The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Watergate hearings, at once haughty and cringing? You cannot help but remember. The net of the press is huge, its weave is coarse, it is cast every day over the whole worM, and it is doing...
...It is as if the filmmaker were trying literally to peer inside the man, still unable to understand him and more absorbed in doing so than in the character of any of the film's heroes...
...The folks pays him to preach (to use his own self-mocking language), so he turns it on mechanically, almost absent-mindedly, lapsing at times into incoherence, as if he's 24 June 1977:404...
...But then too many amateurs joined in the fun, all the Raps and Stokelys and Seales, until even !iberal guilt gave out...
...hen James Baldwin goes wrong he has taken to doing lately), it usually seems less a failure of talent than of policy...
...But it isn't enough for the filmmaker just to be sympathetic to his left-wing heroes because of the perfidy and defeat they suffer...
...Now Hector Olivera's Rebellion in Patagonia follows in this tradition...
...In other words, theirs was a political difference...
...His comrades all arrested and shot, his popular front and general strikes smashed, Antonio is in the end lucky to escape over the border into Chile with his life...
...The only way a film can avoid this political error is by having the courage of its own convictions---by really allowing a political analysis of history to dictate its content and feeling...
...And now the times seems to call for something a little different...
...A film that is pitiless, but also clear-minded and politically "correct" in its interpretation of history, is far more likely to be effective...
...It falls victim to what might quite rightly be called the cult of personality...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...He may or may not feel that strongly about movies (it's hard to believe), but sincerity isn't the issue...
...It commits a peculiar kind of political error...
...Moreover, while Antonio is the hero, the central character of the film is his nemesis, Commander Zavala (Hector Alterio), who leads the military mission sent to put down the workers' rebellion...
...The hero, Antonio Soto (Luis Brandoni), commits himself totally to fomenting rebellion against Patagonia's rancher-capitalists, and he loses almost everything he commits...
...White liberals craved a spanking and they got a good one...
...Ponte-Corvo's Burn...
...Indeed, this is the crucial difference between the few left-wing films that are true to their own politics and the many that are misdirected (pun intended...
...Since Baldwin is too intelligent not to notice this, we get an uneasy compromise, between old habits and new possibilities...
...In the latter the apostate comes to doubt more and moremas Newman does, for instance, in Apologia pro Vita Sua--until, suddenly, we turn the page and learn that now he's a Catholic...
...Concentrating then on Zavala's key role in history, the film begins with his assassination after the rebellion and ends with a victory dinner the ranchers hold in his honor just before his assassination...
...Because the subject is movies, and most movies simply do not accommodate such religious passion...
...But it does mean that the director can't allow personal feeling to cloud political issues...
...But the sermon's subject must be at least in the same ball-park as the style, or you get bathos, the sermon that fails to rise...
...It wastes no sentimentality on All and no bitterness on Mathieu...
...It doesn't follow that a genuinely left-wing film has to be cold, for Battleship Potemkin, which succeeds in making an aesthetic myth out of Marxism itself, certainly isn't cold...
...To the end of The Battle ol Algiers is appended an epilogue informing us tersely that everything Ali seemed to have died for in vain came to pass a few years later...
...In like manner, conditions in left-wing movies get worse and worse until, all at once, the revolution has succeeded...
...Though its conflict between All la Pointe and Col...
...But as I say, no prescription follows...
...In his early days, the twin urges came together to make very good policy indeed...
...It doesn't change from one country, period or script to another...
...The result here is not Fascism, but it is a kind of compromising obsession with authority and leadership...
...So his tone sounds false...
...Your work, even your atheism, will always taste of religion...
...A preacher doesn't have to feel what he says every Sunday: rhetoric is an art, and Baldwin practices it very professionally...
...Presumably the purpose behind leftwing filmmaking is to raise political consciousness...
...The net of the press is huge, its weave is coarse, it is cast every day over the whole worM, and it is doing something to us...
...Why else would we be interested in something that happened in remote Patagonia fifty years ago, if not for the insight it provides into political relations everywhere...
...This is true from the shooting of Valkulinchuk as he leads the mutiny aboard Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin to the execution of All la Pointe during Ponte-Corvo's The Battle ol Algiers, or the assassination of Deputy Lambrakis in Costa-Gavras's Z. 2. The corollary of 1. is that the villain is always a hero of sorts...
...Like the C.I.A...
