The power of protest

Today is Human Rights Day in SA. A commemoration of the sacrifices made by the dozens of peaceful anti-pass-law protesters shot in the back by apartheid police in Sharpeville in 1960.

While the day celebrates the human rights we’re able to enjoy and that so many died for; it also reminds us of the right to protest. It highlights the power of protest to bring about change and the dangers that protesters face.

With the world’s most powerful and increasingly absurdist farce of a nation crushing the rights of protest and few angry people protesting like their 1960s predecessors who were against the Vietnam War and supported the civil rights movements, this week’s film archive dive pays tribute to three films that remind us of what protest entails, what it can do, why it’s still necessary and remains a basic human right.

THE ART HOUSE ESSENTIAL:

Bloody Sunday — YouTube

Paul Greengrass’s 2002 dramatisation of the events of January 30 1972 in the Northern Irish town of Derry when British soldiers opened fire on a peaceful protest by Republican supporters killing 13 and wounding 14 is a visceral, immediate recreation that puts you inside the crowd as the situation escalates towards its tragic finale.

The excellently grim faced James Nesbitt stars as civil rights activist Ivan Cooper, the Protestant leader of a predominantly Catholic march determined to show sectarian unity in the face of continued and unwanted British occupation.

It’s advocacy cinema that’s impressively executed. By stripping the story of extraneous sociopolitical explanation and dropping us straight into the tumult of the events, it makes its case more effectively — mirroring the chaos and confusion of the events and creating an immediate empathy with those caught in the crossfire.

You may know it from the U2 songs and the sloganeering but Greengrass’ film offers the closest picture of what it was like to be there. It’s a dramatically, politically angry film that reminds us that protesters are most often ordinary, anguished fed up people trying to make their voices heard by any means necessary.

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THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC:

I am Cuba — YouTube

Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 USSR-Cuba co-production is a definite work of post Cuban revolution propaganda but it’s also a masterful exercise in conveying the history, spirit and righteous fury of a nation to ecstatic visual life.

Shot in technically innovative long takes by cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky the film tells four stories of different characters in 1959 Cuba and their relationships to the American exploitation of the island under the rule of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Filled with some of the most impressive black and white photography in cinema history and a passion for its setting and message that imbue every frame with determination, it’s a film that dazzles technically and emotionally.

Its politics may not hold up in the light of the historical reality that has unfolded in Cuba since the revolution but it’s hard not to admire its spirit and commitment to delivering a nationalist ideal to screen. Its righteous anger at the forces of US imperialism that created the circumstances for the revolution remain hard not to get worked up over, whatever you may think of Castro.

It’s a rare example of a protest film in which the victories of protest are celebrated by the message of the story and how it’s executed. Its opening shot will still have you scratching your head how it was achieved over six decades later.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH:

Berkeley in the Sixties — Prime Video

Director Mark Kitchell’s Oscar nominated documentary from 1990 is an archive rich documentary about the chaotic spirit of protest that enveloped the radical California campus of Berkeley in the 1960s.

Though it’s focus may be noticeably middle-class and white it’s still a useful reminder of a time when what was going on around them made many young people mad enough to try to do something about it with their voices and bodies as weapons.

While it seems as if Americans are angry but impotent, Kitchell’s nostalgic rewind to a time when people believed — however naively that protest had the power to change the world — offers a reminder of its useful potential. As free speech activist Mario Savio so famously said during a protest at Berkeley in the sixties: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

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