John Gianvito's documentary, Her Socialist Smile is a fascinating and ambitious exploration of Helen Keller's radical political beliefs. Gianvito is a follower of the American revisionist historian, Howard Zinn, and Her Socialist Smile develops that writer's thesis that the real history of the United States has been suppressed and hidden by the Capitalist academic establishment and media. Arguments to this effect in this film seem persuasive to me on the basis of my own experience: of course, I have known about Helen Keller's inspirational life since I was a little boy. (Helen Keller was once so well-known that every kid knew several tasteless, if funny, jokes about her -- for instance, the blind-deaf woman trying to read braille from a hot waffle iron.) I knew that Miss Keller was both blind and deaf, that, somehow, she learned to communicate, that her relentless teacher was Annie Sullivan, and that she had been impersonated by no less than Patty Duke in the movie The Miracle Worker -- I knew that she had met with Kings and Presidents and that she had been an international celebrity. But, of course, I didn't know that she was a radical Socialist, an admirer of Vladimir Lenin, and an advocate of violence in service of the Revolution -- in fact, in 1912, she broke with Eugene Debs, the famous mainstream Socialist, over the use of violence to overthrow the Capitalist government and, in fact, endorsed the Wobblies (the I.W.W.). In every way but the most literal, the little blind-deaf girl was a bomb-thrower. I have no doubt that this aspect of Keller's biography has been almost wholly suppressed. Keller herself noted that when she advocated for blind war-veterans or condemned the treatment of sight-impaired African-American children, she was wildly praised and lionized. But when she addressed the root causes of these injustices -- profiteering that led to horrific international wars or an economic system that caused blindness in Black children by not providing them with routine medical care and resources, she was derided or ignored or, even, accused of lunacy. Helen Keller was considered to be an inspirational figure, an independent thinker, and an icon so long as she kept within the bounds of advocacy for the handicapped. But the moment she transgressed those limitations and engaged in political advocacy, she was claimed to be helpless, delusional, and a tool of sinister Bolshevik handlers.
I didn't much like John Gianvito's earlier film The Whispering Wind and the Profit Motive, although I admired its peculiar, off-putting integrity. In the previous film, Gianvito almost literally adapts Zinn's history of the United States, filming locations where events important in the writer's alternative history took place. The film featured gorgeous shots of empty meadows, fields, and gravestones without any commentary at all. By contrast, Her Socialist Smile adapts the materialist objectivity of the earlier film, incorporating many enigmatic seeming shots of trees and flowers and insects, while also using just about every other cinematic technique available to makes its points. Where the earlier film was minimalist, austere, and stripped-down, Her Socialist Smile is fulling of jarring cuts, weird and evocative period footage and, even, features a performance by the Slovenian punk rock band Pankriti performing an earsplitting and exuberant version of the Italian Socialist anthem, Bandiera Rossa. (This sequence, a real kick in the face, with the music accompanied by red titles on a black background that accelerate until they can't be read, is a highlight of the movie: play it loud!) There's also a dry lecture delivered by Noam Chomsky in which he accuses Lenin of being a "right wing deviationist." Gianvito's presentation avoids images of Helen Keller herself -- we see her in only four or five archival scenes showing her in the 94 minute movie. Instead, Gianvito, following the technique of the purist Communist filmmakers Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, uses copious quotes by Keller, expecting us to read whole paragraphs of text displayed on the screen. Reading, however, is coupled with sensuous shots of the natural world that are puzzling at first but have a two-fold purpose: first, Keller knew the world by touch and the extreme close-ups of animal fur, peeling paint on old walls, ferns, and trees moving in the wind have a tactile force -- we grasp that feeling these things gave Keller her sense of reality. Second, Gianvito's nature footage features caterpillars, tiny industrious insects, even a slow-moving snail -- his point is that the pace of progress may be almost imperceptibly slow and incremental, but, in fact, the movement toward social justice is both inexorable and irresistable: in the end, the truth will be known and human beings will be liberated. Gianvito embodies this faith in a final shot of plants releasing great quantities of fluffy white seed into the air -- truth is an insemination as well as an inevitable dissemination. Tiny, inconsequential gestures toward equality and justice have an incremental effect that will some day culminate in a just society. The