‘After’ or back to Third Cinema? Plebeian film, the national popular, fingernails and the resilient behemoth

This chapter turns away from the données of Third Cinema, placing the concept under erasure. It challenges advocates and critics of Tercer Cine alike to address labour, a topic rarely discussed in detail in terms of the process whereby films are made, for all its centrality to the genre’s origin myth (Solanas and Getino 2000) . We do so in order to show that Third Cinema always had industrial aspects, despite its later interpretations by scholars; that the street popularity of plebeian film today represents a crucial link to that past; and that the national and regional industries sought by Tercer Cine’s founders are dogged by labour exploitation and Hollywood’s New International Division of Cultural Labour (NICL) (Miller 2018) . Our methods blend political economy with interviews. The concept of ‘cinema’ is itself under erasure