Some political films for activists and organizers: An essay in fragments
Written at the request of a leader of the New York City branch of Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am as of recently proud to be a member.,
This is a list of “political” films in the narrow sense of the term, involving social movements and the like. Comments and suggestions welcome.
Mario Monicelli, The Organizer, Italy, 1963, 2h 6m
(Currently on Criterion Channel)
Monicelli was known mostly for film comedies, part of the great school known as Commedia all’Italiana. This film stars Marcello Mastroianni as a school teacher who also is an organizer of factory workers in late 19th century Turin, a Northern Italian industrial city that a was a center for radical left politics. Realistic and with relatively little melodrama, It is one of the most authentically told stories of factory worker organizing and strikes. The teacher is a lonely bachelor with his books, and it is party his story and partly that of the people of the factory and city. The relationship between the organizer who comes from elsewhere and the working class townspeople is treated very sensitively, and the focus of the film is very much on them as well as him. I will not spoil it but tell you: The strikers win and lose, lose and win.
Chris Marker, Rhodiacéta, also called À bientôt j’espère (Be Seeing You), France, 1967
This little-known film (rare enough that IMDB lists it but with no information) by (along with Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda one of the great French film essayists) is a documentary about a strike at a factory in Paris. An imperfect memory of it from one screening years back includes the memory of a young woman who is involved in the strikes and talks about several French and other artists and intellectuals, much as the young Véronique, who is a university student, does in the contemporaneous film “La Chinoise” (discussed below). I recollect this as a strikingly “French” thing to do; as in the Paris Commune of 1871, the worker’s uprising that took over the city of Paris and formed a revolutionary government there before the men and women were mostly executed by the French national government. It is “French” in refusing the separation of roles between “working class” and artist or intellectual, insisting and also taking for granted that those adjectives most truly to everyone, as thinkers, artists, and activists on the left have long insisted (most notably, but certainly not them only, Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci saying that everyone is an intellectual and German artist Joesph Beuys that everyone is an artist. That is, anyone can be and should be. Of course, Marx and Engels also say this in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto. The question of the relationship between intellectuals and artists on the one hand and workers, or the working class, as such, whether conceived traditionally or otherwise, continues to be a live and important one. It is still debated today, sometimes in the context of discussing the situation of university educated people who have been in one way or another proletarianized, forced by circumstances into boring and/or precarious or low-paying employments, or exploited in other ways, such as in the role of consumer, debtor, or—tenant. (Some of the relevance of the “Empire” trilogy fo books by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt may derive from this, as of course did the Occupy Wall Street Movement, often credited as an influence behind the relative success of Bernie Sander’s two campaigns).
See also Marker’s great film about the political events of May 1968 in France and their aftermath internationally, Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge (Eng: A Grin without a Cat), 4h
Andrzej Wajda, Man of Iron, Poland, 1981, 2h 36min
The subject is the Polish Solidarity movement, the workers’ strike that succeeded in winning recognition as an independent labor union from the Communist government. Later, not included in the film, Solidarity was defeated by the imposition of martial law, but renewed protests later in the decade helped bring about the end of Communism (or if you prefer, Stalinism) in Europe. Best seen with Man of Marble, 1977, which forms with it a diptych, the previous film covering the story of a Stakhanovite (a worker who becomes a hero by greatly exceeding production norms). That he is a bricklayer, with the Biblical echoes this has, especially in Catholic Poland, is surely an irony lost on few domestic viewers. The treatment of heroes and heroism is subtle in these films, and echoes the director’s early triumph Ashes and Diamonds, widely considered the best Polish film, as Wajda is also regularly thought the greatest Polish director. The role of journalists and filmmakers is given interesting play. Wajda’s aesthetic frequently either invokes or looks critically at heroic models of political subjectivity that may be called a nationalist romanticism, which often turns, as many films with dramatic conflicts do, on what may be loosely called Oedipal themes, which includes figuring the state as paternal in was that yield certain possibilities of rebellion that are successful, failed, or both. (On this, see also my review of Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2018 Oscar-winning“Cold War,” a film that deliberately evokes early Wajda in style and theme, on this site). Starring the great Polish actors Jerzy Radzilowicz and Krystyna Janda, Man of Iron is a close, pseudo-documentary look (with some actual documentary footage) at a real event from the standpoint of certain typically likely participants.
