Revolution and the Moving Image

Documentary films concerned with revolutionary movements occupy a fascinating position within communications culture, sketching the contours of radical social change and assessing its success. This is not an innocuous or innocent task, no matter who undertakes it. Revolutionary leaders communicate fixed goals and ideologies to followers and the world, and interpret events and complexities to cultivate support for a reality that is coming into being. Historians, concerned with comprehending and contextualizing change, may attempt more detachment, but must still contend with received ideas about how change occurs, why some movements succeed as others fail, and whose interests are involved in interpreting revolutionary moments.

Filmmakers stand in a tenuous space between the fervor of revolutionaries and the rigor of historians. Deciding a story’s beginning, end and theme (though the story may yet be unfolding, and its details chaotic), filmmakers negotiate numerous decisions of great consequence. They may display sympathy for a movement, or treat it with detachment, champion leaders or privilege collectivism. Each decision crystallizes perspectives and beliefs, defining the tenor and rhetorical thrust of a given film. As individual revolutions demand to be understood in their specifics (as leftist, rightist, bourgeois, etc.), so must documentaries be understood as proceeding from specific subject positions – and in their artistic and intellectual achievement, to be seen as active participants in revolutionary movement.

This program combines films from many contexts, some made by participants in their own national journeys, others by artists considering struggles from across an expanse of time or geography. Jean-Luc Godard’s, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Ici et ailleurs underlines the dilemma of representing urgent social and historical information, examining the Palestinian struggle for recognition and self-determination through media representations that refract, re-cast and potentially neutralize this struggle. Cuban documentarian Santiago Álvarez, in a dazzling series of short documentary subjects, exuberantly employs and updates Soviet-inspired montage to herald new social realities, deftly defining revolution in global terms and implicitly situating Cuba’s ongoing revolutionary project as part of a worldwide struggle against Western imperialism. This theme is echoed in Underground, by Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson and Haskell Wexler, in which the charismatic and articulate members of the United States-based Weather Underground Organization, identifying as revolutionaries, explain their campaign of domestic bombings and other actions committed in protest of American violence abroad, especially in Vietnam. That country, invoked in so many other countries’ discourses, appears as it were in the first person in three short, exceedingly rare documentaries produced under the authority of North Vietnamese political and military organizations, graphically illustrating the aftermath of American attacks and the work of North Vietnamese citizens to preserve their own revolutionary project. Patricio Guzmán’s moving Chile, Obstinate Memory examines the role of memory in conserving the flame of revolutionary sentiment, as numerous Chileans recall with vastly different perspectives the coup d’état that ended the government of Marxist socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973. The force of memory also informs Natalia Almada’s El General, in which Mexico’s President Plutarco Elías Calles (the filmmaker’s great-grandfather) is assessed for the ways in which he both continued the ideals of the Mexican Revolution (in which he had served as an Army General) and arguably compromised them in his maneuvers to shore up power. Harun Farocki offers a glimpse of a late 20th-Century revolution as Romania’s President Nicolae Ceaucescu is removed from power in a bristling 1989 military coup, and citizens and political leaders scramble to seize the heady moment – self-consciously deploying media images to make this process complete and effective. Finally, in Long Night’s Journey into Day, Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman document post-apartheid South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, through which, after a decades-long armed struggle, a nation sought to complete and fulfill its revolution without further resort to violence. Radically different in form and approach, each of these films represents an attempt, and an opportunity, to understand the mechanics and the meaning of revolutionary achievement and struggle.