...Living his life on several borderlines, he has learned to watch his step: driven at the same time by an urge to please and a mission to scold...
...agent in State ol Siege, he is a family man and so human a figure...
...Rebellion in Patagonia is so far gone, however, that in it the historical crisis is only, like religious conversion, a change in attitude on the part of one individual...
...Made in Argentina a few years ago between right-wing dictatorships, and about labor strife in a rural Argentinian province in the 1920s, Olivera's film adheres to the three-point program pretty faithfully...
...The film even follows the model of conversion literature when it shows Zavala inexplicably turning against the workers after his first campaign in Patagonia ends with him in complete sympathy with them and playing the role of peace-maker...
...Ponte-Corvo felt no need to exaggerate either personality, for the sufficient difference between them, the only one that mattered to him, was that Mathieu had the wrong analysis of history while Ali's was proved right...
...I don't wish to belittle the quandary in which Rebellion in Patagonia ends, for it is a well and earnestly made film...
...As an alternative to Rebellion in Patagonia, with its romantic left-wing heroes and inscrutable fight-wing villain, I still prefer The Battle ol Algiers...
...And this is the first problem we come across in the new book...
...If that is the only response the filmmaker has to history, the result is mere humanitarianism and his political purpose in making the film is inadequately served...
...Just as the dictatorship of the proletariat has often--in Stalinist Russia, in Cuba and in China--turned into a dictatorship of one man indistinguishable from Fascism, so Commonweal: 403 left-wing filmmaking frequently seems to become mesmerized by its villains and thus distracted from its own politics...
...In the last pages he richly describes a church ceremony he went through as a boy, akin to attaining the last mansions of mysticism: and you have to do something after that...
...Leaving his apartment at the beginning a few minutes before he's killed, he plays with his daughter...
...Of all our writers he is one of the most calculating...
...It tends to attribute history to a single personality much as Fascism would invest history in such a personality...
...Mathieu is as sharply drawn as that in Rebellion in Patagonia, it doesn't turn history into a melodrama...
...The labor organizing done by Antonio and the others is succeeding until Zavala begins his second campaign and is able to take advantage of their initial trust of him to decimate their ranks...
...Somewhere between the second and third of the three episodes in Humberto Solas's Lucia, Castro has appeared in Cuban history and staged his revolution...
...The Battle ol Algiers is at least as much about the legionnaire, Col...
...Yet he turns into a murderous beast...
...It's absolute...
...If he had not acted with this inconsistency, the film implies, the rebellion might well have succeeded and all subsequent Argentinian history might have been different...
...Mathieu, as it is about Ali and the F.L.N...
...At the end of the ]ast scene as he stands to accept an ovation from the ranchers, Zavala scowls into the future, into posterity, and the camera moves in for a tight close-up of his face and finally just his eyes...
...Earlier I likened the way left-wing filmmaking deals with revolutionary struggle to the way conversion literature deals with the conversion, by omission...
...CostaGavrhs's State ol Siege is about a C.I.A...
...The central character in Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes is a gunslinger employed by the Brazilian ranchers to shoot cangaceiros, that in Alea's Memories ol Underdevelopment is a bourgeois wastrel at loose ends after Castro has come to power...
...THOMAS POWERS THE CULT OF PERSONALITY 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Left-wing filmmaking is like an ideology...
...It is because he has it that the course of the rebellion is reversed...
...It's an invariable three-point program: 1. The hero is always the fall guy of history...
...And the most ambitious film Eisenstein ever undertook, Ivan the Terrible is about . . . well, Ivan the Terrible, of all people...
...But I think it suffers the failure that a good many left-wing films do, and that left-wing ideology itself often does for that matter...
...He's a committed radical and leader of the masses who is brought down by the Right...
...agent training South American police in torture...
...More than the equal of the fall guy, he is a figure of fascination and often the central character of the film...
...But in a truly politicized film--in The Battle ot Algiers, or Lucia --this conversion is at least understood to have occurred in the course of events, in history, rather than in the personality of some individual...
...Zavala is really the most important character in the film since its central issue is the question of why he has this change of heart...
...is about a similar counter-insurgency expert hired by British sugar planters in the Caribbean 100 years earlier...
...The Devil Finds Work (Dial, $6.95) shows Baldwin groping-for it--not' just because he's a hustler, at least as writers go, but because he has a genuine quasireligious vocation...
...3. The scenarios for all left-wing films are a good deal like conversion literature...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 13
