in the US. Meanwhile, import substitution policies in many Latin American countries, coupled with the push by the multinational companies towards offshore manufacturing gave rise to a new wave of Fordist industrialization in environments where social contract with labor was weaker. International competition from all these regions intensified to the extent where the dollar-gold parity had to be dissolved in 1973 because of depleting gold reserve in the US. Manuel Castells writes, When demand became unpredictable in quantity and quality, when markets were diversified worldwide and thereby difficult to control, and when the pace of technological change made obsolete single-purpose production equipment, the mass production system became too rigid7 and too costly for the characteristics of the new economy. (Castells 1996: 166)

Devaluation of dollar meant floating and highly volatile exchange rates replacing the fixed exchange rate of the post-war boom. Simultaneously, the OPEC oil price hike, which was paraded as Third world militancy, actually funneled much of the available world surplus into Western (mostly US) banks8. Investments in Europe also created the

One of the major obstacles to flexibility in the Fordist system was the organized labor. Being part of the larger problem of large-scale fixed investment in mass production systems, any attempt to overcome the rigidity of Fordism was challenged by organized working class power as evident in the strike waves of 1968-72. This problem was multiplied by state commitments to entitlement programs like social security and pension rights. Stagnation in production restricted any fiscal basis for state expenditure except for flexible monetary policy. The state policy of printing money whenever necessary to keep the economy stable caused inflation waves, along with devaluation of dollar. These inflation waves were a major factor bringing the post-war boom to sink. Part of this petro-dollar was recycled back to the Third world in form of loans from institutions like IMF and World Bank to the states, temporarily enabling them to balance their budgets and continue importing western manufactures. The legitimacy of developmental states in the Third World was jeopardized when welfare functions had to be cut down following austerity measures in order to service international debt. Finally, being part of the global economic stagnation during
8

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euro-dollar market that could be used by US multinationals for lending and borrowing outside US, circumventing American state regulations. These developments initiated a new phase of de-regulation of the financial system and more generally, financialization of capital. The oil embargo by the Arab states during the 1973 Arab- Israeli war also increased energy input costs dramatically, making all segments of world economy seek out ways to economize energy use through technological and organizational change. Most significantly, introduction of a series of new communication technologies made coordination of production processes across the globe easier than ever. Satellite communications rendered distance irrelevant in calculation of cost of communication (the cost of communicating over 500 miles and 5000 miles became same), air freight rates on commodities came down dramatically, containerization reduced cost of bulk sea/road transport, electronic banking and credit cards made global financial market a singular entity in real time9, while different sectors within the financial market- banking, brokerage, financial services, housing finance, consumer credit, etc- became porous. Finally internet made distance binary, i.e., one is either part of a computer network or he/she is absent, irrespective of physical location. The above developments along with organizational strategies like outsourcing and sub-contracting made possible vertical
the period between 1970-1990 the Third World nation states were unable to pay back the debt in the 80s, after which their markets were forced open for Foreign Direct Invests (FDI), following World Bank suggestions of structural adjustment. Structural adjustment- adoptive steps towards neo-liberal world order- basically means doing away with state protectionist policies in favor of domestic capital and subsidies in agriculture, cutting state expenditure by reducing social welfare and promotion of export oriented economies. This further diminished the power of nation-state vis--vis globalization. See, Immanuel Wallerstein. The Cold War and the Third World in After Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 1995) 10-24. Castells distinguishes between world and global economy as follows, A world economyis an economy in which capital accumulation proceeds throughout the worldA global economyis an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time, or a chosen time, on a planetary scale. (Castells 1996: 101)
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disintegration of production/consumption of products, whereby different parts of the same product could be manufactured and assembled at different locations across the globe under single decision making bodies. Simultaneously, technological innovations like computer generated design; automation or robotics opened up scope for greater product diversity as well as accelerated turn over time. Convergence of these new developments gave rise to a new phase of capitalism, known as flexible accumulation. Harvey writes, Flexible accumulationis marked by a direct confrontation with the rigidities of Fordism. It rests on flexibility with respect to labor processes, labor markets, products new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both between sectors and between geographical regions, giving rise, for example, to a vast surge in so-called service-sector employment as well as to entirely new industrial ensembles in hitherto underdeveloped regions. (Harvey 1989: 147)

If Fordism was economy of scale, flexible accumulation is economy of scope. Unlike the post-war boom, the general productivity of capitalism did not increase significantly after 197310. The technological/organizational innovations were intended instead, to be sensitive to changing consumer patterns or profitable investment opportunities in a highly competitive environment. Demand needed to be tapped in volatile and specialized niche markets through just-in-time delivery systems and small batch production. Information processing was crucial for assessment of these emerging consumer patterns (and hence the surge in service sector via enhanced importance on data processing, market survey, customer service, etc.). Extreme mobility of capital made it possible to shift investment

See Manuel Castells. The New Economy in The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I. (Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996) 147-162.

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swiftly to a relatively untapped/advantageous area. For example, Harvey writes Organized labor was undercut by the reconstruction of foci of flexible accumulation in regions lacking previous industrial traditions, and by the importation back into the older centers the regressive norms and practices established in these new areas. (Harvey 1989: 147) Exploration of new areas deepened penetration of capitalism into its periphery. Distinction between First and the Third World in terms of capitalist relations of production become problematic for that reason over last few decades11. As Jameson wrote, This purer capitalism of our timeeliminates the enclaves of pre-capitalist organizations it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way. One is tempted to speak in this connection of a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious: that is the destruction of precapitalist Third World agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of the media and the advertising industry. (Jameson 1991: 36)

At the same time, every move away from a location for higher profitability causes deindustrialization, devaluation of capital goods, or loss of jobs12. Vertical disintegration in flexible accumulation did away with large concentration of workers in the factory. Therefore the organized working class was not the target for mass consumption anymore. As is it, fragmented physical presence of workers in diverse

11

Thus the Third World has become a simulacrum of the First World, rather than its Other. This according to Jameson creates a schizophrenic perceptual crisis, since previously the Third World, as a primitive/historical space, provided a critical perspective through which intervention in the dominant discourse was possible. Without historicity- we eternalize it and lose our capacity to imagine alternative to it. And, while it is this perspective that forms the indispensable precondition to political practice, it is precisely this capacity that appears to have eclipsed in the postmodern. (Colas 1992: 7) For that reason, Jameson has defined

postmodernism as the age that has forgotten to think historically (Jameson 1991: ix).
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Especially loss of jobs in the US because of outsourcing to countries like India illustrates the global nature of this dispossession.

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locations reduced workers power of resistance. Since they did not have to be primed as potential consumers, real wages went down, organizational practices like sub-contracting and outsourcing replaced permanent jobs with temporary or part-time work and rationalization measures like lay offs became easier13. Increasing empowerment of multinational corporations through mergers and acquisitions made it difficult for place bound nation-states to mediate between labor and capital. In fact, as Castells suggests, in their bid to attract investment in an environment of inter-place competition, nation-states or sub-national authorities like city governments14 tended to take entrepreneurial stands. Offering Special Economic Zones (SEZ) for business, where labor rights are weaker than law of the land has been a common practice in the first decade of 21st century. Also, since people- especially unskilled workers- are place bound, they can not match the global mobility of capital. Overall, As Harvey writes, Flexible accumulation appears to imply relatively high levels of structural (as opposed to frictional) unemployment. (Harvey 1989: 149) Considering the above dynamics, Castells has described the 21st century network society as a space of flow since it is constructed around flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds, and symbols. (Castells 1996: 442) These flows express processes dominating our economic,

With reduced bargaining power, the organized working class and their political organizations (trade union, old school communist parties, socialist parties, etc.) which were hitherto seen as vanguards in struggle against capitalism by the left lost their importance. More generally, all political parties, whose premise of operation was the nation-state, lost power facing the transnational flow of capital.
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As the nation-state weakened, sub-national authorities gain more importance in their negotiation with corporations. Not only corporate deals are struck directly with provincial authorities, cities within a state or region compete with each other for greater share of investment.

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political and symbolic life. But as global networks of wealth and power connect hubs and significant individuals/groups through out the planet, it also disconnects and excludes large sections of society and regions simultaneously. Before coming back to the significance of this process, Ill discuss the cultural implications of flexible accumulation. Flexible accumulation depends on a high pace of product innovation in order to meet/create new demands. While diversification of products is better suited for unstable markets, it also warrants shorter turn-over time for each product. Shorter turnover times have been crucial for capitalist profitability historically. We have already seen how new technologies of automation and robotics along with new business organizations reduced turnover time on the production side in the last three decades. These innovations are useful only if turnover time on the consumption side is also reduced. As a logical consequence, while half-life of a typical Fordist product was between five to seven years, in flexible accumulation it has come down to between two and three years in textile and clothing industries. At another level, emphasis has shifted from production of goods to production of service or events since the latter products have almost instantaneous turnover time.15 At the level of ideology, promotion of consumerist lifestyle has steadily increased since the 60s through proliferation of global media industry and advertising expenditure has taken up ever larger proportion in corporate budgets16. Harvey writes, Flexible accumulation has been accompanied on the consumption sideby a much greater attention to quick changing fashions and the mobilization of all the artifices
For details, see David Harvey. From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation in The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1989) 141-73. Harvey writes, In a highly competitive world, it is not simply products but the corporate image itself that becomes essential, not only to marketing but also for raising capital, pursuing mergers, and gaining leverage over the production of knowledge, government policy, and the promotion of cultural values. (Harvey 1989: 160)
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of need inducement and cultural transformation that this implies. The relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment, instability and fleeting qualities of a postmodern aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms. (Harvey 1989: 156)

Manipulation of taste in context of this new social organization has two aspects. Firstly, as a correlative of short lifespan of commodities, there is a general emphasis on values and virtues of instantaneity/ disposability. Rather than an attitude limited to the realm of commodity/consumption, it is an all pervading lifestyle promoted/disseminated by the establishment. Harvey writes, The dynamics of a throwaway societybegan to be evident during the 1960s. It meant more than just throwing away produced goods (creating a monumental waste-disposal problem), but also being able to throw away valuesstable relationships, and attachment to things, buildings, places, people, and received ways of doing and being. These were the immediate and tangible ways in which the accelerative thrust in the larger society crashed up against the ordinary daily experience of the individual. (Harvey 1989: 286)

Secondly, satellite communication and mass ownership of television since the 70s has compressed the world into peoples living rooms in form of tele-visual flows, interspersed with advertisements. Rush of simultaneous images from different spaces as series of images on screen makes vicarious experiences of what the world contains available to many people. It also induces a simulated worldview in the process17. Baudrillard defines simulation as, generation by models of a real without origin or

A relevant example in this context is programming of reality TV, where ordinary/everyday lives of people (usually middle/upper-middle class) are presented as game shows. Thus, the universe is reduced to (not so) personal life of the average consumer and the commodities promoted during commercial breaks. Thus, the distinction between active/ passive, cause/ effect, subject/ object also vanishes in construction of these simulacra. It becomes difficult to distinguish whether the viewer watches TV or TV watches her.

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reality: a hyper-real. (Baudrillard 1994: 1)18 The model in this context is the global space of flow. As Harvey writes, Advertisementis no longer built around the idea of informing or promoting in the ordinary sense, but is increasingly geared to manipulate desires and tastes through images that may or may not have anything to do with the product to be sold. If we stripped modern advertisement of direct reference to the three themes of money, sex and power there would be very little left. (Harvey 1989: 287)

Production of images and signs that go into making simulacra- what Jameson has called the postmodern built environment- has led to media convergence, making specificity of a particular medium irrelevant, at least at the level of digitization. The triumph of the sign-system of advertisement over all original cultural forms in late capitalism has led Baudrillard to argue that a society where political economy is truly functional has been realized since there is no difference between the language of politics and economics anymore19. Thus on one end of neo-liberal globalization we have the global elite and their highly persuasive cultural machinery, and on the other, disintegration of the working class, roll back of social security benefits of the welfare state and structural exclusion of people and

Baudrillard has defined simulacrum- the effect of simulation- as a state of such near perfect replication that the difference between the original and the copy becomes almost impossible to spot. The implication of this in context of the simulated global/tele-visual space is that here the screen world of advertisement becomes indistinguishable from the world outside, whereas only images that are commodified and compatible with the language of advertisement feature in it. Baudrillard writes, The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October Revolution and the market crash of 1929. Both languages of the masses, issuing from the mass production of ideas, or commodities, their registers, separate at first, progressively converge. Propaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces, of political men and parties with their trademark imageThis convergence defines a society- ours- in which there is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in botha society therefore where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized. (Baudrillard 1994: 87-88)
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places20. Castells described these globally dispersed, disenfranchised population as the fourth world since as we have already seen, the Third World as an entity has lost its significance and the second world has disappeared after collapse of Soviet Union. The fourth world is the antipode of globally connected network space. Castells writes, The Fourth World comprises large areas of the globe [...]. But it is also present in literally every country and every city, in this new geography of social exclusion. [...] And it is populated by millions of homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and illiterate persons. [...] Everywhere, they are growing in number, and increasing in visibility, as the selective triage of informational capitalism, and the political breakdown of the welfare state, intensify social exclusion. In the current historical context, the rise of the Fourth World is inseparable from the rise of informational, global capitalism. (Castells, 1998: 16465)

This dispersal of the excluded is integral to a simultaneous crisis of representation and effective resistance. As Alain Badiou writes, In its circumstantial aspect, capitalist nihilism has reached the stage of the nonexistence of any world. Yes, today there is no world as such, only some singular and disjointed situations. No world exists simply because the majority of the planets inhabitants today do not even have a label, a simple label. [] Today, outside of the grand and petty bourgeoisie of imperial cities who proclaim to be civilization, there is only the anonymous excluded. Excluded is the name for those who have no name, just as market is the name for a world that is not a world. (Badiou 2007: 34) The condition of being part of this market/world is therefore to be a consumer. The absence of the safety net of welfare state has given rise to mooring for more traditional cultural identities among populations excluded by globalization, and found expression in various religious fundamentalisms. In other cases, identity politics based on gender, race,
Castells writes, The fundamental form of domination in our society is based on the organizational capacity of the dominant elite that goes hand in hand with its capacity to disorganize those groups in society which, while constituting a numerical majority, see their interests partially (if ever) represented only within the framework of the fulfillment of the dominant interests. Articulation of the elites, segmentation and disorganization of the masses seem to be the twin mechanisms of social domination in our societies. (Castells 1996: 445-6)
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ethnicities, sexual orientations or counter-cultural movements have run the risk of being assimilated/ proliferated as correlatives of niche markets that flexible accumulation feeds on. This is not to say that identity based political movements like feminism, civil rights movement, or movements for LGBT rights were never progressive. As much as movements around 1968 uprisings were rebellions against the old left among other things- and the organized industrial proletariat was seen by the contemporary left as the primary vehicle of emancipation (majority of them coincidentally were also white male in the US) - identity based movements broadened the voice of the oppressed and won their rightful place in mainstream politics. At the same time, late capitalism penetrated all peripheries untapped by Fordism, and its dynamics involves active production of differential representational spaces just as much as fragmentation of others. Any politics that finds representation in the global mediascape today is therefore suspect21. We have seen in the last chapter that the utopias of Third cinema in the first generation were centered on the metaphor of developmental state. With weakening of the nation state and a general crisis of representation/ positive utopia, I would argue in discussion of the following films that contemporary political cinema critical of capitalism embraces a politics of absence as critic of processes of dispossession integral to dynamics of contemporary network society. Herbert (India, 2005), Cache (France, 2004), City of God (Brazil, 2002) and Tribulation 99 (USA, 1991) are made in four different continents.
A relevant case study for this argument could be the history of Hip-Hop culture. While the earlier generation of Hip-Hop artists like Gill Scott Heron and Stevie Wonder were inspired by Civil Rights/ Black Panther movements, and early phases of Hip-Hop produced socially conscious lyrics as in The Message or The Nigger is Afraid of Revolution, once the movement earned mainstream recognition, it embraced the metaphor of pimp as ideological model. Celebration of consumerist lifestyle and misogyny are common, if not dominant themes of contemporary Hip-Hop. See, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Pimps Up, Hos Down:Hip-Hops Hold on Young Black Women (New York: NYU Press, 2007).
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However, Like the Third World as the margin of global capitalism in the 60s, the perspective of excluded spaces in these films mobilize a post-structural thrust and recontextualize the dominant mediascape disrupting their claims to be realities perpetually present, without any alternative. Instead of emancipatory rhetoric, this critical vector contextualizes dominant discourses continuing Third Cinemas legacy of showing the process of the problem. In a way, absence of a positive utopia makes them more radical, since they do not have an alternative institution as referent.

Herbert (India, 2005)

Herbert (India, 2005), director Suman Mukhopadhyayas debut film is adopted from a novelette of the same title written by Nabarun Bhattacharya in 1993. The novel is a landmark in modern Bengali literature for its sleek prose which synthesizes contemporary urban slangs and sophisticated poetic sensibility into political statements. Thus, the basic strategies of Third Cinema are built into the source of the film. The novel is also reflexively cinematic as Lalit Kumar, protagonist Herberts father in the novel, is a filmmaker who mixes words like cut in his dialogues22. The timing of the decision by Suman Mukhopadyaya- formerly a CPI(M) sympathizer- to adopt the novel is significant, since after remaining in power for three decades in West Bengal, CPI(M) was beginning to loose support among intellectuals around that time for championing neo-liberal policies like building SEZ for multinationals, evicting farmers.

The death scene of Herbert is described using the trope of personified tracking vision of a house-lizard about to prey on a cockroach, ending in entry of a tearful fairy into the room, whose bust Herbert saw in an antic shop- a very brief example of the cinematic language of the novel.

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The film is about the protagonist Herbert whose cremation explodes the crematorium. Initially it is seen as a terrorist act with a lot of media attention, and investigation into the explosion unfolds a social history of Calcutta during his lifetime. We have seen how collapse of the Third World and globalization of consumer culture causes a crisis of referentiality/historicity. For loss of distance, past or future, there is overcompensation of the present- present as absolute, without any alternative/rebellion. At the same time, flexible accumulation promotes a culture of instant obsolescence. There is no place for the dead in this universe unless it can be commodified. Herbert is an urban subaltern is this context. He practices parapsychology professionally. He speaks the language of occult/riddle/poetry that is almost undecipherable. Ironically, his epileptic/semi-lunatic behavior in perspective of the dominant order of Schizophrenia23 implies a stronger connection with the past24. Herbert grows up as the neglected homeboy of his uncles family after being orphaned as an infant and dropping out of school at 8th grade. Tragic exclusion from a proper/prosperous childhood gives Herbert relative stability compared to the world of
I am using Jamesons idea of Schizophrenia being the dominant order of postmodern consumer society here. See, Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism and Consumer Society in The AntiAesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983). When interrogated by rationalist organizations about his business of conversation with the dead, Herbert hysterically proclaims You think you know everything spewing fucking English? Ghosts exist! They shot Binu dead! Bhut, the Bengali word for ghost, also means past. Binu, Herberts Naxalite nephew murdered by the police is part of that past. It is generally believed in parapsychology that souls dying unnatural death dont attain salvation and remain unsatisfied spirit/ghosts until proper rites are performed for them. As we will see in the following analysis, Naxalism- the repressed/disavowed history of rebellion- resurfaces into the world of present through the medium of Herbert, the link between past and present, during his death. The English language on the other hand is the primary requirement for the middle class to be part of globalization. Acquaintance with English through colonial experience gives the Indian middle class competitive advantage in the globally outsourced job market, as it is evident by proliferation of call centers. Knowledge of English therefore separates the Haves from Have nots after liberalization even more than the British period.
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change around him. His parents die unnaturally25. His teenage girlfriend has to leave town following her fathers transfer. His friend Ravi commits suicide after being humiliated for writing a love letter to a girl from a different neighborhood. Finally, his Naxalite nephew is killed by the police. Experiencing this series of losses of his dear ones, Herbert develops a nostalgic attachment towards the dead. His run down ancestral house plays an important thematic role in this mode of existence. The rooftop of the building26 becomes his refuge while escaping regular harassment by his cousin. Gradually he builds his private universe on the rooftop comprising of books (including erotic literature, which he shows to his girlfriend and gets to see a bare female body for the first time in return), kites, and various other disposed items. In one of the unused rooms of the building he discovers a box full of occult ritual tools including a skull that haunts him for the rest of his life. Along with Marxist literature, he starts reading books

His father dies in a car crash while shooting a dance sequence at a hill station with his mistress/actress. His mother gets electrocuted while hanging washed clothes on a clothesline on the rooftop. If it is not too far fetched, is it possible to see the father as the metaphoric national/comprador bourgeoisie (which Lalit Kumar literally was, and the genealogy of their ancestry depicted in the film in a way reflects the evolution of Indian Capitalism), and the mother (cheated on by her husband for the English speaking actress) as the welfare state? North Calcutta is the oldest part of the city established in the colonial period. Since the 70s the urban sprawl took a southern direction, eventually making the south a more happening area. The cityscape of the North remained distinctly older architecturally. Disintegrating extended family structure caused affluent family members to move out of ancestral homes for space constrains. Property disputes or economic situations of people staying back left many buildings ill maintained (for example in a conversation Herbert asked his aunt if water from the river Ganga ever actually came to the reservoir known as Ganga Water tank on the rooftop. Her aunt explained in reply how the supply pipe was never repaired after it cracked, rendering the tank useless) and most importantly colonial urban planning featuring narrow alleys between buildings and archaic sewage system left the north less adoptable to transformation into modern high rise apartments. As a result, the north continued to be shabby, the devalued buildings embodying nostalgia of an old heritage. At another level, these buildings are examples of spaces discarded by capitalist rationalization of urban space, and therefore part of the outside intrinsic to its dynamics. No wonder, it plays an important role in construction of Herberts critical perspective.
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about afterlife after this27. At the death bed of Binu, a police officer interrogates him about Naxalite awareness of Carlos Marighellas strategies of urban guerilla warfare. Marighellas Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla is a compilation of instructions regarding efficient/possible usage of urban space during militant revolutionary struggle in the city. As it turns out in the movie, it is Herbert who makes a better use of the rooftop than anybody else- both as a shelter away from the worlds ridicules, and most importantly, as the launching pad of his daring visions, retaining his dreams. The figure of Herbert functions as a perspective of vision throughout the film. When his Aunt asks Herbert what he does on the rooftop bunking school, he simply answers, I see. Later he elaborates this saying he sees birds, balloons, airplanes, clouds, kites, fireworks to his girlfriend. After watching projectile motions during a firework festival on the roof he comes to the realization that, everything comes down, but first they fly. This apparently simplistic observation is also an aphoristic understanding of cause and effect, a perception of history. Thus, at a time when Baudrillard has declared that in our mediatized/televisual world there is no more spectacle, since there is no more

By reference from one of these books Herbert tries to explain the relationship between afterlife and attachment to Binu. The reference is a story of a ghost sister who keeps visiting her brother out of affection. The idea of a ghost is conceivable only from the perspective of a unified self that is unique and indestructible even by death. Affection between unified selves/souls is also therefore based on this uniqueness that can not be replaced. This proposition diametrically contradicts the postmodern idea of death of the subject, where computers augment our selfimages, and linear time consisting of past, present and future does not provide a stable frame of reference anymore. Binu tells Herbert during this conversation that ghosts dont exist. Herbert replies, just because you havent seen?

