What Remains of Third Cinema?

Abstract

Documentary filmmaking in Latin America today undoubtedly differs from the militant cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. But what remains of “Third Cinema”? How do new strategies blend with old ones to create a kind of temporal hybridity in documentary film? How do new movements like Argentina’s cine piquetero (picket-line cinema) return us to the aesthetics of forty years ago? And how do they diverge? This chapter looks at these questions by considering the evolution from the 1960s to the present of two of Latin America’s most iconic cultivators of militant cinema, Fernando E. “Pino” Solanas (Argentina) and Patricio Guzmán (Chile). The work of these filmmakers is placed into dialogue with the emergence of cine piquetero since the 1990s.