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Ghostlife of Third Cinema
Asian American Film and Video
Glen M. Mimura
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

An interpretive history of Asian American independent media since the 1960s

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown.

For Glen M. Mimura, Asian American cinema is the spectral, ghostly return of the international film movement known as Third Cinema. Tracing contemporary Asian American cinema as a continuation of Third Cinema’s radical enterprise of making marginalized subjects visible in the First World, Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, including Trinh T. Minh-ha’s experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam; avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, and Janice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, and sexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang. In Ghostlife of Third Cinema, Mimura confronts the ongoing erasure of Asian American independent media andilluminates its cultural and political significance today.
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Political Film
The Dialectics of Third Cinema
Mike Wayne
Pluto Press, 2001
Third Cinema is a cinema committed to social and cultural emancipation. In this book, Mike Wayne argues that Third Cinema is absolutely central to key debates concerning contemporary film practices and cultures. As a body of films, Third Cinema expands our horizons of the medium and its possibilities. Wayne develops Third Cinema theory by exploring its dialectical relations with First Cinema (dominant,commercial) and Second Cinema (arthouse,auteur). Discussing an eclectic range of films, from Evita to Dollar Mambo, The Big Lebowski to The Journey, Amistad to Camp de Thiaroye, Political Film explores the affinities and crucial political differences between First and Third Cinema. Third Cinema’s relationship with Second Cinema is explored via the cinematic figure of the bandit (Bandit Queen, The General, Eskiya). The continuities and differences with European precursors such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Lukacs, Brecht and Walter Benjamin are also assessed. The book is a polemical call for a film criticism that is politically engaged with the life of the masses.
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