Third world film: the particular and the global

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2001 by Linda Dittmar

For the present course's goal of helping students become more respectful of cultural and material differences and more reflective about their own relative position (individually and nationally) within global relations, it is important that students be aware that they are not sampling "typical" films or acquiring in-depth knowledge of third world cinemas. Even the question of whether Argentina is "third world" is up for discussion. After all, awareness of the problems tangled in this terminology and of the incomplete nature of what we strive to understand about third world cinemas is at once the most humbling and enabling aspect of what the course aims to accomplish.

APPENDIX

Third World Film--Draft Outline

Note: The outline below sketches out the Israeli version of this course. It is still a wish list, too long for a semesters offering. As noted above, the U.S. version will resemble it closely but recast it in terms of U.S. concerns. While the present outline is too long for a semester's offering, it reflects my overall goal of including films from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia, and having a substantial concluding section that looks at diasporic third world films by way of further interrogating the notion of "third world" in its global contexts. Time allowing, I would like to include some "high art" work by diasporic film makers of third world origins in order to further problematize this terminology.

Week 1: Introduction. Satyajit Ray's The Rime and the World (India; based on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore) and selections from Josephine Baker's Princess Tam Tam (France).

These films will help us delineate issues key to this course: historic contexts of emergent nationhood; encounters between first and third worlds; the effects of class and gender within such narratives; questions of perspective (insider/outsider, self/other); racism and colonialism; the function of gender in third world representations; and the emergence of modernity.

Weeks 2-9: Comparative studies. Selected films from all the areas listed below, except for the Middle East and third world diasporas. These selections will "speak' to films which precede and follow them.

a) Fire (India) pairs well with The Home and the World because of its contemporary feminist focus. Similarly, Euzan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley (Martinique), relates to them as another narrative of personal/political coming of age and national emergence.

b) Cisse's Genesis (Mali) concerns nation-forming myths, Sembene's Mandabi (Senegal) concerns modern bureaucracy and economics in a barely "post" colonial situation, while Maldoror's Sam bizanga (Guadelupe/Congo/Angola) presents a woman's perspective on liberation struggles.

c) Kiss of the Spider Woman pairs well with The Official Story because of their overlapping and yet different treatment of a period of extreme internal repression in Argentine history.

Weeks 10-12: Special interest films. Selections from Middle East and North African cinemas for an Israeli offering, with a more local emphasis for a US offering.