Third World Film Making and the West
Product Description
This volume is the first fully comprehensive account of film production in the Third World. Although they are usually ignored or marginalized in histories of world cinema,” Third World countries now produce well over half of the world’s films. Roy Armes sets out initially to place this huge output in a wider context, examining the forces of tradition and colonialism that have shaped the Third World–defined as those countries that have emerged from Western control but have not fully developed their economic potential or rejected the capitalist system in favor of some socialist alternative. He then considers the paradoxes of social structure and cultural life in the post-independence world, where even such basic concepts as “nation,” “national culture,” and “language” are problematic.
The first experience of cinema for such countries has invariably been that of imported Western films, which created the audience and, in most cases, still dominate the market today. Thus, Third World film makers have had to ssert their identity against formidable outside pressures. The later sections of the book look at their output from a number of angles: in terms of the stages of overall growth and corresponding stages of cinematic development; from the point of view of regional evolution in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and through a detailed examination of the work of some of the Third World’s most striking film innovators.
In addition to charting the broad outlines of filmic developments too little known in Europe and the United States, the book calls into question many of the assumptions that shape conventional film history. It stresse the role of distribution in defining and limiting production, queries simplistic notions of independent “national cinemas,” and points to the need to take social and economic factors into account when considering authorship in cinema. Above all, the book celebrates the achievements of a mass of largely unknown film makers who, in difficult circumstances, have distinctively expanded our definitions of the art of cinema.
Roy Armes, who lives in London, has written nine books on film, his most recent being French Cinema. He spent more than three years researching this volume.
Third World Film Making and the West
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Category: Filmmaking Books | Posted by: brian on September 21, 2009
3 Comments to “Third World Film Making and the West”
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By Anonymous, September 21, 2009 @ 11:29 am
I had to read this book as a part of a film history class in school. To be honest, I wouldn’t have read this at all beacuse of the my lack of interest in the subject, but had to because of a paper i had to write on the topic. The best thing about the book is that it explores a completely different world of filmmaking. It is very detailed and is a good resource on the topic of 3rd world filmmaking. This is a good resource for academic purpopes and if u dig foreign films u should check it out as this is as foreign as it gets.
Rating: 3 / 5
By K. Roten, September 21, 2009 @ 1:02 pm
This book is so boring and awful that haflway through the class I stopped doing the readings. Teachers, please, do not require this book. Your entire class may kill themselves.
Rating: 1 / 5
By T. Anderson, September 21, 2009 @ 2:06 pm
Roy Armes is a well-known name in film studies, and this book fills a much-needed void. Though “Third World Film Making and the West” was published in 1987, and is thus almost two decades old at this point, it is still the best available introduction to Third World (hereafter TW) cinema–with the caveat that the text spends as much if not more time passing judgment on the socio-economics and politics of filmmaking as it does charting the history of TW cinematic production per se. And since Armes’ perspective is thoroughly Marxist, expect the de rigueur bashing of First World nations, along with the ideology and jargon characteristic of such a view.
The text is divided into four parts: the first situates Third World (hereafter TW) social and economic challenges against the horizon of colonialism, post-colonialism and capitalism, with some Third World art and film history thrown in for good measure–mostly towards the end of Part One; Part Two, entitled “The Theory and Practice of TW Filmmaking” finally begins to broach sustantial discussions of individual films and filmmakers; Part Three addresses TW filmmaking geographically, moving from India and Asia to Latin America, the Middle East and Africa; and the last part, “Cinema Astride Two Cultures,” addresses six of the more important individual filmmakers (like Satyajit Ray, Yousseff Chahine, etc.) roughly representative of the geographical divisions articulated in Part Three.
The book provides a wealth of fascinating information, some well-known to film scholars and some not so–in fact, though the bibliography is impressive, I expected and would have appreciated much more robust and frequent references and citations for the plethora of details Armes provides.
In short, if you can handle the tone and navigate your way through the ideological landscape, this is the most knowledgable and comprehensive introduction to Third World filmmaking yet available.
Rating: 4 / 5