Bread and Roses and Secrets of Silicon Valley
Kornblum, William & Quart, Leonard
FILMS ABOUT labor organizing and labor unions come along too rarely, and the best of them are usually documentaries that attract pitifully small audiences. So the debut of Bread and Roses, a...
...It's Loach's first American-made film, and he centers it on a feisty, sharp-witted, bilingual illegal Mexican immigrant, Maya (Pilar Padilla), who turns into a militant unionist over the course of the film...
...Loach's film arrives at the same time as a new documentary by Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow, Secrets of Silicon Valley, which looks at labor issues in the famous high-tech mecca...
...However, Loach barely individuates the workers—except for the diligent, stolid Reuben, the one cleaner who has options...
...Loach again provides cinematic testament to his continuing faith in the capacity of members of the working class to confront the political and economic powers that oppress them and to renew their lives...
...In Riff Raff, Loach's London is a harsh, class-bifurcated city where the homeless sleep in doorways and eat ravenously out of garbage baskets, and sullen, unemployed, drug-dealing young men permanently inhabit the staircases of dismal, graffitifilled housing projects...
...T. (1978), reduce everything that is wrong with the union movement to criminality...
...It's a theatrical and manipulative film, built on reaction shots and a powerful dramatic moment where Norma Rae, protesting her eviction from the plant, jumps on a table holding a cardboard sign with the word UNION on it...
...The film is based on the ongoing Justice for Janitors campaign organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU...
...Its interest is focused more on the heroine's realizing her potential than on labor issues...
...Jayadev loses his job in a Hewlett-Packard packaging plant because he tries to blow the whistle on dire working conditions and severe pay inequities...
...The disadvantage of documentaries, including Secrets of Silicon Valley, is that they are often difficult to find once they have been seen briefly on television, and they rarely reach a mass audience...
...and a textile company (a stand-in for the J.P...
...Norma Rae depicted a union organizing and representation campaign and eventual victory in a southern cotton mill...
...Bread and Roses takes place in Los Angeles...
...The film's two main characters, Magda Escobar and Raj Jayadev, are effective witnesses to these facts...
...Among the many documentary films about labor issues, Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning The American Dream (1991) stands out...
...Similarly, Kaufman and Snitow show some of the difficulties in organizing workers that are left out of the more dramaticallyoriented Bread and Roses...
...The workers on the building site are a variegated group of exploited Liverpudlians, Glaswegians, native Londoners, Africans, and West Indians who labor under false names and insecure and life-threatening conditions without any redress...
...120 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 119...
...LEONARD QUART iS co-author of the forthcoming American Film and Society Since 1945 (third edition) and a contributing editor of Cineaste...
...She is a woman who has spent her young adult life coping with the most soul-destroying conditions— working in a sweatshop and as a prostitute in LA, so she could support Maya and her mother in Mexico...
...The film brilliantly and sympathetically evoked all the central characters and positions in the lengthy strike against the Hormel Meatpacking NOTEBOOK Corporation that took place in Austin, Minnesota, in the mid-eighties...
...Feature films dealing with labor are scarce, but a Bread and Roses, despite its flaws, makes for a stirring film—one that could connect with a large audience if it ever acquired widespread distribution...
...The film's opening scenes prefigure the bold and spontaneous Maya's turning into a strike leader...
...Stevens company) that is utterly unresponsive to the onerous conditions in the mill...
...IN THE TRADITION of The American Dream, this year, Berkeley-based filmmakers Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow (Blacks and Jews: Ambivalent Allies) produced Secrets of Silicon Valley...
...Norma Rae is shot on location and based on a real story and strike, but it's not social realism...
...The union gains recognition, but the film's real triumph is Norma Rae's...
...By the film's climax, two of the men's fury with the working conditions is so great that they burn down the partially completed building...
...Rosa is a survivor, and her strong will, desire, and capacity to keep everything together carry a great emotional cost...
...What is perhaps most noteworthy about both Bread and Roses and Secrets of Silicon Valley is that they deal with central issues of class conflict in the vaunted postindustrial economy...
...The camera lingers heavy-handedly on the raging flames and rats fleeing the fire—a quasi-anarcho-syndicalist affirmation of class war, stemming more from Loach's political vision than from the social consciousness of the film's characters...
...Norma Rae has spent much of her life being abused by men, but the strike gives her an opportunity to discover she's a courageous, intelligent, and independent woman...
...If only there were more labor films like these, especially ones that take us to the more hidden sectors of the economy where used and abused workers fight for collective bargaining rights...
...I I F YOU ARE looking for a more truthful and incisive portrait of labor by American filmmakers, your best bet is the documentary...
...Loach is an unabashedly politically radical, social-realist filmmaker, one of the few directors who makes films that depict working-class characters confronting oppressive labor conditions, indifferent unions, and callous government bureaucracies...
...So the debut of Bread and Roses, a feature film on labor by Britain's Ken Loach, is an event worthy of attention...