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public place, just like there is no secret since there is no private space,28 Herbert lives a life of visual experience, thanks to his marginality. Another aspect of Herberts life as visual experience is, it is an alternative gaze, which invokes possibilities of meaning beyond the mundane and the apparently transparent. He speaks an obscure language of riddles. He writes in his suicide note something that is translated in the subtitles as, Tilapia of a reservoir is going to the sea. Want to see fishy hobgoblin? Shall I show you fishy hobgoblin? The intelligence officers dismiss it as gibberish. Doborer chang translated as fishy hobgoblin can be interpreted as scoundrel, but in a broader context Fishy hobgoblin simply refers to a concept beyond the limits of our current language and perception. The sentence want to see fishy hobgoblin? therefore suggests a yearning to see (experience life from a bigger perspective) the impossible. It has a magical undertone, commensurate with Herberts affinity towards the occult. Because Herbert can think the past/ghost, he can also imagine a future29. The idea of an alternative gaze is built into the structure of Herbert at various levels. The film is framed as a film shot by Herberts dead father, Lalit Kumar. An oedipal drama unfolds in this move as the cinematic vision of the father and the gaze of Herbert contradict each other. Lalit Kumar made money dealing in iron scrap during the Second
Baudrillard wrote, the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen (all the useless information that comes to you from the entire world, like a microscopic pornography of the universe, useless, excessive, just like a sexual close-up in a porno film): all this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private, the scene that was played out in a restricted space, according to a secret ritual known only by the actors. (Baudrillard 1983: 130)
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At another place, after being beaten by his nephews Herbert says, Sensuous people wont understand the other world, not only the other world; they dont understand the finer details of this world either.

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World War like the Congress leader in Calcutta 71. He invested in studio films as a profitable venture. In a sequence in Herbert, we see Lalit Kumar watching dailies in a projection room with his lead actress where a dance sequence plays on screen. Ms. RubyLalit Kumars mistress/actress- finds them boring, making Lalit think they need to go to real location. The sequence continues as Ruby, rejoiced by the suggestion, starts dancing in front of the screen, doubling the dancing figure. In the next shot, they are seen shooting a dance sequence in a meadow, followed by one on a car meandering upward on a hilly road. Ruby repeats similar steps/movements in all three places, referring to escapist formula films, after which the car crashes. Thus, while Lalit gets disconnected from life trying to make a spectacle out of it, Herbert explores interiorities of life having death as a perspective. In another sequence, after Herbert starts sympathizing with Binus political views, he is seen painting posters for his group, while Lalit and his wife observe/shoot him. Herberts mother describes Herberts sympathy for Naxals an act of a tender soul, after which Lalitas if verifying that statement- looks into the viewfinder. Through the camera Herbert is seen as a war hero, dressed in military uniform, machine gun in hand. Like Herbert in the movie, the power of cinema as the medium revealing an alternative reality is emphasized here, while the dual characteristic of Herbert portrayed in the sequence reminds us of Paulo in Land in Anguish (as described in chapter one). There are also montage sequences in the film- including one involving a clip from Battleship Potemkinwhere two realities qualify each other30.

30

In one of those sequences Herbert reads a horrific narration of an occult experience where several severed heads dance on the floor. Herberts reading is intercut here with killing of a

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Finally, Suman Mukhopadhyaya uses the database narrative31 structure, repeating and in the process re-contextualizing several sequences of the film. For example, in the opening sequence of the film we see hysterical Herbert throwing things after members of rationalist organizations left challenging him. When he says, Nobody can stop the catastrophe. You think you know everything just spewing fucking English? he comes across as a lunatic, which is the dominant social perception. When this sequence is repeated towards the end of the film, he is already a tragic hero. Binu adds a new dimension to Herberts conception about death/ghosts. Binu reads the following quote by Mao to Herbert. Thousands of martyrs have embraced death before our eyes. Remembering them fills our hearts with grief. What self-interest can exist that may not be sacrificed? What mistake is possible that can not be rectified?

What was nostalgia for personal loss so far takes a social connotation here. Herbert understands that ideas of social justice or aspirations for a better society continue beyond individual deaths, and peoples contributions carrying those ideas forward make them part of a larger life force. It is important therefore, to keep those ideas alive. One day, in his dream he recollects Binu told him about a diary just before dying. As he finds the diary, people start thinking of him as a potential medium between the dead and the
Naxalite- Binus friend- by the cops in a fake encounter. The theme of horror along with the classical 19th century language monumentalizes the sequence. Marsha Kinder writes, Database narratives refer to narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and that are crucial to language: the selection of particular data (characters, images, sounds, events) from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific talesSuch narratives reveal the arbitrariness of the particular choices made, and the possibility of making other combinations which would create alternative stories. By always suggesting virtuality and the wave of potentialities linked to the uncertainty principle, such narratives inevitably raise meta-narrative issues. (Kinder 2002: 6-7)
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living. Upon insistence of his local/lumpen drinking partners, Herbert starts practicing sance professionally. The world changes before his eyes. Two of his other nephews grow up and start their own business- one as a cable TV operator and the other as a Kung Fu instructor (both professions being signs of globalization). Herbert also gets business proposal from an entrepreneur who promises to take him to the top level. He suggests Herbert should glamorize his business through a better establishment and publicity after which they could have branches abroad. As part of the publicity his promoter manages to publish an article titled Dead speaks in the divine supermarket. As the wooden framework on the rooftop intended to be seat for pet pigeons gets replaced by a satellite dish, rationalist organizations accuse him of swindling people. Refusing to submit to their rational examination of his power as a medium, Herbert commits suicide. As his body is put inside the electric crematorium (a mechanism of disposal), dynamites stored inside his mattress by Binu explode. We learn from another re-contextualized sequence that the dynamites were stored inside the mattress on Herberts birthday many years back, before Binus death. Primarily as a field of vision, Herberts narrative is not coherent. His association of personal memories of loss with social memory of rebellion can only be achieved by ellipsis. He participates in Maoist activities, just like he passively accepts proposals of business expansion. He is not an active political agent for that matter, resisting symbolization. Only his personal history of exclusion, which makes him a distant observer, is too strong to let go of the past. It is this trace that makes him a contextualizing interface, an embodiment of history. As Jameson famously wrote, 100

History isthe experience of necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation, or a master code among many others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather an inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category in the enlarged sense of some properly narrative political unconsciousa retextualization of history which does not propose the latter as some new representationbut as the formal effects ofan absent cause. Conceived in this sense, history is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and set inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ruses turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their own intention. But this history can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which history as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them. (Jameson 1981: 87-8)

Unable to figure out where the dynamites came from, the intelligence officer concluded, This incidence proves we are yet to grasp when, where and how explosions will occur. The idea of a full proof, perpetual present therefore can not be guaranteed. Coincidentally, after being flushed out from the cities by the police in the 70s some factions of the Maoists trained in military tactics and entrenched themselves among tribals in dense forests suitable for guerilla warfare. Over four decades their organization and popular support grew in those areas, but remained unnoticed since those areas fell outside dominant mediascape, and no government development project materialized there. However, that area in South and eastern India- which now covers almost one-third of total Indian districts- is rich in minerals like iron ore and bauxite. After neoliberalization of India in the 90s, Government of India signed a number of secret MoUs (Memorandum of Understanding) with multinational companies giving them extraction rights for meager revenue, and decided to move huge tribal populations from their homelands to facilitate the projects. When government forces moved in to execute the evacuations, they faced armed resistance to such a degree that the Indian Prime Minister 101

Manmohan Singh recently termed the Maoists the biggest internal security threat. The Naxals were supposed to be dead after the 70s, and their presence in areas lucrative to multinationals is an accident, but indeed, they have caused an explosion.

Cache (Hidden, France, 2005)

On October 17, 1961, the French police under command of former Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon killed two hundred peaceful protestors in Paris at a demonstration called by FLN. Michael Haneke learned about the massacre less than two years before making Cache, accidentally watching a documentary on ARTE channel. His immediate reaction after watching the documentary was, How can there be two hundred bodies floating on the Seine, and nobody talks about it for forty years?32 At the same time, he argued in the interview that Cache could be a story told anywhere, since there could be secrets hidden anywhere by the common sense of a particular national milieu. At another end, the film is replete with news footage from all over the world; Anne- wife of protagonist Georges in the film- had just finished editing a book on globalization published to critical acclaim, she refers to Baudrillard in a discussion about the book; their son Pierrot sports a poster of Eminem in his bedroom. Cache is therefore about secrets disavowed globally. More precisely, it is about spaces excluded by the global corporate media. The first image of the film is a long shot of a narrow urban street in an upper middle class neighborhood of Paris, leading to a gated, fairly non-descript house. Buildings on both sides of the street frame the mise-en- scene as a circumscribed space. Cars parked at various distance in the deep focus shot, along with creeper plants flowing down the
32

This is part of an interview on the special features of the DVD.

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terrace of the central house gives the image a rich, tranquil texture. Except for occasional passing of cars or pedestrians, there is no action in the static shot, giving the scenario a non-suspect transparency. However, the exceptionally long duration of the shot renders this apparent stability uncomfortable, after which through a glitch on the screen and off screen dialogue between Anne and Georges we realize it is the footage from a series of surveillance videotape the family has been receiving. We never know where the videotapes are coming from, but this anonymous perspective is the source of narrative dynamics of Cache. The idea of a surveillance society is not new. In his famous description of the Panopticon, Foucault wrote, The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen. (Foucault 1995: 201) For Foucault, with sophistication of the disciplining mechanisms of the modern state the juridical subject internalizes the notion of constant surveillance, making the metaphoric Panopticon omnipresent. Baudrillard argued in late capitalism the Panopticon does not exist anymore, since the functioning of Panopticon presupposes a minimal separation of private and public space33, a separation that ceases to exist with proliferation of global media industry. Simultaneous programming of reality TV and global news network

We have seen how the mechanism of Panopticon works in a colonial context in Battle of Algiers, where power works through separation of Algerian Casbah from the European Quarter. Algerian women violate that spatial barrier disguising themselves as European women to carry out terrorist attack. Colonel Mathieu is seen reviewing footage shot at checkpoints of the Casbah in the film, to restrict Muslim occupants from entering the European quarter.

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conflates34 the mediascape into a frenzied space of communication and flow of information35, a hyper-marketplace, where everything is too visible to the point of being obscene, of which there can be nothing hidden, or no outside36. Georges, himself a television anchor, is happily embedded in this universe. Return of a perspective ruptures the illusion of this circumscribed universe, structured around disavowal. One of the ways in which contradiction between network society and its relegation of vast masses of people into oblivion manifests itself is terrorism. The bomb- rendered anonymous by death of the suicide bomber- fails to construct a narrative, but signals at the symbolic level of a presence that has no representation otherwise. In place of bombs, we have

An example of this can be found in Cache, when Anne and George enquire about Pierrots whereabouts calling his friends house after he goes missing. They are in their living room featuring a centrally located TV surrounded by shelves full of books and videos, a mediatized universe. Annes anxiousness while talking on the phone is complemented here by images of wounded civilians carried away in Iraq following allied bombing. Neither Anne nor George looks at the TV during the conversation, rendering the suffering of the victims a mere backdrop of domestic ritual. This concept of war as an event to be consumed through live coverage led Baudrillard to declare that the Gulf War did not happen. Baudrillard writes, Rather than creating communication, (information) exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The non-directive interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: You are concerned, you are the event, etc. More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the anti-theater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. (Baudrillard 1994: 80) Thus, while classical narrative cinema sutures the spectator into the narrative as the absent one, television structures the audience within its informational circuit as the absent meaning.
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As media hollows out the private space, image of the private becomes more important in form of the sanctity of the bourgeoisie family. Haneke says in the interview, As couples work out their social and domestic life, everything is given the appearance of its success and functionality, and nothing is discussed outside of it. Functionality of the nuclear bourgeoisie family legitimizes the media circuit of consumerism. The image of an affluent middle class family life is therefore what we see in the first shot of Cache.

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videotapes in Cache. Thus, while Classical Hollywood sutures the spectator into the narrative space, Haneke permanently places her outside of it, in an antagonistic relationship with the image. The videotapes come wrapped in childish sketches of a face vomiting blood. Introspection into who might be filming the tapes to terrorize his family, stirs up Georges memory. He remembers Majid, whose parents worked on the farmlands of Georges provincial estate. Majids parents were killed in the 1961 massacre after which Georges parents (probably out of sense of guilt) decided to adopt Majid. Despising the idea of having to share the house with a brown skinned boy, Georges made up stories about Majid coughing up blood (contagious- therefore needs to be quarantined) and killing a chicken to scare him (actually it was Georges who asked Majid to kill the chicken, because he was scared of the bird and portrayed it as if his parents wanted Majid to do the job- the narrative of Majid is displaced upon the chicken here) to his parents. Noticing Georges discomfort about Majids presence, his parents sent Majid off to an orphanage. The field of the repressed outside expand in Cache in form of a narrative struggle. In the realm of the visible, recurrent denial forestalls Majids entry into the narrative field. When George visits his mother and asks if she remembers Majid, the Algerian boy she almost adopted, she answers in negative. Later George describes this conversation to Anne as, maybe she doesnt want to remember. When the tape featuring Majids encounter with Goerges reaches Georges boss, he destroys it to prevent it from falling into wrong hands. After Majids death, when his son, Hashem comes to see Georges at his office, Georges refuses to talk to him first, and denies any culpability when forced to 105

have a conversation. Significantly, Georges office is a television station, and George tells the boy he is not supposed to come inside. On the other hand, after the second tape arrives, the bloody face of young Majid- blood being reminiscent of both accusations forged against him- appear in a jump cut as a shrill psychological projection of Georges, while the tape is playing. Inter-medium permeability, between the sketch and the video, thus succeeds the transgression between oblivion/scotomization and trace/sign within the regime of visibility. The third appearance is a nightmare sequence, where silhouetted Majid ominously approaches young Georges with an axe in hand, after killing the chicken. This imaginary narrative segment is followed by Georges first encounter with Majid. Georges accuses visibly submissive Majid of terrorism here, maintaining a violent posture himself. When this tape plays in Georges living room, the part where Majid breaks into tears after Georges leaves is omitted (Anne has already seen it, but says it is too long and boring to be replayed). Thus, Majid is denied the stature of a human being, an individual capable of suffering. Denied humanity, and a space in the dominant narrative of exculpation, Majid performs the symbolic act of terrorism after being accused of kidnapping Pierrot37. He reenacts the childhood scene of slaughtering the chicken, the chicken being himself this

The rupture of the circumscribed universe by terrorism has an apocalyptic overtoneespecially in context of the imagined kidnap of Pierrot which disintegrates the nuclear family, the symbolic legitimacy of the consumption circuit. Julian Murphet describes how since beginning of neo-liberalism in the 90s there has been a prominence of neoapocalyptic/world disaster films in American cinema. The apocalypse is staged as a struggle between humans and animals, where for sudden desertion of societal safeguards and mechanisms in the advanced capitalist core, men also become animals. Murphet writes, The history of the apocalypse is a history of animal becomings, magnifications and meldings, as though in recognition of the fact that the Day of Judgment is a day on which we are caught naked before the eye of an animal. (Murphet 2008: 107) 106

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time. Significantly, he invites Georges to be present at the scene. So far we have seen the anonymous bloody sketches on the one hand, and the complacent domestic space of Georges, the space of moving image, on the other. With reenactment of the sketch- the same diagonal splash of blood across the wall in a deep focus shot reminiscent of Bazanian aesthetics- the scene becomes mise-en-scene including Georges in it as the absent cause. It is the act of ironic sharing of space- the sharing Georges refused as a child, the memory-space he disavows as an adult- comes to stand as a photographic punctuation in the way of Georges avowed subjectivity. Majids suicide also connects the psychological space to a larger national space as the context of 1961 massacre enters the narrative in a confessional38 dialogue between Georges and Anne after Majids death. The suicide makes Georges open up to Anne, and reveal secrets he had held back so far, to preserve his self-image. The series of disavowal Georges goes through in order to preserve his image and possessions (during their first encounter Majid asks him, what wouldnt you do not to lose what is yours?) is a correlative of series of dispossession capitalism causes for accumulation. The duality of this existence is summarized in the virtuoso penultimate sequence of the film. After confronting Hashem at office who explained the reason for his visit saying I just wanted to see what feels a mans death in your conscience, Georges returns home. A shorter replica of the opening shot establishes his return. Contextualized through the film, the shot does not have the aura of complacency this

It is literally a confessional environment. When Anne enters the room and turns on the light, Georges cant bear it. The conversation takes place in silhouette, the only source of light coming through the sheers of the two windows.

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time.39 Georges, visibly devastated, takes sleeping pills, calls Anne to say not to disturb him after returning home, then retreats into his bedroom. He closes the curtains making the room completely dark- as if to protect himself from further interrogation- then covers himself with a blanket in bed. His family house is seen in the next shot, from the other side of the field in front of it. Half of the field is covered by the shadow of a building, simulating an extension of Georges darkened bedroom. The rest of the field and Georges house is lit by bright sunlight. Chickens run around on the field. The original sin/scene of exclusion plays out here once more. A car enters the frame to stop in front of the house. Representatives from the foster home knock on the door getting out of it. People look tiny in the extreme long shot, signifying the distance from Georges induced sleep. Eventually young Majid steps out of the house accompanied by Georges parents. Majid starts walking towards the car away from the parents, stops, looks back helplessly, then starts running towards the shadow screaming I dont want to go. The representatives follow him. Majid goes out of the frame briefly before being pulled back, nabbed by his pursuers. The car leaves after he is taken into it. The flight of Majid parallels the movement of the birds on the field, bringing back his association with the slaughtered chicken. Through the trope of Goerges sleep, Haneke performs a reverse optical operation here, portraying the scotomized dispossession in bright light. The last shot of Cache expands the polemic set up by the film into a postcolonial perspective. After interrogating the institution of Bourgeoisie nuclear family (a recurrent

The street sign in the shot reads Rue des Iris. Ara Osterweil writes there are two possible meanings of the phrase. It could mean street filled with flowers. This impression comes across in the opening shot, especially because of the creeper plants. The second meaning is sadness of the eye. In context of the second occurrence of the shot this meaning may be stretched to suggest, visibility that causes sadness (Osterweil Summer, 2006).

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theme in Haneke films like Code Unknown [2000], Piano Teacher [2001], Time of the Wolves [2003]) Haneke turns his attention towards another liberal institution, the school. The last shot repeats the opening shot in its set up. It is a wide, multi-layered shot of the front entrance of Pierrots school. Stairs lead up to the glass door of the building. Unlike Georges house it is a bustling public space; students walk in and out of the building and chat sitting on the stairs. Hashem and Pierrot are seen having an amiable conversation, establishing the postcolonial scenario. In other words, apparently it is even more transparent than the first shot. However, the unusually long duration of the take brings back the eeriness nurtured throughout the film. Haneke, thus continues his militant call to distrust the image. Hanekes strategy of assault on optics is not novel. We have seen self-reflexive rewinding of footage earlier in Funny Games. At one level, skepticism towards nave ocular mastery of Hollywood is one of the basic premises of art cinema epitomized by Antonionis Blow-up. This strategy is susceptible to stoicism, being locked in foregrounding of authorship as structuring principle of cinema on one end and contemplating emptiness/futility of modernist existence on the other. Hanekes critic of this tendency in high culture comes across in Cache (and to some extent earlier in Piano Teacher) in the sequence when Georges is in the editing room watching a literary talk show. Georges orders the tape to be cut at the point when the guests start waxing too theoretical while discussing works of Arthur Rimbaud.40 In that context, what broadens the scope of Cache over Hanekes earlier films is its thematization of the social into

Poet Rimbaud was part of the 19th century Decadent Movement that valued artifice over romantic view of nature.
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aesthetics. In a way, moving from the family to a larger social institution, the last shot makes that statement.

