Off-Screen Vision: The Legacy of Teshome Gabriel

Abstract This essay is a meditation on the notion of Third Cinema and a tribute to the person who singularly theorized it: Teshome H. Gabriel, a professor of film at UCLA, who was a veritable late-Bandung figure as an Ethiopian exile since his radical student days. Gabriel's teaching was formative for a number of students from the postcolonial sphere who came though California universities in the 1980s, and his historical presence traces a unique account of the internationalist spirit of Bandung culture in the post-1989 geopolitical world. Third Cinema is now established as a specific domain in film studies, but in reexamining Gabriel's perspective it becomes a metaphor for a range of political and aesthetic visions across the disciplines that exemplify a contemporary Bandung spirit of collaborative innovation and alternative globality.