Flashback to the Sixties

Even before Jean-Luc Godard urged filmmakers in 1967 not to make political films but to make films politically, the question of an “alternative cinema” was on the agenda of European directors. While some filmmakers were looking to formal, experimental, non-narrative traditions, Godard's notion was that of a counter-cinema, implying a film-politics that would challenge the economic supremacy of Hollywood, its monopolistic distribution and exhibition system in the countries of Europe, but also in the Third World.

The moment for a radical break was opportune: renewed interest in avantgarde filmmaking during the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a period of stagnation and structural changes in Hollywood which led to large-scale mergers, takeover bids and board-room struggles for the control of the industry's assets, acquired by multi-national companies like Gulf andWestern or the Kinney Corporation, whose main interests were in oil, canned food or real estate.

Not least because of a general decline in the cinema as a form of mass entertainment, but due also to lighter and cheaper filmmaking equipment, post-war Europe had seen the emergence of a number of “new” national cinemas with an art cinema orientation: Italian neo-realism, the French Nouvelle Vague, the New German Cinema, for instance. By the mid-1960s, the moment was also propitious to another kind of cinema in Latin America, partly modeled on European auteurism, but partly also poised to be a political cinema, influenced by Marxist or Maoist perspectives such as those voiced by Godard. As so often in the history of post-colonialism and the liberation struggles, a European-educated intellectual and artistic vanguard sought to forge links with indigenous sources, often a combination of folk culture and the classic 19th-century European novel.