Introduction

Originating in the highly politicised context of the late 1960s, Third Cinema – a politicised idea in itself – has until quite recently dominated studies on Latin American cinema. The concept appeared for the first time in Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 1969 manifesto, Towards a Third Cinema, and it was conceived in opposition both to the commercial and mainstream First Cinema and to the auteurist Second Cinema. Third Cinema was initially formulated by the co-directors of the paradigmatic political film La hora de los hornos / The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) in relation to a specific historical and geographical context: Argentina and its national film industry during the 1960s. Soon after its formulation, however, Third Cinema developed into one of the key categories for understanding and analysing politically oppositional cinema worldwide. Nevertheless, by the early 1980s this idea had already begun to seem too partial and even insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of more contemporary Latin American cinema. Regarding post-dictatorship Argentine cinema, while a considerable number of films were politically committed to the rebuilding and the strengthening of the democratic system, the characteristics of these films – as political cinema – were radically different from those of the also highly politicised cinema that preceded the advent of military rule. Involved in many and varied ways with the representation of recent history, the Argentine cinema of the reinstalled democracy was also political, yet it had no revolutionary aims whatsoever.

Given the nature and the scope of this research – concerned as it is with historical and political filmic discourses in the Argentine cinema of the post-dictatorship years – and considering the long lasting influence of the idea of Third Cinema in discourses on Latin American cinema (and well beyond it), it seems essential to re-historicise the idea and update some of the debates around it with the aim of throwing some light on the different kind of ‘politics’ contained in the films under study. Despite the productive derivations of the concept on a global scale, which Anthony Guneratne identifies as Third Cinema theory (2003, 1), I will mainly focus here on Third Cinema, in terms of its impact, contradictions and subsequent corrections, in relation to the Argentine cinema, at the same time trying to avoid the risks of dispersion.