Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
I Wish to Say Something: An Introduction
by Matt Peterson
Darius Dixon's piece on our screening, "Buffalo Soldiers: African Americans and US Militarism," includes original research on No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger (1968), one of our favorite films that we've been able to include in this project. This is exactly the kind of work we hoped to publish in this magazine. As is the case with a number of the films and videos we've screened, there is not a great deal of scholarship or primary sources on the work. Research often brings back fragments—fragments which might add up to a vague impression in the researcher's mind, but without a reason to document and synthesize these scraps of information, each subsequent researcher has to keep starting over each time the film is rediscovered.
By including films like David Loeb Weiss' No Vietnamese in our project, we have become, deservingly or not, some kind of resource. We've received messages and emails asking about certain films and videos—what are they about, where did they come from, how can I see it, etc. We wanted to better explore this aspect of the project, and better serve such inquiries.
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Jem Cohen's One-Sheet of photographer's rights in New York City is a document we first distributed at our third screening, a retrospective of the short films of Agnes Varda. It felt appropriate, as Varda began her career as a photographer. We continued to distribute it throughout the Visual Liberation summer film series at the Brecht Forum. One of the overarching themes of the series was the idea of the "Right to the City," of which visual documentation is an absolute necessity. It is of course not just a concern for visual artists, but becomes a political question, and the campaign to challenge the city's proposed law changes was joined by the New York Civil Liberties Union. We recommend anyone with an interest in using photographic devices of any kind to document our city, either intentionally or spontaneously, carry this sheet with them.
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Colin Beckett's response to our screening of The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) first appeared as a blog entry on the website of UnionDocs, one of the co-presenters of our screening on Easter Sunday. The UnionDocs project is committed to exploring the documentary arts, and it pursues this exploration in a collaborative structure. This of course made Furnaces a relevant place of inquiry, as an artifact of a certain approach and orientation to documentary. One of the suggestions I object to in Beckett's piece is the question of how to read the state of political cinema today, and to what extent Furnaces is or should be a model for contemporary production.
Yes, one of the reasons we show such historical films, like No Vietnamese or Furnaces, is to try to provide a model in direct opposition to what passes today for a political cinema. This isn't just a question of form—though I would say that was has become an acceptable and template form for documentary is abhorrent—but rather of politics; or content, if you will. When dealing in repertory cinema, you become sensitive to the question of nostalgia, of timeliness, of relevance—especially when your focus is in a radical, and contemporary, politics. But in films like No Vietnamese and Furnaces we see not just a sentiment of opposition, which we could say still exists today; but an opposition explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and from a particular political tradition which is forgotten, ignored, and/or lost in most documentary discourse today.
Yes, while we do have today a glut of issue-oriented documentary, it is a liberal, individualist, anecdotal, impotent cinema. (We might say, "today's social documentary is a paper tiger...", if we'd even call it a tiger.) The question is not one of violence versus non-violence, but of anti-capitalist revolution versus liberal appeasement. The point isn't to make new epic films the same way as Solanas and Getino did; but perhaps to consider how to make contemporary the use cinema as (anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist) propaganda. This would involve questioning our ideas of production, conception, authorship, engagement, distribution, exhibition, financing, etc. Essentially asking all of same questions today Solanas and Getino did in 1968. We must go beyond Godard's truism of "making films politically": it is just not just about the making of the work—form vs. content—but the goals of the work. This question of aesthetics has for too long been a straw man, a red herring.
I appreciate Beckett's point that this question of form—style—has become its own authority; where certain filmmakers, like Solanas, Godard, Eisenstein, Alvarez, Farocki, Watkins, et al, have become our idols, our adopted masters, their works taken as our new templates. This artist-worship becomes individualist and diversionary. Mimicking the form of Farocki creates merely a simulacra. I am reminded of a recent discussion where "materialism" was conjured in solely art-historical and formal terms, as if such a thing was desirable or even possible. The point becomes, again, to what extent our work and goals are explicitly anti-capitalist.
