FILM
- AS A -
SUBVERSIVE ART

A PROPOS DE NICE
(Jean Vigo, France, 1930)
"A Propos De Nice" is one of the most unconventional
documentaries ever made -- with irony and bitterness
the camera explores this center of middle-class decadence,
the monstrous hotels, the amorous elderly women with their
ruthless gigolos, the stinking alleys and grimy bistros filled
with tramps, ponces, fences; a scathing contrast of the idle
poor and the idle rich."  (George Morrison, Sequence, 6)

INTERNATIONAL LEFT AND
REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA

 The subversion of existing value systems and social structures
in political cinema ranges from criticism of particular issues to
propagandistic attacks on a country or power bloc, from the subtle
to the intentionally direct, from the reformist to the revolutionary.
 The exposure of social ills or injustice, the satirizing or demysti-
fication of institutions and leaders, the recording of conflict or
disturbance, the exhortation to radical violence or non-violent
revolution -- these form the themes of political cinema.

All these films, whether their intent is reformist or revolutionary,
aim to change the viewer's consciousness.  Considering the hundreds
of dull, ineffectual films propounding laudable objectives, the question
of form arises once again, for the basic problem of political subversion
is whether bourgeois form can be used to advance radical content.
Surprisingly, many radical filmmakers cast their works in a conventional,
often dated mold, unaware of the far more profound impact of artists
attempting to fuse new content with new form (Resnais, Marker, Solanas,
Franju, Rocha, Herzog, Godard, et al).  But if one trend in political world
cinema is to continue blindly in the use of outworn stylistic structures,
pedestrian realism or naturalism, or pseudo-radical narration superimposed
on indifferent and dead images, another is to use film as a tool to change
the world, no longer an "art object" existing "parallel" to the world.
This supreme attempt at subversion -- film as act rather than creation --
represents a desperate attempt to bridge the gap between life and art.
The first step is to denounce art itself as a bourgeois deception,
thereby echoing the surrealist, dadaist, and anti-illusionist stance.
Subversion, in this view, requires an utilitarian tool (rather than
an aesthetic medium) to advance the revolution; concomitantly,
the role of "art" is completed once the revolution is achieved.

The second step is to activate the spectator, bringing him closer
to the work, which at the same time approaches him by becoming
more life-like.  For the completed work is but part of the final
equation; it begins to exist fully only when confronted by an
audience which brings to it its own associations and frames of
reference and accepts the communication offered in a particular
and subjective manner.  It is only then that the process of
communication -- and in this case, of subversion -- is complete.
The continual dilemma of the subversive artist has always been
how to confer his subversion on his audience.  To the extent
that modern art has constantly aimed at breaking down
the invisible barrier between work of art and beholder --
in the cinema, from Eisenstein and Vertov to Godard and
the avant-garde -- it completes the circle of subversion,
and indeed becomes a tool in the political struggle.

The basis of politically and socially subversive cinema is the
tension that exists between society and artist.  This expresses
itself in forms and subjects that vary from country to country,
resulting not from greater or lesser artistic sophistication or skill
but from differing stages of societal development, from political
pressure, from the absence or presence of democratic tendencies
and the degree of sharpness of social contradictions.  In each
instance, however, the artist goes further than his particular
Establishment wishes him to.  This "going beyond"
is the precise characteristic of all subversive art.

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THE WEST:  REBELS, MAOISTS,
AND THE NEW GODARD

Although political films have been produced in all Western countries,
most of them are from the United States.  This is mainly due to
the extensive use and high technological level of 16mm production
equipment and laboratory facilities, and the relative absence, as
yet, of censorship.  Apart from the thousands of films produced by
students, independent filmmakers, or political film collectives,
there also exist distribution companies controlled by the New
Left (such as "Newsreel", American Documentary Films, and Tri-
Continental Film Center) which attempt to extend the area
of political film exhibition.  Recent developments in videotape
(the availability of portable, lightweight equipment) and cable
TV (the creation of "public access" channels, the programming
of which must by law remain uncontrolled and open to everyone)
point to a further increase in the production of such films.
The end of the war in Vietnam and the deceptive quiet of the
country, however, tends, at least temporarily, to inhibit their
creation.  Since the basic problems of race, class, or generation
conflict remain unresolved or, even worse, are artifically papered
over, the future will undoubtedly witness new wavs of radicalization.

