Feature article lifting the beret of revolutionary cinema.
Published in the 'Che' issue of Little White Lies.
¡CINEMA LIBRE!
They are tales of struggle; rich pageants of human endeavour set to the machine-gun rhythm of revolutionary fervour while the crimson banners of hope and loss bleed into the setting sun. The screen flickers, the world turns and the new dawn sends forth its golden battalions armed with their burning spears of truth.
Which is to say, they are a universal yet routinely misunderstood filmic Esperanto with which to bamboozle one’s similarly precocious, know-nothing cineaste chums down at the student union bar. More importantly, they serve as a passport into the big, baggy pants of otherwise coldly enigmatic foreign exchange students.
They are that committed band of cinematic martyrs who, through a mixture of bold political vision, occasional wit, and ready recourse to po-faced dogma, open our eyes to the possibility of change, the brotherhood of all men and the vicarious thrills of hanging around in outsize shades toting an assault rifle.
In anticipation of Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara diptych hitting the screens of threadbare art-house kinos and grotty little film clubs up and down the country, we consider the manifesto of revolutionary cinema and the mythos surrounds it. It doesn’t always promise to be pretty, but as Ho Chi Minh once said, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs...”
The proletariat look to the armed cadres engaged in revolutionary struggle to establish the conditions for self-liberation inherent in the crisis of bourgeois capital.
The Political Stuff
The battle of ideas is all very well, but when its time for a shooting war look no further than Gillo Pontecorvo’s ‘The Battle of Algiers’ (1965) for tips on armed insurrection and the lowdown on how the pre-existing forces of reaction will bring their heat to the street. The film was made only a few years after the bloody clash between French forces and Algerian insurgents while Free Algeria was as unsteady as a new-born colt. Taking a cue from Robert Rossellini’s template for guerilla film-making, ‘Rome: Open City’, director Pontecorvo gets round not being afforded the dubious luxury of shooting his film in an actual war by aping Rossellini’s documentary style so convincingly you’ll swear you can feel the bullets flying past your ears.
If such naked realism is too much, you’ll be relieved to immerse yourself in the opulent production values of ‘Reds’ (’81), the Bolshevik ‘Gone With The Wind’ in which querulous fancy-boy Warren Beatty leaves behind endless absinthe soirees with the great and the good of Upstate New York for the furious guns and even more furious moustaches of revolutionary Russia. If the name of his character, Jack Reed, rings a bell it’s because the movie is based on Reed’s 1919 book Ten Days That Shook The World – the self-same unread Penguin Classic you kept casually peeking from your overcoat pocket for your entire fresher year and which got you precisely nowhere with either the trendy lecturers or the opposite sex.
But surely the grand dialectic deserves a star with more epic credentials than Beatty, and how Soderbergh must have envied Richard Fleischer’s good fortune in being able to cast wild-eyed gambling aficionado Omar Sharif in his 1969 biopic ‘Che!’. Sharif must not only contend with Jack Palance in the role of Fidel Castro and an appalling script but has to battle his way through what are patently the crisp valleys of Californian wine country rather than the steaming jungles of Cuba: the cursed imperialist blockade had claimed another victim – cinematic verite!
Permanent revolution will be achieved only through the destruction of the rightist demarcation between workers, peasants and students.
The Aesthetic: Threads. Hair. Shades
No film amongst this broiling snakepit of rebellionwears its not-so-bleeding heart on it’s oh-so-fashionable sleeve as proudly as Jean Luc Godard’s baffling 1969 polemic, ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. On paper it can’t go wrong; the Rolling Stones strut that funky stuff through a series of fascinating early demo versions of their brooding signature tune while the iconoclastic director splices in sequences featuring Black Panthers spouting snippets of Marxist/Maoist doctrine. It’s a shattered pane of time through which we see that the whole freak flag-flying world is in flux, nothing can ever be complete and simply Everything Must Go.
Either that, or it’s a haphazard medley of Their Satanic Majesties’ drugged-up outtakes that witnesses Brian Jones nod off over his axe, some harebrained racists trot out scads of impenetrable invective while you eye your watch and wait the first reasonable moment during which you can slip out and install yourself in a dank corner of the theatre bar and look conflicted and dangerous over half a pint of subsidised snakebite. If you ever meet anyone who defends this film in any way, do the decent thing and kick them as hard and repeatedly in the shins as you can possibly get away with.