Tribulation 99 (USA, 1991)

While Third Cinema shares the quest for new cinematic forms with it, social intervention is even further away from the comfort zone of Avant-Garde than art cinema. Instead, a recurring theme in discussions on the Avant-Garde is purity. This involves questions of medium specificity (i.e. the formal essence of cinema, that the avant-garde has to discover), authorship (the attempt to give a strictly personal expression of the universe), cult or group identities (camp, race or gender for example), and critic of commercial narrative cinema. At a postmodern moment, when we are more concerned with recycling, this preoccupation is problematic. We have known cinema has been a point of convergence of other arts historically and one of its strengths is this very composite nature. Formal essentialism in that context can be self-defeating. Similarly, in spite of existential uniqueness personalities are socially constructed, and authors at best respond to existing discourses. While some group identities/sensibilities are avowedly apolitical,41 the overarching problem of identity based politics is its parochialism and self-obsession42. How can we call Avant-Garde cinema- happily ensconced in its own

As Susan Sontag writes, for Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. (Sontag 1966)
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Jameson has written in this context that, in the decades since the emergence of the great modern styles society has itself begun to fragment in this way, each group coming to speak a curious private language of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect, and finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone elsein that case, the very possibility of any linguistic norm in terms of which one could ridicule private languages and idiosyncratic styles would vanish, and we would have nothing but stylistic

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cathedral- progressive then? Perhaps, films like Craig Baldwins Tribulation 99 (1991) provide answer to that question. Both Tribulation and City of God (2002) - the last film I am going to analyze in this chapter- use magic realist strategies to make political statements. A brief discussion of magic realism will illustrate how political position is determining the narrative structure of both films, even though Tribulation is an avantgarde film made in the US, and City is a fiction film made in Brazil. Magic realism is not all magical. The Fantastic and Fantastic literature has been defined by Tzvetan Todorov as, Fantastic is the hesitation of a being who knows only natural laws in the face of the supernatural. In other words, the fantastic character of a text resides in a transient and volatile state during the reading of it, one of indecision as to whether the narrative belongs to a natural or a supernatural order of things.43 Most science fictions are understood to fall under this genre. Magic realism, on the other hand is poetic transfiguration of the object world itself- not so much a fantastic narrative, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived. (Jameson 1986: 1) It differs from European surrealism in the sense that the fantastic events in that transfigured object world is also narrated44. What makes this mundane narration of the marvelous

diversity and heterogeneity. (Jameson 1983: 114) Also, Judith Butler has criticized feminism in this context. It would be ideal to discuss all of the above points in greater details, but that is beyond scope of this essay.
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See, Stanislaw Lem. Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature, Science Fiction Studies1, no. 4 (1974), reprinted on http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/4/lem4art.htm, accessed on December 7, 2005.

One of the major thrusts of the surrealist attack against realism was directed at the literary language. For example, Andre Breton wrote, The countless kinds of surrealist images would require a classification which I do not want to make todaywhat I basically want to mention is their common virtue. For me, their greatest virtue, I must confess, is the one that is arbitrary to the highest degree, the one that takes the longest time to translate into practical language, either because it contains an immense amount of seeming contradiction or because one of its terms is strangely concealed (Breton 1969: 38) In contrast, the urge to narrate/communicate without

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possible in magic realism is the assertion that the magical is an inseparable part of the reality it is addressing, and not a supplement. For example, Robert Stam refers to Alejo Carpentiers The Lost Steps where the mere smell of mushrooms induces hallucinations, and swarms of butterflies darken the sky (Stam 2005: 316), and then stresses that magic is not so distant from the truth since some mushrooms are powerful hallucinogens and in the Brazilian Pantanal butterflies do suddenly darken the sky. What makes the real seem magical here is an outsiders perspective. How this play between exaggerated immediacy and the critical distance can be political is evident in the following passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But since the afternoon when he called the children in to help him unpack the things in the laboratory, he gave them his best hours. In the small separate room, where the walls were gradually being covered by strange maps and fabulous drawings, he taught them to read and write and do sums, and he spoke to them about the wonders of the world, not only where his learning has extended, but forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes. It was in that way that the boys ended up learning that in the southern extremes of Africa there were men so intelligent and peaceful that their only pastime was to sit and think, and that it was possible to cross the Aegean Sea on foot by jumping from island to island all the way to the port of Salonika. Those hallucinating sessions remained printed on the memories of the boys in such a way that many years later, a second before the regular army officer gave the firing squad the command to fire, Colonel Aureliano Buendia saw once more that warm March afternoon on which his father had interrupted the lesson in physics and stood fascinated, with his hand in the air and his eyes motionless, listening to the distant pipes, drums, and jingles of the gypsies, who were coming to the village once more, announcing the latest and most startling discovery of the sages of Memphis. (Marquez 2004: 16-17) Mottled among intimacy, everyday details, technology, self-reflexive imagination, time lapse, layers of colonial history and finally its framing through childhood memory, death

being illusionist in Magic Realism, I would argue, makes it more political than some other stoic anti-realist traditions.

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related to the allegory of dictatorship becomes absurd and non-hegemonic here. Jameson has argued in this context, that the possibility of magic realism as a formal mode is constitutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally presentthe organizing category of magic realist film (is) a particular mode of production still locked in conflict with the traces of the older mode (if not with foreshadowings of the emergence of a future one). (Jameson 1986: 311)

Even if we do not agree with this model of economic reduction, even if it is not the real Third World or underdevelopment, the idea of it as a critical space outside of a homogenized diegetic universe thus returns in magic realism to compensate for the lost historicity. Tribulation 99 is a found footage film. Catherine Russell has argued that, Recycling found images implies a profound sense of the already seen, the already happened, creating a spectator position that is necessary historical. For many filmmakers, found footage constitutes a means of recycling the excess waste of consumer culture. (Russell 1999: 241)

She extends this argument further stating archival filmmaking promotes a schizophrenic dispersal of discourses of mastery, authenticity, and authority through fragmentation, cutting up and interruption. (Russell 1999: 243) While these assumptions are correct in specific instances, their tendency towards architectural essentialism is dangerous. Recycling is not necessarily interventionist or historical. More than a decade before Russell, Jameson had pointed out pastiche to be a character of post modernity, but differentiated it from parody in terms of lack of political Motive.45 For example, in A Movie (1958) by Bruce Conner, another found footage film
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Jameson wrote, Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such

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Russell writes about, the shots of mushroom clouds after atomic explosions are so long, that they have more hallucinatory or alienating effect, than any appeal to political consciousness. I would argue what those shots lack is authorial intervention and therefore fall short of being radical in the process of re-contextualization. In the same inertia historicity, writes Jameson, is neither representation of the past nor the representation of the future (although its various forms use such representation): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is as relation to the present which somehow de-familiarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized the historical perspective. (Jameson 1991: 284)

Thus just watching footage from the past does not give us any critical vantage point. For that reason, I will emphasize on the level of narrative while talking about Tribulation. The film is about the US foreign policy in Latin America structured as a combination of science fiction and apocalyptic Christian mythology46. On the one hand, through apocalypse, the notion of end of history as described before, is inscribed in the diegesis of the film, and the Latin American people except for the collaborators with the CIA, are rarely seen in the film, but on the other, the US security apparatus, with its vast arsenal of
mimicry, without parodys ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without the still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. (Jameson 1983: 114) Ill borrow Catherine Russells description to give an overview of the narrative. She writes that, the history of US intervention in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Granada, Nicaragua and Panama is depicted in the movie. Interspersed with the footage of flying saucers, monsters, mad scientists, Latin American actors, diagrams, maps, and American politicians are scenes of Latin American laborers, religious processions and newsreel footage of street violence in Chile and Nicaragua. The verbal and written texts describe a complex conspiracy of anti-communist personnel organized through CIA, the United Fruit Company, and the Warren Commission, which is battling a supernatural conspiracy of the Bermuda Triangle, Haitian Voodoo, and a Mayan-alien alliance. In the apocalyptic finale, the Panama Canal is flooded by secret dumping of American atomic waste, the Atlantic and Pacific mergethe world comes to an end, for which we are grateful. The Chosen Ones flee to Mars via stealth mother ships and damn those left behind. (Russell 1999: 261)
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mass media, military, and government institutions is depicted as mobilized against alien invaders from outer space, moving through the Latin American landscape. Thus, the science fictional space that exists parallel to the normal space of the diegesis (becomes) a rhetorically heightened other realm. (Bukatman 1993: 157) It is the self-reflexive imaginative vision from this realm, like the trope of childhood memory in the Marquez passage quoted above, that lends ironical meaning to clips from otherwise illusionist Hollywood films47. It also guides them towards an undesired apocalypse through both their arrangement and connection via narration. It is significant in this context that the very short credits towards the beginning of the film says, reported by Baldwin, meaning both edited and voice over by. Only mention of the last name in this move gives a sense of informal intimacy and framing through this personalized consciousness, i.e. through the breakdown of the binary between the projective private space and ritualistic public space48, absurdity and a repressive reality effect coexist in his narrative. The film begins with the assertion, This is not a fiction, but the shocking truth about the coming apocalypse and the events that led up to it, inscribed on the screen with accompaniment of eerie Sci-fi music. If we are allowed to follow what Robert Stam did to the Carpentier example sited earlier in this essay, then indeed this is not a fiction, since our consciousness is shaped by extremely escapist pop culture, especially television, and since there is no longer any system of objects, as Baudrillard has declared (Baudrillard 1983), we can only make sense through simulacra- the signifiers detached from their
Also used are American information films and newsreels, maps, educational documents and TV programs.
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This is what Hollywood does and disavows at the same time, through the rise to glory of its goal oriented protagonists. In that, what we are witnessing here is the exaggeration of the repressed magic, already existing in Classical Hollywood narrative (Bordwell 1986).

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signified- available to us. What is more interesting in this assertion though, is the shocking truth. Following Lacan, If sci-fi is the realm of imaginary, and the narrated diegetic space is the symbolic, then our lost real is the Third World people who escape representation in the film. Thus they live as aliens, people who have no referent, but live in pure representation49. (Russell 1999: 261) I would argue therefore, that the shocking truth-the relationship between the real and the symbolic- of the movie is the violence/neo-colonial exploitation afflicted on Latin America, which caused its erasure50. This erasure and the subsequent linguistic collapse/social schizophrenia is the apocalypse Baldwin is reporting. Right after this assertion, we see the title of the movie, Tribulation 99: Alien anomalies under America, followed by the quote from Christian millennial myth, and when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and
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In Tribulation, there is a sequence of assassination attempts on Cuban President Fidel Castro. When CIA conspiracies of poisoning his cigar, planting a radio controlled bomb on his private beach, putting a machine gun in the TV set, etc. fails, the narrator laments after 33 failed assassination affords and spending 50 million dollars they finally realized that you cant kill somebody who was not alive after all. Throughout the sequence we see clips taken from Sci-fi thrillers. Russells observation in this context about found footage film is useful. She writes, If nostalgia is the signature of modernitys ambivalent embrace of technology, its renunciation constitutes a postmodern view of history as a discontinuous, non-narrative temporality. By means of montagethe past is transformed from a fixed space of forgetting to a dynamic time of historic imagination. The past is the allegorical form of the future, especially when it is perceived as already embedded in technology, as in found footage filmmaking (emphasis mine). (Russell 1999: 253) I would like to add to this, that even at the narrative level we see this technologically embedded historic landscape, as M-16 rifles, and other humanitarian weapons are supplied to the militias fighting the democratic movements in Latin America in the film. This will have far reaching consequences on Latin American economy, including in development of drug trade, and therefore a strange form of capitalism, as we shall see in City of God. The imagery of the Latin American people vacillate between alien monsters (we actually see aliens dying as the US backed military fires towards its opponents) and slimy natural elements, including rocks, deserts, snakes or creatures who build their city with their own excretory elements, thus pointing towards a post-humanist era. Interestingly, when newsreel footage of real people confronted by the police or military is seen, it is usually not supplemented by any voice over in Tribulation. At one level, this is usage of the indexical nature of the documentary, and at another, it is the trauma beyond representation, which is either sublime, or has to be repressed.
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deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth, and gather them to battle. This whole sequence takes place in the outer space, alluding to the location of the narrator. Also, he narrates the future event of the apocalypse in past tense further confirming of a sci-fi temporality. After this we see a sci-fi landscape of an alien planet in 1000 AD, which gets blown up (the explosion, like apocalypse fills up the screen) owing to internal conflict. These are the aliens that would travel to earth and settle under the soil. To point out another magic realist element in the movie, the journey of these aliens to earth is structured following standard continuity editing and seamless cutting. This is all the more significant since generally the film follows the paranoid documentary style, i.e. layering the imagery with written inter-titles, a whispering voice over, superimposition etc. In fact there are references to human doubling by the aliens, including that of the President of Guatemala. This practice of layering/doubling refers to two or more intertwined streams of consciousness, of fiction and reality, which are inseparable since the one does not make sense without the other in the film, and the films success depends on this very new coherence51. Russell writes about another character of found footage film as,
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For example, there is a sequence in the film where Chilean Marxist President Allende is elected to power. This according to the narrative logic caused disturbance in the earths magnetic field, and a part of Latin America was hit by draught. After a short montage, depicting the landscape and people hit by the draught, we see a man in traditional attire having a panoramic view of this landscape from a hilltop. Following his eye-line, the next shot shows a rectangular entrance on the other side of the hills. This shot dissolves into another shot from a Hollywood film, where a group of men wearing trench coat and fedora hat enter a similar entrance, accompanied by horror film music. While the music certainly underscores the break between the clips, the match cut also invokes continuity between misery and its subsequent advantage taken by imperialist oppression (for example, by IMF or World Bank loans). This is further emphasized in the next shot, where we see a television commentary on a jewelry exhibition. An artificial hand is seen rotating mechanically on display there, holding gems from Colombia. At one point, the commentary says, they saw the precious gems of Latin America displayed in the settings worthy of their beauty. A similar match-cut can be seen before clips depicting bombing of Allendes Presidential palace

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Detached from referentiality, the fundamental link to the past is broken, and as a fiction, the ethnographic enters a different temporal schema, one based on metonymic combination rather than metaphor, symbolism, and narrativity. If metaphor implies a depth of meaning, metonymy takes place on the surface, constructing a language of appearances and signifiers. (Russell 1999: 258)

Here Russell does not take into account the role of the sound track in these recombinations. For example, in a sequence when attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro is narrated, imagery of different kinds of murder plots (I have mentioned some of those in another argument. We see a gas mask, a ball pen, a woman in bikini walking on the beach listening to a conch shell, etc.) Are juxtaposed one after another, Thus only at the level of picture, threatened blizzard of imagesrenders memory an inadequate means of organizing time,52 and presents the shock experience in a new form of representation. But we become aware of the specificity of the murder plots after their labeling by the factually correct voice over. Additionally, suspense music from a James Bond thriller plays throughout the sequence, finally synching with the image, as we see Sean Connery pointing a gun towards the audience, and hear licensed to kill in the background. Thus not only the familiar context of a James Bond thriller is referred to in this sequence, and used to string together disjoined found footage, but reciprocally the connoted failure of the murder plot is used to subvert the unshakable image of James Bond into one of paranoia. Thus the politics of Tribulation 99 is not a journey back to the pre-Griffithian actualite, or any resistance to metaphoric depth, but a ruptured sense of time trying to come in terms with itself, as a minority discourse.
by the army backed by CIA. There a character from a movie clip throws a grenade into an entrance like I have mentioned before. There is a series of match-cuts of explosions from there leading up to ouster of Allende.
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(Paraphrasing Russell) narrative on the other hand is representation of chronological time.

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I would like to point out to a more self-conscious use of metonymy within the diegesis of Tribulation in this context. After the episode of overthrow of the Allende government, an intertitle states, the great white brotherhood. Hereafter we see alternative shots of speeches by Pinochet- the Chilean dictator, Henry Kissinger- the US secretary of state, his old Nazi friend Walter Ralf (the voiceover reports he has been appointed the chief of DINA, the right wing internal security force supporting Pinochet. It also mentions another WW 2 anti-communist leader Harry Chandelmann who had been summoned from Guatemala for more immediate duties in Chile.) In between these clips, we see profile close-ups of DINA soldiers wearing helmets and expressionless face. After the voiceover finishes, in a black and white clip, army boots march diagonally across the screen. Low angle framing of the shot detach the boots from their perspective. In the next shot, the impact of the previous shot is further emphasized as we see only one boot marching slowly towards the camera. Laura Mulvey wrote in her famous essay, one part of a fragmented body destroys Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative; it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen. (Mulvey 1975: 309) A similar effect, magnified by a strong metonymic familiarity, totally de-humanizes those army men here. They look like ominous robots. Later, in another part of the film, a native Latin American is seen holding up a similar boot, presumably taken from a dead/wounded soldier, adding to the general theme of the film. Finally, as the last political/aesthetic strategy of Tribulation Ill discuss its usage of maps. From the time of early explorers, mapping has been a means of totalizing, visualizing and therefore controlling unknown space. Simon Ryan writes, 119

Imperial discourse, indeed, looks in a mirror; everything it sees is a reflection of itself. For the other what it constructs is merely a reflection of repressed desires and urgesThe symbolic order driving this essentially solipsistic construction of difference works to deny the castration threat difference implies. (Ryan 1996: 200)

The solipsistic drive that we see in Tribulation in installing puppet governments all over Latin America and labeling of its opponents as aliens thus gets translated in the film as a cartographic gaze. There are several shots of maps or birds eye view of different parts of South America. Baldwin has those maps abruptly rotate at times, giving a catastrophic effect. We see a hand moving over a map in front of the camera- precisely inducing the very castration effect cartography wants to avoid, and alien radars or apocalyptic ocean waves are superimposed on these maps. However, what I would call the best magic realist subversion of the cartographic gaze happens in the movie without any direct reference to a physical map. The sequence leading to depiction of Chilean President Allendes election to power starts with inter-titles saying Easter island mystery. Rocks shaped like human faces are seen on the sea shore of Easter Island and the voice over comments, specially bred in a super secret lab on Easter Island, their cybernetic replicants are insinuated into critical positions of power. After this, following a montage of complex technological steps we see a process of brain mapping. Images of human brains (which look like maps) get manipulated by electronic signaling and turn into metallic circuits featuring beeping lights, but still look like brains. These brains are now transplanted into heads of androids, which are then given human forms by hair transplant and face grafting. This process follows clips from Sci-fi films once more, where human beings are brainwashed in alien electronic chambers, and come out with the same look, but a different mind. The sequence is accompanied by Sci-fi/horror music. This is 120

followed by another inter-title axis shift, and then we see President Allende giving a speech on TV, whose subtitles read, I have no alternatives. Only by riddling me with bullets can they end my determination. The voice over contradicts this inter-title stating, The so called Salvador Allende, proceeds to disrupt the economy, the resulting chaos shifts the earths polar axis. This is followed by two shots of hands fiddling with magnets and compass, then a three dimensional map of the rotating earths magnetic field. The voice over asserts here, the earth stops moving, and the rotating globe on the map actually stops. From a dominant perspective, what is disturbing in this sequence is the possibility of an alternative mapping of the same body. That puts into question the sacrosanct status of technologies of mapping, namely compass and therefore its assumptions about geography. Technological threat in a bi-polar world armed with nuclear weapons is a reality. Thus in the delirium of paranoia over election of a Marxist President in Chile (which is close to the US and not in Eastern Europe) and his decision to nationalize the industries (which affects the US investments in the country adversely), economics, geography and science fiction get conflated. The paranoia is underscored by the rigor and precision with which the idea of an alternative mapping is constructed, and juxtaposed around the newsreel footage of the Allende speech. Now, I will discuss some of the narrative strategies from City of God and try to draw a parallel between the two films.

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City of God (Brazil, 2002)

City of God is a film about a Brazilian favela of the same name in Rio, through the period of 1960s till an unspecified present53. The title refers to the medieval Catholic priest St. Augustines famous book, where he does a comparative study of the heavenly and the earthly city, since the beginning of the world. At one level, the history of urbanization in Brazil follows a similar trajectory. Owing to its colonial and neo-colonial history, Brazil has the second widest economic disparity in the world between the rich and the poor. During the international urbanist movement led by Le Corbusier immediately after WW2, Brasilia finally offered the modernist planners the best settings for the ideal city: it could be built from ground up, in an absolutely open and empty space-a nothingness well suited to the early 20th century urban utopia (Carvalho 1991: 359). As a result, ultra-modern architecture became part of cities like Rio and Sao Paolo. On the other hand, the uneven forces of modernization attracted large groups of migrant laborers to the cities, for whom make-shift housing projects like the City of God had to be built, which did not have the basic civic facilities like sewage, electricity or paved roads. Thus in the post-dictatorial urban Brazil, there was development of constitution based on rule of law and democratic

A number of personal stories get intertwined in the movie, under the general theme of gradual criminalization of the favela, as drug business flourish and consequent gang wars break out. A group of children grow up in this atmosphere both as witness and players in the process. Violence rob them their innocence before they are even ten, and gang members consider themselves lucky, if they live till twenty. There are three principal threads in the film, namely the story of Lil Ze (the leader of one of the gangs in the City), Knockout Kned (leader of Lil Zes opponent gang), and Rocket, an aspiring photographer from the favela, through whom the story of the city is narrated. Lil Ze has his childhood friend Benny as his companion, while Knockout Kned is assisted by another gangster, Carrot. Initially Lil Ze starts an organized drug trade in the city, after killing off his predecessors, but soon faces challenge from Carrot and Knockout Kned after he rapes the latters girlfriend. All these characters except Rocket die by the end of the movie and Carrot gets arrested following encounters with the police. Rocket finds a job in a newspaper as a trainee photo-journalist.

