Blue Light: The Afterlives of Third Cinema in Anti-Caste Film

Cinema is a liar with extraordinary manners. It sits us in the dark, dazzles us with light, and caresses us into believing that what we see is real. Maybe this is why film has been such an insidious instrument of ideology: a medium that teaches us how to feel and think about power while pretending to entertain us. “Every image,” wrote Glauber Rocha, “is an act of politics, whether we acknowledge it or not.” By the 1960s, a handful of filmmakers began to understand that to make an “apolitical” film was itself an act of obedience and unchecked subservience. The camera had become a colonizer’s tool, reproducing hierarchies of gaze. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino called this the “cinema of dependence,” a form mirroring the same economic subjugation it claimed to critique. Hollywood sold dreams of progress; European auteurs sold the melancholia of privilege.

“Both,” Solanas wrote, “operate like cultural branches of multinational capital.”

So they asked the most dangerous question a filmmaker can pose: what if cinema refused to serve the market altogether?

Third Cinema: An Insurgent Grammar

In 1960s Latin America, a group of young filmmakers and activists found themselves trapped in a crisis of image and authority; realizing that cinema had become the perfect metaphor for their political condition: the colonized watching themselves through the eyes of the colonizer. The screen, much like the state, belonged to someone else.

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, writing from Argentina, declared that the camera must stop imitating the gun and become one. Glauber Rocha, filming amid Brazil’s dictatorship and poverty, called hunger itself an aesthetic. To them, the problem was that Hollywood (and every other major film industry at the time) hypnotized. “First Cinema” (commercial) taught the masses how to dream like the rich; “Second Cinema” (European auteurism) taught the rich how to feel like the masses. But “Third Cinema,” Rocha argued, had to do something more reckless: to empower the oppressed to film their own oppressors. And so the grammar shifted. The camera became lighter. Hand-held, mobile. The frame was tough around the edges, refusing to conform to the polished studio aesthetic. The cut often abandoned classic continuity for jump-cuts, colliding montage, even blank frames. It was clear that what they were filming (and the intention of what they would eventually be screening) was not comfort, but discomfort. The soundtrack would be unsettling, jarring and chaotic; borrowing the chants of workers’ marches and the sirens and chaos of coups.

Distribution, too, was weaponised. Private theatres were less useful than public assemblies and makeshift theatres. Solanas’ La Hora De Los Hornos (1968) is a four hour epic that details the history of Argentinian neoliberal politics. But what it stands out for is the way it travelled: bootleg prints on 16 mm, mobile projectors installed in factories, universities, neighbourhoods. The intention of every screening was to create a pipeline. From audience to political cadre: debates would take place, leaflets were handed out, new unions were convened. Some of these discussions spilled into strikes, occupations, even arrests. The focus was as much on the film as it was on what you did after seeing.

If cinema in the West was a window that led nowhere, Third Cinema made it a mirror that shattered in the viewer’s hand. And if that sounds romantic, it was meant to be. Rocha called it “an aesthetics of hunger,” and went on to say “our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood.” In Rocha’s schema, “the love that this violence encompasses is as brutal as the violence itself because it is not a love of complacency or contemplation but rather of action and transformation.”

India’s “Parallel” Detour: The Bhadralok Gaze and the Limits of Liberal Sympathy

When these revolutionary movements reached India in the late 60’s, it arrived declawed, inhibited by the complexities posed by caste. Enter Parallel Cinema, a term that promised rebellion but often ended up running safely alongside power. Born in the 1960s from the state-funded Film Finance Corporation and later the NFDC, this movement gathered some of the country’s most respected filmmakers: Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Ritwik Ghatak. Their films carried the promise of revolution but their politics, like the audiences they reached, were resolutely upper-caste. The irony was jarring. Funded by the state, celebrated at international festivals, and written about in English film journals, the so-called “New Indian Cinema” became a kind of middle-class guilt machine: a space where the privileged could rehearse compassion without threatening their own coordinates of existence.

Any and every rebellion was safely framed with beautiful long takes, classical music and elegant decay. The lower-caste subject appeared as allegory, but never as author or audience. A 1936 classic like Achhut Kannya could notice untouchability yet miss the annihilationist politics Ambedkar proposed that very year in “Annihilation of Caste.” As Jyoti Nisha argues, Indian cinema’s romantic village (Gandhian ideals without the Ambedkarite critique) flattened the brutal specificities of caste into a pastoral wallpaper of the “past”. The spectatorial address remained firmly vertical: the camera explaining the oppressed to the sympathetic.

Film societies in Calcutta and Delhi became the new temples of seriousness. Entry by invitation, discourse in English, screenings followed by tea, snacks and verbose moral outrage. But the halls were small, the audiences even smaller and as insular as present-day Gymkhana gatherings. In other words, political cinema without any intention of organizing. The grammar of Third Cinema had arrived, but its infrastructure had not. There was no apparatus to transform spectators into public. Indian political cinema in the mid-20th century occupied a theoretical paradox: disrupting form while obeying infrastructure. And still, history has a way of looping back through its blind spots. Decades later, another group of filmmakers would inherit the same tools of film-making but refuse the same deference.