The 1968 student revolts in Western Europe gave political cinema
there an added impetus, the abortive "States General" of French
cinema even calling for a restructuring of the industry based
on collective self-management, elimination of the profit motive,
opposition to the star-cult, to censorship, and private ownership
of the means of film production, distribution, and exhibition.
But if this movement ultimately proved as abortive as the revo-
lutionary upsurge itself, it also contributed to the radicalization
of one of the great French directors, Godard, and his raising once
again, on an international level, the problem of revolutionary cinema.
If his previous work had appeared to conventional (and even "liberal")
critics and audiences so extreme as to be beyond the pale, Godard
now rejected it as being in itself hopelessly bourgeois.  "I wanted
to conquer the fortress of French traditional cinema", he says in one
of his fascinating interviews of the period, "I did and now I occupy it
as its prisoner."  And:  "I used to bang my dish on the bars of the cell.
They let me make all the racket I wanted."  There was therefore,
according to the new Godard, to be no more seduction of the audi-
ence by "art"; no more "art for art's sake" or films of "consumption".
The narrative cinema, even as modified by himself in Breathless,
Masculine-Feminine, and other works, was hopelessly outdated;
the "dictatorship of the director" had to be smashed and replaced by
group filmmaking; the work was never to be "finished" but remain
forever in flux; and the imperialist inundation of the individual
with worthless or manipulative pictures was to be replaced by
visual primitivism, the reduction of the image to a few shots --
a strengthening of Godard's earlier tendencies toward
minimal cinema, here combined with Maoism.

Unfortunately, the resultant films -- from Meet You At Mao to
Tout Va Bien -- prove that to "will" political cinema into being
without the mediation of art is self-defeating.  Despite brilliant
sequences (reminiscent of the "old" Godard), these works are
visually sterile, intellectually shallow, and, in terms of their
overbearing, insistent soundtracks, didactic, pedantic, dogmatic.
The "creative boredom" of minimal cinema may well constitute
a valid investigation of the medium's potential from an aesthetic
viewpoint, but whether the masses will be activated by a 10-minute
harangue on woman's liberation monotonously delivered against the
background of a young lady's navel (See You At Mao) is questionable.
As the minimalist directors and theoreticians have properly pointed out,
they are concerned with medium and work "as such", with an exploration
of form and structure devoid of meaning and message; an "aesthetic"
approach in total contradiction to Godard's didactic preoccupations.
The very emphasis on "word-film" as a political weapon is debatable,
particularly when compared to such masterpieces of subversive visual
cinema as The Hour of the Blast Furnaces, Battle of Algiers, and others.
 Yet Godard's obsessive radicalism and continued experimentation
has had a positive, catalytic effect.  It has already produced both
emulators and others exploring new paths. Perhaps these late-
Godard radical films will come to be viewed as primitive, important
forerunners of an ultimately successful fusion of form and content in
the service of revolutionary subversion. "In the service of"; for the
search for a cinema that is itself "an act" rather than "an art"
is illusory.  Even revolutionary cinema ultimately remains
a reflection of different intensities of light on a flat surface.

