The Need for a Revolutionary Cinema in the Belly of the Empire

 

“We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent and resolute.”

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

 

    Here’s a fun little experiment. Go to YouTube’s search bar and type in “death of cinema.” Browse through the results and you’ll probably find a plethora of longform video essays and think pieces about this very topic. Now, people have been bemoaning the death of cinema ever since the art form’s early days, but nowadays, thanks to the rise of superhero movies and IP-driven blockbusters, everyone from established filmmakers like Scorsese to Joe Blow with a YouTube channel seems to think that “real cinema” is on its last legs.

    And…yeah, I agree with them up to a point. But I think they’re missing a piece of the puzzle that is arguably more important than just mere artistic integrity.

 For me, it’s less the artistic value of these IP-driven blockbusters and superhero films I find concerning than the subliminal messages many of them seem to want to imprint into our collective subconscious.

    So, who am I, you may be asking yourself. I am an independent musician and filmmaker. And I’m a guy who wants to use the powerful medium of the moving image to maybe help improve a world that’s on fire in so many ways.

     With that, let’s begin. Because Marvel/Disney are debatably still the top dog when it comes to blockbuster cinema, let’s use them as an example of the cinematic psyop being performed on the public.      It’s become sort of a known fact by now that whenever Marvel movies try to tackle real-world issues and geopolitics, they can’t quite stick the landing. YouTuber Pop Culture Detective did a great video about the inherent flaw with Marvel’s superheroes: they only seem to take action when the status quo is threatened. The only people in the MCU who ever seem to mention any real systemic problems are the villains. And many times, it’s the villains who want to fundamentally change the world. In Black Panther, Killmonger wants to arm oppressed black people the world over to defend themselves; in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Karli and the Flag Smashers want to reopen the world’s borders; in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, K’uk’ulkan (Namor) wants the Wakandans and the citizens of Talokan to unite in a rainbow coalition against colonizing state institutions such as the CIA and U.S. Armed Forces.

    Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, hold your horses, because just when we find ourselves agreeing with these villains’ goals, they have to either do something randomly monstrous and out of character (Karli) or we have to find out that they’re violent, raging hypocrites who ultimately want to rule the world (Killmonger). And at the end of the day, the heroes only take the most palatable aspects of the villains’ ideologies into account. T’Challa only opens one outreach center; at the end of Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Sam gives the corrupt bureaucrats a stern talking-to about how they need to “do better”; in Wakanda Forever, Wakanda and Talokan unite only at the very end after we’ve witnessed them fighting for the majority of the movie while the CIA gets off scot-free. Or, as Vladimir Lenin once put it:

 

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

           

    And this defanging/co-opting of revolutionary ideals isn’t exclusive to Marvel superhero blockbusters. I’m not the first person to point this out, but Greta Gerwig’s Barbie - for all of its filmmaking prowess and surprisingly powerful monologue from America Ferrera - is still a prime example of what Angela Davis calls “White bourgeois feminism,” the type where race and class aren’t really acknowledged and capitalism isn’t identified as a component of sexual oppression (and no, a few throwaway lines that are mostly meant for laughs don’t qualify as critique). Then again, Mattel was one of the main financiers of this project, so of course the film could only go so far with its message.   

    And that’s something to keep in mind: many of these IP-driven blockbusters are nothing more than extensions of the capitalist superstructures which distribute them. And the robber barons in charge of these corporations know that nothing sells these days like radical buzzwords and surface level revolution. So yeah, Marvel can show an image of a black Captain America whilst villainizing people who want to reunite the world and whose literal slogan is “one world, one people.” Mattel and Warner Bros. can put out a movie that has a great monologue whilst still being peak White feminism. All the better to sell their products and rake in a profit equal to the GDP of a small country.

    Don’t get me wrong: Hollywood has been doing this ever since it first sprang up in the early 20^th century. But the reason it’s so frustrating to see now is because information is so much more accessible than it has ever been. Thanks to the expansion of outlets like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and online independent journalism sites like The Intercept, the coming generations are starting to see how messed up the world is, and how much deeper the rot goes than just a few bad individuals. From police brutality, institutional racism, the ongoing slaughter of indigenous tribes, and encroaching environmental collapse to outright genocide in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and Haiti, young people – especially young people of color - are waking up to the savagery of the world and have thus adopted the age-old radical mindset that bad systems need to be outright replaced instead of merely sprinkled with “good” individuals who will most likely be ineffective.

    And yet, the major films coming out nowadays don’t illustrate this reality.

    As a filmmaker who wants to make films to help people, all of this is incredibly frustrating. Even more so considering how it seems to be getting even more difficult for an independent filmmaker to break into the industry and spread a better message.

