Towards a Palestinian Third Cinema

In 1970 the filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin were commissioned by Fatah (with funding from the Arab League) to create a film about the Palestinian Revolution. The footage they shot eventually became the well known essay film Ici et Ailleurs. In 1971 Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu visited the region to shoot footage for their film Japanese Red Army/PFLP Declaration of World War. These works have received considerable critical attention since they first appeared. As sophisticated meditations on film and politics, they use the Palestinian Revolution as a case study for intervening theoretically into conversations surrounding questions of truth, representation, media circuits and the relationships that can and cannot be formed through them. Less well known are the works of Palestinian and other Arab filmmakers working on the ground at the time who were committed to making films within the Palestinian revolution itself. As texts arising out of a national liberation movement in progress, these filmmakers were necessarily focused on communicating and processing information and emotions related to current events rather than intervening in theoretical understandings about the nature of the image and mediation. Nonetheless, as attempts to communicate in new ways about an active revolution, the films engage with many of the same ideas that inform the theoretical works of Godard, Adachi and their respective collaborators. As a result, the Palestinian films offer a concrete example of the enactment of third cinema as articulated by Latin American filmmakers, and the messiness inherent within film movements emerging from within the context of ongoing political struggle, and so serve as an important complement to these more famous works. A careful tracing of this film movement and close readings of the modest films that emerged from within it uncovers an important thread to the complex story of political filmmaking of the 1970s.