National Cinema

COLONIAL/POSTCOLONIAL CINEMAS

Cinema was exploited by imperialist nations such as Great Britain to represent Britannia's globalizing domination of its dominions and territories in films such as the Empire Marketing Board's One Family: A Dream of Real Things (1930), in which a white child travels the empire but makes identifications only with white settlers. In the 1920s nascent nations such as the Dominion of Canada, a former colony in the act of becoming a nation, practiced a cinema of internal colonialism that legitimated the white domination of the country's indigenous peoples in ethnographic documentaries such as Nass River Indians (Marius Barbeau, 1928).

Postcolonial cinema attempts to disrupt such national cinemas and denaturalize them as colonizing entities, thereby articulating the discourse of contested indigenous nations. In Canada, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin documents the continuing violence of the Canadian nation-state against Indigenous First Nations in Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) and Incident at Restigouche (1984). In Australia, Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) tells the story of the white Australian nation's attempt to steal a generation of Aboriginal children from their culture, while Tracey Moffatt's Nice Colored Girls (1987) represents the exploitation of Aboriginal women by white men. New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori explores the tensions between Maori identity and contemporary New Zealand culture in Once Were Warriors (1994). Moffatt's and Obomsawin's oppositional work might well be considered in the context of Third Cinema's anti-imperialist ideology and aesthetic. Although Third Cinema is generally understood to engage the neo-neocolonial paradigm of a hegemonic US cinema, the vision of two of the movement's foundational thinkers, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, is certainly in line with the films of Moffatt and Obomsawin.