Beckett suggests that the cinema "is no longer the populist medium it once was", and "has become a minority pursuit". I would not necessary disagree with him, but I sense he is referring to a particular, and rather narrow, definition of cinema as 35mm and 16mm productions projected in traditional theatrical settings. If we think more broadly of cinema as the moving image, which could include all forms of video production and digital transmission, then it has become more populist than ever. He cites examples of some of the original screening settings for Furnaces as union halls, apartments, and cell meetings, but then goes on to seemingly critique the "idiosyncratic communities" where the film circulates today. And this is again where the question of form and aesthetics in documentary is a diversion. Radical content is not just "defanged" by a traditional form, but both radical form and radical content are defanged by a mainstream transmission. To hand over revolutionary work to the mainstream, to the marketplace, to the dominant "cultural framework" is to strip it of its revolutionary potential. Revolutionary work needs a revolutionary context, not just a revolutionary form, and this is where Godard's quote has been misused for so long. It is exactly in these idiosyncratic communities where transformation will begin to take place.
The organizing and outreach that happens within the Red Channels project is not simply for the sake of arts appreciation, or movie night, but to create a forum to ask the exact question of how "to find social meaning in our passion for films," or perhaps, how to to use our passion for cinema to create social meaning. In the case of the large group of people that convened to watch and discuss for 6 hours a revolutionary film from 1968 Argentina, I would say our successes were obvious: to learn about this time and place; to consider the filmmaker's analysis of neocolonialism and its contemporary relevance and application; to consider the use of media, historically and contemporarily, in giving voice to the oppressed; and finally, as Esperenza Martell put it so sharply, to confront our commitment to the movement. It is this reflection which we hope would lead to the organizing which would lead to the action that would do any good for the global poor, specifically those suffering in Haiti and Mexico cited by Beckett.
Beckett's warmer response to Jackie Raynal's Deux fois illustrates some of the divide in presenting fictive versus documentary work—work based on characters versus work based on events, ideas, issues, etc. In the case of Deux fois, the character, and subject, is Raynal herself, as both producer and object of the production. The universality of individualized narratives has always offered fictional cinema a greater capacity for reaching a public than documentary. Likewise, the history around an artist is easier to write about in cultural terms than the history around a movement, an ideology. For Raynal and Zanzibar, a personalized anarchy was their politics. For Raynal, an experiment in form was an attempt at a politicized content. This is so much different than what we see in Susan Sontag's Promised Lands, but is of course equally important in addressing within our project.
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Rebecca Schneider's essay on the Port Huron Project seemed to reveal, without any awareness of Red Channels, so much about our project and its relationship to time, culture, and politics. Even the opening Howard Zinn quote on "creative history" is something we ourselves could have used as a manifesto. The question of a mediated time—of making history, particularly the 1960's, contemporary—is something we've confronted during essentially every event we've organized. The essay also seemed to eerily address John Gianvito's film Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, after which it was read aloud by Mark Tribe at our screening “A People’s History: Memorial for Howard Zinn,” which took place shortly after Zinn’s death.
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In Susan Sontag's Promised Lands (1974), written about by both Jeanette Samyn and Laura Schleifer, the question of materialism again arises. Samyn highlight's Sontag's vague goals of representing, capturing, "a condition". (This is the exactly what Beckett praises Raynal's Deux fois for achieving.) Samyn incisively charts the problematic dialectic of representing simultaneously an Israeli and Palestinian imagery, a visual reality of 1973 Israel—as seen and interpreted by an American Jewish intellectual. This same issue was confronted, to some extent, in another film produced around the same which we also screened, Godard Gorin and Mieville's Ici et Ailleurs. The "here and there" of Israel and Palestine, of Israel and the West, becomes increasingly complicated 35 years later when the here and there becomes a question of not just place but time. The dialectic Samyn raises of political cultural production and viewership brings to mind the Frantz Fanon quote featured so prominently in The Hour of the Furnaces, "every spectator is either a coward or a traitor." Schleifer's reading of the film continues Samyn's philosophical approach, but is explicitly tied to a contemporary politics. The question of Sontag's inclusions and exclusions is probed again, touching on the inherent contradictions, hypocrisies, and paradoxes in the Israel/Palestine conflict, here and there, then and now.