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values as parallel moves of urban planning, but the civil component of citizenship remained seriously impaired, owing to economic underdevelopment. This disjunction between politics and economics was bridged by systemic violence. As the state could not provide citizenship rights, and in many ways suppressed demands for it, it lost legitimacy as an institution of justice. This loss of legitimacy fueled criminalization of the poor, and mushrooming of illegal, parallel economies. That in turn required forceful regulating bodies, like the armed gangs. Since even these gangs failed to have total control over their business54 (since they have to expand according to Capitalist necessities), the cycle of violence proliferates (Holston 1999).55 The cycle of violence is summarized in one brilliant sequence of the film. One of the protagonists of City, Knockout Kned, in spite of his intention to live a non-criminal civic life in the favela, gets drawn into drug trade under unavoidable circumstances and as everybody else, is killed. The sequence where he makes the decision to join a sympathetic drug dealer starts as follows. Lil Ze (Kneds rival) sends a messenger boy to Carrot (the sympathetic drug dealer and leader of Lil Zes rival gang before Kned) proposing Ze would strike a truce with Carrot if Carrot kills Kned. The trajectory of the message from Ze to Kned through the messenger kid and Carrot is constructed through two false matches where Ze and the kid repeat the same dialogue. The camera pans along the eye line of Ze to show the kid, but when we see him, he is already at Carrots den
Like in Tribulation, usage of maps to depict this crisis in the City of God is significant. To describe the power relations of the city, three mapped territories controlled by three groups are seen in the movie. While describing each group their territory is outlined with fluorescent color, while the rest of the map is left dark.
55 54

For a detailed discussion of this process, see James Holston and Teresa P.R. Caldeira. Democracy and Violence in Brazil Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (Oct. 1999) 691-729

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conveying the message. Carrot enters the frame through a reverse/oblique pan in the next shot. Hearing the proposal he looks off-screen in a parallel direction as Ze in the earlier shot, and following another pan along Carrots eye line we see a closet, from where Kned comes out. Realizing Kned is already under Carrots protection the messenger kid flees the room pursued by one of Carrots associates. Meanwhile, Carrot asks Kned to make a decision about his future. Here, as Kned contemplates, the frame splits unevenly, approximating with the spatial proportion between the room and the favela alleys. In the narrower frame, the kid is being pursued. In the wider frame there is a close-up of Kned, deciding between two choices of eventual death. As the kid looses the race and gets dragged back to Carrots room, the split is resolved in a push cut. Kned decides to join Carrot. I will argue social production of the favela space is recreated cinematically in this sequence. The combination of pan, false matches and the split frame resemble the flow of dispossession in this case Kneds dispossession of citizenry that propels the parallel economy of drug trade, the alternative space for capitalism proper. While the trajectory of camera movement resembling the letter z gives an impression of a magical, three dimensional volume, repetition of dialogue connecting disparate places in the continuum of false matches foregrounds the unequivocal brutality of the process of accumulation, that renders all the involved characters eventual victims56. That way, this is also an

As we learn through the film, the surplus of drug trade is used for buying weapons mediated by the police. While gunfights in the favela cleanse people already excluded from the legal sphere of larger society, the surplus eventually makes it way back to places manufacturing Uzis and AK 47. In the documentary accompanying the DVD of City, the former police chief of Rio makes this point. Zizek has written in this context that, Although it is global, encompassing all worlds, [capitalism] sustains a stricto sensu worldless ideological constellation, depriving the great

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example of annihilation of space by time57 which culminates in the split frame. The split momentarily ruptures the symbolic order of the image. Like the disunity of space, Kned is torn here between two subject positions, the citizen and the criminal. At another level, it draws a parallel between the kid and Kned, alluding to the broader social dynamics of the favela. While Kned looses his defense against criminalization in the room, the kid looses its innocence in the alley, realizing the fragility of Zes protection. In this referential de-corporealization, we confront the traumatized absent subject58, Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer, who has to be disavowed for the unity of the image once more, when the subject position for Kned as the criminal has been restored, and the new spatial order has been established. Favelas do not match the idyllic image of St. Augustines City of God. Rather they resemble what he called earthly city described as follows, the earthly city, which shall not be everlasting (for it will no longer be a city when it has been committed to the extreme penalty), has its good in this world, and
majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a civilization, for a specific cultural-symbolic world,

but the name for a neutral economico-symbolic machine. (Zizek 2006: 318)
Marx defined this as a characteristic of capitalism, since capitalism brings dramatic changes to places through rationalization/re-organization of space for swifter circulation of capital. Castells has argued that within the sphere of network society this dynamics has changed, since with integration of the global financial market bulk of investments are made based on speculations of future return (as we have seen through the recent collapse of the housing bubble in the US), whereby space eats time (Castells 1996). The dynamics I have described in this therefore a phenomenon of marginal capitalism. Zizek writes, the Real is the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access, the Thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first standpoint to the second (Zizek 2006: 26).
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rejoices in it with such joy as such things can afford. But as this is not a good which can discharge its devotees of all distresses, this city is often divided against itself by litigations, wars, quarrels, and such victories as are either life-destroying or shortlived. For each part of it that arms against another part of it seeks to triumph over the nations through itself in bondage to vice. (Book XV. CHAP. 4 of The Conflict And Peace Of The Earthly City59)

But it is also a city where lack of state support and violence make people depend on miracles for survival. This is the reason the city is known by its dwellers as City of Goda place where miracles happen, where the real and the magical co-exist. The characters try to solve the miracle/mystery of the city weaving their own outsiders perspectives in the movie. For example, Clipper, a member of the relatively amateurish gang tender trio from the 60s, develops faith in God after his life is unexpectedly saved during police firing.60 Lil Ze, on the other hand, visits a shaman who worships the devil, on his 18th birthday. In a room lit with candles, the smoking shaman (whose face we never see fully, like the under represented Third World in Tribulation. He is the pre-Christian trace in postcolonial Brazil that gives Brazilian capitalism its specific character. Therefore he is like
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See, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/aug-city2.html, accessed on December 9, 2005.

The Tender Trio was being pursued by the police after a motel hold up. As the cops chase a suspect, Clipper walks past them in a gentle pace, posing as an innocent civilian. Another boy of the same age, who is actually a worker according to the police, starts running in anticipation of a shootout, and gets killed. The cops realize their mistake and decide to make the kid a posthumous hoodlum. A bullet hits a rear view mirror of a bike after several deflections off the imposing walls of the favela alleys, right next to Clipper (the effect is induced by virtuoso rapid pace, discontinuous cutting). Clipper keeps walking without blinking his eyes, limping towards the sound of an echoing church sermon, which can be heard in the background throughout the sequence. Along with this contrapuntal use of sound and the sepia tone, the sequence becomes magical with a piece of retrospective information. What appears to be Clippers disguise during the sequence turns out to be truth, as we are told he has become a priest. This episode, along with two other stories, marks the end of a generation in the history of teen hoodlums in City of God. This was a time when people were still nostalgic about integration into the civil society like in the pre-capitalist times, and crime was a pastime. Two of the three members of the tender trio die nurturing that hope, but Clipper survives.

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the metonymical found footage, existing only in the realm of the signifier. This is the only time, we have access to him in the film) suggests why live in the city of God, where God has abandoned you? He gives Lil Ze an amulet that would give him power, changes Lil Dices name to Lil Ze and warns him not to fornicate wearing it. Later in the film Lil Ze rapes Knockout Kneds girlfriend wearing the amulet. More importantly he fornicates with the rules of consumption/cannibalism by not finishing off Knockout Kned at that very moment, and thus scripts the beginning of his own end. Lil Ze starts off as the epitomic lumpen proletariat. As it is narrated in the film, he is ugly. Lacking the symbolic capital of look, he has to force or pay for womens attention, unlike his rival Knockout Kned who is handsome. He could either perish, or defy the laws of God, by making his own. Therefore he rebelled against his elder brothers, and made the current laws of the city through cannibalism61. He brings to the city the rules of killing as a means of accumulation. In other words, organized capitalism entered the City of God holding Lil Zes hand as he transformed himself from a robber to drug dealer62. Before him people who had money used to be in the drug business, now people with more guns ran it.
In the Brazilian context, cannibalism has two connotations. According to Oswald de Andrades Movimento Antropofago (Cannibalist Movement) of the twenties, cannibalism is somewhat similar to Homi Bhabhas hybridity, where the colonized appropriates the dominant culture and through consumption and critical elaboration transforms it. During its later revival in the midsixties it came to mean simply consumerism. As Joaquim Pedro De Andrade wrote, those who can, eat others through their consumption of products, or even more directly in sexual relationships. (Stam 1995: 82) In case of City of God, both of them apply. According to the first, an organized business network develops without the initial capital investment. According to the second, as gang war with Knockout Kned starts in the City, more drugs means more guns, and more guns mean more drugs. If Lil Ze works like the blind eye of profit motive, then his alter ego Benny acts like the welfare state of this little universe. He deters Lil Ze from killing people indiscriminately and maintains a balance of power among the hoods. His death symbolically marks the beginning of an anarchy, which pushes the City towards total criminalization at the end of the film.
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Knockout Kned on the other hand is the marginalized civil citizen. He worked in the army and later as a bus conductor before joining Carrots gang. He looked for legal avenues of prosperity and lived in the city with his extended family for want of a better job. In his first meeting with Rocket as a bus conductor, he said, Im a peaceful person, and I dont like to fight. But if I have to At this point the frame freezes and the narrator forecasts his future as a fighter63. He couldnt find a better job soon enough and his symbolic mainstream stability the family and a girlfriend attracted the wrath of Ze. Kned retaliated for the first time when his house was attacked by Ze, after raping his girlfriend. Eventually Kned got devoured by the spiraling violence, emerging as the leader of Zes rival gang, perpetually struggling to retain his humane values. These multiple layers of realities are strung together in City by the voice over of Rocket, the budding photographer of the City. At a time when boys of his age group start craving guns to taste power, Rocket became interested in cameras. As violence accelerated and death became everyday reality in the City, Rocket became interested in preserving traces of life, questioning the velocity of narrative temporality64with interiority of moments. Details of his photographs foreground the database structure of the film revealing alternative connotations65. From his perspective, the film takes shape as the matrix of

This is one example re-contextualization and de-contextualization takes place simultaneously. The freeze frame ruptures the linear narrative of Rockets story in reference to the coming catastrophe, but opens up a new thread of consciousness in the narrative. The precarious nature of linear temporality is depicted numerous times in the film. To give one example, after Shaggys dramatic death, his apparently emotional girlfriend is shown in the arms of another guy later in the film without any commentary, almost like in a documentary footage. For example, in one of his first photographs of the film he asks Tiago, then boyfriend of Angelica the girl Rocket secretly coveted- to step back composing for a group photo on the beach. This move put Tiagos face in shadow, next to lustrous Angelica in the frame. His relative
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episodic micro-narratives crisscrossing each other, mapping the volatile social space. Each segment, like in Tribulation, is marked by intertitles. As part of the self-reflexive database narrative structure the segments share same footage, and re-contextualize each other as they interweave. For example, The Story of Tender Trio ends when Rockets elder brother Goose apparently leaves City to avoid arrest. The segment ends in a freeze frame as Goose starts running after snatching some money from Lil Dice and Benny. The sequence returns in The Story of Lil Ze, when the shot continues beyond the freeze, and Lil Dice shoots Goose after offering him a gun for the road. Thus two functionally different time periods- of unorganized petty crime and organized drug trade- are punctuated through the trope of recycled temporal overlap. Like Herbert, Rocket is socially awkward. He lacks the aggression like most people around him and fails to be a competent criminal. Like Herbert, this slowness (he is scared of getting shot) gives him the perspective to see life from a critical distance. City of God is not a found footage film, but its relationship with the archive is interesting. The film is based on a novel by Paulo Lins based on experience of the favela where he lived. When asked, the director of the Fernando Meirelles described his style as hyper neo realism. Although there is no newsreel footage used in the main body of the film, during the credits names and photographs of the actors and the real life characters they portray feature simultaneously. At the end of credits, real life Knockout Kned is seen giving a television interview about gang wars in a newsreel clip. He utters exactly the same words as the flamboyant fictional version used in the film. Finally, we see a written text saying, based on a true story. Thus, the truth claim that comes before the credits in
slowness and timidity compared to the hoods and the derivative drive towards alternative meaning fuels Rockets silent intervention in City.

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Tribulation, comes at the very end in City of God, and in both cases, they frame the texts. In both cases the resultant distantiation is a Brechtian intervention. The genre - fiction or avant-garde - becomes a matter of secondary importance in this context. In context of found footage films, Katherine Russell has pointed out that, De-contextualization is the means by which the archive offers up history as a nonnarrative series of bodies and events (and)the traces of another historical narrative (challenges) the ideologies of capitalism grounded in bodies of time. (Russell 1999: 258-259)

I would like to add to this assertion that, de-contextualization alone does not form any argument against dominant meta-narratives. Formation of any argument involves narrativization of the indexical traces found in found footage or photographs. Thus while neither Tribulation nor City of God provides us with narrative closures, they do provide contexts to look at images, and connect them to larger political questions. This becomes possible through a dialogical relationship with linear narrative only. Both these films use the power of narrative against itself, through spatialization of time.

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Chapter 2 References
Badiou, Alain. The Century. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 126-133. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. Bordwell, David. "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures." In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 1734. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Carvalho, Jose Jorge de. Review: The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia by James Holston. Current Anthropology 32, no.3 (June 1991): 359-362. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Colas, Santiago. The Third World in Jamesons Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism Social Texts 31/32, (Third World and Postcolonial Issues, 1992) 258270. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Dulac, Germaine. "The Avant-Garde Cinema." In The Avant-Garde Film, edited by P. Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press, 1978. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1989 . . The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford university Press, 2003. Holston, James and Teresa P.R. Caldeira. "Democracy and Violence in Brazil." Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1999): 691-729. 131

Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. . On Magic Realism in Films Critical Inquiry 12, no. 2 (Winter 1986) 301-325. . Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. . The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Kinder, Marsha. "Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buuel's Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative." Film Quarterly 55, no. 4 (June 2002): 2-15. Lem, Stanislaw. "Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature." Science Fiction Studies 1, no. 4 (1974). Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital . New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976. Murphet, Julian. "Pitiable or Political Animals?" SubStance 117, no. 37(3) (2008): 97116. Osterweil, Ara. "Film Review: Cache." Film Quarterly 59, no. 4 (Summer, 2006): 35-39. Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The work of film in the age of video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Ryan, Simon. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Pimps Up, Hos Down:Hip-Hops Hold on Young Black Women. New York: NYU Press, 2007. Sontag, Susan. "Notes on Camp." In Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell Publishing, 1966. Stam, Robert and Randal Johnson (Ed). Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 132

Stam, Robert. Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

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Chapter 3

Of City, Body and Children

In City of God, Rocket sees a camera for the first time when the last member of the tender trio- the amateur criminal group- is killed by the police while trying to escape the favela with his girlfriend, in search of a new life. This moment, when annihilation of the dreaming body makes way for more entrenched and organized crime in the city is crucial for the new Third Cinema. It is the time when the (dead) body is rendered transparent, transformed into an image ready for media consumption by the photo-journalist. It is also the time when Rocket starts using still photographs as punctuations in the frenetic narrative of violence, as nodes from which alternative meaning can emerge, giving the narrative critical interiority. Before coming back to the significance of bodies in political cinema critical of neoliberalism, Ill briefly discuss the discursive evolution of body as a socio-cultural artifact in post/modernity. According to Cartesian dualism mind was an immaterial thing substantiated by thought which constitutes subjectivity. Being ontologically distinct from the material body, the mind or animal spirit causally interacted with the body and in the process, the body, as a subordinate entity extended in space, manifested the workings of animal spirit. The sovereignty of the individual subject was paralleled here by positionality of the body in absolute time and space. Perceptions of

subjectivity/physicality based on Newtonian time/space were challenged among many others by structuralists. It came to be generally understood that, The body isorganically/biologically/naturally incomplete: It is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering and long134

term administration, regulated in each culture and epoch by what Foucault has called the micro-technologies of power. (Grosz 1992: 243) While Lacan pointed out that the formative psychic unity was bounded by the epidermic surface of the body (as well as through the intervention of the [M]others body), Foucault argued that with rise of the modern state since 18th century bodies were made over into docile bodies by invasive disciplinary apparatus. Biopower, Foucault argued was a practice that treated the social body as the object of government, rather than the individuals. It acted in preventive fashion through regulative mechanisms that are able to account for aleatory and unpredictable phenomenon. The legitimacy of biopower derives from valorization of productivity of power that is partly realized through the policies that allow for the formation of the individual (through the disciplinary normalization plans) and bodies. Foucault wrote, The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forcesA body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. The celebrated automata, on the other hand, were not only a way of illustrating an organism; they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power. (Foucault 1995: 136) And later, Through this new technique of subjection a new object was being formed; slowly, it superseded the mechanical body the body composed of solids and assigned movements, the image of which had for so long haunted those who dreamt of disciplinary perfection. The new object is the natural body, the bearer of forces and the seat of durationIn becoming the target for new mechanisms of power, the body offered up to new forms of knowledge. It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority, rather than imbued with animal spiritsThis is the body Guibert discovered in his critique of excessively artificial movements. In the exercise that is imposed upon it and which it resists, the body brings out its essential correlations and spontaneously rejects the incompatible [emphasis mine]. (Foucault 1995: 155) 135

Thus the mechanism Foucault describes here is, in short, manipulation/control through naturalization, a process that neutralizes the unstructured animal spirit that is incompatible with the order of power. Foucaults concept of docile body is important for our purpose since as we have seen in chapter 1, in the emancipatory discourse of Third Cinema there was tremendous investment in human capital. Distinctive/repressive separation of the colonized space made the colonized subject question hegemonic values/equilibrium of the metropole and as Fanon described, rebellion against domesticating values at least initially took a corporeal expression. To reiterate Fanons illustration one more time, The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality (Fanon 1963: 15). As opposed to docile bodies that were political puppets, the rebellious body craved muscular transgression that was also a correlative of decolonization1. The idea of bodily transgression of Fanon, especially in its affinity

towards spatial fluidity is similar to Bakhtins idea of the Grotesque Body. Stam writes, Against the static, classic, finished beauty of antique sculpture, Bakhtin counterposed the mutable body, the passing of one form into another, reflecting the ever incompleted character of being. The bodys central principle (like that of language) is growth and change; by exceeding its limits, the body expresses its
The post-structuralist thrust of Fanon is underscored by the fact that enraging contemporary Marxists and the socialist camp, he identified the revolutionary classes in terms of distance from power in colonial regimes. For example, he wrote, It has been pointed out repeatedly that, in colonial territories, the proletariat is the core of the colonized people most pampered by the colonial regime. The embryonic proletariat of the towns is relatively privileged. In capitalist countries, the proletariat has nothing to lose; it has everything to win in the long run. In colonized countries the proletariat has everything to lose. (Wallerstein 2000: 17) Instead, Fanon placed his hope on casual, unskilled migrant laborers and seasonal workers in agriculture whom he called lumpen proletariat and peasants respectively.
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essence. The grotesque body is not a rigid langue, but a parole in constant semiosis. As a shifting series of vortexes of energy, the site of unanchored polysemy and radical differentiality, the grotesque body is given to excess, and thus to the gigantism and hyperbole of its artistic forms its outsized noses and swollen buttocks, and the masks that emphasize metamorphosis and the violation of natural boundaries. (Stam 1992: 158-9)

We have seen in chapter 1 that this concept of mutability becomes a recurrent theme in Third Cinema, where bodies signify a larger than life utopia. Bodies as metonymy of the welfare state multiply ceaselessly in cuts from protagonist Ranjit to wide shots of processions and crowds in Interview, Manuels embodied run culminates in the resplendent sea of prosperity in Black God, tableau shots of gun wielding Paulo envelop the nostalgic dystopia of Land in Anguish, and the nameless young Naxalite narrates his own death in Calcutta 71. Bakhtins emphasis on the ceaseless metamorphosis between death and renewal as a shared collective human reality is further pronounced in the contemplative duree over the photographed dead body of Che - his open eyes frontally addressing the audience, accompanied by the voice-over to choose death is to choose life- in the concluding shot of Hour. Sacrifice of the mortal/defiant body rhetorically opens itself to the larger life force in the sequence, and in the process becomes immortalized in the image celebrating the vivacious gaze. Disconnection with the masses on the other hand renders the handsome body of Sergio paralytic, imploding within its skeleton in Memories. Mutability in the above examples violates corporeal boundary, but at another level connects individuals to a larger social entity, the developmental state, which in turn becomes the legitimizing factor in social production of corporeality, the corporeality Fanon described as the new man, new humanity.