 LEFT AND REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA: THE WEST

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SUBVERSION IN EASTERN EUROPE:
AESOPIAN METAPHORS

The failure to extend the proletarian revolution to the West and the
subsequent degeneration of the Russian revolution has tragically
transformed the political system that promised man the widest
possible freedom into the world's most efficient totalitarian regime.
 In the cinema as elsewhere, the state's complete control over the
means of productions and of communication seems effectively to pre-
clude opposition or dissent.  Yet the spirit of freedom surreptitiously
re-emerges, particularly among the young of each new generation.
Symptomatically, just because this spirit of freedom is directed towards
the extension of democracy and, in the arts, towards the flowering
of different aesthetic tendencies, it appears counter-revolutionary to
the regime (which thereby unintentionally defines itself in action) and
new repressive measures are instituted, to which the new pioneers re-
spond with new tactics.  This constant state of tension between creative
artist and government bureaucracy is basic to the eastern societies from
Eisenstein in Russia to Schorm in Czechoslavakia, Skolimowski in Poland,
and Makavejev in Yugoslavia.  Unable to pose questions head-on, the artist
is forced into allegory, metaphor, and indirectness -- secret communications
to be decoded by the viewer.  These courageous filmmakers are the moralists
of their society, reminiscent of Diderot and the Encyclopedistes; for where
politics is inhibited, art tends to assume its function and form and style --
not merely content -- become ideologically charged.  in this sense, while
propaganda films are lacking in Eastern Europe, poltical films are not.

Individual works involving lesser or greater dissent can be found at
infrequent intervals in each of the national cinemas of the East.
 But the emergence of an entire "school" has so far been limited to
the short-lived Polish experience of the Gomulka years of the fifties
and the equally brief and brilliant Czech film renaissance, immediately
before and under Dubcek.  Though now only a glowing moment of history --
it was destroyed by the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia -- this latter
movement and its works stand as astonishing revelations of the hidden
trends within the so-called monolithic ideological structures of the East.

To Western eyes, this movement offered a challenge:  the most difficult
film to find in Prague was a Communist propaganda film and the easiest,
a humanist work in the idiom of modern cinema.  The "socialist realism"
of the past -- a sentimentalized falsification of reality -- has been super-
seded by an attempt to confront truth and uncertainty, experience and
doubt.  These Czech films deal with alienation, with anti-heroes and
the  corruption, by terror, of victims as well as executioners.  Devoid of
"official" ideology, they are filled with unorthodox compassion for people
as they are and no longer, as in Stalin's times, as they should be.

The astonishing, tightly knit group of young filmmakers represented
the values of the first post-Stalinist generation.  It was striking to note
how similar their views were to those of the West's rebellious youth,
which, from a different starting point, had also become engaged in a
search, without illusions, for possible ideals and provisional truths.
It seemed that the world was perversely backing into an enforced
brotherhood, which would universalize such problems as individual
freedom in a bureaucratic society, estrangement between generations,
the failure of dogmatic ideologies, and eternal confrontations of
imperfect innocence as against the corruption of so-called maturity.

Two complementary tendencies dominated the young Czech cinema.
The realist camp (similar to the Italian neorealists and "cinema
verite") concentrated on the significance of the insignificant, using
non- professionals and actual locations for greater authenticity.
Unlike the Italians, however, the Czech realists (Forman, Passer,
Menzel) seemed less ideological, sentimental and heroic. In providing
a truth and spontaneity too long frowned upon, their films were as
radical as the elaborate creations of the allegorical-symbolist wing.

This camp (represented by Schorm, Nemec, Masa, Juracek, and Vera
Chytilova) was far more cerebral; its scenarios were careful intellectual
constructions; its settings and visual syles intentionally artificial; its
tone oblique, suffused with existentialism.  There was less of the smiling
optimism of the neorealist camp; a more somber, even pessimistic,  mood
obtained.  Stylistically, they tended to be allegorical, symbolist, or even
"absurd"; touches of Bunuel, Fellini, Bergman abounded and the possibility
of an underlying complexity too dense to be unravelled was hinted at.

However, it ws the influence of Kafka that loomed largest.  This modern
prophet of ambiguity, unidentifiable nightmare, and sublime intimations
of limited hope had finally become inescapable.  The property of the world,
he was at last accepted in his own country as well.  Following his ideological
rehabilitation at the end of the Stalin era, his works instantly sold out and
entered the intellectual and conceptual framework of the new generation.

