Part 3. Master's Thesis

A New Reality is Better Than a New Movie! Committed Documentary and Class Struggle at the End of the American New Left

From the introduction to my Master's thesis on the growth of committed documentary filmmaking in the United States between the end of the classical New Left period and the first years of the New Communist Movement:  

Pictures of a propaganda and educative nature should be checked by old Marxists and writers, to avoid a repetition of the many sad instances when propaganda with us defeated its own purpose. 

          - V. I. Lenin, "Directives on the Film Business" (1922)

Because the political situation is always changing, no single universal political criterion can apply to radical documentary. However, any fully revolutionary analysis within such work must answer two questions. First, what is the situation? Second, how can it change? In other words, the documentary must deal with structure and contradiction. 

          - Chuck Kleinhans, "Forms, Politics, Makers, and Contexts: Basic Issues for a Theory
             of Radical Political Documentary" (1984)

In early 1969, the membership of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) Local 1-561 walked off the job in Richmond, California, an industrial working class city of a little less than 80 thousand people, just north of Berkeley on the east side of San Francisco Bay. Part of a nationwide oil workers’ strike, what was unique about the fight in Richmond was the enfolding of this labour action with the student struggles going on around the Bay Area at the same time. The OCAW workers, most but not all of them white, were unexpectedly joined on the line by militant students hailing from multiple Bay Area colleges and universities. Even though this period saw the U.S. student movement grow into an enormously powerful political force—arguably the greatest it has ever been, before or since—the student solidarity action in Richmond represented one of the only such alliances between industrial workers and revolutionary students during the mid to late ‘60s. It is fortunate, then, that the uncommon worker-student alliance in Richmond is the subject of San Francisco Newsreel’s short documentary Richmond Oil Strike (1969). The film’s lean 16-minute running time is common for Newsreel productions of the time: it is sufficient to present a political scene, identify the social forces involved, highlight the central antagonism underlying the action, and hypothesize by what political route this contradiction can be overcome, even if such a resolution is yet unrealized and thus for the moment remains beyond realist representation. In general appearance, the rough, off-the-cuff shooting style is not far off from straightforward direct cinema, save for some narration and a handful of formal interjections—most notably the ironic appropriation of stock promotional footage from a Standard Oil-produced industrial film. The images of the strike itself are immediate, their indexicality not scrutinized (even if the principled, liberal non-interventionism of direct cinema’s heyday is clearly absent). 

But what is most significant about Richmond Oil Strike, aside from its distinction as the first labour-themed documentary ever produced by a chapter of the Newsreel network of documentary collectives, is the turn it evinces towards a sense of collaborative or collective vocal address that shifts between the traditionally authoritative filmmaker as narrator and the voices of the social actors—that is, the strikers and their families—with their “situated presence and local knowledge” (Nichols, 1991, p. 44; emphasis in original). The men and women on the picket line are able to describe not only the police abuses they have endured while the camera was not around and the growing worker-student solidarities that have blossomed in response, but articulate their own developing interpretations of the strike and the relationship between the state and capital. The activists, organizers, and semi-professional revolutionaries of Newsreel and the student groups on the ground like the Revolutionary Union (RU) can identify and denounce Shell or Standard Oil as imperialist entities, but only a striking worker can address the camera and admit, “I’ve seen over television and read in the newspapers about this police brutality, and I always thought it was—and tried to tell my children and my wife that it’s a bunch of radical troublemakers out looking for publicity, looking for trouble. Now I have changed my mind.” Because Richmond Oil Strike is such a short work, with little time to dedicate to narrative development, vocal recollection as a personalized mode of narrative inscription is granted a great deal of importance by the filmmakers. The indexical minutiae of the strike—that which the observational camera would record as the “really real”—is mostly telescoped into short bursts of testimonial information and vernacular analysis. The film’s representation of growing class consciousness as a collective experiential process, communicated most lucidly through these moments of testimony, indicates a particular focus on the epistemological dimension of documentary, over and above the artistic and dramatic dimensions.

The complete 126-page thesis is available as a PDF on the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revolutionary On-Line hosted by marxists.org.

Part 2. Strike & Misère au Borinage

The Melodrama of Proletarian Solidarity: Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) & Misère au Borinage (Joris Ivens & Henri Storck, 1934)

As a “form of collective action,” Joshua Clover suggests in his historical study of class struggle tactics, Riot. Strike. Riot (2016), the strike can be defined as an object of study according to three essential precepts:

1) struggles to set the price of labor power (or the conditions of labor, which is much the same thing: the amount of misery that can be purchased by the pound);
2) features workers appearing in their role as workers;
3) unfolds in the context of capitalist production, featuring its interruption at the source via the downing of tools, cordoning of the factory, etc. (p. 16; emphasis in original)  

Insofar as the strike is a form of struggle corresponding to a particular development in the way that labour is divided and administered under capitalism, Clover’s definition is very helpful. What it necessarily elides, however, is an element of the strike that is not unique to capitalism and wage-labour, but which is instead mediated and reconfigured according to these material conditions: solidarity. A peculiar phenomenon, at once affectively charged and intellectually demanding, working class solidarity emerges at its source from the collective, or at least common, experiences of labour, exploitation, dispossession, and alienation. It simultaneously exerts an affective force or claim over the individual and requires of the individual a perspective or consciousness capable of abstracting from the often messy, conflicting signals of the empirical situation. Such a situation poses the possibility of the proletarian subject simultaneously coming to apprehend of the structural basis of the class conflict to which they are subject, and binding themselves to the particulars of the struggle in the form of personal identification and political will. Solidarity as a structure of feeling glimpsed in the political form of the strike, then, appears as a secondary element of the strike’s “social content,” buried amongst “the principles of the participants, their affects and beliefs,” (Clover, p. 84).

Part 1. Harlan County, U.S.A.

Class War with Musical Accompaniment: Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

The protracted historical disintegration of most authentically popular forms of American working class culture in the face of expansive cultural industrial subsumption marks out those peripheral cultural movements that have actually managed to retain an oppositional character as truly exceptional in the precise sense of the term. Most of these movements in recent decades have been tied to the experiences and liberation struggles of nations and otherwise racialized peoples—one can think in the 1960s and 1970s of the flowerings of Black, Chicano, and Asian American arts—as well as to radical women’s and queer cultures that were for the most part concretely proletarian in economic terms (and often politically so in self-conception). Amongst the diverse cultural fronts during this radical postwar period, however, there is a notable anomaly, significant for its articulation of a regional traditionalism reflecting a particular, subaltern formation of U.S. whiteness: the persistence in Appalachia of white proletarian cultural forms, which harkens back explicitly to the revolutionary unionism of the interwar years and beyond.