Third Cinema, radical public spheres and an alternative to prison porn

Abstract

This article considers how media production is framed by class experience, and how this framing mediates exclusion. Drawing on research on ‘poverty porn’ the article presents an analysis of how experimental exclusion is operationalized in media representations before moving the analysis to consider the framing of an additional exclusion that afflicts mainly working class people ‐ that which comes with the status of prisoner and convict. Here, poverty porn becomes prison porn and we find a double exclusion. After noting the shortcomings of a number of prison documentaries in the framework of Third Cinema, the article finishes with a proposal, based on the production of a prison film made by the author, to more adequately represent such marginalized classes, finishing with a reflection on the perseverance of exclusion.