    So, what is a young musician and filmmaker of color like me supposed to do? Hold onto my Hollywood dreams from high school? Try submitting my stuff to festivals? Nah, because like filmmaker Daedalus Howell said in an interview with Indie Film Hustle Podcast, “A lot of [film festivals] want stars…no one wants your punk rock weird movie…unless Brad Pitt’s in it. And if Brad Pitt’s in your punk rock movie, it’s not punk rock anymore, man.”

    So, I ask again, what’s the solution? Not just for me, but for all the other young filmmakers who want to use film to help this crumbling world.

    Well, I offer to whomever is reading this my current mindset: screw Hollywood and the festival circuit. I’m gonna make my own stuff that says what I want, find an audience who wants to hear it, and make my career that way. There’s no better time to do it than now. Filmmaking technology has never been more accessible. And the Internet has made it that much easier to find an audience who wants to hear my message so I don’t become a slave to trends. We see it happening with indie musicians all the time, and the same can be true for filmmakers.

    Hell, it practically already is true; we just don’t hear about it as much. I mentioned the Indie Film Hustle Podcast earlier, and if you go check out their episodes, you’ll see many examples of filmmakers who make a good, respectable living making their art and showing it to their audience without having to be anywhere near Hollywood or the festival circuit.

    One example: Steven Lewis Simpson. A native of Aberdeen, Scotland, Simpson adapted a book called Neither Wolf nor Dog, which centers on a Lakota elder and was shot on an indigenous reservation. Once the film was completed, he held a screening on Pine Ridge Reservation in Bemidji where he shot the film. From then on, he was able to self-distribute the movie to both chain and independent theaters, totaling about 600+ venues in the U.S. and abroad. And this was in the summer of 2017, when multiple blockbusters were released. According to Simpson, in one theater, they beat out most of the summer blockbusters that were showing there. "Only Wonder Woman beat us," he says.

    Now, I dunno about you, but that sounds like a more fulfilling career to me than constantly submitting to the festival circuit hoping to get thrown a bone or just throwing it up on the digital ether and praying to get views.

    Not only does this business model offer more autonomy and artistic freedom, but it provides another opportunity: to start a movement of films that address the injustices of today and potentially speaks to a fired-up audience full of people wanting to help the world.

    Throughout cinema’s relatively short history, we have seen a plethora of different movements spring up within the art form. There was the Nouvelle Vague in France, Dogme 95 in Denmark, and of course, the American New Wave in the U.S. However, the subcategory of artistic movements which interests me the most are the political cinema movements, especially Third Cinema in Latin America (1960s – 70s), in which filmmakers aimed to deprogram the viewer from Hollywood’s imperial glitz and glamor and instead communicate to them ideas about their liberation. Unsurprisingly, these films were highly politicized and even viewing them was a political act.

    The only time in the US when we’ve ever had anything close to that was the L.A. film rebellion. There’s a great documentary about it here, but in a nutshell, in the 70s, a multiracial group of student filmmakers at UCLA set about to make movies that illustrated their lives and told their stories independent of the Hollywood machine. The only thing that really held them back was a distribution system.

    But it’s not the 70s anymore, thankfully. As mentioned before, we have the technology and the means to make and distribute our own films in a more efficient and expedient manner. And thanks to social media, we can not only find our audience, but we can network with various civil rights groups, activists, and causes for the purposes of not only research, but also to involve these groups in the films’ production and even distribution (i.e., setting up an event in collaboration with these groups).

    Another reason why now is a good time: last summer, more than a few Hollywood blockbusters underperformed at the box office (not counting the cultural event that was Barbenheimer, of course). And according to a recent article from CNN, it looks like Summer 2024 may be a similar story. That tells me that the younger generation are looking for something that’s not only different, but also something that speaks to them and their experiences and addresses their feelings of powerlessness in a world that just seems to be getting worse by the month. People today – especially, people of color like me – deserve stories that say more than just “yeah, the system may be bad, but just hold tight and trust that it’ll eventually work itself out.” No, the message we’re craving is, “if you band together with your friends and fight the power, you can make a better world possible.” And we deserve to see movies with that message on as many screens as the next Marvel movie.

    Well, instead of complaining about not seeing it, I’m just gonna make it myself.

    And if you’re reading this and you’re a young filmmaker of color or want to use film to help the world, I suggest you do the same.

    So, you in or you out?

 

            “It has to start somewhere

It has to start sometime

What better place than here?

What better time than now?”

 

Rage Against the Machine, “Guerilla Radio”