Peter Watkins, La Comune, Paris, 1871, 2000, 5h 45m
The Paris Commune was a movement of workers, men and women, who in the wake of France’s defeat in war with Prussia, set up a revolutionary government in the city or Paris. It was short-lived, but has remained one of those inspiring historical moments in the history of the communist/socialist movement, or the “left” more broadly. It is also, of course, a major moment in French history, and modern European history. Participants included the realist painter Gustave Courbet, and it inspired many others, including the young poet Arthur Rimbaud. Maybe because some political struggles are successful enough that their history cannot be easily forgotten or rewritten from the standpoint of the police. Lenin considered it to be an important task for socialists and workers to find a way to avoid the defeat suffered by the communards. They were attacked by troops of the national government, defended themselves, were defeated, and mostly lined up and shot. But not forgotten.
The film might usefully be viewed in conjunction with Marx’s writing on the subject, “The Civil War in France,” and also the recent short book by NYU French professor Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: the Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune.
Herbert Biberman, Salt of the Earth, USA, 1954, 1h 34m
(Currently on Mubi, which is free with Scribd, the giant reading service.)
I have not seen this film in many years, but I recollect it as realistic and well-made. Made by film industry professionals suffering from the anti-Communist Hollywood Blacklist, it stands out among the small number of films on organizing and strikes in being close to Italian neorealism in its unflashy, non-overcooked style. Its artistic status is a matter of some controversy, though it wins on theme for most people who care about its subject: a strike that is organized in New Mexico among Mexican immigrant agricultural workers. In California they would a couple of decades later become a major political force though the United Farm Workers’ union led by Cesar Chavez.
Gillo Pontecorvo (Italian), Battle of Algiers, France/Algieria, 1966, 2h 1m
(Currently on Criterion Channel)
Often considered the best overtly political film of all time, scripted by a leading participant. Even if revolutionary wars and national liberation movements are now less trendy around the world and of course just an inapplicable now as then to domestic struggles in “first world” nations. It concerns the struggles of members of a national liberation movement (of Algerians against the French colonialists). It portrays both the revolutionaries and the French government engaged in the violence of a revolutionary war of independence. Highlights both the use of torture by the French and centers around the political formation of a young illiterate who becomes a principle leader along with educated career activists. Filmed in a melodramatic style designed to make engaging storytelling, it is nonetheless realistic in portraying acts of political violence with sympathy for people on both sides and thus foregrounding moral ambiguities. Sans untainted heroes, unsympathetic villains, or acts of violence that are simply admired or merely condemned. The kind of film that doesn’t seem to have a hidden track that is a noisome superego echoing conventional moral platitudes. For all its melodrama, the film is considered a very realistic account of what both insurrectional movements are like to be in, and what governments that oppose them tend to be like. It has been shown to officers in training by the U.S. military, used to teach counter-insurgency, and I suspect by many on opposites sides as well; it is also one of the great works in film history. Brace yourself for acts of terrorism, mass resistance, torture, colonialist violence, and terrific neorealist faux-documentary photography along with stirring music by the great film composer Ennio Morricone.
Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise, France, 1967, 1h 35m
(Currently on Mubi, free with the Scribd reading service, with its millions of books.)
Jean-Luc Godard became, and remained for 4 years, a committed left-wing filmmaker the following year after the May 1968 protests and mass strike in France. This film is prescient because one of the stars, Anne Wiazemsky, became the filmmaker’s wife and in this film plays a version of her own role as a student involved in radical organizations at Nanterre, University of Paris #10, which in fact is where the May ’68 protests began before spreading to the famous and ancient Sorbonne, and then throughout Paris and then France. Radical left politics in France at this time was still defined by the official Communist Party and its rivals, one of which, a Maoist group, is the principal affiliation of these young activists. But the interest in this film really lies partly in its relentless critique of more or less everything these young people say and do (including Wiazemsky’s ridiculous didactic lecturing and Jean-Pierre Léaud’s defense of theatricality as a political strategy). The film is a comedy, and it must be said that Godard was always good at criticizing people’s mistakes, which he finds interesting. Filmmakers have often made films criticizing political mistakes, and no one ever did this better than Godard in this film, which remains relevant in some ways even though the curious political tendency that was French Maoism no longer is. If the film has a faith in anything, it is at the level of style and certain gestures and ideas that go beyond the posturing and positions of the young activists. It is a very great film and very beautiful. Don’t miss the discussion about political violence between the philosopher professor Francis Jeanson and his real-life student at the time, Anne Wiazemsky as Véronique. A supertitle suggests that the director thinks they are both wrong. The real ideational inspiration for the film is the theater theory of Bertolt Brecht, the one name that “Guillaume” (Léaud) does not subject in one scene to what might be called a literally rendered aesthetic politics of erasure, which is itself a variant on a very French (Descartes, the Revolution) “zero degree” aesthetics that the film actually sets rather against the reductive gestures of a politics that takes polemical opposition to extremes that make their representation a reductio ad absurdum. Godard at the time was clearly in search of a politics. It seems remarkable now just how much sympathy he could draw on for these youths playing seriously at being radicals. What I mean to say is that the film seems somehow to straddle a line between the credible and absurd. Godard was always brilliant at posing questions.
