REDS without POLITICS
Levinson, Mark
Mark Levinson Reds Without Politics Two young, politically engaged film-makers, Julia Reichert and James Klein, with one successful documentary (Union Maids) to their credit; a subject full of...
...We don't know because the question isn't even asked...
...a subject full of human and political complexity...
...492...
...Reichert and Klein want to refute what they take to be a popular stereotype of American Communists...
...Later in the film she says she "has no regrets...
...his life shattered, it took him as many years to recover as he spent in the party...
...The problem is in the questions that are not asked...
...Howard "Stretch" Johnson tells about his days in Harlem as a dancer in the Cotton Club...
...These people lived through the most traumatic years of this century—and surely took a very particular political stand...
...Dorothy Healey recalls organizing poor California farm workers...
...Dorothy Healey at one point says that during her years in the party she was "a little Stalin...
...This was not done...
...There are moments of authenticity in these interviews...
...Yet this film says almost nothing about the Third Period, dual unions, social fascism, the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Popular Front, the suppression of worker revolts in Eastern Europe, or the Hungarian Revolt of 1956...
...There is a human tragedy and a political tragedy here...
...ONE SUSPECTS that the reason for the absence of politics or history from this film is that it would introduce a measure of complexity the film-makers didn't know how to deal with...
...Using archival film footage and still photographs as background, most of the film consists of contemporary interviews with ex- and current members of the Communist party...
...The film's problem is not with the people interviewed, who respond honestly to the questions they are asked...
...He says that when he saw pictures of Nazis dragging Jewish women through the streets he reacted with horror: "That could be my mother...
...Any honest account must recognize that thousands of bright, hardworking, idealistic Americans joined the CP...
...To ignore the political part of their experience is to ignore what defines them as Communists...
...But this film doesn't explore either...
...According to some estimates, perhaps threequarters of a million people passed through the American Communist party...
...To say this is not to insist that the filmmakers should have taken a particular point of view on the CP...
...That such an unquestioning commitment can be blinding and self-defeating is, in retrospect, hardly debatable...
...Unfortunately, Seeing Red, a documentary about American Communists, doesn't live up to these expectations...
...Howard Johnson explains the trauma of 1956...
...We get little sense of what motivated these people to join the CP and less sense of what life was like in the party...
...Several minutes later the HitlerStalin Pact is mentioned almost in passing...
...The CP in those days made racial equality a major part of its activity, so it made sense to join...
...seven years in preparation, including 400 interviews (only about a dozen make it into the film...
...Reichert and Klein, with good reason, want to invalidate this kind of crude anticommunism and to show the humanity of the Communist experience...
...Many of these people abandoned personal interests, and made a commitment to what they believed would 491 be the future of humanity...
...One would like to know a bit more about how she reconciles these two statements...
...Bill Bailey, a colorful longshoreman, describes what it was like to give his first soapbox speech...
...What did Bill Bailey think at the time...
...But no further questions are asked...
...an Academy Award nomination—combine all this and we have every right to expect a stimulating result...
...But they are only partially successful, because in refuting one simplistic picture, they replace it with another...
...For instance, Bill Bailey describes how antifascism was an integral part of his involvement in the CP in the late '30s...
...Carl Hirsch, tears in his eyes, reads letters he wrote to his wife 40 years ago describing the conditions of desperately poor sharecroppers...
...Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Herbert Philbrick make appearances to describe the CP as part of a demonic international conspiracy...
...Despite such moments of insight, the interviews are for the most part stolid...
...There is no mention of the fact that the CP was strongest in immigrant communities, especially among Jews and Finns...
...It is simply not possible to understand the story of American Communists if it is severed from its historical context and the political activity of the CP...
...The result is an apolitical portrait of very political people...
...It is this reality—individuals betrayed by their idealism— that is the source of the continuing fascination with the American Communist experience...
...It is only to suggest that in order to fulfill their own aim of telling the story of individual Communists, Reichert and Klein should have probed the contradictions and tensions of the Communist experience...
Vol. 31 • September 1984 • No. 4
