Against a Third Cinema: The non-revolutionary revolution of Ian Gabriel's Forgiveness

Abstract

The intellectual challenge of addressing the "political" role of cinema is of pronounced historical and cultural significance in African film discourse. Yet what critical tools permit us to measure out a film's political content, let alone assert the causal relation between a filmic politics and an audience's political reaction? By assessing the significance of Mike Wayne's dialectical adaptation of Solanas and Getino's infamous category of "Third Cinema", and further unpacking Wayne's own subsequent theoretical presuppositions, this paper unravels many of the core problems which face any attempt to speak constructively of any such "revolutionary" cinema category. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.