A somewhat more effective tilt at well-coiffed insurrection comes from Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni’s dip into the Hollywood studio system, ‘Zabriskie Point’ (1970). A hypnotically pointless essay on late-Sixties Southern California campus politics, high desert orgies and explosive fin de siècle wish-fulfilment set to some spectacularly loopy Pink Floyd noodlings, it follows a couple of beautiful, blow-dried non-actors through some heavy-handed metaphors. Again, it sounds like just the ticket, but the whole thing resembles nothing less than an X-rated perfume ad and has no actual revolutionary ideas beyond blowing everything to high heaven.
The old-school Brit stylings of Lindsay Anderson’s public school scandalabra ‘If…’ bring things closer to home. Perpetual problem child Malcom McDowell may have turned many a man of a certain age on to the sheepskin-lined bomber jacket with this dyspeptic slice of student revolution, but… public schools? Really? Couldn’t they have picked on something more identifiably street-level and immediate, like, say, the House of Lords, or the Masons?
‘If…’? Yeah, sure. What about ‘When..?’..?
The revolution is incomplete while the revolutionary sisterhood remains oppressed by patriarchal notions of chastity and morality.
The Sexy Stuff
With the trappings of machismo so prevalent in these pages, one could be forgiven for imagining that revolution is a boys’ only affair, but radical cinema also offers the comrade sisters an opportunity for liberation – usually from the tyranny of clothing. ‘Who Are You, Polly Magoo?’ (1966) is the story of an oppressed American supermodel commodified by the fashion-industrial complex. As if the indignity of starring in a gag-free Godard spoof were not enough, her acid-tongued French svengali subjects her to such willful and highly dubious psychological experiments as being forced to model aluminum knickers and a harrowing interrogation as to who she would boff out of Castro, Ali, Picasso and, unfathomably, Lawrence of Arabia.
But in this world, flesh undoubtedly equals freedom, so slip out of your silk kimono and into ‘Performance’, where Mick Jagger and a pair of pansexual dolly birds are busy sharing a bathful of hallucinogens as James Fox’s cracked gangster rattles around their Notting Hill mansion in search of his libido. Orgies, betrayal, make-overs and mob violence come to a head when Fox is forced to confront the sickening realisation that he has come to embody the very decadence he has sought to destroy. Sound familiar, comrade?
Subversive chiffon capers of more respectable cut are to be found in ‘The Stepford Wives’ (1975). The patriarchal junta of a well-heeled Connecticut suburb has replaced its wives with subservient fembots and everyone seems to be getting along fine until a new arrival starts rocking the boat. Quite why the toolshed geniuses of Stepford didn’t go commercial with this technique is not disclosed, but the film is no less revealing in its dissection of the fascist psyche than Nazi brothel procedural ‘Salon Kitty’ (1976), In which director Tinto Brass conducts us on a guided tour through the mechanics of evil with every bit of his trademark understatement and charm.
It is the duty of every revolutionary to guard against the errors of reactionary thinking through permanent self-questioning
What You Could Have Been Watching…
While you were in the dank back room of an anarchist bookshop trying to find the funny in Fassbinder’s Red Army Faction comedy ‘The Third Generation’ (1979) or dozing through a late night repertory showing of Coasta-Gavras’ ‘Z’ (1969), the lodestones of liberation were idling on the shelves of your local video shop, or hiding in plain sight after ‘Match of the Day’ of a Saturday night.
For a stirring example of workers seizing the means of production, one could do little better than Sam Peckinpah’s unjustly maligned trucker parable, ‘Convoy’ (’78). A tale of suppression, collectivization and uprising to rival Alexander Dovzhenko’s ‘Ukraine Trilogy’, this bawdy romp follows a coalition of truck drivers double-clutching their way along the freedom express to the martial beat of a 1976 novelty record. “The purpose of the convoy is to keep moving,” declares de facto leader Kris Kristoffersson, outlining his Tex-Mex take on permanent revolution, and who are we to argue?
Rusty rebellion also corrodes the heart of Paul Shrader’s 1978 directorial debut, ‘Blue Collar’. It’s a sweaty, gritty drama that revolves around the lives of three Detroit assembly line workers (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto) who, dissatisfied with the shoddy treatment served up by their union representatives, take matters into their own oily hands. It’s a steely nugget that remains peerless in its raw depiction of the feedback loop of frustration experienced by the average working stiff.
‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967), on the other hand, shows us that you need neither a manifesto nor a moral compass to revolt, while Marlon Brando’s bold turn as a Mexican rabble-rouser in ‘Viva Zapata!’ (1952) proves that the unlikeliest of people can find themselves taking the lead in the insurrection mambo. And lastly there’s Wes Anderson’s ‘Rushmore’ (1998), a winsome tale of hope, realisation and unchecked malice which nevertheless serves to remind us all that our idealism can never be taken, but only lost and that even when we’re not wholly sure who or what it is we’re rebelling against, struggle itself is its own reward.