other visual strands in the movie are period footage, for instance, anti-Bolshevik cartoons and scary pictures of the aftermath of the Centralia Massacre; there are images of strikes and civil unrest. We see only one shot of Helen Keller in motion -- the images show her rising from her typewriter (she typed in braille) and making her way stiffly across a room: there is something weirdly robotic about her and she has the hieratic posture of an archaic Greek kore, a maiden who is the bride of Hades. Similarly, we hear Keller's eerie and (to my ears) completely unintelligible voice only twice -- at the start of the film, we see braille characters being typed and hear Keller speaking with another voice "translating," as it were her, blurred falsetto words, more a strange atonal aria than speech. At the end of the film, when Keller was old, a man asks her some questions: Are you happy? and If you could have one wish granted what would it be? She answers and, by this point in the film we are so engaged that we strain to hear what she says -- but the words can't be deciphered, something in response to the latter question about "light" perhaps, but who knows what she is saying? This final scene confirms to us that despite her world-wide fame, Keller remained mysterious, an enigma, and, perhaps, ultimately beyond our understanding. (Keller says something similar about her visit to post-war Hiroshima -- she says that a man badly scarred by the atomic bomb let her feel his face and she writes: "the rest is silence....") Apparently, Keller was something of comedian after the manner of Will Rogers. She toured in vaudeville opry-houses between 1920 and 1924, answering questions posed to her by the audience -- her answers were apparently wry, humorous, and aphoristic. The movie periodically takes a break to show us some of these remarks, the words projected in front of ornate old theater screens. The documentary establishes its materialist bona fides by not cutting away from mistakes or, seemingly, irrelevant material -- an an early scene, the woman who reads Keller's words into a microphone in the studio talks about her lunch and discretely burps before reading the text required for the movie. (Near the end of the movie, we see her packing up notes and script and leaving the studio.) A reader who floridly recites words written by W.B. Dubois has something go wrong with his hearing aids and has to stop in mid-sentence -- these misfires are dutifully recorded by the filmmaker.
The movie is full of remarkably interesting bits of information. Keller was an admirer of Marx and thought that The Communist Manifesto, "if not imposed on anyone", was the world's greatest political tract. When Keller asked the International Society for the Blind to translate a book by Mikhail Bakunin into braille, the organization refused -- she had to pay someone to make the translation. There are many extraordinary quotes -- although a believer in women's suffrage, Keller subordinated her feminism to her socialism: I'm not just a suffragist, she wrote, I'm a militant socialist suffragist. We must free men and women together before we can free women," Although her Alabama father was a slave-owner, she preached that "White supremacy augers ill for this nation." She called for a "world-encircling revolt"and argued that the wretched of the Earth are entitled to use violence to achieve their liberation. Toward the end of the movie, we see dead animals, basically road kill, and hear about "three fires" -- there are shots of Nazis burning her books in Nuremberg, then, we learn that a catastrophic fire burned her archives including the manuscripts of her biography of Annie Sullivan, a book called Teacher. She had to reconstruct the text for publication -- a task that took her ten years. Then, when the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, the Keller Foundation archives two blocks away were destroyed, another enormous loss archival materials and, in fact, two employees were trapped in an elevator and died in the fire. One of the few things surviving the blaze was an uncanny looking portrait bust showing Keller as she was when she toured post-war Japan -- the torso is scarred by flame and its blind eyes are huge, blank, and unsettling. Asked "What is the greatest illusion?" Keller said: "To think we have none." Asked what was her greatest pleasure, she replied "walking in the woods" and feeling the plants, the bark of the trees, the breeze, and the flowers. (This disclosure late in the film motivates many of the beautiful shots of plants and little animals in the movie.) Keller remained true to her political convictions until the end of her life. She wrote that "(her) life was not a hardship compared to the lives of working men and women ground under the heel of oppression."
Her Socialist Smile was produced by MUBI and should remain available into the indefinite future on that streaming service. True to Gianvito's theories about the media, I fear that this film may be hard for many people to see. But it's an inspiring and provocative work and I highly recommend it.
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