The realism as an anti-hegemonic confrontation

Post-World War II film manifestos in India and Argentina from a global perspective

Abstract

After the World War Two, Italian neorealism had a great impact on world cinematography and spread across different national cinema schools. In the same period, Hollywood production reached a new hegemonic level in terms of exhibition and distribution, following the preponderant role of the United States in world geopolitics. The simultaneity of these two phenomena generated similar responses in cinematographic schools of countries as far away as Argentina and India, in which film manifestos tried to confront the homogenization promoted by Hollywood dominance in their markets, betting on realism as an aesthetic option. If at first moment, from the end of the 1940s, manifestos by authors such as Satyajit Ray and Fernando Birri sought to identify structural problems in their countries, pointing to the need to build their own language; secondly, at the end of the 1960s, movements such as the New Indian Cinema and theoritical propositions like the Argentine Third Cinema represented a radicalization of terms, given the continuity of American dominance in cinemas in the so-called Third World countries and the continued difficulty of achieving anti-hegemonic works in them. To analyze this sparse, contemporary and interconnected phenomenon, I use the manifestos What is wrong with Indian films? (1948), Cine y Subdesarollo (1962), Manifesto of The New Cinema Movement (1968) and Hacia un Tercer Cine (1969), understanding them from the global perspective and world-system analysis, proposed by authors such as Conrad and Dussel.