Third World Cinema in Latin America: Representing “Otherness”

Introduction This dissertation will argue about third cinema in Mexico, focusing on how in the movies are treated topics regarding social problems, such as underdevelopment and crisis of national identity, whose roots have to be found in the past colonization. The main aim is to show that cinema is used as a medium to denounce the current critical situation of Mexican society, that until nowadays is facing difficulties in finding equilibrium between the past colonization and the attempt to construct a national identity. Mexican cinema has been living through the years a sort of paradox. On the one hand there is the effort to make of colonization history, on the other hand Mexicans still look for models to follow abroad (Europe or North America). In fact, since the beginning of a Mexican production, it has been difficult to create a style that was not contaminated by foreign influences. From the Italian neorealism to the Hollywoodian romantic comedies, Latin America has been living cinema as another form of colonization. Cinema makes its first appearance in Latin America thanks to French and Italian productions, and during the following decades mainly foreign productions (first European and then American) were dominating the screens. It was quite difficult for these countries to develop a their own national film production without taking in consideration the foreign models that brought and dominated the cinemas of the Spanish America for such a long period of time. Latin American movies are up to nowadays considered part of the third world cinema , where the definition third world highlights how there is still a European and American-centric point of view, not only as concerns economy but also as concerns culture. The Mexican society, and the Latin American society in general, after centuries of colonization is still living a process of decolonization in which the conflict between the models imposed by the colonizers and the attempt to find a their own identity has given birth to a conflict. In Mexican movies there is a portrait of this reality, the characters lives reflect this conflict, and in their everyday life is visible this fight for their own identity, an interior conflict that they are not able to avoid and solve. Mexico has been one of the first South American countries to use cinema as a mean of divulgation. For instance, the general Francisco Villa that in the second decade of the century was leading the revolution, decided to use the camera to film making a sort of “propaganda” of the current revolution. However, this use of cinema left the place to a cinema whose 1