Promised Lands is exactly the kind of film Red Channels defines itself on presenting. Upon hearing that Jake Perlin had acquired it for his Film Desk distribution project, we were excited to participate. The issue the film gets at, both then and now, is how as intellectuals we can participate in international politics, and how as media makers we can produce useful work. For these questions Sontag's film, for all its potential shortcomings, still needs to be widely considered.
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Melissa Morrone's piece on our screening "Historical Memory: The Library in 1956" details a bit of our process. Morrone is a member of the Radical Reference collective here in NYC, the co-presenter of our Library screening. It is exactly these kinds of alliances Red Channels pursues when organizing and promoting our events. These "co-presentations" and "co-sponsorships" are the basis of our outreach, reaching out to collectives, groups, organizations, and projects, to ally, build community, combine audiences, etc.
It is not enough for us to simply try to show "interesting" work—we need to try to connect the work with the contemporary movement, the groups and individuals most related to its themes and subjects. It is this way we can get a group of people together in a room to really talk with and learn from each other. We get to hear their readings of the historical works we present, as well as hear how this work does or doesn't relate to the organizing being done today. It brings an immediacy and relevance where there might otherwise be only abstraction, gesture, and speculation.
Chris Maisano's piece, on the same screening, again touches on both context and (historical) materialism. Within the arts, and the cultural institutions that support them, the focus of our rhetoric is often based around "ideas," in their most immaterial sense. (I'm reminded of the great satirical line from Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977): "Right now it is only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, then later turn it into an idea.") To bring political engagement to the arts, especially from a Marxist tradition, is to bring materiality to their discourse. And by materiality we mean here, as Maisano wastes no time getting at, the economic realities of the present. His essay comes from an intentionally and usefully biased point of view. Isn't it more interesting to hear a librarian than a film critic talk about a film about libraries.
Maisano's response gets to what was, for me, the heart of the issue around our Right to the City series. During each of our events on the subject, be they about our public transit infrastructure; public space; public libraries; public housing; natural or violent disaster; private development; public education; etc., the end result of the night's focus all pushed me in the same direction. If we recognize neoliberalism as capitalism's shift toward the privatization of public property and services, doesn't our analysis and response need as its foundation a systematic anti-capitalist framework. This gets to the primary weakness of the anecdotal social issue documentaries that have flourished in the last decade—they feature no analysis, and offer instead a seemingly infinite listing of abuses and violations to individuals and communities. Do we need to start with the disease or the symptoms, the cause or its manifestations.
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Daniel Frontino Elash's first piece comes in reference to our presentations of newsreels by the Workers Film and Photo League. WFPL is the earliest example of collectively produced cinematic propaganda we've shown, preceding the work of Newsreel, Videofreex, and Paper Tiger Television. Elash's report, like Dixon's, again offers new sources and examples of research into an American counter-hegeomic effort using cinema as its primary focus. We still have much to learn about these films and organizations, including but not limited to the details of their conception, organization, goals, process, and end; as well as for their successes which might be usefully adopted in today's media climate. Film research is too often limited to the span between the artist's conception through the work's premiere; ignoring reception, distribution, exhibition, etc. In political terms, it is often the latter which is of more importance and interest than the former.
Elash's second piece, on the film collection of the Soviet-American Friendship Society, goes into the kind of research and work historians scholars critics and curators need to continue doing. As I mention in our "Suggested Viewing" section of this issue, it is not enough to rely on the American home video distribution market, or our repertory theater programs, to dictate what is worth seeing. We need to ourselves visit archives, libraries, museums, institutions—and in some cases liberate our history from the bureaucracies keeping them hidden and unseen. I can't wait until the U.S. Friends of the Soviet People finds the resources to distribute this work, which sounds fascinating.
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Mallary Abel's conceptual piece is a well-considered response to our first call for submissions. As I said in our interview, an experimental cinema needs not just an experimental form, but an experimental context, an experimental discourse, and here, an experimental writing.
We need to continue to free our imaginations from the structures we're forced to live and work within. Abel's free associative response on place, community, communication, interaction, alternatives is in itself liberating, transformative. It helps us break from our own insecurity and isolation, and embrace warmly all of our fellow travelers.