The Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

 It's hard to imagine the audience for John Gianvito's The Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind.  The film is simultaneously a lament that the leaders of movements resisting Capitalism have been forgotten and a celebration of their memory.  This double, and contradictory, impulse is embodied in images of deserted places marked by graves and commemorative plaques:  the graves and the historical markers signify both absence as well as the abiding presences of memory.  This high concept is too abstruse for most activists that I have met and too passive as well -- a picture of a gravestone doesn't move men and women to march.  Aesthetes interested in poetic documentary will likely be put off by the film's rather obvious and, even, trite, Leftist imagery -- after all, the picture ends with a jaunty, reggae-style version of the Internationale.  And those that might have a historical interest in the events and people commemorated will find the movie too ostentatiously barren and devoid of information:  36 of the heroes of the labor and civil rights movements identified were unknown to me.  One might argue from this fact that a part of Gianvito's intent is to encourage viewers to research these forgotten heroes.  But if you see the film in a theater, are you expected to write down the names in the dark?  Or somehow recall them when the movie is over?  (Probably, a picture of this sort was never really made to be consumed in the communal darkness of a theater and, so, in fact, someone watching the film on a streaming service (or on DVD) interested in this research, if equipped with paper and pen, could write down the names and, later, look them up --  in fact, Gianvito even cites a reference, suggesting implicitly further reading on the topic in Howard Zinn's history of the United States.  In short, the film is too poetic and melancholy to inspire activists to march to the barricades, too ahistorical for the historically minded, and too simple-minded and obvious for those interested in Leftist cinema of the kind made by Chris Marker or Straub and Huillet (whose influence is everywhere in this film).  The picture is interesting but too esoteric, I think, for most people.

Gianvito's film is 58 minutes long, materialist in form:  the director shows gravestones and markers  commemorating events of significance in the resistance to Capitalism in the United States.  The shots of the commemorative stones and sites are utilitarian -- generally, we see a marker in the grass shot from a distance of about 20 feet, then, a close-up with titles that read the inscription often illegible due to time and erosion.  In some cases, the camera simply lingers on roadside markers that we are supposed to read -- there is a lot of text and reading in this film.  These images are intercut with shots in which we see the wind as an invisible presence animating trees, brush, and grass -- the wind is obviously a symbol for the pervasive spiritual presence of these heroes, a literal afflatus or inspiration for later generations of activists and radicals.  At first, we think that the shots of the wind are filmed where the graves and other markers are located -- this is an example of the famous Kuleshov effect in which the mind links shots to create a coherent topography or narrative.  But, as we come to understand, the images of the wind are not topographically related to the shots of the markers and commemorative stones -- to the contrary, the shots showing the wind invisibly animating grass and hanging branches were taken in other places.  (It took me a while to figure this out -- toward the end of the movie, I recognized the landscape near Boulder, Colorado, a place with lots of wind but no correlation to any of the warriors of the resistance celebrated in the movie.)  Some of the shots depicting wind moving in foliage are pictorially beautiful, albeit in a conventional way. Most of the pictures show blue skies, although some images show rain and clouds -- in one shot, we see clouds hurrying across the heavens.  Gianvito's representative heroes begin with Ann Hutchinson and a Quaker, Mary Dyer, who was hanged in earlier colonial times.  Dianvito begins the film with a 1894 gramophone recording of a Kiowa ghost dance song.  (Why?  It's conventionally politically correct to pay homage to Native American resistance to colonialism, but this is a completely separate matter than the labor movement and its activists which comprise the great majority of the figures identified in the film -- what does King Phillip, the Indian leader, have to do with the American Labor Movement?  The answer is nothing at all.  After some initial confusion -- the film shows monuments to Shay's Rebellion and Henry Thoreau (again questionably related to the other figures in the film), the picture name-checks prominent early Feminists, Suffragettes, Abolitionists, and, then, slips into a mode of displaying monuments to various massacres and killings involved in struggle between labor and management during the late 19th century -- we are shown the sites of the Homestead, Ludlow, and Matewan massacres:  Paul Robeson sings the song "Joe Hill" while the camera shows us union organizer's grave -- later, we see Robeson's grave as well.  Some of this is predictable:  we see the very elaborate grave of Mother Jones, the more modest tomb of Ida B. Wells, Cesar Chavez' monument, the graves of some Civil Rights martyrs, Rachel Carlson's tombstone, and the graves of writers Lorraine Hansberry and John Dos Passos (his later conversion to the Right apparently excused).  The most recent grave marker shown in the film is that of Father Berrigan (died 2002) the Vietnam anti-war activist.  At intervals, the film shows wobbly, spidery rotoscoped images -- I couldn't identify what they were showing except, perhaps, someone frying eggs and some beefy guys bellowing at one another.  These pictures are a distraction and aren't intelligible.  The movie ends with a Soviet-style montage of people protesting, marching, parading down streets with a drum ensemble percussively pounding out an accompaniment -- the imagery becomes increasing agitated, with very fast cutting and the shots of protestors sped up; this footage is intercut with fragmentary shots of the wind stirring in trees and meadows.  The picture ends with a list of places where the gravestones are located while the Internationale plays on the soundtrack.  The movie isn't hard to watch and its not a hyper-rigorous bore like some of Straub-Huillet's films of this sort.  But there's not a lot of content and, probably, the same effect could have been conveyed in about twenty minutes with a less encyclopedic approach to American history.  The general impression conveyed by the film is that the viewer is ignorant with respect to a lot of our labor history, that the United Mine Workers have been tireless in building monuments to their heroes, but that the monuments are generally vapid and in poor taste and that most history is forgotten.  But this last point is trivial -- in this country, most history is never even known in the first place and when I've visited the graves of people like Poe or, even, Hubert Humphrey there's never anyone there -- for better or worse, the United States is a place without much of a cult of the dead; whether the dead are righteous or wicked, they are all pretty much forgotten.