(At the moment of this writing, the film is by chance available on Mubi, which is also free if you get the reading service Scribd, with its enormous library. Readers are invited to address this writer if they would like a Scribd invite with one free month). Those who enjoy this film might also like Godard’s “Masculin Feminin,” “Alphaville,” “Vivre sa vie (My life to live)”, and “A married woman,” among others. These films are political in the broad sense of social criticism).
Jean-Luc Godard, Tout va bien, France, 1972, 1h 35m
This film marks the tail end of the great French director’s explicitly political period that begins with “Le gai savoir” of 1968. Those films are rarely seen and approach being unwatchable, their significance now seeming to lie more in Godard’s questioning of various ideas both aesthetic and political. Tout va bien stars Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, two film stars who were known to have strong left-wing political commitments. Both here play media professionals (television and journalism) who are trying to negotiate being political in both their personal and professional lives, that great preoccupation of many people in the early ‘70s. (See, for example, Alain Tanner’s Jonah who will be 25 in the Year 2000; and in a certain also Jacques Rivette’s Out One: Noli Me Tangere and its shorter version Out One: Specter.)
The heart of the film is a factory strike that involves a sit-in with bosses locked in their offices, and lots of political speeches being made. Far from being one of Godard’s best films, it may be recommended as an attempt to reflect on the very idea of (old-fashioned) political struggles of industrial workers in factories, and the question of how middle-class activists might relate to them. This being the early ‘70s and Jane Fonda being who she is (she also starred in Joseph Losey’s rather political filmed version (1973) of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in many ways the signature (middle-class) “feminist” work of theater from the nineteenth century), she makes some issue with lover and common-law husband Montand in the film of issues of gender and sex (hint: it should be equal!).
(For more on Godard, see my “Seven propositions on Godard,” on this site.)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Eight hours don’t make a day, Germany, 1972, 7 h 56 m
There are very few films that sympathetically cover factory workers who go on strike, and this is one of them. This long made-for-television film, whose title has double reference since the film is 8 hours long, and which was recently re-released, is the only film in the incredibly prolific oeuvre of Fassbinder’s short career (1968-83); perhaps partly because he was also a theater director, most of his films are sharply socially critical and in ways that often turn as much on drama, that is, character, as mise-en-scène or visual style; he also makes much use of mirrors and glances. Loosely associated with the German New Left, Fassbinder was unsparingly critical of characters who belong to minority and oppressed groups, including those to which he belonged (he was gay) or had deep artistic, political, and romantic attachments with (including American blacks); he once said that women “use their oppression as a weapon.” And not only them. The enfant terrible and leading light of the New German Cinema that emerged in the 1960s, and one of the most successful filmmakers who are broadly considered left-wing (a very short list might include Godard, Pasolini, Oshima, Fassbinder, and early Bertloucci), his cinema might be said broadly to comment on failed postures of people who should have been radicals. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is refreshingly unpolemical, and lightly comic, in this regard. It presents a group of working-class people in the city of Munich and their lives. No exploitation here, and affirmation without idealizing: the characters are presented with realism and little of the ironizing melodrama that Fassbinder took from Hollywood director Douglas Sirk. The film is a delight to which, a bit of a proletarian soap opera.