...What is most unusual about this film is its attempt to mix entertainment, political polemic, and an introduction to Organizing 101 in the same work...
...The third film to come out of the seventies, Martin Rites Norma Rae (1979), is probably closest in sentiment to Bread and Roses...
...In a brilliantly vertiginous sequence with a great deal of gasping for air and shouting (shot with a handheld camera), Maya and other illegal immigrants flee through the brush across the border...
...WILLIAM KORNBLUM is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York...
...In fact, he allows the strikers' rallies to go on at length, so he can drain every bit of political emotion out of the scene and affirm his commitment to collective action...
...Two of them, Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (1978) and Sylvester Stallone's EI.S...
...Loach's films have often focused on labor issues...
...Like Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), such films have often portrayed the unions as not much different from organized crime...
...Still, Bread and Roses, despite being a less layered film, is a rousing, emotionally affecting work...
...In the 1970s, Hollywood produced three films that focused on the labor movement...
...In two of Loach's earlier films, Land and Freedom (1994), set during the Spanish Civil War, and Carla's Song (1996), set in Nicaragua during the contra-Sandinista conflict, he creates passionate, albeit sentimentalized, heroines that are models for Maya...
...And although Loach may not grant his central characters— the two sisters, Maya and Rosa— much of an inner life, they still exist as more than ciphers or stereotypes, especially the harsh and loving Rosa...
...FILMS ABOUT labor organizing and labor unions come along too rarely, and the best of them are usually documentaries that attract pitifully small audiences...
...Her fellow workers shut down their machines—leaving the room resoundingly silent...
...Secrets of Silicon Valley exposes the exploitation and class contempt that belie the squeaky clean, imageconscious, high-tech information economy...
...The film is so focused on the problems of the workplace that it barely touches on the social texture of LA's Hispanic neighborhood life...
...It's possible that Loach—who in his English working-class films like Kes (1969) and Raining Stones (1993) richly evoked the atmosphere and social dynamics of pub, street, and school—felt less at ease in LA...
...It's one of the most politically nuanced, and emotionally complex treatments of a strike we have ever seen...
...The company does not DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 117 NOTEBOOK march, and sing "We Shall Not Be Moved" in Spanish...
...Bread and Roses contrasts markedly with the few Hollywood films that have dealt with labor unions and labor conflict...
...The cleaners are employed by Angel Cleaning Services, a nonunion contracting company that takes advantage of their undocumented status...
...a sophisticated, aggressive Jewish organizer from New York who acts as her mentor and guide...
...The film shares some elements with Bread and Roses: a spunky female protagonist, Norma Rae (Sally Field), who leads the campaign...
...In making Bread and Roses, Loach adds to the slim number of Hollywood films that tackle real issues facing working people...
...Loach dashes any notions that service workers in modern office buildings are better off than third world workers in sweatshops or oppressed African-American and immigrant workers in southern chicken-packing plants...
...The sixty-minute documentary is an attack on the New Economy's oldfashioned exploitation of its workforce and the immense economic gap in Silicon Valley between those who have made it and those who work on the assembly lines...
...A secret of the Valley is that temporary workers, often immigrants, labor at jobs where injuries are rife and the speed-up is the norm...
...Without narration and primarily dependent on talking heads, the cogent, if stylistically unimaginative documentary makes the case that the enlightened selfimage of the Internet corporations covers up their use of high-tech sweatshops...
...One of his best-known works, the seriocomic Riff Raff (1993), is set on a nonunion London construction site where luxury condominiums are being built...
...Kopple's interviews get the people talking in an unselfconscious, revelatory manner, and the film avoids turning the strike into a struggle between heroes and villains...
...Loach uses a number of long shots that capture the modern office building looming over the cleaners—an image that neatly encapsulates the nature of power and class relations in LA...
...However, Loach is much more concerned here with the janitors' economic and social situation than with Rosa's personal drama...
...Upon her safe arrival in LA, Maya's sister, Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo), gets her a job where she works, cleaning in a downtown building filled with the offices of banks and high paid Hollywood lawyers...
...The films illustrate two very different ways of attempting to translate contemporary labor issues to the screen...
...Or they have subordinated an exploration of the union ethos to personal dramas depicting the redemption of alienated, adolescent characters like On the Waterfront's Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando...
...Maya is optimistic, alive, and foolhardy, while Rosa, the film's most defined character, is convincingly angry, controlling, and cynical about the union and its promises—believing in "Justice for Rosa...
...It's not that a number of unions weren't corrupt—it's just that crime and violence are much easier to translate into Hollywood genre formulae than films that explore other weaknesses of the union movement, such as the sense of privilege and complacency sometimes visible in union officers and their alienation from the rank and file...
...Escobar finds her efforts to run a computer-training center in East Palo Alto defeated by the rising rents that force the people she is trying to reach out of the community Although it lacks the brilliant cinema-verite immediacy of the more popular Startup.com , Secrets of Silicon Valley is much more pointed in its depiction of class abuse even before the dot-corn bubble burst...
Vol. 48 • September 2001 • No. 4
