Revolutionary cinema: when filmmakers were mad as hell

You can use movies as a means of escaping your real-world troubles and there are hundreds of thousands of films that help you do this in all sorts of way and for all sorts of weather and reasons. But sometimes as American student activist Mario Savio famously declared in a 1964 speech, the real-world and the operations of its nefarious controlling machinery become, “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!”

Now, before you recoil in disgust at the thought that this column has become a tool for revolutionary action, it is still just a column about movies. For those of us who may be sick at heart at the despairing inefficiency and inhumanity of those who grease the wheels of political and social machinery for their own benefit and not the greater good, but don’t have the will or the fire needed to get up and do something about it, there are plenty of angry films about turbulent times and the need for radical social transformation to keep us consciously couch surfing a televised revolution, if it comes.

This week’s films offer strong examples of times and situations when filmmakers were mad as hell, just couldn’t take it any more and picked up the only weapons they had to try to briefly throw some spanners in the works of mainstream ideology.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL

Memories of Underdevelopment — YouTube

A film for political fence-sitters everywhere, Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s adaptation of the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoes sets its existentially angsty drama against the backdrop of Cuba in the wake of the failed 1961 US-backed coup at the Bay of Pigs. It’s protagonist Sergio is a bourgeois Cuban intellectual who decides to remain in Havana, after his family escape in the hopes of making a new life in Miami.

Though he is not opposed to the revolution that brought Fidel Castro and the communist regime to power, Sergio wants to believe that he can live in his beloved homeland without having to take a pointed ideological stand. It soon emerges that such a middle-class, privileged position may be untenable in 1960s Cuba with its central place in the Cold War politics of the era.

Sergio, strolling around, passing patronising voice-over narrated judgment on the “underdeveloped,” thinking and manner of his fellow Cubans, takes a young lover who he tries to indoctrinate to his church of intellectual pleasures and aesthetic appreciation, but when she fails to be suitably impressed he quickly leaves her. When he’s accused of raping her, Sergio quickly becomes a player in a political and ideological game he thought he could get away with only cynically watching and comes to realise that perhaps it’s not his country that’s underdeveloped but rather his own thinking and mentality that haven’t matured.  

Using an innovative-for-the-times, French New Wave influenced style which utilises jump-cuts, documentary footage and still photography, the film offers a compelling visual portrait of the inner turmoil of its protagonist that also mirrors the broader anxieties of the social class he represents. It all adds up to a distinctive work that reflects the chaos, dread and uncertainty of a global moment when everything seemed as if it might change dramatically forever.

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THE STONE COLD CLASSIC

20 Years Later — YouTube

Director Eduardo Coutinho’s fascinating documentary attempts to make sense of the terrifying era of Brazilian dictatorship in the 1960s, two decades on. Released in 1984, the film was originally planned to come out in 1964, when the story of the life and assassination of activist João Pedro Teixeira in 1962, was still fresh in the outraged minds of his countrymen.

Before the film — which was originally intended as a fictional drama — could be completed, real-world developments in Brazil lead to the installation of a military dictatorship and Coutinho and his crew found themselves the targets of censorship with many being arrested and having their equipment and footage confiscated by the authorities.

Coutinho’s return to the material saw him make a trenchantly critical and moving documentary as he combined some of the original fiction footage with documentary interviews with the cast and crew to tell a unique story about truth and lies, reality and fiction, and the threats that alternative narratives can pose to those in charge of constructing official versions of national history.

It’s unsentimental but never didactic and it challenges its audience to see for themselves the depressing evidence of how history so often repeats itself. It also feels like a timeless argument for social change that is spurred by the lived experiences of its characters and story, rather than a propagandist exercise in clumsy storytelling intended to illustrate a dodgy ideology.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

The Hour of the Furnaces — YouTube     

Argentinian political filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’ four-hour documentary epic is a classic of “Third World Cinema.” It was released in the turbulent political maelstrom of 1968, when filmmakers took the idea that their work might be able to change the world, very seriously, particular in non-western, non-mainstream regions like newly independent Africa and Cold War Latin America.

The film is organised into three sections, each with its own formal style, thematic concern and ultimate objective. The first, “Neocolonialism and Violence,” addresses the history of Latin America and Argentina within the context of a new form of economic colonialism that arose in the wake of independence and lead to a new kind of violence executed by the wealthy against the poor. The second section, “Act of Liberation,” casts a critical eye on the Peron era and its aftermath. The final section, “Violence and Liberation,” makes a case for the use of violence as a tool for revolution and liberation.

It’s all very heavy on the politics and urgent calls for change and ultimately, its objective was never achieved, thanks to the Argentinian military Junta, which took over the country in the 1970s and set about violently repressing opposition through kidnappings, disappearances and assassinations.

As a cinematic artefact however, the film remains a powerful demonstration of the marriage of angry revolutionary ideals and formal innovations that ask and demand proper engagement on the part of viewers whose normal intellectual passivity as spectators is continually and aggressively challenged in an attempt to turn them from couch potatoes into Fanonian-fired makers of a new destiny. 

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