Vittorio de Sica, Miracle in Milan, Italy, 1951, 1h 37m
A group of people in a shantytown of shacks organize with the help of a leader and his girl, and some amount of magic. Workers and bosses are shown in fairly stereotypical ways that ring absolutely true. A very Italian sense of community among the poor (then, especially) here together with the magic gives the film an almost Christmas-like enchantment, as it if were Cinecittà’s answer to “It’s a Wonderful Life,” in a world where people are desperately poor and have not only family and friends but bosses to contend with. One of several key films in early Italian neorealism by the great director and writer team of de Sica and (then) committed Communist Cesare Zavattini.
See, also by de Sica, Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D.
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, The Night of the Shooting Stars (La Notte di San Lorenzo), 1982, 1h 47m
(Available for streaming at $3-4 on various outlets)
This film is framed as a memory by a woman living in a comfortable house in now wealthy Northern Italy from her childhood almost 40 years earlier. It is set during the partisan war or Resistance against the Nazi occupation of Italy that began in 1943 after Mussolini was deposed by the King. This war has been in some ways the defining event for Italians in the period after the liberation, which was achieved by Americans and British soldiers who had invaded Sicily (a year before D-Day in France), with some serious help by partisan fighters in the mountains and sometimes towns, who, as across Continental Europe outside of Germany proper, were volunteers, generally an alliance of Communists and liberal nationalists, the former generally playing the more important roles. (The landmark history of this civil war and the different groups involved in it, Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War, was recently published in English translation by Verso Books.) The Taviani brothers both tell a story that is emblematic, not surprising, but full of drama in their usual somewhat operatic way, but what is distinctive about the film is the use of myth. The townspeople are divided into two groups, those who obeyed the German authorities who told them to gather in a church to be saved when the city would be bombed, and another group who chose instead to flee, and then shortly to fight, as they met up with a group of partisans. The partisan fighters are of course national heroes in Italy as elsewhere. But what is a hero, and who becomes one? We know that most people who perform heroic acts did not want to be heroes nor think of themselves as such. It is said that most often they just see something that must be done, and they do it; their self image is not that of some special kind of person who acts on right morals; and neither do they deliberate when they see what is to be done. But now take a group of people who find themselves caught up in a work that after all is both self-defense and can be thought of as the national liberation that it was; at the very least, they knew that they were not only fighting for their own lives, or that of their property (indeed, they hear their homes being destroyed by the bombs set by the Germans in the city, including of course the church, where most of the “compliant” ones are killed; their response to the loss of their homes is to toss away the keys many of them were wearing around their necks.
What happens is that each person at the moment they began to do something, which in many cases is an action in the battle they find themselves in, imagines themselves as a hero in some story, like the Iliad, which Italians would know from school at least. It seems that myth, and in this way the film is like a musical, is a way for these people to represent to themselves an image of who they are in that moment. Indeed, the Iliad itself gives lots of attention to moments in battle and how the fighting men appear, if only to us; it seems to be composed, unlike modern warfare, of individual confrontations and thus acts. What the Tavianis do with this film is both present what is after a major chapter at least of Italy’s national myth, one of fighting oppression and achieving, at a cost, liberation, and call attention to the fascination that such stories seem to evoke in us spectators, but also in the people who are acting in the drama, actors also in the sense of those who act, who do something, that formally stands out with the discreteness of action and not the continuity of behavior, but also momentous actions that are memorable. People involved in what may well turn out to be momentous events may understand the importance of what they are doing, then or later, as images, ways of appearing and being. This obviously also has a meta-cinematic effect, because it implicitly asks us to consider that we are seeing images that are selected and privileged and carry an aura of importance. The film’s ultimate question is what does this history mean to people now and what does it mean that we view it in this way.
This can also be seen to part of the significance of the films of Quentin Tarantino; his own film revisioning of World War II, Inglourious Basterds, contains several musical quotes by Ennio Morricone, including of another film of the Tavianis, Allonsofan, whose key musical number Tarantino’s film plays at length through the credit sequence. Allonsanfan, which is itself a deviant phoneticized version of the opening words of the French Revolutionary and later national anthem, “the Marseillaise,” and which like it are an invocation, similar to the Iliad’s “Sing, goddess,…”, is an operatic treatment of a pseudo-revolutionary movement, which turns out to have at its center for the “Sublime Brothers” in post-Napoleon Italy, a musical dance number which is very stirring but reveals itself as a displacement through something like the operatic of politics onto art, or a movement that is really a movement in dance.
