Decolonial
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Decolonial thought challenges the matrix of colonial power, which perpetuates domination through totalizing forms of knowledge under global capitalism. From different perspectives, black feminisms, queer theory, indigenous universities and various other movements and practices open cross-disciplinary spaces beyond global epistemic hierarchies, mobilizing subaltern identities and geopolitical spaces to generate multiple varieties of situated knowledge which embody other forms of imagination, action and being in the world. Decolonizing image production would imply dismantling the Eurocentric, racist, sexist and patriarchal representations that still dominate the visual canon of hegemonic thought. A decolonial approach would also involve reframing the purpose of audiovisual production in the service of groups and social movements committed to pluriversal projects.Genealogies of practice
- La hora de los hornos (“The Hour of the Furnaces”) (Argentina) Fernando “Pino” Solanas, Octavio Getino, 1968
This brilliant documentary, which launched the Third Cinema movement, is divided into three parts: Part I, Neo-colonialism and Violence (95 minutes); Part II, Act for Liberation (2 hours) and Part III, Violence and Liberation (15 minutes). The film inspired Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, members of the Grupo Cine Liberación to write the influential manifesto Towards a Third Cinema (1969). 'First Cinema' would be the Hollywood production model; 'Second Cinema' is the European art film, which rejects Hollywood conventions but is centred on the individual expression of the auteur director; ‘Third Cinema’, by contrast, appeals to the masses inspiring revolutionary activism: “The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognises in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point - in a word, the decolonisation of culture”.
- Afrique sur Seine (Francia-Senegal) Paulin Suleiman Vieyra -Groupe Africain du Cinéma, 1955
Is Africa in Africa, or is it by the river Seine in Paris? This question inspired a generation of Paris-based African students and film-makers seeking to define their civilization, their culture, their future. Regarded as the first independent African film, Afrique sur Seine was sponsored by the Ethnographic Cinema Committee of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.
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