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The question of an imagined, de-colonized, social space corresponding to rebellious bodies brings us to the second theme of this chapter, i.e. the city. Grosz wrote, the built environment provides the context and coordinates for most contemporary Western, and today, Eastern forms of the body, even for rural bodies insofar as the twentieth century defines the countryside, the rural, as the underside or raw material for urban development. (Grosz 1992: 242)

The projected decolonized space perceived as the foundation for the emerging nationstates in the first generation of Third cinema was rhetorically non-urban, or at least contextualized by the underdeveloped natural economies, since the urban space in a colonial or neo-colonial context was structurally integrated with circuits of colonialism. While in some of the films we have discussed (like Black God) the developmental politics directly played out from perspective of a peasant consciousness and as battle of landscapes (between the backlands and the sea), in others, where city is the site of contention, the non-urban functions as the critical outside. In Hour there are sequences of police brutalities or assault on workers demonstrations, but when Solanas introduces Buenos Aires to the audience, it is narrated as home for foreign banks and the place where the pro-status quo, timid petty bourgeoisie live. The real narrative of poverty and mal-nutrition on the other hand plays out in the countryside. Similarly, what makes processions in the Mrinal Sen movies incisive2 is the presence of tribals wielding bows and arrows. As we have seen earlier, Teshome Gabriel made distinctions between First and Third World film theory/narrative in terms of different family matrix and face to face tellings embedded in oral traditions as opposed to written, linear narratives. Gabriels
Calcutta being the most politicized city of India, political demonstrations are not out of the ordinary spectacle otherwise.
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concept of family matrix is based on Metzs argument that film spectatorship is structurally voyeurism, analogous to the mechanism of Freudian primal scene based on separation of children and adult space3 within the western family (a correlative of separation between private and public space). The thrust of Gabriels argument is similar to Jamesons idea of the political unconscious in the sense Jameson also argued that while the radical split between private and public, or between the personal and the political made the modernist novel inert, it was lack of alienation- typical of a capitalist society - and immediacy of experience that made Third world literature political. To the extent this public/private division does not exist in contemporary global capitalism which actually functions on a planetory scale and highly mediated face to face telling, has been taken over by interactive media (internet chat, social network websites, etc.), the body politic of perception of the body as microcosm of a collective based on immediacy of experience is not sustainable anymore. In fact mushrooming of innumerable real and virtual communities as potential niche markets is an integral part of flexible accumulation we have discussed in chapter 2. Rather, mutability of the body is part of dominant discourse of late Capitalism. Being part of the interactive, increasingly automated built environment structured by information flows, human beings become part of what Deleuze calls the humans-machines systems.4 Modern biology translates organisms as problems of genetic coding a move parallel to coding in communication sciences, a
For details see, Christian Metz. The imaginary signifier: psychoanalysis and the cinema. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). Deleuze writes, cybernetic and informational machines form a third stage that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible humans-machines systems replace the non-recurrent and non-reversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action. (Deleuze 1987: 458)
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move Haraway describes as, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange (Haraway 1991: 164). The human body like any other object loses its integrity subordinated to these automated expert systems. Haraway writes, Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so wellThe cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations. (Haraway 1991: 163) The most prominent component of network society, the cyberspace, is a world without bodies5. The absence of physical presence on the web enables exploration of multiple selves simultaneously as well as morphing of selves with little effort. What was known as multiple personality disorder when psychoanalysis commanded respect in the academia therefore is the norm now for netizens who cycle through society of minds and learn how to "stand in the spaces between selves and still feel one, to see the multiplicity and still feel a unity. (Turkle 1999: 645)" In the examples I have cited in this chapter, it is the metonymic presence of the rebellious body that makes imagination of an alternative
Technology reduces the body to flesh here. Douglas Thomas describes how hackers exist in the cyberspace as virtual beings. He describes the incorporeal nature of this being citing an example from William Gibsons 1984 novel Neuromancer. The novels protagonist Case, a computer cowboy, develops neurological problems that prevent him from interfacing with the computer matrix. Gibson describes the protagonists now defunct relationship with the technological as follows, For Case, who had lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars hed frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Thomas 2004: 221) Elsewhere, Zizek has compared surfers to the figure of astro-physicist Stephen Hawkings suffering from motor- neuro degeneration, whose imagination travels across the universe, but physical movement is limited to finger movements on the keyboard.
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space possible. The exploration of desire manifested in the distributed identity on the internet on the other hand is contingent upon scotomization of the body. Haraway points out, In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the western sense a final irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the Wests escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the Western, humanist sense depends on the myth of original unityrepresented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and MarxismThe cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. (Haraway 1991: 150-1)

Deleuze was probably the most forceful advocate of the ideology of decorporealization among modern philosophers. Deeply influenced by the events of May 1968 like the French new wave directors, Deleuze was responding (and over-reacting) to the rigidity/homogeneity of Fordism when he wrote The body without organ is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires. (Deleuze 1987: 165) Deleuzian politics of desire is directed against the state apparatus6 and its overcoding mechanisms. Desire for Deleuze is a notion of positivity that constitutes machines (like the body without organs) that produce the real without mediation7. While overcoding is a process of

Deleuze defines the state apparatus as the assemblage of reterritorialization effectuating the overcoding machine within given limits and under given conditions. The most we can say is that the State Apparatus tends increasingly to identify with the abstract machine it effectuates. (Deleuze 1987: 223)
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Criticizing the Freudian idea of desire being the chain of signifier deferring an original sense of lack, Deleuze wrote, Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by detour through suffering; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire was filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. (Deleuze 1987: 155)

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spatialization, Deleuzian life/BwO/ becoming is function of duration/ personal temporality and rhizomatic movement. Therefore as May writes, Incorporeality isquality of life. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze discusses the Stoic distinction between "states of things," which are corporeal and of the present moment, and "events," which are incorporeal and occur as becomings in time (LS 4-6). Life is concerned not so much with the physical as with what occurs between bodies, what changes pass across the surfaces of things that are not material but immaterial transformations. (May 1991: 26) Deleuzian body without organ has striking similarity with Castells description of network space, or with nodes connecting the global network space to be precise. Deleuze writes, A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and ciculate. Still the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with fantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. (Deleuze 1987: 153) In other words, it is a mutable entity without context, facilitating and producing flows within a network outside which nothing exists. It exists only as long as it remains part of the flow, as the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it). (Deleuze 1987: 154) considering the above similarity Zizek has called Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism. Zizek writes, The much celebrated Spinozan imitatio affecti, the impersonal circulation of affects bypassing persons, is the very logic of publicity, of video clips, and so on, where what matters is not the message about the product, but the intensity of the transmitted affects and perceptions. Furthermore, recall hardcore pornography scenes in which the very unity of the bodily self- experience is magically dissolved so that the spectator perceives the bodies as a kind of vaguely coordinated agglomerate of partial objects. Is this logic where we are no longer dealing with 142

persons interacting, but with the multiplicity of intensities, of places of enjoyment, of bodies as a collective/impersonal desiring machine not eminently Deleuzian? (Zizek 2004: 293)

Deleuze nevertheless has been an immensely influential figure among scholars in last twenty years. I have briefly discussed in chapter 2 how identity based politics that find representation in the late capitalist mediascape run the risk of being assimilated as correlatives of niche markets. Ill try to elaborate my point now through a quick look at Elizabeth Groszs body politics in corporeal feminism as a case study. Proponents of corporeal feminism agrue sexual difference has been produced through negation of the body with the assumption that the body is feminine - the other of thought - in western metaphysics. Corporeal feminists therefore contend that body is a crucial site of gender construction. Grosz proposes her model of corporeality examining cultural meanings associated with control of bodily fluids, i.e. pollution of the body. Bodily fluids attest to the permeability of the body, and the control of their flow is a matter of vigilance. As Mason-Grant writes, Bodily fluids thereby affront the aspiration toward control and selfcontainment and refuse consciousness its priority over body. Bodily fluids contravene traditional notions of autonomy and self-identity that rely on metaphors of containment. (Mason-Grant 1997: 215) Grosz argues that that while male seminal fluid is primarily understood as the causal agent, transmitted through erection and ejaculation, womens bodily fluids are conceptualized as Passive: leaking, uncontrolable, seeping. Grosz argues that womens bodies are thus marked as inferior in terms of self-control and autonomy. Inverting this hierachy where men have cast out liquidity from their self-representations and projected 143

it onto women's representations, Grosz proposes a body politics of open materiality, a set of (possibly infinite) tendencies and potentialities which may be developed, yet whose development will necessarily hinder or induce other developments and other trajectories" (Grosz 1994: 191). Grosz argues that becoming woman means being incorporeal, defying the norms of organisms. The unity of self that constitutes subjectivity is constituted by bodily sexual differentiation; therefore the alterity of that difference emerges in her account as the very possibility and process of [feminine] embodiment. (Grosz 1994: 209) Although Grosz questions the unity of self, she accepts the construction of stable, hetero-normative bodily contours relying upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and impermeability, as Butler has pointed out.8 In spite of claims otherwise, the body remains a pre-discursive entity for her, upon which culture is inscribed. However, in her projection of male-female binary opposition in terms of unity/multiplicity, she repeats the Deleuzian dyad of tree and rhizome9, and at another level, logics of Fordism and flexible accumulation

Butler writes, Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively re-inscribe the boundaries of the body along new cultural lines. Anal sex among men is an example, as is the radical re-membering of the body in Wittigs The Lesbian Body. (Butler 1999: 169) Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. (Deleuze 1987: 7) The concept of corporeal open materiality is derived from Deleuzes concept of BwO. Deleuze wrote, we treat the BwO as the full egg before extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movement involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it changes gradient. No organ is constant as regards either function or positionsex organs sprout anywhererectums open, defecate and closethe entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments. (Deleuze 1987: 153)
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respectively. Thus, the feminine embodiment advocated by Grosz in a way is the feminist acknowledgement of the late capitalist dynamics. Significantly, Grosz is not interested in struggles of any other group or the general category of human. While accepting the broader premise of Deleuze, Grosz critics the broader scope of Deleuzian multiplicity as, The presumption that womens molar struggles for identity are merely a stage or stepping stone in a broader struggle must be viewed with great suspicion, for Deleuze and Guattari begin to sound alarmingly similar to a number of (male) political groups that have supported feminism on condition that it be regarded as a stage, phase, element, or subdivision of a broader cause. These are very common claims, claims which have been used to tie women to struggles that in fact have little to do with them [sic], or rather, to which women have been tied through a generalized humanity which in no way represents their interests, which is a projection or representation of mens specific fantasies about what it is to be human. (Grosz 1994: 179)

On the other hand, the embeddedness of Groszs position becomes clearer when she precludes any possibility of structural social exclusion in her formulation of body-city relationships. Grosz writes, If bodies are not culturally pregiven, built environments cannot alienate the very bodies they produce. However, what may prove uncondusive is the rapid transformation of an environment, such that the body inscribed in one cultural miliue finds itself in another involuntarily. This is not to say there are not uncondusive city environments but rather there is nothing intrinsically alienating or unnatural about the city. The question is not simply how to distinguish condusive from uncondusive environments, but how different cities, different socio-cultural environments actively produce the bodies of their inhabitants as particular and distinctive types of bodies, as bodies with particular psychologies, affective lives, and concrete behaviors. (Grosz 1992: 249-50)

Grosz acknowledges after Paul Virilio that the information revolution has given cities hyper-real character where geographic space is replaced by screen interface, distance and depth is transformed into pure surface, and interpersonal relations are increasingly mediated by terminals and keyboards. She writes, 145

The increasing coordination and integration of microfunctions in the urban space creates the city not as a body-politic but as a political machine no longer a machine modeled on the engine but now represented by the computer, facsimile machinea machine that reduces distance and speed to immideate, instantaneous gratification. (Grosz 1992: 251)

Retrospectively, the concept of open materiality inalienable from this environment of instant gratification- where the body and city interface through the computer and bodys limbs and organs become interchangeable parts with the computer10 - is nothing short of consumerism. On the other hand, Grosz does not recognize that the informational city she describes is home for a minority population on a global scale. A vast majority of people fail to be part of it, and that is where our interest in this chapter lies. As Saskia Sassen has pointed out, the informational society does not exist in thin air. Information networks require physical infrastructure, for which globally connected cities play crucial roles as nodes in the network of flows (Sassen 2001). As centers of managerial upper functions of the global economy, mega-cities (currently with population over 20 million in 2010) like Tokyo, Sao Paulo, New York, Shanghai,

In context of Virtual reality Lev Manovich writes, The user was able to turn around and rotate her/his head in any direction but s/he could not move away from the machine more than few steps. Like today's computer mouse, the body was tied to the computer. In fact, the body was reduced to nothing else and nothing more than a giant mouse, or more, precisely, a giant joystick. Instead of moving a mouse, the user had to turn her/his own body. (Manovich 2002: 110) Manovich gives a movie example as an illustration of this mechanism, which can be also be read as a commentary on the relationship between Deleuzian BwO, the desiring machine, and the physical body. Manovich writes, The parodox of VR that requires the viewer to physically move in order to see an image (as opposed to remaining immobile) and at the same time physically ties her/him to a machine is interestingly dramatized in a "cybersex" scene in the movie Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992). In the scene, the heroes, a man and a woman, are situated in the same room, each fastened to a separate circular frame which allows the body to freely rotate 360 degrees in all directions. During "cybersex" the camera cuts back and forth between the virtual space (i.e., what the heroes see and experience) and the physical space. In the virtual world represented with psychedelic computer graphics, their bodies melt and morph together disregarding all the laws of physics, while in the real world each of them simply rotates within his/her own frame. (Manovich 2002: 110-11)

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Bombay, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Paris, Rio de Janeiro etc. define the new spatial form of the informational society. As Castells writes, Mega-cities articulate the global economy, link up the informational networks, and concentrate the worlds power. But they are also the depositories of all these segments of population who fight to survive, as well as those groups who want to make visible their dereliction, so that they will not die ignored by areas bypassed by communication networks. Mega-cities concentrate the best and the worstYet what is most significant about mega-cities is that they are connected externally to global networks and to segments of their own countries, while disconnecting local populations that are either functionally unnecessary or socially disruptive. I argue that this is true of New York as well as of Mexico or Jakarta. It is this distinctive feature of being globally connected and locally disconnected, physically and socially, that makes mega-cities a new urban form. (Castelles 1996: 436)

An illustration of the dynamics of global connection and local disconnection can be seen in the opening sequence of Pizza, Beer and Smokes (Argentina, 1998). The film is about teenage criminal underworld of Buenos Aires, personified by a group of teenage boys and Sandra, the pregnant girlfriend of Cordobes, one of the central characters of the film11. The opening sequence pays homage to Hour of the Furnaces in its staccato editing where snippets of the cityscape are intercut with title cards. The environment of crime is underscored in the first shot featuring police cars, sirens and off screen police radio transmission about a car with suspicious characters. This night shot is followed by a series of discontinuous, handheld shots of the city accompanied by title music. The shots contrast relative immobility of people including long queues, people on wheelchair, a lonely man presumably giving a political speech- with city traffic featuring different kinds of transportation cars, buses, trains and an airplane (signifying a global space).

Unable to make ends meet or secure steady employment, the group undertakes increasingly risky projects of robbery. Eventually, after a botched operation of robbing a night club where they are regularly denied entry as customers, they are pursued by the police and killed in the resulting gun battle.

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The movement of the vehicles is complemented by the pace of cuts and camera movement. Pizza quotes a sequence from Bunuels Los Olvidados (Mexico, 1950) later in the film where a group of teenagers rob a handicapped man, but this frenetic pace and in-your-face style framing, instead of static establishing shots - a consciousness of time as velocity rather than lived time, situates the film in contemporary global economy. Abetted by their cab driver boss, Cordobes and his friend Pablo rob a passenger in the sequence. The passenger was headed for the airport to catch an international flight, belonging to a world alien to these teenagers. Frustrated by the traffic jam, Cordobes makes the mistake of getting embroiled in an argument with another cab driver during the operation. Consequently, he is beaten up by the boss at the end of the day. The sequence exemplifies how Cordobes, moving from Cordoba to Buenos Aires in search of a better life is exploited by each of his boss and fails to figure out how to tread the streets of the city12, while the passenger in the cab has only illegal, chance encounter with him. The rate of global urbanization has surpassed all prediction in the last couple of decades. According to Mike Davis, the global rural population has reached its peak at 3.2 billion and will start shrinking after 2020. Global urban population on the other hand will absorb most of the population growth which is supposed to peak at 10 billion in 2050 (Davis 2004). Ninety five per cent of this population growth is happening in the developing world. While in some instances (like Shanghai) the population growth is accompanied by vast inflow of foreign capital and export oriented manufacturing boom, most of this urbanization is de-coupled from development or industrialization owing to ruined import

At one level Pizza is a road film, since most of its diegetic space is located on the streets, and the narrative develops through a series of unsuccessful travels. The botched journeys set up the relation of exclusion between the city and these characters.

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substitution industries, shrinking public sectors and centrality of the service sector in silicon capitalism. Instead, what Davis calls the perverse urban boom, is driven by IMF and WTO dictated agricultural de-regulation, consolidation of small into large holdings, internationally competitive mechanized agro-business and subsequent de-

peasantization, and in some cases civil wars and natural calamities like floods or draught. Thus, unlike the 19th and early 20th century urbanization in Europe, there is a huge inflow of surplus agricultural labor without the complementary urban pull through the industries13. Part of the surplus labor problem in Europe was solved through settler colonies and transfer of populations away from the metropole. In neo-liberalism by contrast, one of the major functions of the dilapidated nation-states has been regulating legal and illegal immigration14, further weakening labor resistance against increasingly mobile capital. As a result, Davis reports, The primary direction of both national and international interventions during the last twenty years has actually increased urban poverty and slums, increased exclusion and inequality, and weakened urban elites in their efforts to use cities as engines of growth. (Davis 2004: 11) Davis gives an interesting comparison of the historic periods before and after the rise of welfare state as follows, The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 is analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a third world in the first place, during the era of late Victorian imperialism (18701900). In the latter case, the forcible
Freddy, the protagonist of Bolivia is a representative figure of this population. Immigrants, legal or illegal, worked in the agricultural sector of Argentina until the 90s. Over last twenty years their destination has been the urban centers in Buenos Aires (Sorrensen 2009).
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Davis writes, Today surplus labor, by contrast, faces unprecedented barriersa literal great wall of high-tech border enforcementblocking large-scale migration to the rich countries. Likewise, controversial population resettlement programs in frontier regions like Amazonia, Tibet, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya produce environmental devastation and ethnic conflict without substantially reducing urban poverty in Brazil, China and Indonesia. (Davis 2004: 28)

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incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result, in Latin America as well, was rural semi-proletarianization: the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semipeasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence (As a result, the twentieth century became an age, not of urban revolutions as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.) Structural adjustment, it would appear, has recently worked an equally fundamental reshaping of human futures. As the authors of Slums conclude: instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade. The rise of [this] informal sector, they declare bluntly, is . . . a direct result of liberalization. (Davis 2004: 19) Fanons faith on the peasantry as more of a revolutionary class than the organized urban proletariat in a colonial context, its demand for a non-aligned nation state and rural landscape as the national imaginary can be explained by the above understanding. The new informal proletariat on the other hand does not have any rooted identity owing to displacement from the traditional environment, neither a new identity as part of the organized working class, and obviously they cannot be integrated into the skill based network space either as consumers or workers. The receding function of the welfare state therefore means that the labor power of one billion people is simply expelled from the world system. Davis writes, But if the informal proletariat is not the pettiest of petty bourgeoisies, neither is it a labor reserve army or a lumpen proletariat in any obsolete nineteenth-century sense. Part of it, to be sure, is a stealth workforce for the formal economy and numerous studies have exposed how the subcontracting networks of Wal-Mart and other mega-companies extend deep into the misery of the colonias and chawls. But at the end of the day, a majority of urban slum-dwellers are truly and radically homeless in the contemporary international economy. (Davis 2004: 26)

Not surprisingly, the dwelling place of this radical homeless- the slums are illegally occupied in eighty five per cent of cases in the developing world (Davis 2004: 15). Slums 150

of various nomenclatures constitute a third of global urban population. While national or local political machines acquiesce in informal settlements for electoral loyalties or extraction of bribes, without formal ownership slum dwellers are forced into quasi-feudal dependency on local officials. Disloyalty to patrons or real estate business interest often results in eviction of people or razing of entire districts15. Slums in most of the world define the dual-city landscape. Davis writes, The building blocks of this slum planet, paradoxically, are both utterly interchangeable and spontaneously unique: including the bustees of Kolkata, the chawls and zopadpattis of Mumbai, the katchi abadis of Karachi, the kampungs of Jakarta, the iskwaters of Manila, the shammasas of Khartoum, the umjondolos of Durban, the intra-murios of Rabat, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo, the gecekondus of Ankara, the conventillos of Quito, the favelas of Brazil, the villas miseria of Buenos Aires and the colonias populares of Mexico City. They are the gritty antipodes to the generic fantasy-scapes and residential theme parksPhilip K. Dicks bourgeois Offworldsin which the global middle classes increasingly prefer to cloister themselves. Whereas the classic slum was a decaying inner city16, the new slums are more typically located on the edge of urban spatial explosions17. (Davis 2004: 19)

For abandonment from all institutional support, the informal proletariat can only be identified by precarious possession of their physical bodies. While Deleuze and Grosz celebrate de-corporealization and metaphoric Bodies without organs, selling body parts is actually a means of subsistence for a section of this population as attested by the rise of international organ trading rackets (Castells 1998: 181). The urban poor are almost
15

Davis writes, The disenfranchised communities of the urban poor, in addition, are vulnerable to sudden outbursts of state violence like the infamous 1990 bulldozing of the Maroko beach slum in Lagos (an eyesore for the neighboring community of Victoria Island, a fortress for the rich) or the 1995 demolition in freezing weather of the huge squatter town of Zhejiangcun on the edge of Beijing. (Davis 2004: 17)
16

United States and England are exceptions in this general trend.

Thus, as Castells has argued, the new urban processes are defined by increasing differentiation in social terms and simultaneous functional interrelation beyond physical contiguity.

