From Algiers to Buenos Aires: The Third World Cinema Committee (197374)

The cinema made in the Third World shows a great diversity depending on the region or country in question. But towards the late 1960s, there was a gradual consolidation of a cinematic-political project whose main principles were very similar to the Third Cinema proposed by Solanas and Getino, or to Garca Espinosa's imperfect cinema, but also included claims in other Asian or African manifestos. Particularly bold and ambitious was the creation of a Third World Cinema Committee intending to gather film-makers from the three continents. Two successive meetings, in Algiers (December 1973) and Buenos Aires (May 1974), gave rise to this organisational structure and established its goals. But whereas the Algiers meeting is a reference point in historiography on Third World Cinema, the Buenos Aires gathering remains almost unknown. This article reconstructs both events, the links that made them possible, and views the third-worldism of that period as a gap-bridging imaginary to the consolidation of Third World Cinema in the geopolitics of international cinema.