tailieunhanh - THE CHANGING GEOGRAPHY OF THIRD CINEMA

The film print shown in theaters is typically a copy of a copy of a copy, three generations removed from the Original Camera Negative. Each generation sacrifices detail and contrast, leaving audiences with a pale imitation of the original. Digital presentation is typically far closer to the Original Camera Negative, enabling much higher picture quality. Stability. Film projectors must “pull down” each frame, then pause while that frame is projected. This process is inherently mechanical and somewhat imprecise. Slight misalignments from one frame to the next cause the picture to hop around on the screen. In. | From Screen Special Latin American Issue Volume 38 number 4 Winter 1997 THE CHANGING GEOGRAPHY OF THIRD CINEMA Michael Chanan IN 1968 after two years work a group of film-makers in Argentina calling themselves Grupo Cine Liberación radical in both politics and their approach to cinema completed a mammoth three-part political film running almost four and a half hours entitled La hora de los hornos Hour of the Furnaces . 1 Constrained by the conditions which followed the military coup of 1966 but bolstered by the growth of organised resistance the film was shot semi-clandestinely in conjunction with cadres of the Peronist movement the negative was smuggled out to Italy where the film was finished . In short as the North American critic Robert Stam has put it it was a film made in the interstices of the system and against the in production militant in politics and experimental in language . 2 Setting out with the intention of making a social documentary in the manner established in Argentina ten years earlier by Fernando Birri and the Documentary School of Santa Fe of which one of the group Gerardo Vallejo had been a member the project underwent an organic transformation as a result of the conditions in which it was made. In particular its most famous trait - the openness of its text - derived from the experience of the film makers in the organisation of political debates around the screening of films from Cuba or by film-makers like Joris Ivens We realised that the most important thing was not the film and the information in it so much as the way this information was debated. One of the aims of such films is to provide the occasion for people to find themselves and speak of about their own problems. The projection becomes a place where people talk out and develop their awareness. We learnt the importance of this space cinema here becomes humanly useful. 3 Accordingly the film was constructed in a highly idiosyncratic manner prompted by intertitles