When Third Cinema was a power in the land
Zineb Sedira 2025 Photo Alexandra de Saint Blanquat © Zineb Sedirat
Daniel Nelson
One of the glories of London’s mega-galleries and museums is their willingness to put on exhibitions about important subjects that are of interest to only a few people.
So let’s raise a glass to Tate Britain for commissioning Zineb Sedire: When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks…
African cinema is a minority interest in this country. African films of the 1960s and ‘70s is even more specialised. Films from Francophone countries, where the UK had no direct colonial interests, are more specialised still. And looking at films of that era through an Algerian lens reduces the public interest to near zero.
Undeterred, the Tate has given a French Algerian British-university-educated photographer and video artist space to bring a snatch of the past alive by several re-creations, most notably a 1960s Paris cafe where Algerian exiles would gather during the anti-colonial struggle, a mobile cinema van and a delightful short film interview with Boudjema Kareche, director of Cinemateque Algerienne from 1973 to 2004.
Now 85 and blind, Kareche’s glorious trip down memory lane (“I immediately understood that cinema could greatly help educate young people”) vividly embraces films and directors from that colonial-busting period when Africans took control of both sides of the movie camera.
Several of these films occasionally flicker again at the National Film Theatre in London, and a handful of the directors have secured their places in cinema history, but otherwise they are little known.
Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson says “Sedira takes visitors through a radical turning point in the history of the Global South. She reveals the critical role of the cinema as a tool of resistance, memory and political imagination…”
This is a thoroughly and lovingly researched exhibition that resonates with old-timers like me who remember fondly the intellectual buzz and brio of “Third Cinema” within the new global force, the Third World, and is a lesson for those who know only the small screen.
But to really bring Sedira’s moving evocation to life we really need to see and hear clips from the films themselves, to hear cinema speak.
When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks…, free, is at Tate Britain, Millbank SW1P 4RG until 17 January. Info: Zineb Sedira
18 June, Artist Talk: Zineb Sedira, 6.30 – 8pm
14 August, Late at Tate Britain: Zineb Sedira, film, music, performance, food and drink, talks and workshops + after-hours access to the gallery’s exhibitions and free displays , 6 -10pm
12 September, African cinema screenings and seminar, exploration of the cultural, political and artistic significance of African cinema from the 1960s to 1980s, 10:30am - 5pm