Questions of Third Cinema

Book excerpt: Is there an international film language? Are national, ethnic and cultural differences in how films are made and understood merely differences of dialect? Such questions have been increasingly debated in recent years with the emergence of the idea of a Third Cinema, which means not simply the films made by the so-called Third World countries, but any cinema which offers a radical challenge to entrenched Western notions of what the cinema is. In a wide-ranging series of essays, this book extends the debate about Third Cinema—in Britain and the United States as well as in Africa and Asia—and offers a provocative analysis of the political problems and aesthetic possibilities of a different kind of film-making.