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everywhere forced to settle on hazardous terrains (Davis 2004: 16). For lack of any other opportunities they also populate the lower rungs of global criminal economy engaging in Darwinian competition for a short-lived existence of individualized hyper-consumption. In most cases the life of hyper-consumption is just a dream seen on TV. As it is depicted in Pizza, the kids fantasize about bumping into actresses they have seen on TV18 while planning to rob a swanky restaurant, but actually work for daily bread, i.e. Pizza, beer and cigarettes. Elsewhere, after being exploited repeatedly by their criminal bosses they contemplate other career options. Cordobes remembers his job as a railway worker, but concludes in context of recent privatization and lay off, life as a criminal is more acceptable. Cordobes and his group try to learn robbing techniques watching gangster films (while watching the movies Ruben, a friend of Cordobes remarks, See, they take all the money and leave unlike us), like the Tender Trio in City of God mimicking western heroes while robbing gas trucks. Consumable, fetishized violence of the mainstream media is contrasted in Pizza by its symptomatic treatment. Pablo, Cordobes accomplice, suffers from asthma attacks during their operation and once needs help from an old lady they are supposed to rob. After they take revenge on their boss for all his mistreatment by robbing him instead of the lady, she takes pity on Pablo, offering him her inhaler. In another occasion, all the money they get snatching wallets from a crowd goes into Pablos treatment in a hospital.

While waiting outside, they mistake a girl coming out of the restaurant for an actress, Calajon. When they realize that the girl had a smaller bottom, one of the kids suggest may be she had undergone a surgery since she does not need the older body anymore. Thus we confront here the idea of body as an artifact, the mutability of which is the privilege of the rich, from an outsiders perspective.

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At another level, presence of unwanted, material bodies are disruptions in the coded network space19. The new Third Cinema is replete with examples where visualization of the cityscape is worked through annihilation of bodies. In La Haine (France, 1996), when the trio is visiting Paris on a RER train, they bypass a billboard depicting a globe accompanied by the caption, the world is yours. In the very next shot the prohibitive relationship of the city with these suburban teenagers becomes clear through a camera technique reminding of Hitchcocks Vertigo. Starting from a long shot of a downtown skyscraper, the boys are visually introduced to the city through a simultaneous zoomin/track out camera movement that evokes Scotties acrophobia in Vertigo. Not only the shift in focus from the skyscraper to Said and Vinz establish an either/or relationship between the city and the trio, the camera movement in context of La Haine gives the feel of a ghostly, incorporeal emergence. This shot prefigures the series of exclusions the trio will go through in the city, culminating in the final gunfight. Carandiru (Brazil, 2003) opens with a shot of the cityscape of Sao Paulo from an aerial view. The camera speeds down from here to focus on the prison Carandiru within the cityscape, after which the title card appears. The film is about this overcrowded prison, from where many inmates dont want to get out for they have no place in the outside world. At another level, the prison itself functions as a body in the narrative. The number of inmates grows in number, the characters change; there is various moods- festive, riotous, family. Like an organism the prisoners have their own governing rules, organizations like church, body building group, vendors etc. Most importantly, the
In a rather humorous example, one obese accomplice of Ebony dies in Carandiru getting stuck in a tunnel dug in the prison by some inmates as an escape route. In the sequence his companions ask him to suck himself in to reduce his physical volume, which cant. Frustrated, one of the companions knifes him to death.
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nuances of the prison that make it humane through the film is discovered and narrated by the doctor who comes to the prison for an AIDS prevention campaign. As the healer in an environment of precarious existence of bodies he acknowledges towards the end of the film that he would never have the experiences he had unless he was a doctor. Thus the alternative vision we have discussed throughout this dissertation is enacted in the film by shifting of perspective from juridical to clinical20. The prison, the largest in Latin America with over 7500 inmates, will be demolished after a riot among the inmates and its brutal suppression by the state, for a new wave of urban planning. In City, as Lil Ze takes over the drug business killing older dealers after turning eighteen, Rockets narration describes the new power formation of the city through a map bordered with blood. These borders are stable only as long as one boss is in complete control of the territory, and as we learn through the film, temporary success of one boss motivates others to emulate the success story through a similar cycle of violence. In Bolivia (Argentina, 2001), the Buenos Aires caf where protagonist Freddy briefly works, functions as the microcosm of the global city21. The cosmopolitan character of the

Clinical in this context is different from Foucaults idea of the new medical epistemology 18th century forward. For Foucault the new dominant conception of the disease was inclusive. In the new system of pathological life, he wrote, disease is hooked onto life itself, feeding on it and sharing in that reciprocal commerce of action in which everything follows everything else, everything is bound together. It is no longer an event or a nature imported from the outside; it is life undergoing modification in an inflected functioningdisease is a deviation within life. (Foucault 1973: 188) In our case, the dominant discourse is exclusion of the prison as something extra-bodily or inhuman. The medical vision as a minority discourse on the other hand, is rediscovery of unacknowledged vitality. During the Rita Cadillac show in Carandiru the doctor is referred to as the medical alchemist therefore.
20

Bolivia starts with a television broadcast of a soccer game between Argentina and Bolivia, where soccer giant Argentina scores multiple goals against a hapless Bolivian side. The narrative celebrated in the simulated space of television is given ironic treatment in the diegetic space of the film where goals parallel systemic (since just like an opponent is indispensible for victory in a game, illegal immigrants are integral part of megacities like Buenos Aires) exclusion/obsoletion

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space is signified by nearby streets named after different countries (Nicaragua, Uruguay, etc.), American movies on television, half-Paraguayan origin of the waitress Rosa, reference to gypsies and Turks for professional reasons by regular patrons of the caf, and frequent visit by a gay salesman (who is subject to ridicules, just like his fellow other, illegal immigrant Freddy). The contemporary economic crisis of Argentina22 is reflected by the plight of patron Oscar, who is not able to pay the bills having lost possession of his Taxi cab. Freddy becomes victim of xenophobia- common during times of crisis among the vulnerable sections of societies- in this milieu of desperation23. The flow of immigration is outlined in the film through job postings on the caf window looking for cooks at the beginning and end of the film. It is evident that Enrique, owner of the caf has hired people like Freddy earlier for immigrants are willing to work for less than minimum wage. The last posting also suggests that the vacuum left by Freddy will be filled soon, in spite of the warning by the policemen right before Enrique posts the new advertisement. In between, Freddy has to die. The manager of the hotel affirms to Rosa that it is a common experience for him when guests dont return after paying in advance, and even though it is a monetary gain, he has to fold their clothes and store their luggage.
of people like Freddy. Thus the film sets up a thematic opposition between the network space and place of the people.
22

One of the hardest hit sections by the crisis was the lower middle class represented by Oscar in Bolivia. In the worst moments of the economic crisis between 1999 and 2001, the
government virtually froze all bank accounts for twelve months to impede capital flight, and unemployment rose to near 25% (Sorrensen 2009).

Oscar vents his frustration on Freddy regularly through insults and racist abuse, since Oscar holds immigrants responsible for loss of Argentine jobs and lower wages. One day, Oscar hits Freddy after getting drunk, forcing Freddy to retaliate. Infuriated by the audacity of a foreigner, Oscar kills Freddy.

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In the last sequence of Pizza, Cordobes sends Sandra away from Buenos Aires to his hometown Cordoba with the money robbed from a night club. As the ferry is tugged away from the dock, Cordobes falls on his knees succumbing to the bullet wound he received24. Shot from behind through a netted fence, he sits as a nameless body, at the margin of land and water as the cops approach him. Cut to a wide, long shot, as his body is carried away. As the camera zooms out bringing the city skyline into view, Cordobes or the cops carrying the body becomes unnoticeably tiny in the frame, giving the shot a look of inanimate architecture. The dock, surrounded by landmasses and the skyline on one side, and framed by the camera on the other, itself looks like an open wound, given perspective by the zoom out. The narrative continues hereafter through the police radio transmission we were introduced to in the first shot of the film. The communication confirms it is a young male, no ID, probably killed by a bullet wound and requests a hearse from the headquarters for dead Pablo lying in the car he was driving. The communication stops here, establishing the city as a network of communication through enveloping of the film by radio transmissions, and counterweighing the network space by exclusion of living bodies. Another salient aspect of urbanization in last twenty years is explosion of over-exploited children. Davis informs that at least half of the slum population in most developing cities is under the age of twenty. According to 1996 ILO report, about 250 million children between ages of 5 and 14 were working for pay in developing countries, of which 120 million were working full time. Castells writes, Out of reach of statistical observation, large numbers of children, both in developed and developing countries are involved in income generating activities linked to the
24

This impossibility of return to an older identity is another defining feature of the Fourth world.

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criminal economy, particularly drug traffic, petty thefts, and organized begging. Much of the proliferation of street children is linked to these activities. Thus, studies in Brazil, whose cities, and particularly Rio de Janeiro, have been highlighted as the most striking example of thousands of children living in the street, show that, in fact, most of them return to their poor homes at the end of the day, bringing their meager gains to the family. (Castells 1998: 154)

The surge in child labor results from the crisis of subsistence economies that force impoverished families into survival strategies of increasing number of income earners immediately. On the demand side, child labor is easy to exploit for its defenselessness, i.e. lack of awareness of rights, obedience, disposability and low absentee rate. Global networks of subcontracting and receding state power makes bypassing government regulations on child labor laws easier. As Castells writes, On the side of society at large, the crumbling of social institutions, behind the faade of repetitive formulas on the virtues of traditional families that, by and large, has ceased to exist, leaves individuals, and particularly men, alone with their desires of transgression, with their power surges, with their endless search for consumption, characterized by immediate gratification pattern. Why then not prey on the most defenseless section of the society? (Castells 1998: 164) On the other hand, in case of child soldiers used in various wars, gangs or insurgencies around the world, it is the feeling of power, of becoming a man avenues of which are otherwise closed - are motivations for being fierce, to kill and be ready to die. Becoming a man and its achievement through varying degrees of violence can be seen in City where the Tender Trio is happy only robbing the motel, but being snubbed by them, younger Lil Dice asserts his fierceness by killing the guests at the hotel without any purpose of direct material gain. The new level of ferocity in turn marks the emergence of a new economy and spatial organization of the favela.

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This motif gets ironic treatment in Pizza when the boys discuss a phallic watch tower in the central city and connect it to a fictional character Obelix, whose penis acts as the magnet of all masculine forces in the vicinity. In order to sense the power associated with the birds eye view of the watch tower25, the boys climb the tower, only to see Sandra who could not join them for her advanced stage of pregnancy- being taken away by the police for loitering (or some other undisclosed charge). In context of our discussion, particularly interesting is the figure of rebel teenager which is characterized by liminality, i.e., on the one hand, by its disjunction with the family/domestic space, simultaneous inheritance of an excluded urban space, and on the other, its proximity and simultaneous lack of access to the larger adult world (i.e. consumer culture). The construction of masculine identity in La Haine illustrates this positionality most forcefully among the films discussed in this chapter. La Haine is a banlieue (industrial suburb) film about structural exclusion of post-colonial young immigrants in the outskirts of Paris, featuring 24 hours of a diegetic span, a day after riots break out in a government housing project following brutal battering of an Arab teenager in police custody. As Castells writes, The suburban world of European cities is a socially diversified space; that is, segmented in different peripheries around the central city. There are the traditional working class suburbs, often organized around large, public housing estatesThere are the new towns, French, British or Swedish, inhabited by a younger population of the middle classes, whose age made it difficult for them to penetrate the housing market of the central city. And there are also the peripheral ghettos of older public housing estates, exemplified by Pariss La Courneuve, where new immigrant populations and poor working families experience exclusion from their right to the city. (Castells 1996: 432)
25

For a detailed discussion of the contrast between the birds eye view of power and its subversion by people on the ground level altering and individualizing mass culture, see Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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As it surfaced during the riots of 2005, in a post-industrial context unemployment is a huge problem in the working class housing projects owing to shrinking manufacturing sectors. As a consequence, many older males, i.e. the father figures, survive on unemployment benefits, unable to support their families. Functional absence of the father is reflected in La Haine by the absence of any adult male in the families of the three lead characters. While Saids family is never seen in the film, Vinz lives with his grandmother and sister. Hubert, the most balanced of the three, supports his mother and sister dealing Hashish. There is also reference to his incarcerated brother in the film underscoring prevalence of criminal connections in the suburbs. The absence of a male role model is substituted in the banlieue by the hip-hop culture and Hollywood movies. Hip-hop being a product of post-industrial inner city culture of America resonates well with the perspective of banlieue, and the masculine themes of crime, guns, or individualized opposition to the police disseminates without friction among the teenagers lacking other frames of perspective beyond their cramped lives in the suburbs26. The media saturated ambience of the banlieue is foregrounded in the film as Vinz (and his excessive energy) is introduced in the film through an extra diegetic performance of acrobatic hip-hop dancing. As a symbolic protest against police brutality the day before, a friend of the trio
The lack of mobility, social or otherwise, and ghettoized existence is marked in the film repeatedly. One of the strategies Kassovitz employs to this end is marking of time in black frames between sequences. Spatialization of time contextualizes the social space of the ghetto. It also produces the banlieue as a territory outside passage of dominant time. As Schroeder writes, The use of the time markers is a strategy of narration, but it also plays ironically at particular moments when the markers surround shots of idle time as experienced by the main characters. The progression of time contrasts sharply with the lack of outlets and activities in the protagonists lives, and the markers are particularly effective in illustrating the duration of the night the trio spend waiting for the morning RER train back to the banlieue. In addition, the entire film takes place in the lull or idleness after the spectacular event of the riots. (Schroeder 2001: 171)
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practices DJ-ing, playing N.W.As 1988 hit fuck the police on a turn table in front of a window, as if making the whole banlieue his audience. Said narrates a gangster movie sequence to Vinz with great excitement where the protagonist says, You are my friend, I wont kill you for money, if I have to, Ill kill you for free. While they refuse to be interviewed by the TV crew from the city after the riot, the characters live an imaginary existence as movie characters (and hence, the aphorism in the film, choose your characters carefully). In a remarkable scene, Vinz does a Robert DeNiro performance from Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver (1976) in front of a mirror (and the camera, therefore emphasizing the theatricality) holding the gun stolen from the police uttering, you talking to me? Appropriation of these pastiche identities27 is in fact, failed attempts to mask the lack of orientation for Vinz. When Hubert tries to pacify his aggressiveness, Vinz replies, why do you talk as if you know what you are talking about? The precarious nature of this craving for power through appropriation of media-image induced ferocity is de-constructed through the narrative of La Haine, especially when the trio is in the city. Vinz fails to gather courage to shoot when Saids friend, Snoopy, provokes him to do so in his apartment, only to realize later Snoopy had already removed the bullets by sleight of hand, exposing the inexperience of Vinz with guns. Said also loses his money as a consequence of this confrontation. Later, when his acquaintance

Schroeder writes, as Vinz imitates Travis Bickles you talkin to me? performance in the mirror, how are we to read this gesture in terms of the Taxi Driver characters fixation on the scum of New York City, clearly defined at times in heavy eyeline matches between Bickle and anonymous black men on the sidewalk? If La Haine offers a space of performance that harnesses some of Bickles rage, Taxi Drivers diagnosis of the urban condition and its promise of a vigilante solution that secures the fame of its white male savior sits uneasily in La Haines universe. (Schroeder 2001: 167) It is a fact that Vinz being of Jewish background identifies himself with Arabs, the ultimate other in the film, but Schroeder misses the point that it is the very irony of assuming such a de-contextualized position that defines the non-identity of Vinz.

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from the suburb actually shoots a bouncer after being denied entry to a dance club, Vinz finds it disturbing. Finally, the trio is actually snubbed for their aggressive, macho attitude and lack of symbolic capital of high culture at the middle class party they crush. Said, who is obsessed about clothes and haircuts, requests Hubert to introduce him to two girls that walk in to the party. While Hubert tacitly describes Said as a shy poet who wants to talk to the ladies, Said immediately asks for their phone numbers. When the girls sarcastically remind Said of Huberts introduction, Said assertively retorts arguing, off course, Im shy. The boys are politely driven out after the ensuing altercation; an elderly man closes the door on them, and remarks, malaise of the ghetto. Thus, Castells concludes, We are witnessing a dramatic reversal of social conquests and childrens rights obtained by social reform in mature industrial societies in the wake of large-scale deregulationWhat is different is the disintegration of traditional societies throughout the world, exposing children to the unprotected lands of mega-cities slumsWhat is new is the disintegration of patriarchalism, without being replaced by a system of protection of children provided either by new families or the state28. And what is new is the weakening of institutions of support for childrens rights, such as labor unions or the politics of social reform, to be replaced by moral admonitions to family values which often blame the victims for their plightAt the roots of childrens exploitation are the mechanisms generating poverty and social exclusion throughout the worldWith children in poverty, and with entire countries, regions, and neighborhoods excluded from relevant circuits of wealth, power, and information, the crumbling of family structures breaks the last barrier of defense for children (Castells 1998: 162-3).

This theme is recurrent in Pizza as Cordobes is unable to provide for Sandra or the unborn baby. Sandra initially runs away from her abusive father before meeting Cordobes, but she has to return because of the precarious existence of the group and her pregnancy. Cordobes secretly brings her useless gifts like a pack of cotton (Sandra asks him what was that for to which Cordobes replies youll soon be leaking a lot. This will keep you dry as a hopeless romantic. Cordobes keeps assuring Sandra that things are almost under control until his death, after which Sandra has to leave Buenos Aires on a ferry, all by herself, and bearing the child.

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A parallel trajectory in the changing status of children can be traced in the history of political cinema after World War two. In neo-realist films (made during execution of Marshall Plan and post-war reconstruction) the figure of the child functions as embodiment of immanence, passionately eulogized by critics like Bazin. This immanence is incorruptible. By the narrative logic therefore, the child undergoes hardship, but never dies. This survival in turn becomes the politics of neo-realism29. By the time Hector Babenco made Pixote (Brazil, 1981), there were already 3 million street children in Brazil. As a result we do see children being killed and raped, and even an aborted fetus addressed as meat in the film. However, there is still nostalgia about innocence around the figure of child, as exemplified by the character of Pixote. The original title of the film was Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco, the second phrase meaning survival of the weakest. The title refers to a social space where weakness of state institutions, absence of adequate welfare networks, poverty and unpredictable chaos/violence falsifies the scientific hypothesis of Darwin30. Survival of Pixote, the weakest of the group portrayed in the film, is therefore a magical possibility. Babenco is aware of the precariousness of this politics31, as it is apparent in the penultimate sequence of the film, where prostitute Sueli frustrates Pixotes fantasy of maternal reunion by
29

This is significant since, some early theorists of Third Cinema, like Glauber Rocha, Fernando Biri or Julio Espinoza, were heavily influenced by neo-realist aesthetics.

30

Actually the phrase survival of the fittest was first used by Herbert Spencer, inspired by Darwins The Origin of Species. Spencer used the term to criticize theories of Free Market Economy, proposed by classical economists like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus and characterized Laissez-faire as Social Darwinism. Whatever relevance and sustainability free market economy had in context of the First World, in Third World contexts absence of social welfare has simply meant depriving vast populations of basic human rights. Therefore, if by the logic of social Darwinism in Europe the weakest should be most vulnerable, the lack of social order in the Third World, especially among street children, makes survival a matter of chance.
31

The boy playing Pixote in the film was actually killed in street violence after the film.

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pushing suckling Pixote away from her breast, after initial nurturing. Pixote has to take to the streets after this, depending on his gun for survival, but at least as a negated desire the fantasy exists. On the other hand, in films made during high times of neo-liberalism I have discussed so far, death of children is the very condition for progression of narratives. As attested in the concluding sequence of City of God, while Rocket struggles to establish himself as a news photographer, the link between the scene and the disavowed, his subjects turn out to be increasingly younger children playfully planning to kill each other wielding real guns. I have tried to illustrate in this chapter how physical bodies including children stand in a relation of exclusion in the neo-liberal cityscapes. On one hand we have cyborgs connected to computer terminals and the global network space. On the other, we have an unprecedented influx of people possessing only their bodies who are denied right to the cities. The informal proletariat is therefore analogous with Agambens idea of Homo Sacer (Agamben 1998). Agamben borrows the term from Roman law which means sacred man. Agamben defines the figure of Homo Sacer as someone who can be killed with impunity but may not be sacrificed (i.e. killed according to some lawful ritual)32. The sacred man is left with only Zoe or bare life but no politics. The existence of the sacred man demonstrates according to Agamben how politics constitutes itself through exclusion that nevertheless binds the excluder to the excluded. As we have already seen,

In an interesting analogy, Hector Babenco in his introduction to Pixote (1981) reports that most children in the favela, especially those without known family origins take to crimes (or lured into it by adults) knowing they can not be prosecuted and if they are sent to reformatories, they will soon be released for overcrowding of those institutions. However, this impunity exposes the street children to violence both from the state as well as the world of crime.