Odessa Collective: India’s Missing Bridge

When Latin America’s Third Cinema declared that “the camera must become a gun,” India’s brief flirtation with that ideal came from a bearded anarchist in Kerala with a battered 16mm projector.

John Abraham founded the Odessa Collective in 1984: a nomadic, people-funded cinema movement raising money in temple festivals, village squares, and street corners. He moved through villages with Chaplin prints and a donation bucket, raising small notes and trust to make Amma Ariyan (1986), and then carrying that finished film back to those same squares to watch together. A cinema made by the passers-by and returned to them; an ethics of circulation as politics. As one scholar noted, the film’s “itinerant form became its ideology.” In a country where state-funded cinema spoke about “the people,” John Abraham’s films spoke with them. Abraham’s vision was a candle in a storm. His death in 1987 froze that dream; but not before it lit several smaller fires. In the past decade or two, a new wave of filmmakers have revived the Third Cinema spirit in both form and scale. Third cinema re-emerges through anti-caste cinema, carrying forward the older radical lesson that cinema needs to re-think how you circulate it, who gets to watch, and who gets to make.

Anti-Caste Cinema: A Counter-Ontology

The current wave of anti-caste cinema has been the first large-scale attempt to recode cinematic ontology through Ambedkarite epistemes. At the center of this movement stands Pa. Ranjith, whose Neelam Productions has become an ecosystem of its own, funding and distributing what one critic calls “an oppositional Bahujan agency”, consistently presenting films, spotlighting artists and producing content that would never take shape under traditional funding setups. Where Parallel Cinema constructed false empathy, Ranjith’s cinema stood by Ambedkar’s praxis of “Educate, Agitate, Organize”. His Kaala (2018) stages a full-blown semiotic war: between “Beema Chawl” (invoking Ambedkar) and “Manu Builders,” invoking the Manusmriti. Even the jeep’s number plate, MH 01 BR 1956, encodes Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism that year, turning a prop into a powerful ideological citation (an ideological dimension of Ambedkar that is often overlooked by most historians and academics, even). When Rajinikanth, that most mythologized of Tamil heroes, becomes a Bahujan patriarch framed against statues of Buddha, Phule, and Ambedkar, the film performs an act of mythic counter-appropriation. Brahma is replaced by Beema.

Ranjith’s collaborator, Mari Selvaraj, extends this semiotic insurgency with Karnan (2021). His police villain is named Kannabiran, a direct echo of Krishna suggesting that divine justice, once monopolized by upper-caste cosmologies, now arrives in khaki and lathis. Selvaraj’s hero rewrites the hindu epic as he resists the state. In a country where myth is routinely weaponized by power, Karnan turns mythology on its head and back into resistance literature. For decades, the bhadralok filmmaker treated “the people” as content. Ranjith and his contemporaries return the favor by treating “the elite” as subjects of inquiry; characters framed with the same anthropological distance once reserved for the working class. In Karnan, the Brahminical police officer is the fable’s fallen god. In Kaala, the city itself revolts, its dust and color in the last scene reclaiming the “clean and white” palette long monopolized by upper-caste sentimentality.

These films bring Ambedkar into the frame as syntax, structuring how a story is told, who is centered, whose suffering is cinematic, and whose gaze counts as art. In Rethinking Third Cinema, Anthony Guneratne describes the Latin American auteur as “a monster whose work confronts the intentions of a system aimed at commercial conquest and totalitarian politics.” That line could easily describe any anti-caste filmmaker today; their cinema devours the apparatus meant to feed it. But what makes India’s anti-caste cinema the truest descendant of Third Cinema is that it fuses revolutionary grammar with a redistributive screen. Ranjith’s Neelam network curates screenings in working-class neighborhoods and Ambedkarite study circles. And unlike the old art-house revolutionaries, these films are not relegated to whispers in cinephile circles. They explode at the box office too. Kaala grossed over ₹160 crore worldwide, Karnan crossed ₹60 crore, Sairat became the highest-grossing Marathi film of all time. Numbers, here, are proof that revolution can sell without selling out.

Conclusion

While Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger” named the condition of a colonized sensorium, where scarcity produces both narrative and form, anti-caste cinema extends this into an “aesthetics of annihilation” in the Ambedkarite sense: the cessation of caste as an ontological grammar of the world. It does so by terminating the visual contracts that make caste appear natural, removing Brahminism as the default architecture of lookability, and upending the epistemic privilege that assigns who documents and remembers. Under this horizon, Indian cinema is undergoing a radical transformation by refusing the frameworks that narrate suffering as fate. Cinema has always been the art of suspending disbelief. Pretending that light is truth and that a cut shall heal if we simply feel for it enough. Anti-caste cinema doesn’t pretend. It names the wound, then hands you the scalpel. And that’s the real triumph: when the blue of Ambedkar floods screens once reserved for gods in saffron. Somewhere, Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger” has found a rightful heir.