The Dubcek era, by modifying an artificial isolation from abroad of 17 years,
reconstituted the link with Czechoslavakia's unique past, which predisposes
the country toward the more modern cultural tendencies.  Situated at the
center of an age-old, warring continent, always a minority within larger
empires, this unfortunate country has perhaps been more frequently
subjugated or "liberated" than any other European nation, as well as
subjected to the most sophisticated cultural influences.  Surrealism,
Cubism, Dadaism were at home under Masaryk and Benes.  Ironically,
Hitler forced into Prague an additional group of outstanding emigre
exponents of "decadent" modern art, and the isolation from world art
under Hitler and Stalin led to an advantageous amalgamation of leading
Czech elements in theatre, film, painting, and literature into one common
milieu, the inevitable nucleus for the forces of cultural liberalization.

Despite Russian destruction of this movement -- all the directors were
forced out of the industry or into exile -- it has left its mark and, together
with the Polish film renaissance under Gomulka (Polanski, Borowczyk,
Lenica, Skolimowski, Wajda, Kawalerowicz, Has, and Munk), has set
standards of thematic and aesthetic daring that have become prototypes
for filmmakers in other Eastern countries as well.  In vain does one
nowadays look for "socialist realism", "positive heroes", or paeans to
tractors; instead, in their best works, there is a painful confrontation
of the basic question of human freedom under a collectivized regime
without democratic controls, a positive scepticism and rejection of
hypocrisy which reveal a struggle for new values and new lifestyles.
These films are not "counter-revolutionary", but rather attempt
to clarify what the Czech reform movement used as its slogan;
"socialism with a human face".  They prove that arrogantly
exercised power, alienation, and the corruption of both the
individual and society are as rife in the East as in the West, and
that the aspirations of the most progressive youth in both blocs
are identical:  a more equitable society, yet one that preserves,
 indeed extends, the best democratic traditions of the West.

LEFT AND REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA: THE EAST

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THE THIRD WORLD:  A NEW CINEMA

The cinema of the Third World is as young, varied, and amorphous
as the different political and geographic realities it represents and
is united only in its determination to liberate itself from the sway of
foreign domination; its subversion, therefore, is primarily directed
against a power elite which is alien and extraneous and a native ruling
class allied and subservient to it.  Perhaps the politically and aesthe-
tically most developed Third World Cinema was Brazil's "Cinema Novo"
movement, one of the new "national" cinemas to emerge in the last
decade; it accurately reflected the social fervor and progressive
nationalist commitment of a new generation coming to maturity in
a stagnant, dictatorial oligarchy shored up by American capital and
based on poverty, oppression, and cultural and political colonization.
 This group of young filmmakers attempted to develop an indigenous,
socially relevant Brazilian cinema, free of domination by foreign,
particularly American capital, drawing its themes and aesthetic
preoccupations from the country's heritage and tragic need for
transformation; but the political climate in Brazil has now,
at least temporarily, put an end to its activities.

The basic themes of Cinema Novo are those of Brazilian reality:
the archaic, cruel "sertao", the sun-parched steppes that occupy
much of the country's huge territory, in which, as in a primeval,
mythological landscape, the ultimate tragedies of oppression,
lust, heroism, and betrayal are played out; the exploits and
myths of the "cangaceiros" and "beatos", anarchist and flamboy-
ant bandit-rebels who redress social injustice by violence directed
against the rich; and the "favela", Rio de Janiero's festering
shanty-town slums. In these basic landscapes, Cinema
Novo has placed characters tenaciously clinging to outworn
privileges and exorbitant rebels determined to destroy them.

A full-fledged, nationalized film industry entirely in the service
of the revolution has been developed in Cuba, which produces a
significant number of feature films by internationally recognized
artists, documentaries, propagandist shorts and strongly political
newsreels.  Despite increasing pressures towards ideological
conformity, the Cuban films remain refreshingly free of the
stultifying "socialist realism" of the Stalin period in the East,
reaching levels of poetry (Gomez' First Charge of the Machete) and
intellectual sophistication (Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment)
that place this very young industry in the front rank of the third world
production.  The "subversive" Cuban cinema, perhaps surprisingly,
is primarily found in the propaganda films by Santiago Alvarez who
today is one of the world's most prolific and notable political filmmakers.

