Day 91 : Book Excerpt : Screening Schillebeeckx: Theology and Third Cinema in Dialogue

The Pentagon called for an important meeting in August 2003, predictably, to discuss anti-terrorist strategies. What was of peculiar interest about this meeting was that it was a special screening session for The Battle of Algiers, a film lensed by Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo in 1965. An example of a type of political film known as Third Cinema, “The Battle of Algiers” essays the 1954–1962 Algerian revolt against French occupation and gives ideological visibility to the guerilla-style bombings carried out by the Algerian Liberation Front (NLF) during the turbulent period. The privileged audience of about forty Pentagon officers, along with some civilian experts, huddled to screen Pontecorvo’s film in the hopes of gaining more insight into the motivations and modalities of present day terrorist activities. The obvious lesson for the day: “know thy enemy.”

I am not a big fan of the Pentagon’s activities. Neither is Third Cinema, which casts a gimlet eye on the hegemonic tactics routinely conducted by the globe’s rich and powerful. Yet, ironically, the Pentagon screening session unwittingly confirms the power of Third Cinema; the power to represent and mirror the sociopolitical realities of a Third World that continues to exist, though the zeitgeist would like to believe otherwise. That said, I am convinced that Third Cinema merits regardful consideration and, as in the case of my work, more serious theological attention.

Situated within the interdisciplinary efforts to bridge Theology and Cinema, I explore the ways in which the liberative project of Edward Schillebeeckx’s eschatological perspective is crystallized in Third Cinema. Third Cinema occupies a special niche in Cinema Studies. It is the only major film theory that did not originate from a EuroAmerican milieu. It is also the only type of political film that insists on a dedicated representation of the plight of Third World peoples who continue in the struggle to become agents of their own history in the postcolonial aftermath. Third Cinema is of undeniable value for Third World cultures because it serves as a custodian of subversive memory; a critical counterbalance to the wilful amnesia of dominant western cinema, which almost always insists on the primacy of entertainment value over all other considerations. Films from Hollywood, for instance, usually do not care to examine how the causal structures of social, cultural, and economic inequality impact on two-thirds of the global population. As long as there exists a lopsided global symbolic exchange that separates the metropolitan capitalist First World from its erstwhile colonies in the Third, there will always be a strong case for Third Cinema.

My choice of Third Cinema as a dialogue partner for theology is driven by reasons personal and strategic. Personal because I am not just a scholar committed to the interface of Theology and Film, I am a Filipino, a child of the Third World, in search of soul and story. The films I choose as case studies reflect a world I was born and raised in. By proximity, the title that has the most personal resonance with me is Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare. Tahimik is a cutting edge Filipino filmmaker who paints from the palette of revisionist historiography. For him, hindsight is 20/20. His Perfumed Nightmare, winner of the coveted Berlin International Film Festival Golden Bear in 1978 and a rare Southeast Asian example of Third Cinema, is a re-visiting of the Philippines’ tortured history of multiple colonizations and a subversive filmic re-telling of a collective deep story of liberation. Being a member of the culture in question, I am an involved participant in Tahimik’s postcolonial “exorcism.” But in a wider sense, each of the chosen case study films confirms my membership in, and solidarity with, Third World cultures.

Strategic because I am convinced that the very stylistic signature of the films carry undeniable ideological weight and thus trigger the hermeneutical impulse. The key point for consideration is Third Cinema’s lucid sociopolitical critique and liberative current, situated within the general rubric of “postcolonial struggle.” Through the various elements of cinematic grammar, the films portray, in one sense or another, the collaboration of human and divine agency, while an innervating vision of emancipative praxis looms in the horizon. Here, the divine is identified with the marginalized culture, represented here in synechdoche by the film’s protagonists, whose growing resistance and protest draw them to an alternative future of greater human flourishing. The filmic texts, as such, lay down a bridge for possible creative crossings with theology.

What emerges as a lucid and nuanced discursive framework for a deeper discussion of Third Cinema is Edward Schillebeeckx’s eschatological perspective. The decisive link between salvation and liberation, an unmistakable touchstone of Schillebeeckx’s later theology, has almost completely fallen below the radar of research works in Systematic Theology. Schillebeeckx’s later theology is always immersed in the concrete, historical situation and epistemologically grounded in human liberation. In a personal interview I conducted in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, Schillebeeckx himself affirms that “the liberation of human beings is the golden thread of my theology.” I submit that the depoliticizing tendencies in the reception of Schillebeeckx’s work represents a myopic reading of Schillebeeckx’s later theology and an undervaluing of the continued intercultural relevance and impact of his thought on the Third World situation. From my own Third World optic, I see these tendencies as missed opportunities; the inordinate muting of the prophetic-liberating voice of Schillebeeckx as a credible and significant western mouthpiece for marginalized peoples who are still in the process of finding their own voice amid dehumanizing sociopolitical realities.

~~Screening Schillebeeckx: Theology and Third Cinema in Dialogue -by- Antonio D. Sison