Apart from that, it stands with Roberto Rossellini’s landmark films Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946) as depictions of aspects of the Italian partisan war. Its character as a kind of visual musical, with brief visual “songs” sung by each character as he/she does something, does not detract from its realism, in that the actual events shown, in contrast to the imagined ones, are presented with a great sense of drama, but in a story that is quite exemplary and we know that much of what happened in Italy, and Europe, then, was like this.
Luchino Visconti, La terra trema (The earth trembles), Italy, 1946, 2h 40m, Sicilian language with subtitles
(Available for streaming cheaply on Amazon Prime, Vudu, and other channels)
A key work of Italian neorealism, the great movement in Italian cinema that emerged at the end of the war and lasted roughly through the 1950s, an artistic movement that considered social and political concern as very much central. The film was financed by the Italian Communist Party, which, even more than in France, was hugely influential and important after the war, and until its auto-demise in 1989, because of its central role in the anti-Nazi Resistance. It adapts a naturalistic novel to a story meant to depict the rise and fall, success and failure, of a group of poor Sicilian fishermen who organize to defeat the power over them of bosses, who own the boats they use and pretty much everything else. The story is melodramatic, a genre that has often been found suitable to political stories because it allows for foregrounding moral qualities of heroes and villains and deep emotional resonance through identification with protagonists and their struggles.
(In the 1960s and early 70s, film theory would often criticize such narrative structuring as not just overly manipulative but ‘bourgeois’; after all, mainstream cinema, most infamously in Hollywood since its patterns were first set by D. W. Griffith, involves typically what Raul Ruiz in “Poetics of Cinema” called central conflict theory: a protagonist has some life project that involves him or her in a struggle against adversaries and obstacles to success. And he or she may succeed or failure, leaving us pleased or melancholy. It is thought that such narratives and the formal devices that the films that make use of them tend to be built around, are ideologically conservative because of the type of subjectivity they help create, or reinforce, and the lack of reflective or self-conscious irony or distancing towards it. That is conservative by definition, even if only at a formal level.)
Eisenstein, “Strike” (1925), 82 min.; “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), 66 min.; “October” (1927), 95 min.
Landmark films with an explicitly revolutionary content linked to avant-garde form. Eisenstein is a major film theorist as well as perhaps the most important early Soviet filmmaker. More detailed remarks pending. Yes, “October” is that October, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution. These films are as great and important as those of Chaplin. Eisenstein like Griffith develops an aesthetic of montage, but very different purposes: Griffith, whose style influenced so much of later Hollywood and international cinema, is meant to be rhetorical and effect viewers emotionally through identification. The plots are taken from 19th century fiction, which Eisenstein criticized him for, and the editing style is meant to make you feel, not think. Today, when management has become largely psychological, how much of American culture is summed up in that! Eisenstein wants to make people think.
Forthcoming on this site:
Discussion of documentary films of American political activists in the Communist Party and other organizations.
Honorable and ambivalent mentions to popular Hollywood films:
Spike Lee, Malcolm X,
Bio-film about Malcolm’s life. Comments forthcoming.
Martin Ritt, Norma Rae, 1979, 1h 54m
A not-bad film that was said to be the first time Hollywood sympathetically treated a strike. Sally Field plays a worker at a factory in the South who become a union organizer. As with all organizing and strikes, it is a battle. A romance between the newly radicalized factory worker (who is married to an uncomprehending man) with a Jewish organizer from New York sent by the union livens things up.
Ava Du Vernay, Selma, 2014, 2h 8m
Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1965. On my list. Director Du Vernay also made “The Thirteenth,” a documentary film about mass incarceration as racism, based on a book by Michelle Alexander, that had the singular honor of opening the New York Film Festival.
Warren Beatty, Reds, 1981, 3h 15m
The story of John Reed, the American journalist who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World above the Russian Revolution, which he saw firsthand and admired, is put into a cooking pot with personal relationships with writer Eugene O’Neill and others. It’s well-shot with stars (Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton) and some people in the film world quite like it. It’s quite entertaining.