A young, but growing, film industry is emerging in Algeria, with
a strongly political bent, emphasizing the fusing of nationalist and
radical elements so dominant there.  The features deal primarily
with the still traumatic period of the anti-French struggle, both
fictionally and by the use of newsreel materials; the shorts
frequently exhibit a greater variety of subject matter; hardly any,
however, classify as either pure entertainment or pure politics.
The most strongly political work is probably Ahmed Rachedi's
The Twilight of the Damned, an anti-imperialist history of Algeria.

Though Chinese films have not been widely seen in the West --
a situation that hopefully will now change -- there is no reason
to assume that a large new source of subversive films will suddenly
emerge from what by all accounts is a strongly ulitarian, conservative,
socially "positive" cinema, free of aesthetic "frills" or even propagan-
distic subversion either of its own establishment (unthinkable) or of
world imperialism (such films would already be known in the radical
West or the film festival circuit).  It is entirely possible that the
most subversive Chinese film so far is Acupunctural Anaesthesia
with its cold, scientific demystification of the human body.

Some political films have also come from North Vietnam,
Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, and Senegal; and from Argentina,
probably the masterpiece of Third World Cinema, the violently
anti-AmericanThe Hour of the Blast Furnaces  by Fernando Solanas.

Finally, tribute must be paid to a type of political film almost unique
to South America and directly linked to the nature of its political
systems:  the illegal film, produced (and distributed!) under the
most dangerous and trying circumstances, the ultimate, if not
in film art, at least so in personal revolutionary commitment;
chiefly these are exposes of social ills or documentaries of other-
wise unreported political demonstrations, strikes, and riots.

 LEFT AND REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA:  THIRD WORLD

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EAST GERMANY:  AGAINST THE WEST

Some of the strongest and simultaneously most questionable
political films of the post-war era have come from East Germany.
Originating in the works of Annelie and Andrew Thorndike,
continued by Joachim Hellwig and, more recently, by Walter
Heynowski, these hard-hitting, tightly edited films at
first aimed at identifying West Germany with the Nazis,
establishing a continuity of personnel if not ideology,
and were later broadened to include West Germany's
imperialist ally, the USA.  The Thorndykes called their
series of films The Archives Testify, and this proved to be
the ideological shape of all East German films of this type.
Based on archives, official legislation, secret orders, and
newsreels of the Nazi period, they exposed, prosecuted,
and convicted their victims on film by carefully chosen
visuals and sophisticated editing.  There is no doubt what-
soever that in these films real Nazis and certain crimes
of the West were indeed exposed; and to this extent, they
were not only subversive works par excellence, but, due to
their wide distribution, quite effective.  Yet they raise the
most disturbing questions (if not, indeed, parallels to Nazi
propaganda films) in their crude simplifications, tendentious
pre-selection, shaping and even doctoring of what may well be
valid materials, use of political "amalgams" (the meretricious
cross-cutting of materials in reality unrelated), and insertion
of staged scenes (without even identifying them as such).
In short, they are propaganda work rather than political films --
"trials" by camera and montage -- and ultimately operate, despite
their intellectual, factual gloss, primarily on an emotional level.

The "subversion" of these films, all made prior to the 1972 detente
between the two Germanies, was directed against an external foe
and as such was in accordance with official East German foreign
policy of the time.  No "subversive" films exist in East Germany
directed against its own establishment.  It is not that there are
no social or political problems:  it is simply that the state owns all
motion picture production, distribution, and exhibition.  Neither
cautious, allegorical works (as in Hungary, Czechoslavakia, and
Poland), nor directly political films (such as Red Squad, The Murder
of Fred Hampton, and many more in America) have so far been made
in this most orthodox of Eastern countries.  Perhaps their fulminations
against Western Nazis in high positions would sound less self-righteous
if there existed just one East German film drawing attention to the
use of former Nazi bureaucrats (or nuclear physicists!) in the East.

 EAST GERMANY: AGAINST THE WEST

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A PROPOS DE NICE
(Jean Vigo, France, 1930)
It also commented visually on "the girls" in the
terrace cafes by simply juxtaposing two images.