Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990, edited by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan, PM Press, 384 pages, $29.95
Revolution in 35mm is the rare political history that can refuse to resolve its contradictions without giving you the impression that it’s cheating. Some of the movies it examines present political violence with commitment (several of the filmmakers had experience as, or worked closely with, left-wing and partisan fighters), others with irony. Violence in these pictures can provoke pleasure or doubt, catharsis or analysis. Filmed violence can be a call to real violence, or a substitute for it, or a vaccine against it, or a dream of it—and often several of those at once. Underlying these oppositions there’s a deeper and sadder one: the opposing magnetic pulls, which few political films resist, of either propaganda or despair.
The book’s physical form tilts toward pulpy pleasures and even nostalgia. It’s edited by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan; Deighan is a film historian, and Nette has co-edited several volumes of big, colorful, fun books about radical currents in pulp and genre paperbacks. Like those earlier Nette volumes, Revolution alternates between longer reflective essays and quick hits you can read during your smoke break. Like those books, Revolution is full of cool Cold War art: stills, set photos, lobby cards, and movie posters, often featuring sunglasses and girls with guns. The pages are nice and thick, and the shorter essays are printed on maroon pages made to look worn around the edges.
Against these sensual pleasures is set the narrative of chastening implied by the book’s historical scope. It opens in the post-Stalin era and closes right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, covering an era when countless colonies gained their independence. It would be a wild oversimplification to say that years of hope and terror are followed by years of reckoning. But that fable, or vibe, is reinforced even by the ways the book doesn’t quite follow a chronological order. The last colonial struggle depicted on film in this book takes place in Northern Ireland, in a film whose central concern is for a kind of liberation that can’t be won by arms: “Men’s relationship to women is just like England’s relationship to Ireland,” the title character of Maeve (1981) argues. “You occupy us like an army.” The closing chapters’ focus on feminism means that Born in Flames (1983) also comes near the end: a depiction of feminist revolt in a socialist future, a postpunk science fiction vision that feels more hopeful than its plotline would suggest. Born in Flames is, as its title hints, about what it’s like to win—to emerge into a world made new, and realize it is still just the world and you have to work in it.
Revolution argues that both film and political movements are intertwined across national borders, and it covers movies from six continents. Many essays open with quick stage setting, getting Americans caught up on the politics of late-’60s Bolivia or Italy’s Years of Lead. Three of the longer essays stand out. Christos Tsiolkas offers a personal meditation on family and class, queer identity, the relationship of political resistance and historical memory, and Costa-Gavras’ 1969 Greek thriller Z. Uday Bhatia traces the rise and fall of the “reluctant gangster” in Hindi films: from the gangster as a man ruled by his past, reduced to “helplessness in the face of destiny,” to an “unrepentant killer” with “no family, no God, no purpose,” and no past. And Matthew Kowalski looks at the Yugoslav Black Wave, whose films sometimes criticized the cult of Josip Broz Tito and challenged the heroic myth of Yugoslav partisan anti-Nazi fighters of World War II.
The latter essay stands out because it’s about filmmakers testing the limits of a Communist regime, one that defined itself as more liberal than the repressive USSR and yet used state power to sanitize its history and enforce its taboos. Kowalski also strikes some rare notes of doubt about the artists’ political acumen. At the very end, he reflects not on what the Black Wave films captured about the Yugoslav past but what they failed to see coming in the future: While fighting Titoism and “red fascism,” they missed the threat of virulent ethnonationalism.
One of Revolution‘s subtler themes is the discovery of still-vital truths in history and stories from the past: Hamlet in Poland, the Oresteia in 20th century Greece. Italian cinema generated a whole subgenre of “Zapata westerns,” featuring Mexican revolutionary battles against colonizers and rapacious capitalists. Lee Broughton argues these filmmakers intentionally used another nation’s past to reflect class and regional divisions in Italy, anticolonial struggles across the globe, and rebellion against American hegemony. No less important are the thrills: the crack of rifles, the pounding of hooves, the pulse-pounding titles (Yo soy la revolucion; Duck, You Sucker!), the breasts framed by bandoliers. Italian studios churned out these movies because they sold.
Revolution is alive to audiences’ baser desires. Nette finds an unexpected angle in the disturbingly large subgenre of Patty Hearst films. All of these films were made within roughly a decade following Hearst’s kidnapping, participation in the crimes of her kidnappers, and conviction. She’s sexy because she’s got a gun and she’s dangerous; but she’s also portrayed as damaged and degraded, in films that (judging by the descriptions here) fetishize her rape. It’s impossible to write about violent movies without acknowledging the disingenuous way so many of them enjoy looking at the suffering victim. One might argue that close-ups on the sufferers’ faces, the camera fingering all the bruises, evoke pity. On the other hand, that close-up is what the torturer wants to see.
Revolution only fleetingly, and not always persuasively, addresses the question of whether films about violence can avoid glorifying violence. A lot of these movies are cool, and they’re cool because they depict sympathetic characters exercising power. There’s a fascinating, underdeveloped little moment at the beginning of the book, where Nette says something that most viewers notice about Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 classic The Battle of Algiers: The “warrior-intellectual” Col. Mathieu who leads the French forces and presents the ideological justification for torture in the service of the colonial state is not “entirely unsympathetic.” He’s as magnetic as his Algerian counterpoint, Ali La Pointe, who offers equally uncompromising defenses of anticolonial terrorism.
Well, why is Col. Mathieu so compelling? Like La Pointe, he’s a volatile mix of power and vulnerability. The vulnerability (he will lose and he can glimpse it) makes it possible to swoon for the power. He’s both intelligent and shrewd; he’s capable of both commitment and irony; he’s the kind of person who, in movies, doesn’t lose. What a propaganda coup by the Algerian government to fund this film! What must the Algerian people be like, if they beat this guy?
Algiers is a smart and fearless film. Nette notes that it’s been used as a recruiting or training tool by the Black Panthers, by the Provisional IRA, by Palestinian and Kashmiri organizations—and that it was screened at the Pentagon in 2003, for exactly the reason you think. I’m not sure any of these films inspired exactly what their makers hoped. Blood of the Condor (1969) prompted Bolivia to expel the American Peace Corps after the film accused the Americans of performing forced sterilizations. Michael A. Gonzales’ essay on The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) ends with a long list of black artists who cite the film as an influence—but no political leaders.
“Does art change anything?” is one of those questions where it’s easy to resort to propaganda or nihilism. It’s a subset of “Does anything change anything?”—and Revolution is full of examples on several sides of that question: violence that attained something like its ends, and violence that failed, and violence that provoked a nation tilting between left and right to reject whichever side just murdered a bunch of civilians.
Revolution takes a lot of sides: the militant and the critic, the gleeful pulp devotee and the thoughtful savorer of complex ideas. It’s not ambivalent; it doesn’t seek “balance.” At the same time, Nette and Deighan don’t seem to think it’s their place to offer definitive answers to the questions these films raise. I respect a book that knows its limits.
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