Michael Cimino, Heaven’s Gate, 1980, 3h 39m
Deserving to remain of interest and controversy, this is a big-budget enjoyable flop by a major director about a shooting war that develops out of class conflict between ranchers out West in the railroad days and immigrant workers from Hungary, set in the framework of a morality tale with a hero, villain, and fool who are all Harvard classmates, and the good whore whom the hero marries. (Respectively: Kris Kristofferson, Sam Waterston, John Hurt, and the always great Isabelle Huppert). One thing the film gets right is of course something that still happens: the pattern with regard to protests or strikes involving violence is almost always that workers strike or people protest, bosses or the government doesn’t like it, and the police or armed security guards or other agents of capital shoot at the workers or protestors and kill some. Sometimes, though not often, people have armed themselves and fought back, and of course they usually are defeated because they do so against overwhelming odds and are far out-armed. The balances of forces in this regard has increased in recent decades. Some people hold that a revolution will have to be non-violent not (or not only) for moral reasons but because fighting back would not work. Leading Marxist economist David Harvey has discussed this, among others.
Another reason I find Quentin Tarantino to be an interesting filmmaker is the way that representations of violence in film have at the same changed, and of course today there are all the superhero films, which may or may not be art at all. In film violence has become more extreme, and in Tarantino’s revisionist histories (revising history in a way that Cimino does not, just as the Tavianis do not, instead providing an aesthetic frame with the musical form or the melodramatic morality play with hero and villain as stock types, limiting the ambiguity and subtly of characterization that make most film portrayals interesting when they are), the extremity is, I think, meant to be reflected upon. This is done differently then in the Brechtian cinema of early Godard, or Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging, but I think it is there. Put it this way: aren’t your choices as spectator to either lean back and say, stupidly, “Yeah! Do it!” as Tarantino has Hitler do in Inglouroius Basterds when he is in a theater seat watching the German sniper kill people on the screen, — or, think, wait a minute, this is funny and there’s a pleasure in it, but. I am working on this topic in Tarantino now, which is why I go on here, but my point is that heroes and identification, and more broadly, viewer judgment and its evocation, are never simple matters in understanding film. If I am right, this argues a different but perhaps not unrelated reason to endorse Gilles Deleuze’s argument in Cinema 1 and 2 that cinema today (he locates the break with the war and neorealism) does not give us images that motivate us in a way that renders action continuous with vision and being affected, so that we react; instead, it presents situations that cannot be reacted to but only made the basis of some new way of seeing.
A key line in the film explains what is wrong with it: “You are not in my class, you could never be in my class; you’d have to die and be born again,” says hero to villain, referencing also ‘class’ in, oh, that other, sense. Morality in the film triumphs over mere politics, providing a formula for films to reduce themselves formally to a tame bourgeois thinking, and also, in 1980, for a box office failure so huge it bankrupted United Artists, a company whose filmmaker founders included Charlie Chaplin, a director infinitely closer to a radical left politics that Cimino is in this film, and also the reactionary liberal D. W. Griffith, who was able to make a trio of films linking the idea of liberal tolerance to the dislike of both French Revolution and American post-slavery Reconstruction, a matter in which the young Lillian Gish was to lend her face for the purpose of largely defining that tolerance.
Conclusion of this essay in fragments: Art cannot direct politics, but it can inform it. That surely depends on the right kinds of discussions taking place. Actions may be useful; art can only be interesting. Perhaps activists will find great political art of use in some broad and synergistic way; I don’t know. I fear they will too simply and badly. But then, is it not true that the things that motivate us must easily and readily reach us less deeply, and that what really should matter us when we set about to organize and work to change anything in our world of everyday life, is harder to get at, will be more painful, and the struggles we must engage in then also struggles with ourselves? This would be a far cry from thinking of ourselves as righteous heroes going forth like cowboys in some Western to right wrongs. And isn’t that why on the right wing thinking is shallower and usually relies on invocations of the obvious, often in a rhetoric of scorn, which relies on assuming that everything we need to know we know already? That logic of obviousness and scorn is also a logic of the police, who are not known usually to be scholarly and curious. Of course, we know some, maybe much, of what we need to know to act. But we live in time, in a history still up for the making. Pascal said we must wager on the chance of improving things; I think planning and learning are distinct, but both subject to this openness.
Thus, most of the film reviews on this site are political in some way or other, or at least are meant to be. But in art, controversy has priority over consensus. It is more important to be interesting than right. Accordingly, suggestions for this list as well as comments are welcome. (See comment box below).