The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder

In the 1960s, several Latin American filmmakers launched a movement referred to as third cinema. They declared the third cinema as a counter to Hollywood’s first cinema and Europe’s second cinema. Third cinema for these filmmakers was a revolutionary-oriented cinema, a cinema with an aesthetic and political approach that was sensitive to the situation of the third world. The term third world came from Latin American intellectuals who identified in the term third world not only a condition of dependency and poverty, but also a possibility–an ideology, a dream, a route of progress. According to two exponents of this movement-Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, third cinema is “a cinema that recognizes that within the struggle of the peoples of the third world against imperialism lies the noblest cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of the present, a possibility of forming a liberated personality, with each person being the starting point of change-in other words, the decolonization of culture” (1969). Through the film The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos) (1968), they illustrated this anti-imperialist struggle through a comprehensive analysis of oppression in Argentina.

The films in the Perspektif program do not date back to the third cinema revival of the 1960s. However, the films made in the last five years carry the same spirit and approach to contemporary aesthetic and political issues, which concern the intertwining of oppression, violence, and injustice. The first film, The Trial (2023), was created from the court archives of military generals involved in violence and terror during Argentina’s military junta (1974-1983). The film not only exposes the atrocities of the military regime, especially against student activists, trade unionists and critical artists, but also the power of cinema to bear witness to the drama of a nation seeking to set its own history straight.

Inadelso Cossa’s The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder (2024) takes us on a long meditation on violence, challenging the strict temporality between past and present, colonial and postcolonial, memory and history, ghost and reality in Mozambique. Amidst the sounds of the night, the chirping insects, third world problems continue to be present in a land that has experienced colonization and a history of slavery for hundreds of years. Independence is a passage, but also a condemnation.

The third and final film in the program, Fifth Cinema (2018) by filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi offers a critical take on the stagnation of third cinema. Indigenous filmmakers have taken their place in the fourth cinema, declaring how the third cinema, although populist and revolutionary in orientation, has forgotten the relationships built by genocide, gender injustice, and racism. Set in the context of Vietnam, one of the nations that managed to defeat almost all of the world’s imperialists (China, France, and the United States), Fifth cinema brings us to reflect on the duties of artists and cinema: presenting possibilities and offering new realms.

–Veronika Kusumaryati
Programmer