The movement spread across the southern hemisphere and to various developing nations, generating movies that were deliberately rough, crude, simple, outraged, faithful to the real life of poor people and also often absurdly nasty. In the '60s and '70s, these movies were a novelty to adventurous filmgoers around the globe, as blunt and earnest as they were, although of course the depth and force of the problems presented by the postcolonial situation were hardly as front-of-brain for most "Western" viewers as they were for the people that lived through them. Today is a different story - Third Cinema's set of priorities and obsessions feels inherent in the way we think about the world now, just as the discussions around gender persecution, racial inequity and economic injustice have reached unprecedented breadth today.
Part of the fascination with Third Cinema films is that their postcolonial fury was always crucial to their intended audiences, whether we were paying attention or not. No adult in the Philippines, for instance, needed a primer about postcolonialism and its discontents, and it was only a matter of time until the Third Cinema agenda manifested there, which it did with Lino Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light (1975). Recognized worldwide, then and now, as the preeminent Filipino film, this gritty, proletariat melodrama is neo-New Wave through and through, low-budget and technically amateurish and proud of it, wearing its class warfare bona fides on its sleeve. You can easily imagine an entire generation of Filipinos embracing this handmade anthem, thinking here, finally, is a film that tells the truth.
The story couldn't be simpler, at first. Julio, an island boy (Bembol Roco), arrives in Manila for work, and joins the community of near-itinerant construction laborers, earning subsistence wages - out of which they are routinely cheated by their bosses - doing the grunt work in and around the city's exploding crop of new office and apartment buildings. Homeless and fainting from hunger, Julio is supported by his co-workers, whose chewed-up lives amid the Marcos regime's rampaging industrialization are buoyed by humor and a tacit sense of shared responsibility for each other. No one had made an internationally-seen film about these people before, peasants caught in a wage-slave nightmare Gomorrah, where civil rights are negligible, industrial accidents are covered up (while zoom-shot with Mario Bava hyperbole) and complaining can render you homeless and doomed.
Once Julio is laid off, yet again (along with all of the job's older workers), his backstory, hinted at with brief flashbacks, comes to light: he's come to Manila to find his girlfriend, who was essentially bartered into sex work by her mother back in their southern island village. Julio follows the scant clues he has, finding his girl but meeting tragedy in a way that converts his quest into a mission of vengeance, while intersecting with all manner of Manila's demimonde, including a deep dive into the gay underworld led by a hustler (who insists he's not gay himself, and who has a Taylor-Burton Cleopatra, 1963, poster in his flat), with Julio himself reluctantly becoming a "call-boy." (Brocka was himself gay, and rarely failed to inject that perspective into his many films, regardless of the story.) From there, it evolves into a kind of rehearsal for, or prophecy of, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, released early the following year - except here, Julio's outage rhymes with the Communist protests we see swamping the city.
It pays to remember that Brocka made his film only a few years into Marcos' 14-year stretch of oppressive martial-law dictatorship - it's fearlessly confrontational. As such, the film does not trifle much with nuance, and yet for all of its crudity and speed it maintains a remarkable realism, carefully lit, earnestly invested in these hopeless characters' struggle, and painting a vivid portrait of the city. It is pure proletariat cinema, fashioned not for American arthouse filmgoers and European students who have read their Marx and Frantz Fanon, but for the very Filipinos (and "Third-Worlders" elsewhere) it depicts. All the same, Brocka always had his eye on both the world's film festivals and his native audience at home, and he was successful, winning global awards and sometimes making four or five films a year for the next 16 years, before dying in 1991 in a car crash at the age of 52. Beyond the nation's low-boiling reputation as a center of '70s exploitation films, Filipino cinema could be said to be personified by Brocka alone - whose dedication to his country's on-the-ground political reality helped solidify its modern identity and carry it into the new age.
By Michael Atkinson
