Programmation : Jérôme Baron (Festival des 3 Continents), Catherine Hass, Anne Kerlan & José Quental (IHTP/ CNRS)
Tricontinentale : In the present
Between the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana 50 years ago in January 2016 and the 3 Continents: just a question of resonance? Not only. When the festival opened in 1979, the term “Third World” sparked some reticence with respect to its miserabilist and derogatory connotations that the founders fittingly wished to avoid. Yet the fact was that films from Africa, South America and Asian countries came in the main from this so-called “Third World”, which was still off-camera for the most part, leading to both an absence and disavowal of its multitudes and singularities. There were indeed two, perhaps three, worlds – far-removed for many people. So the 3 Continents Festival then took up the ambition of showing films or rather enabling them and their makers to reach us. These numerous and important discoveries had the effect of nibbling away, and sometimes biting, at our prevailing hierarchies. The emerging films exhibited a broad range of forms and highly varied contexts in the wake of the newly won independences. What was visible were not only talents, but also the aspiration to forge distinctive as well as personal forms of filmmaking in the here and now. The work of catching-up was intense and relayed by other events: on the one hand, unknown treasures of the past were exhumed while the other hand was taking the pulse of contemporary creation. Yet, after a troubled decade during which cinema had also been “novo” revolutionary, activist, utopian and political for better or worse, the need appeared, more clearly than ever before, to confront the old orders and present arrogance that sometimes reigned with the same old authoritarian violence. Here or there, it was indeed tempting to believe that cinema had – more than its word to say – a precious role to play in the ideas and societies where it was present. Here or there, it also happened that cinema’s arrangements with politics (and the notion of culture) officialised its entry into the serried ranks of servility. In those countries not at war, many regimes were already firmly in place at the beginning of the 1980s.
Over the past thirty or so years, the map of the world has changed, not because the inequality gap between the rich and poor countries has closed or because the North-South divide has been overcome, as evidenced daily. Indeed, in the poorly orchestrated concert of globalisation now amplified by a torrential technological revolution, change has come about with the emergence of new economic and political powers and the rise of new hubs and trading practices where money nonetheless remains the end and not the means. The basic problems of swathes of humanity are still not resolved. On our three continents, which are younger than in the past owing to demographic trends, the disparities, asynchrony, convulsions and discontentment, of which we are both actors and powerless witnesses, persist and become even more complex. It is not so much that there are two or three worlds, but rather an environment with many interlocking levels of dependence, meaning that each eddy propagates a shock wave with geopolitical and macroeconomic consequences that are too unpredictable to be forestalled.