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the informal proletariat, although excluded from the world system, left only with physical bodies and no organized politics, is creation of neo-liberalism at the same time.
Perhaps the visualization closest to Agambens description of Homo Sacer can be seen among the films we are discussing in Carandiru, after the riot squad regains control of the prison through a bloodbath. In the sequence, the organized brutality of the police surpass all violence witnessed in the film so far, the policemen behave just like the criminals as they steal things, give prisoners false hope of life before killing them for pleasure, and torture surrendered inmates (In the actual riot of 1999 after which the film is made, 111 inmates died without any injury on part of the security forces). The remaining alive inmates are made to come out of their wings naked after the riot shouting eulogy for the riot squad, and then seated heads between knees in the field outside. This is the last time we see the inmates in human form, before the metaphoric demolition of the prison in the last scene. As the inmates sit waiting for the next order, or a possible bullet, their bare life is emphasized in the sequence by its long duration, shots from multiple angles including top-shots, and an overarching silence. Relevant to this discussion is the recurring theme of individuals without IDs in the five films I discuss in this chapter. We have already seen Cordobes is reported as young male, without ID after his death in Pizza. Similarly, being an illegal immigrant the protagonist of Bolivia avoids encounters with policemen and remains metaphorically anonymous even after his death. In La Haine radio transmission in front of an attacked police station announces arrest of a teenager with no ID towards the beginning of the film and later Vinz, while in Paris, runs away when asked for ID. On the contrary, in the sequence where Clipper miraculously survives police firing on his way to church in City, the child worker accidentally killed is identified by his workers ID, but realizing their mistake the policemen decide to report him as a person with no ID implying a criminal identity. These examples of bodies without legal identities that may be killed with impunity attest the disavowed presence of the fourth world dispersed around the world, as

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Castells has argued. Ironically, the doctor in Carandiru, the narrator and the mismatched figure of healing/life in the abandoned prison of death, is asked to wait until he is identified by a prison guard, illustrating the inanimate apparatus of classification.33 Realizing the exceptional presence of welfare in the territory of exclusion, Ebony, one of the inmates, asks after the first day, Doctor, will you come back?

Agamben expands his idea of the sacred man in The Open: Man and Animal, focusing on how the animal as the figure represents bare life, especially late twentieth century forward. Agamben argues that the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man (Agamben 2003: 16). Since Aristotle human beings have been defined isolating them from animals, but since bios, the human form of political life cannot be separated from the zoe, the animal of the man takes up the same position as the Roman sacred man. Agamben argues therefore that in the biopolitical era, The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man (Agamben 2004: 77). Agamben, after Heidegger, makes the distinction between humans (as world forming) and animals (the poor in the world) as, the difference between a being who relates to the world through a matrix of unbreakable instinctual interactions and a being that, precisely by rejecting such a matrix, is one for whom the world can begin to take on
The guard later apologizes to the doctor saying, Dont take it personally. It is their job to escape, and mine not to let them. Agamben writes in this context, It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by deciding every time between man and animal (Agamben 2003: 77) The strategy we see in Carandiru as a critic of this decision/exclusion/animalization is searching signs of the open. One example of this search is the scene where Chico, an inmate for many years flies a giant balloon he made as a hobby. The balloon rises high, beyond the boundaries of the prison, as the doctor watches it from his office window. We learn later in the film the flying balloon is also his metaphoric dream to unite with his children after finishing his term. As an exception to the norms of the prison, it actually happens one day.
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significance or meaning (Dienstag 2006: 150). The possibility of significance is the open for Heidegger. Agamben writes, The open is nothing but a grasping of the animal not-open. Man suspends his animality and, in this way, opens a free and empty zone in which life is captured and a-bandoned in a zone of exception (Agamben 2003 (Deleuze 2003): 91)

For our purpose, if the free and empty zone is the network space and suspension of animality is de-corporealization, then being trapped in ones body and being defined by it is the very process of animalization34. The most hardened criminals, inmates in the yellow wing of Carandiru, have lost all desire for the open, in all sense of the term. They are content with the darkness of their cells like subterranean creatures. They dont want to see the sun anymore. Freddy in Bolivia is subject to the burden of total management of animality that humanity of man has to bear. First, he is displaced from Bolivia and removed from his family after the American troops burn down the cocoa fields he worked on. In Buenos Aires he is regularly ridiculed for his indigenous looks and thick accent (Oscar once accuses him of mumbling in the film). His anonymity is attested in the first sequence when the initial job negotiation between him and Enrique happens off screen against the detailed visuals of the functional space of kitchen, of which he would be a part only for a short while.
It should be noted here that this animalization is different from the animalization Deleuze celebrates. For Deleuze, animalization is releasing the autonomous animal spirit in the process of realization of body as meat. Commenting on paintings by Francis Bacon Deleuze writes, What happens is that an animal, a real dog for example, is outlined as the shadow of its master; or conversely the shadow of the man assumes an autonomous and unspecified animal existence. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal to which we give shelter. Instead of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of the indiscernible, of the undecidable, between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but he does not become so without the animal simultaneously becoming spirit, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or fate. (Deleuze 2003: 16) The animalization Agamben talks about is the forced, structural political/juridical exclusion.
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Finally when Freddy is shot, the film goes silent. Absolute silence is a disruption by the norms of sound films that needs to be cleaned up, i.e. a new advertisement must be posted for another live Freddy. The silence denies Freddy of speech reducing him to the status of an animal, but at the same time ensures his metaphoric, peaceful death that an animal deserves from human beings, according to Agamben. A more direct process of animalization is alluded to in the opening sequence of City of God. The high speed block montage sequence that establishes the carnivalesque cook out at Lil Zes rooftop is interspersed with shots of chickens giving terrified looks as various stages of slaughtering, skinning and barbequing meat takes place in a festive ambience accompanied by samba music. This look is presumably the instinctive response to the high strung tone of the sequence set by the initial close-ups of a shining knife being sharpened against a dark surface, intercut with short black frames. The flashy, high pace contrast between light and darkness gives a sense of cold, viscerally jarring inanimate violence to which the chickens react. When one of the chickens manages to escape this scene, Lil Ze orders his boys to get the chicken, and they run after the animal, firing guns, as if playing a hide and seek game. The position of the fleeing chicken is paralleled here with that of Rocket who always wanted to escape the hood since he was scared to be shot. As Rocket re-enters the hood in search of a picture that would get him a newspaper job - an escape route out of the city - his path meets with the fleeing chicken. Both the chicken and Rocket are caught between the police car that arrives at the scene and the hoods led by Lil Ze. Simulating the tied chickens on the rooftop, Rocket turns his head back and forth in directions of the police and Lil Ze respectively. This is where his narration of the film begins. This convergence is significant from the perspective of 167

adaptation of City of God since the chicken sequence is a trivial episode in the novel by Paulo Lin. Similarly Rocket as a photographer is not central to its theme. Part of the politics of City, the film, therefore is foregrounding of this animal vision, which is also a photographic gaze. Murphet writes, The cinemas amoral magic was always to have presented movement-images, recognizable as human through resemblances of various kinds, from which the ethical assumption of subjectivity was miraculously suspended. The cinematic gaze was one that voyeuristically encountered mobile human forms shorn of interiority, depth, and the returning gaze in a way unmatched by any previous representational medium. The sense of humanity it conferred upon a massed spectatorship was thus achieved via the spectacle of its own serial flattening and dehumanization. The gigantic two-dimensional images of human faces, gaits, gestures, seemed always already to have drifted into the territory of the non-man, the automated machine proxy or animal domain of deathless doubles, since every aspect of this uncanny movement was perfectly repeatable and invariable, embalmed in a timeless mechanical continuum out of all synch with the stochastic durations of real social bodies. (Murphet 2008: 101) If the decisive political conflict of our time is between the animality and the humanity of man as Agamben has argued, then the return of this animal subjectivity, aided by the prosthetics of camera is the counterpoint that returns history into its own making. By witnessing/contextualizing ones own animalization, the gaze confronts the symptomatic inanimate/post-human, i.e. proliferation of global criminal economy35. Similar politics can be seen in Carandiru, when towards the end of the riot, Dada- the young soccer player- saves his life lying still, along a row of dead bodies. After the policemen leave, a dog walks along the way sniffing the bodies, and meets a cat coming

As Castells describes, the growth of organized crime and violence is a direct result of advanced communication technologies which makes access to sophisticated small arms like Uzi made in Israel possible in the favela, mediated through corrupt policemen and arms dealers. In the documentary on City of God, the favela, featured in extra section of the DVD of the film, an expolice chief of Rio suggests in order to curb the drug trade in the favelas, arms industries in Switzerland and America must also be curbed simultaneously, since as Rocket narrates in the film, more drugs means more guns, and more guns mean more drugs.

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from the opposite direction half way through. The two animals look at each other peacefully, as if they have seen something (i.e. the animality of human beings) that unites them. The animalized inmates on the other hand, address the camera documentary style and narrate their experience/perspective of the riot adding a politics of truth claim. Thus combinations of these animal and clinical visions add interiority to the excluded characters and return the relational identities of their past lives, humanizing them. The narrative of Carandiru starts from the yellow wing of the prison, where the most hardened criminals like dagger live. As the doctor sees more patients and meets the motley crowd in the process, smaller micro-narratives of personal lives told in interview style and flashbacks defines the layered social space of the prison. Deusdete, for example comes to jail for killing two men who molested her sister Franci. After Deusdete reported the crime to the police, those men start harassing him. For self-defense Deusdete acquired a gun from Zico, and eventually used it. Zico, the orphaned boy who grew up with Deusdetes family became a small time drug dealer. He is surprised to see Deusdete serving a longer term, in spite of not being a criminal. Highness, a stolen car dealer, comes to jail following arson caused by one of his two jealous wives. Ebony, who had always kept his son away from crime scenes witnesses one day his arrival as an inmate. Just like the outer world, happiness and tragedy take place simultaneously in the prison. Zico loses sanity from smoking crack and pours boiling water on Deusdete, his alter ego in the film. This takes place at the time when Lady Di and his gay partner no way undergo their festive marriage ceremony under supervision of the doctor, in a different

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wing. This strategy of diminishing distance between the inside and outside36 culminates in the visitors day sequence. Part of the sequence is shot from Daggers perspective. Dagger is the ultimate outcast. He never had a family. Admittedly, the only thing he learned in life was to kill, and all he possesses is his well built body. In the sequence, Dagger finishes his daily work out at the improvised gym and climbs down the ladders into the courtyard where visitors for the inmates have gathered to see their loved ones. As the camera tracks Daggers lonely walk across the courtyard, snippets of family life, togetherness and partnership unfold from his perspective. A group of children perform a song on a makeshift stage. One inmate gives Dagger a scared look while doing tattoo on his partners arm. Highness is interrupted while having sex with his wife Delva (and simultaneously doing commentary of his kids soccer game in the corridor) as his other

A brief comparison between Babencos earlier film Pixote and Carandiru makes this strategy clearer. There are several structural similarities between the two films. Both films are about marginal groups with criminal connections, street children and prisoners respectively. Part of Pixote is about the reformatory where Pixote lives, while Carandiru is a prison. Both films feature transvestite central characters, Lilica in Pixote and Lady Di in Carandiru. Both films include close-ups of toilets. However, treatments of their respective subjects give the films different political positions. The toilet scene in Pixote is sensational, featuring Pixote cleaning feces floating on water, leading to a dream sequence of him escaping the reformatory naked, pursued by a police car. The toilet scene in Carandiru on the other hand introduces us to a tender facet of Highness, who screams bitten by a rat, while trying to hide his drugs inside the toilet. This is the same Highness, as Lula reminds us in the next scene, who doesnt make a sound being hit by iron bars. Although half of Pixote takes place in the reformatory and the rest in cities of Rio and Sao Paulo, the two segments remain mutually impermeable, leaving characters one-dimensional. In Carandiru on the other hand, inside and outside, past and present interweave with each other in a process of contextualization. Pixote features many close-ups, while in Carandiru shots are wideremphasizing the perspective. Pixote centers on a single, even if symptomatic, character. The narrative logic follows his path and tries to hold on to the precarious utopia of survival. Carandiru in contrast, makes the social space its theme and gives a critical perspective to collective social exclusion. Pixote and Carandiru therefore illustrate politics of Third Cinema from two different eras.

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partner arrives. A church37 choir chants a hymn from the Bible. Alien to these spectacles of tenderness, Dagger makes his way to the yellow wing to inform a sobbing inmate that his partner lied to him about being HIV positive. For a change, Dagger smiles noticing the change of expression on his friends suffering face. Carandiru does not take the route of sociological analysis to roots of crime. Neither does it glamorize crime38 like in gangster films or hip-hop culture. Rather, through layering of the characters and their social space with density, which is flattened in the dominant discourse as single dimensional criminal space, Babenco questions procedures of social exclusion materialized through the institution of the detention center. At the same time through conflating the prison space with the outer world through contextualization, he locates the roots of violence in larger power relations. Consistent with the claim of the film being based on real events, the film does not give any judgmental reasoning for the breakout of the riot. The doctor informs us the atmosphere was festive around a soccer tournament when he left. Later in the narration, the governors decision to deploy the riot squad was seen as a gimmick for quick resolution before the upcoming elections. In the sequence where this narration happens, the riot squad is seen doing their combat drills in the courtyard, inmates dropping their knives from the windows following a request by the prison chief, and some demands for better living conditions being chanted. In an interview style address to the audience one of the inmates later says, We might be ignorant robbers, but we are not stupid. We wouldnt fight them with knives and sticks.

The inmates church is going to be Daggers future refuge as for some ambiguous reason he will start feeling guilty and lonely, perhaps from witnessing these spectacles. 38 Before leaving the prison Chico tells the doctor when asked about his reason for coming to Carandiru, You want to hear another story? Everybody lies about their reason for coming to jail.

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Other than that, the narrator concludes that Only God, the police and the inmates knew what happened. Therefore, putting the events in the larger context of the narrative, the demolition of the prison monumentalized through slow motion shots of dynamite explosions can be safely read as structural dispossession integral to the dominant discourse of neoliberal capitalism. A reverse process of animalization takes place in La Haine when Hubert and Said, two boys from the suburban housing project are taken to a police station in Paris. They are seated on chairs next to each other facing the camera, handcuffed, and used for training another policeman how to torture criminals without going too far. Although they are not indicted for any specific criminal charge except making trouble in front of a middle class building, officers treat them as guinea pigs who could be held at the police station until they missed the last train, beat them black and blue, keep Huberts hashish for personal use and with great enthusiasm demonstrate the trainee (vicariously that is also the audience, since the scene is shot from the trainees POV, and the officers speak directly to the camera) how to carry out their job. Criminality is equated in the scene with not being proper French since Said and Hubert are of Arab39 and African descent respectively. Thus through a series of displacement of stereotypes, non-Parisian/nonFrench/non-adult/criminal is also assigned an animal status whose physical torment40 can be displayed as a scientific/management procedure. The animalization is confirmed by
After asking for Saids name the officer remarks, Is that a French name, you Arab son of a bitch?
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Murphet has argued that increasing sensitivity about cruelty towards animals on screen in mainstream Hollywood is a correlative of complementary humanization of animals and animalization of human beings. However, citing examples of bodily harm to animals as a counter strategy of humanization in Haneke films, Murphet argues that the statement Haneke makes by this choice is that only humans suffer. Director Kassovitz adopts a similar politics in La Hanie.

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the change the process induces on the boys, since Said who was obsessed with the cool gangster image disseminated by the dominant Hip-hop culture of the suburb so far, breaks into tears. Hubert, who has been the voice of sanity41 so far, turns spiteful on the other hand after the experience. Even visually, the boys are seen framed through bars resembling a cage in the following shot begging to be freed, so that they could catch the train home. Hubert is involved in a gunfight with the police at the end of the film trying to save Vinz. The outcome of the fight is unknown since the screen goes black (perhaps because the ultimate conflict between humanity and animality of man has not been solved yet). The conflict does suggest however, the increasing polarization between the human and the animal territorially segregated between the central city and the suburban housing projects, since throughout the narrative Hubert had occupied the liminal in-between status. We have seen in the second chapter, that the political cinema critical of informational capitalism does not have an emancipatory rhetoric like Third Cinema in the first generation. They belong to the tradition of Third Cinema in their interest in analytic contextualization, what Espinoza described as showing the process of the problem, but at the same time, they retain certain skepticism/confusion about resolution, commensurate with the pulse of our time. La Haine strongly foregrounds this politics as

In an earlier sequence when the boys are running away from the police, the trio comes face to face with a policeman in the basement of an apartment complex. Vinz, seeing the opportunity to get even with the pigs who brutally beat up their friend while in custody, points the gun he had stolen during the ensuing riot the day before towards the unarmed policeman, but Hubert stops him.

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it begins with the aphorism, the question is not how you fall, but how you land42. While the film illustrates the process through which confrontation with the post-industrial state as an apparatus of exclusion becomes inevitable, and Hubert accuses a man coming down the escalator with a suitcase in hand as the worst kind of racist, happy to be transported through life with so far, so good attitude, outcome of the confrontation suggested in La Haine remains a mystery. La Haine was made in 1995 in response to an urban riot similar to the one alluded in the film. Contemporary relevance of the theme was re-attested when an almost identical in form, but much larger scale riot broke out in 2005. However, only time can tell if these acts of rebellions can factor into a progressive intervention facilitating long term qualitative change in the current world order.

La Haine begins with an image of a globe shot from a top angle, on which a petrol bomb descends as if from outer space. As the bottle lit at the neck drops, the narrator tells the story of a man who fell of a skyscraper. As each floor passes the man kept saying so far so good. The aphorism mentioned above comes after that as the bomb crushes on the globe and lights up the frame before the screen goes black. The antagonistic relationship between the petrol bomb and the globe is displaced onto Hubert and Paris later in the film when Hubert is traveling to Paris with Vinz and Said as we see a similar globe through the train on an advertisement board accompanied by a caption, the world is yours. It is learned through the experience of the trio in Paris that the central city is not theirs but the relationship between these suburban boys with the city is that of exclusion.

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Chapter 3 References
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. . The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, 2003. Butler, Judith. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. . End of Millennium. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. . Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Davis, Mike. "Planet of Slums." New Left Review 26 (March-April 2004): 5-34. Dienstag, Joshua Foa. "Review: The Open: Man and Animal, by Giorgio Agamben." Political Theory 34, no. 1 (February 2006): 148-152. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995. . The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Routledge, 1973. Grosz, Elizabeth. "Bodies/ Cities." In Sexuality and Space, edited by B Colomina, 241254. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. . Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149-181. New York: Routledge, 1991. 175

Mason-Grant, Joan. "Review: Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. By Elizabeth Grosz." Hypatia 12 no. 4 (Autumn, 1997): 211-217. May, Todd G. "The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze." SubStance 66, 20(3), (1991): 24-35. Metz, Christian. The imaginary signifier: psychoanalysis and the cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. Osterweil, Ara. "Reviwed Work: Cache by Michael Haneke." Film Quarterly 59, no. 4 (Summer, 2006): 35-39. Sassen, Saskia. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Schroeder, Erin. "A Multicultural Conversation:La Haine, Ra,and Menace II Society." Camera Obscura 46, no. 16(1) (2001): 142-179. Sorrensen, Cynthia. "Film Review." Journal of Latin American Geography 8, no. 2 (2009): 225-228. Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Thomas, Douglas. "Re-Thinking the Cyberbody: Hackers, Viruses and Cultural Anxiety." In Technological visions: the hopes and fears that shape new technologies, edited by Douglas Thomas, Marita Sturken and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, 219-239. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Turkle, Sherry. "Cyberspace and Identity." Contemporary Sociology 28, no. 6 (November 1999): 643-648. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Essential Wallerstein. New York: The New Press, 2000. iek, Slavoj. "The Ongoing "Soft Revolution"." Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter, 2004): 292-323.

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Conclusion
Death of Which Cinema?
The debate around death of cinema centers on apparatus theory. Lev Manovich has defined five characteristics of new media, i.e. numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding (Manovich 2002). Broadly, all these characteristics are functions of computer1 mediation. Numerical representation implies all new media objects are composed of digital code that can be described mathematically and subjected to algorithmic manipulation. Consequently, new media consists of two distinct layers, cultural (plot, aesthetics etc.) and computer. Transcoding implies translation of the cultural layer into computer language and commonality of the computer layer, i.e. data structure puts into question specificities of the previously independent mediums. Modularity is defined by the fractal structure of new media. New media elements (image, shape, sound etc.) are represented as collection of discreet samples that can be organized at different scales, but the smaller units (pixels, voxels etc.) do not lose their separate identity in the process. Possibility of alternative assembly therefore makes new media objects variable, rather than fixed in a particular version. Numerical coding and modular structure of the new media objects also makes automation of operations involving media creation, manipulation and access possible. Thus, as Manovich argues, human intentionally can be removed from the creative process, at least in part. (Manovich 2002: 53)
Manovich writes, All digital media (text, still images, visual or audio time data, shapes, 3D spaces) share the same the same digital code. This allows different media types to be displayed using one machine, i.e., a computer, which acts as a multimedia display device. (Manovich 2002: 66)
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In context of the dramatic changes brought to consciousness by industrial time and space, Bazin perceived the optical/chemical recording of physical reality without human intervention to be the power of cinema, since it preserved unity of time and space, revealing the immanent humanist meaning of reality. Ironically, one of the outcomes of proliferation of digital technology in cinema has been opening up possibilities of creating film like scenes by computer programs (i.e. partly circumventing human intentionality) without recording pro-filmic reality. Since digital images, regardless of their origin (analogue or otherwise), are edited by pixel management, Manovich has argued, Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end. (Manovich 2002: 255) Manovich also argues that Beginning in the 1980s, new cinematic forms have emerged which are not linear narratives, which are exhibited on a television or a computer screen, rather than in a movie theater and which simultaneously give up cinematic realism. Anne Friedberg attributes the popularity of non-linear narratives to advent of time-shifting institutions/mechanisms like multiplex cinema2 and VCR (and later DVD players) which recasts the virtual mobile gaze- which she asserts is the essence of cinematic spectation into a more accessible and repeatable exponent (Friedberg 1991), making spectators time tourists. She concludes, The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes for what is now blithely described as the postmodern

Friedberg writes, Multiplex cinemas metonymize the cinema screen into a chain of adjacent shop windows. The screens in a shopping-mall cinema transform the stillness of the shop mannequin into the live action of film performance, as if the itinerary through the mall to reach the cinema theater reenacts the historical impulse from photography to film. (Friedberg 1991: 427) The remote control of the VCR on the other hand enables the spectator to stop, accelerate, and reverse time.

