Cinema and the Political Imagination

Book excerpt: Highlighting the importance of Third Cinema on twenty-first-century political filmmaking, this book examines films that have adopted Third Cinema’s experimental film techniques for the purpose of political intervention. The text explores the legacy of Third Cinema on more traditional cinema, and Robin Truth Goodman examines how Third Cinema’s cinematic reinvention of the image as a political springboard is still being utilized by contemporary filmmakers. In exploring the relationship between political subjectivity and cinematic practice through a variety of contemporary case studies, Goodman also looks at topics not previously examined by Third Cinema. The book focuses on the multiple internationalisms of borders and cities and treats gender as a vector through which different directions in a political field can be imagined. Finally, while linking a mid-twentieth-century tradition of filmmaking to contemporary problems of the political, the book considers the politics of representation through the representation of politics, reflecting on what makes an image political and what inspires us to identify with it. A compelling read for students and scholars interested in Third Cinema, Cinema and Politics, and Cinema and Subversion and anyone interested in exploring the connections between Third Cinema and contemporary political filmmaking.