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condition. In short, our prior theorizations of the cinema have been burst asunder. (Friedberg 1991: 428) The problem of contemporary apparatus theory seems to be insensitivity to politics/aesthetics and essentialization of the dominant ideology. Although Friedberg notes that the virtual mobile gaze was a parallel development of departmental store shopping that turned the gaze of modernist flanerie into that of a consumer-spectator, a practice of consumption through vision, she portrays it as the only cinematic practice. What she defines as the cinematic vision ends up being affirmation of escapist Classical Hollywood codes in the process3. Friedberg writes, As many film theorists have argued, the cinematic apparatus provides the illusion of a present as well as of a different, absent time. Jean-Louis Baudry describes the "artificial psychosis" produced in the "cine-subject" by the "simulation apparatus": "It can be assumed that it is this wish which prepares the long history of cinema: the wish to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions" ("Apparatus" 315; my emphasis). This epistemological twist - representations mistaken for perceptions - is, as Baudry argues, the locus of the apparatus's ideological power. And, in Baudry's analysis, the pleasure found in this misapprehension is precisely the wish that "prepares the long history of cinema." The cinematic apparatus provides a desired psychosis in its mechanically reproducible construction of another place and time. One of the essential properties of cinema is its temporal displacement of the spectator: the time of a film's production, the time of its fiction, and the time of its projection are all conflated into the same moment in viewing. The reality effect, created by cinematic conventions of narrative and by illusionistic construction, works to conceal this conflation, to produce representations that are taken for perceptions or-as Christian Metz would have it-discours that is taken for histoire. (Friedberg 1991: 427)
The position of Avant-garde as the harmless outside in this understanding becomes clear when Manovich writes, When the avant-garde filmmakers collaged multiple images within a single frame, or painted and scratched film, or revolted against the indexical identity of cinema in other ways, they were working against "normal" filmmaking procedures and the intended uses of film technology. (Film stock was not designed to be painted on). Thus they operated on the periphery of commercial cinema not only aesthetically but also technically. (Manovich 2002: 258) Manovich, although more inclusive of marginal cinema than Friedberg, takes normality of Hollywood for granted.
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It is worth noting here that Baudrys apparatus theory was a critic of nave realism that fails to take into account of the power relations embedded in mechanisms of representation. Baudry wrote, Everything [in the ideology of representation and specularization] happens as if, the subject himself being unable and for a reason to account for his own situation, it was necessary to substitute secondary organs, grafted onto replace his own defective ones, instruments or ideological formations capable of filling his function as subject. In fact, this substitution is only possible on the condition that the instrumentation itself be hidden or repressed. Thus disturbing cinematic elements similar, precisely to those indicating the return of the repressed signify without fail the arrival of the instrument in flesh and blood, as in Vertovs Man with the Movie Camera. Both spectacular quality and the assurance of ones own identity collapse simultaneously with the revealing of the mechanism, that is, of the inscription of the film-work. (Baudry 1985: 540) Most major cinema movements critical of Hollywood has therefore taken up selfreflexivity in one form or another to reveal the working of the apparatus. In case of Third Cinema formal innovation is integral to the quest for an alternative social matrix that can only be achieved through violation of linear time and space. As it is evident from the episodic structure of Hour, City and Calcutta 71 and their call for audience participation in continuing the narrative (at least in principle), Third Cinema is not opposed to modular structure or variability4 that Manovich defines as characteristics of new media. As Wayne

Not only we see this in Solanas, but the 8mm experimental short movement in Mexico heavily influenced by the praxis of Third Cinema - which was called 4th cinema by its practitioners exemplifies this in their manifesto. Sergio Garcia concludes their manifesto Toward a Fourth Cinema as follows, I would like to list the solutions I believe are decisive for the continuance and development of the 8mm Cinematographic Movement: 1. Create a national network for projection, using the universities as the main center for action. This, on the basis of exchange. 2. Create specialized criticism to comment on everything that has to do with this Movement, trying to do so in a mass circulation newspapers or magazines. 3. Create (and this is the most important) an audience of followers, who enthusiastically support this type of cinema. 4. Try to find an accessible language, as a work is made with someone in mind.

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has pointed out, its strongest claim being a place in the tradition of international political art, Third Cinema has always shown affinity towards media convergence; be it in form of inter-titles, still photographs or paintings in City and Hour, theatrical staging in Black God, stop-motion photography in Interview, found footage in Tribulation, Television images in Cache or cinematic use of local culture in numerous other films. In fact, platforms like Youtube on the internet can potentially solve the problem of distribution of political cinema through mainstream channels. Cinema being an interface of three dimensional moving images in the general environment of digital media therefore is not a death sentence for Third Cinema. However, the characteristic of new media Third Cinema is least compatible with is automation5, i.e. removal of human intentionality, at least in production of the media. While Third Cinema is not a tradition of passive celebration/consumption of indexicality, its premise is defined by the repressed social referent. Its creativity celebrates the human hand as the outsiders perspective, as the rebellion against machinic, structural

5. Use familiar and already existing elements, with the aim of simplifying the understanding and comprehension of the films. For example, a Santo in 8mm who, instead of fighting mummies and monsters, fights large estate owners, black marketeers, gringos and other exploiters (this is for the interested in working with peasants and marginal classes, that is, the majority of the country). 6. Organize frequent projections, festival and cine-clubs. 7. 8. 9. Etc. (Numbers 7, 8, 9, etc. are for additional points that each reader may want to add). (Garcia 1999: 175) Automation is a blanket term beyond the scope of elaboration in this conclusion. Manovich reminds us that there are variable degrees of automation the lower levels of which could simply be the spell-check function of word processing softwares. The automation which is problematic in context of Third Cinema is where human choices are subordinated to pre-given options of a program.
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standardization.

The search for a common code/language in new media is a parallel

move of quest for universal translation/exchange value affected by globalized capitalist markets6. In neo-liberalism that quest has transcended/assimilated its former peripheries the geographic Third World, people of marginal identities and nature. As long as cinema retains the legacy of a humanist art form, and the integrity of human body resists this codification/obsoletion (even if precariously), Third Cinema has the simultaneous obligation of resisting automation. This is where we have to address the question of cinema being an ideology. It has been argued that Virtual Reality is a step forward towards realization of what Bazin called the originary myth of total cinema, i.e. reproduction of nature in its own image7 snatching it away from time (i.e. by de-contextualization) (Bazin 1960). Significantly, what Bazin considers striking in this realization is the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas rather than any help offered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers (Bazin 1967: 17). If the mummy complex, the dream of individualized, inert existence

If classical Hollywood conventions were correlatives of Fordist assembly line production, then new media reflects the logics of flexible accumulation. As Manovich writes, The logic of new media thus corresponds to the post-industrial logic of "production on demand" and "just in time" delivery which themselves were made possible by the use of computers and computer networks in all stages of manufacturing and distribution. Here "culture industry" (the term was originally coined by Theodor Adorno in the 1930s) is actually ahead of the rest of the industry. The idea that a customer determines the exact features of her car at the showroom, the data is then transmitted to the factory, and hours later the new car is delivered, remains a dream, but in the case of computer media, it is reality. Since the same machine is used as a showroom and a factory, i.e., the same computer generates and displays media -- and since the media exists not as a material object but as data which can be sent through the wires with the speed of light, the customized version created in response to users input is delivered almost immediately. Thus, to continue with the same example, when you access a Web site, the server immediately assembles a customized Web page. (Manovich 2002: 56) Bazin wrote, In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color and relief (Bazin 1967: 20).
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is one of the mythological inspirations behind cinema, there is also the aspiration of connection with matter - the outer, social world through vision (see Aleas definition of Third Cinema on pg. 61). Similarly, as Arnheim has argued, limitations of a medium can be the very strength of its enunciation8. If Virtual Reality offers immersion (i.e. collapse of the distance between the diegetic and spectatorial space9), Television offers immediacy of live images and the so-called interactive media offers physical participation10, then the time-lag between production and reception of cinema, not to mention the anti-illusionist narrative strategies consciously employed by political filmmakers can return the critical

Arnheim famously wrote, Not until film began to become an art was the interest moved from mere subject matter to aspects of form. What had hitherto been merely the urge to record certain actual events, now became the aim to represent objects by special means exclusive to film. These means obtrude themselves, show themselves able to do more than simple reproduce the required object; they sharpen it, impose a style upon it, point out special features, make it vivid and decorative. Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off, where the conditions of reproduction serve in some way to mold the object (Arnheim 1957: 57).
9

On the other hand, Manovich writes, In VR, either there is no connection between the two spaces (for instance, I am in a physical room while the virtual space is one of an underwater landscape) or, on the contrary, the two completely coincide (i.e., the Super Cockpit project). In either case, the actual physical reality is disregarded, dismissed, abandoned. (Manovich 2002: 113)
10

Manovich warns about the following limitations of interactive media in this context. He writes, When we use the concept of interactive media exclusively in relation to computer-based media, there is danger that we interpret "interaction" literally, equating it with physical interaction between a user and a media object (pressing a button, choosing a link, moving the body), at the sake of psychological interaction. The psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification, which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all, are mistakenly identified with an objectively existing structure of interactive links. (Manovich 2002: 71-72) And more significantly, Now interactive computer media asks us instead to click on an image in order to go to another image. Before we would read a sentence of a story or a line of a poem and think of other lines, images, memories. Now interactive media asks us to click on a highlighted sentences to go to another sentence. In short, we are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations. Put diffidently, in what can be read as a new updated version of French philosopher Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation," we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody's else mind for our own. (Manovich 2002: 74)

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distance necessary for a historical perspective. We have already seen in the first chapter how foregrounding of the imperfect conditions of production has been in itself an aesthetic and political statement, not only in Third Cinema but neo-realism as well. At a time when the tradition of suturing of the spectator into the classical narrative has given way to even more immersive virtual reality of video games, and shorter life span of video games have made filmmakers like George Lucas shift their attention to the latter as more lucrative financial venture, I believe, cinemas power of distanciation has become crucial for its significance as an art form. Against the logic of mass production, Avantgarde cinema claimed its status as an artisanal practice. But as Manovich describes, In a post-industrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and "select" her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices. Rather than pushing the same objects/information to a mass audience, marketing now tries to target each individual separately. The logic of new media technology reflects this new social logic. Every visitor to a Web site automatically gets her own custom version of the site created on the fly from a database. (Manovich 2002: 60) Consequently, the dominant cultural logic also shifted from linear narratives to more variable, customized cultural forms11. The changes Manovich and Friedberg point out since the 1980s can be explained by this switch. Manovich therefore acknowledges that, One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer. (Manovich 2002: 258) It is not possible to claim an alternative status or even elitism only on basis of formalism any more. In context of the age of mechanical reproduction Benjamin argued that, while fascism aesthetisizes self-destruction, communists politicize art (Benjamin 1936). At the
Commenting on the ever changing surface of flexible accumulation and its cultural forms Zizek has therefore asked the question, How can we revolutionize a society that is constantly revolutionizing itself?
11

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age of post-humanism and digital reproduction/codification politicization of cinema therefore seems to be even more relevant. An example will clarify this point. Manovich has argued database is the symbolic form of the computer age just like the linear form in modern age (Manovich 2002). Our perception of the world in form of databases is reflected in increasing popularity of the database narrative, as we have seen in our discussion of City and Herbert. A brief comparison of these films with Run Lola Run12 (Germany, 1998) by Tom Tykwer will suggest that while celebrating the database form and media convergence (use of animation, computer graphics, speeding of the micro-narratives, etc.) Run Lola Run (the novelty of its narrative structure has been later known as Nintendo narrative) ultimately conforms to the classical convention of closure as possible crisis presented in the first two runs of the film is resolved in the Third as Lola and her boyfriend Mani walk away with a bag of money at the end of the thriller. The film starts with some deep philosophical contemplation about humanity concluding in the end of the sequence that the ball is round, and the game is ninety minutes long. At another level, the three possibilities of the narrative that the film presents simulating a computer game structure remain distinct from each other except for some overlapping characters and locations. In the films we have discussed earlier on the other hand, the database structure contextualizes earlier assumptions about images or segments to add
The film explores several possible outcomes of a single event the consequences of Mani, Lolas boyfriend, losing 100,000 marks after a diamond smuggling deal. The film consists of three separate runs following Manis call to Lola informing her about the loss. The episodes more or less follow norms of the gangster genre depicting actions of the couple trying to win back their money. In the first run, Lola is shot by a policeman at a store Mani was robbing. After Mani asks Lola if she wanted to live, she says no and then stop. The movie goes back to the beginning from this point. In the second run, Mani is run over by an ambulance. Lying on the ground he remembers a time when he asked Lola what she would do if Mani died. After some deliberation Lola replies they were not dead yet. The movie goes back for its third run here. At the end of the third run their operation becomes successful, and they end up having more money than expected.
12

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new connotation and thereby weave a spatial understanding of the theme. Thus, while Herbert and City are not linear narratives, they are interested in sequential connections for an historical understanding and intervention. So far I have discussed structural social exclusion as one of major themes of the new Third Cinema where the physical body and children/teenagers are the new frontiers of the global network space. To conclude on an optimistic note, I will now discuss a different trend of contextualization in contemporary political cinema where children are reconnected to a repressed political history in context of the last dictatorship in Argentina. During the military dictatorship during 1976-1983, the period known as the Dirty War, over 30000 left wing activists were abducted by government agents. They were tortured, many of them killed, and according to the military record itself, 9000 of them are still unaccounted for. 500 children born during that captivity were given to military related families with false birth certificates, of whom 74 have been found later. A movement in search of those disappeared children was started by their surviving mothers and grandmothers through an association called Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, named after a main square (known for being the focal point of political life of the city) in downtown Buenos Aires, where the bereaved mothers first gathered for a political demonstration. As we will see in the following discussion, this entry of the maternal/bodily connection into political public space will have bearings in the political staging of Cautiva (Argentina, 2003) by Gaston Biraben. A body of fiction [Like The Official Story (1985)] as well as documentary [Spoils of War (2000), Histories of Everyday life (2001), H. I. J. O. S: the soul split in two (2002) etc.] films have been made on the subject, and their proliferation during or after the financial crisis during 1999-2001 186

suggests that the theme resonates with the contemporary anti-neoliberal thrust of the Argentine left. Cautiva is a film about Christina/Sofia, one of the disappeared teenagers reconnection with her biological family. A federal judge under the civilian government orders a secret blood test of Christina (actually Sofia) following an appeal filed by her biological grandmother. As the test attests the genetic continuity between Sofia Lombardi and her nana, Sofia is taken away from her foster parents, a retired policeman and his wife. As Sofia goes through the period of distrust and confusion over the newly revealed identity, a parallel secret history of repression of the biological connection and by default, the radical politics surfaces in the film. Having to choose between the repressed past and pro status quo present (the inter title at the end of the film reminds us that the collaborators of the dictatorship are protected by laws recently created for their benefit) Sofia chooses the former. Like Bolivia (and metaphorically Cache) the film starts from the simulated space of television where Argentina plays Holland in the World Cup Soccer final of 1978. Argentina scores a goal in the sequence against which the Dutch defenders appeal for handball, but the referee overrides it. As Argentina wins the cup controversially, the military generals are seen celebrating this national victory in company of notorious US diplomat Henry Kissinger. The celebratory mood carries over to the next shot where Christina is dancing with her father in a family gathering on her fifteenth birthday. It is revealed through the film later that the actual birthday of Christina/Sofia was the day

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Argentina won the World Cup, when her mother delivered her blindfolded13in a secret prison hospital. Thus the opposition between pseudo nationalist discourse of dictatorship and radical politics is framed in the film as a parallel opposition between the ob/scene and the repressed unseen, a recurrent strategy we have seen in this dissertation. After the birthday sequence Christina is called for a blood test apparently as a routine check up. The association of the unseen with the visceral is emphasized in the sequence through a close-up of the syringe drawing blood, doubling the medical examination as an optical procedure. The strategy is repeated in the child birth sequence where close-up of the delivery in a way establishes a sound bridge between screams of labor pain (which sounds like long, distant screams under torture) and the first cry of the child. Thus politics of a non-mutable body and genetic continuity counters the dominant narrative of specular manipulation (falsification of documents, or the concealed handball in the TV footage) in the film. Contrast of the body with the image (the perpetual present) evokes the second association with the unseen, which is ghostly (the past)14. The secret prisons where the abducted were confined are referred to as concentration camp in the film reminding us once more of Homo Sacer or the animalized human. This analogy is visually alluded to in the film when Sofia coincidentally meets her friend Angelica, another child of disappeared parents at a volleyball game. Angelica was expelled from their earlier school for making radical comments in a class on constitution.
13

To emphasize the parallel temporality both the television sequence and the secret delivery scene is given blue tint in the film.
14

Like Herbert, Sofias biological nephew tells her on their first meeting that he has seen a ghost which is big like the moon. In a way, that confirms her own vision of seeing her mother on a rocking chair as part of a fantasy sequence. The nostalgic still photographs and memories of family members are other ghostly traces of the unseen in the film.

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When Sofia tells her in the shower room both of them had similar background, the two girls stare at each other naked under the shower in a wide shot, reminiscent of gas chamber scenes of holocaust films. In other words, they embody the ghostly, their parents. The parents and the daughters are denied history in two different ways by the dominant discourse of dictatorship. Popular animalized/demonized perception of left wing politics Sofia grows up with15 breaks down with gradual discovery of the history of repression. Simultaneously, her body goes through biological renewal. Thus when politics returns to the zoe, the embodied bare life, it becomes bios once more16. In a conversation Sofias grandmother recalled her daughter liked large windows and natural light from all directions. At the end of the film Sofia asks her, if her parents disappearance was forever, before giving her a passionate hug. Accompanied by choir music, dissolve to a slow pan across the memory laden bedroom leading to the balcony outside. Sofia is looking at the night sky leaning on the railing there. In a reverse shot, the camera zooms out from here following her eye line. She becomes smaller gradually, before the house is recognizable only by its lights amid surrounding darkness. The shot dissolves to another aerial night shot of Buenos Aires, recognizable by its crisscrossing strings of light.

Her friend tells her while smoking in the bathroom that communists blow up priests. Her foster father initially claims she was abandoned in a train after birth, then unable to defend that position argues that they are not the angel you are thinking. A brief comparison with The Official Story (Argentina, 1985) made on a similar theme of disappearance with make this point clearer. In The Official Story, made at the height of Reaganist era, the child is almost an infant, lacking critical or cognitive capabilities. The narrative of guilt therefore unfolds from the foster mother, Alicias perspective. In Cautiva, made at a different political juncture, the teenager has active agency.
16

15

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The relation of exclusion between bodies, children and cities we have discussed in the earlier chapters is altered here by a politics of emplacement in the city, by returning the power of history to the animalized captive (Cautiva). Beginning at the turn of Twenty- first century neo-liberalism has survived a series of slumps. The East Asian Financial crisis of 1997 has come back in a much larger scale with bursting of the housing market bubble, leading to ironic state intervention worldwide through bail out of corporations. In face of global recession, left leaning governments have returned in countries like Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia. Local or indigenous populations have put up glorious struggles against neoliberal assault in places as diverse as Amazonia in Peru to Nandigram and Dantewada in India. Political parties (like CPIM, see chapter 2) implementing anti-people policies to facilitate foreign investment have been routed in elections. US military policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been far from fruitful. Perhaps, the confidence expressed in the politics of Cautiva reflects these changes.

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Conclusion References
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Filmography
Memories of Underdevelopment. Directed by Tomas G. Alea. 1968. Carandiru. Directed by Hector Babenco. 2003. Pixote. Directed by Hector Babenco. 1981. Tribulation 99. Directed by Craig Baldwin. 1991. Cautiva. Directed by Gaston Biraben. 2003. Los Olvidados. Directed by Luis Bunuel. 1950. Bolivia. Directed by Adrin Caetano. 2001. Pizza, Beer and Smoke. Directed by Adrin Caetano. 1998. A Movie. Directed by Bruce Conner. 1958. La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Primera parte: La insurrecin de la burguesa ["The Battle of Chile, Part 1"]. Directed by Patricio Guzman. 1975. La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Segunda parte: El golpe de estado ["The Battle of Chile, Part 2]. Directed by Patricio Guzman. 1977. La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Tercera parte: El poder popular ["The Battle of Chile, Part 3]. Directed by Patricio Guzman. 1979. Cache ["Hidden"]. Directed by Michael Haneke. 2005. La Haine ["Hate"]. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. 1995. City of God. Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Ktia Lund. 2002. Herbert. Directed by Suman Mukhopadhyaya. 2006. The Official Story. Directed by Luis Puenzo. 1985. Pather Panchali ["The Song of the Little Road"]. Directed by Satyajit Ray. 1955. Black God, White Devil. Black and White. Directed by Glaubar Rocha. 1964. Antonio das Mortes. Directed by Glauber Rocha. 1969. 192

Land in Anguish. Black and White. Directed by Glauber Rocha. 1967. Akaler Sandhane ["In Search of Famine"]. Directed by Mrinal Sen. 1980. Calcutta 71. Directed by Mrinal Sen. 1971. Interview. Directed by Mrinal Sen. 1971. Padatik ["The Guerrilla Fighter"]. Directed by Mrinal Sen. 1973. The Bicycle Thieves. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. 1948. Hour of the Furnaces. Black and White. Directed by Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio Getino. 1968. Social Genocide. Directed by Fernando Solanas. 2004. Run Lola Run. Directed by Tom Tykwer. 1998 The Edukators. Directed by Hans Weingartner. 2004.

193

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