Toward a Militant Cinema

In 1970, the Italian cinema was represented at the Cannes Film Festival by Elio Petri's 'Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.' The star of the film was Gian Maria Volonte. The following year, the official Italian entry at Cannes was Guiliano Montaldo's 'Sacco and Vanzetti,' which also starred Gian Maria Volonte. And in 1972, two Italian films, Francesco Rosi's 'The Mattei Affair and Elio Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven', tied for the Grand Prize of the Cannes Film Festival. The star of both films: Gian Maria Volonte. The dominance of Gian Maria Volonte at this level of international film competition is no accident. He is a consummate performer, with a background in classic and contemporary theatre, and, on the commercial level, was one of the top film stars in Italy until his death in 1994. But Volonte was also an actor who chose, on artistic and ideological grounds, to engage himself through his work in contemporary social and political struggles.

Gian Maria Volonté was born in Milan on April 9, 1933. After graduating from Rome's national academy of dramatic art in 1957, he entered upon a professional theatrical career, distinguishing himself in a wide range of productions, from the classics, including Shakespeare and Racine, to contemporary works such as "Sacco and Vanzetti" and Hochhuth's "The Deputy." He subsequently received critical acclaim for a series of TV performances, including productions of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot."

Volonté's first major film roles were in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Un Uomo da Bruciare (1962) and Gianfranco de Bosio's Il Terrorista (1963). The best known of his early screen performances, however, are those as the villains in the Sergio Leone "spaghetti westerns," A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), although his name appears in the credits under the anglicized pseudonym of "John Welles." But then, at that early date, even Sergio Leone was known as "Bob Robertson." It was the international financial success of these films which established Volonté ‘s commercial status and  later allowed him greater choice in his film roles.

From the mid-1960s, Volonté worked with some of the foremost leftist directors in Italy and France - with Elio Petri on Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) and The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971), with Jean-Luc Godard on Wind from the East (1970), with Yves Boisset on The Assassination (1972), with Marco Bellocchio on Slap the Monster on Page One (1972), and with Francesco Rosi on Many Wars Ago (1970), The Mattei Affair (1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973). Volonté also worked in Mexico, where he completed a starring role in Actas de Marusia (1976), a historical film on Chile (with contemporary parallels) directed by exiled Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin.

The following interview, conducted by Guy Braucourt (who has deleted his own questions), originally appeared in the French publication, Ecran, and has been translated for Cineaste by Renée Delforge.

THE ACTOR AND SOCIETY
I don't really choose my roles - I either accept a film or not according to my conception of the cinema. And I don't intend here to give a definition of political cinema, a category I don't believe in anyway because every film, in a general manner, is political. An "apolitical cinema" is an invention of poor journalism. I only hope that the films I make say something about the mechanisms of our society, that they engage in the research for a bit of truth. For me, it is essential to consider the cinema - as well as theatre and television - as a means of mass communication.

It is true that I have made films, particularly westerns, that do not exactly correspond to this conception. But at that time I was at a stage in my career when I had to establish myself on the market, especially because the films "with content" that I had shot - Un Uoma da Bruciare (A Man to Burn) and Il Terrorista (The Terrorist) - were ignored by the distribution system and the public. A Bullet for the General (1966), the western directed by Damiano Damiani, was a different case since that script actually dealt with north American imperialism and the role of the CIA in Latin America. But generally speaking, the western is a tiring genre for an actor and one which personally doesn't interest me.

Being an actor is a question of choice which poses itself first on an existential level - either you express all the conservative structures for the society and content yourself with being a robot in the hands of the establishment, or you turn toward the progressive elements of the society and try to establish a revolutionary rapport between art and life. From that point, it is obvious that the fact of being a star gives me the objective possibility of choosing my films, but I see no contradiction between my conception of the cinema and this status. Without a doubt I'm worth anywhere from 100 to 120 million lire per film [approximately $160,000-$200,000] but I don't indulge myself in the typical life-style of a movie star. And then, as Petri says, we are ready to accept a lower salary if the other financial aspects of the cinema are also diminished. Otherwise, who would profit from the reduction of the salaries of actors and directors - the producers, distributors, and others who exploit them, in short, the bosses!

I don't believe in the definition of political cinema fostered by bourgeois critics, but rather in the existence of a politics of the cinema. In Rome, for example, there is a businessman who owns 60 movie theatres, and distribution in Italy is so concentrated that the fate of films is totally out of the hands of the creators. The Working Class Goes to Heaven didn't do well because it was poorly distributed, while The Mattei Affair was as successful as a James Bond picture. The situation of the cinema is very different in socialist countries where the business is nationalized. And, essentially, there isn't all that much to do in this area beyond taking away the power from the producers, distributors and other businessmen, from those who enrich themselves at other's expense.

Even the politics of "art" cinema, though useful, is not sufficient, these theatres are situated in the centers of big cities and therefore reach only a circumscribed public, small circles of two or three hundred people, mainly intellectuals. On the other hand, a distribution circuit with immense possibilities is that of A.R.C.I. [Italian Cultural and Recreational Association] which is tied to the left unions and parties and which consists of several thousand movie theatres throughout the country which are independent of the commercial circuit. But these theatres are poorly utilized and have again one confronts the problem of decentralization which so heavily stamps Italian cultural life.

FROM ROSI TO PETRI
The investigation pursued by Rosi in The Mattei Affair consists of analyzing the political line of the Mattei character - his struggle with the oil-producing countries against the U.S. monopoly, his contracts with the Eastern countries, his support of the politics of nationalization. He is a character, however, who is seen critically - he's a man who, despite his political line, eventually yields to a certain demagogy and who mistakenly thinks he can struggle by him self. Moravia has written accurately that there has never been a sufficiently enlightened bourgeoisie in Italy to support such a man and such a dialectical process between capitalism and the state.

The Working Class Goes to Heaven by Petri is also a dialectical film, not a propaganda film. It is a critical analysis, somewhat expressionistic, of the situation of a "non-conscious" working class. We tried to make an X-ray of working class reality, in its professional surrounding (the factory) and its private one (women, children, leisure). The communist critics criticized the film for misrepresenting the relationship between the workers and the party, but this is a dimension we intentionally overlooked in favor of another aspect of the problem - the worker taken in by the traps and seductions of consumer society, whose goals are limited to the car, the TV, the sports on Sunday, and who even in times of union conflict doesn't get involved politically. I think the film reflects a particular aspect of reality today - it is a critical discourse on consumerism as an attempt to lull one's consciousness to sleep. The worker character that I play is not conscious of this process but he continually pays with his self and each time he plays he discovers another aspect of his condition.

Petri is without a doubt the director who has the least hierarchical conception of cinematic work, and the one who establishes the best dialectical relationship with all the members of the crew. For him, a film is a collective in which everyone contributes in terms of ideas; and it's an economic collective, too, the crew actually being the owners of the film.

Generally speaking, I develop my characters in the fashion of an investigator who collects all the possible documentation on the issue which interests him. My presentation, then, is done more on a journalistic than on a dramatic level, and utilizes the same material the writer collects and uses to construct his subject. I worked this way, for instance, in creating the inspector in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion - his way of walking, his attitudes, his language, even the way he combs his hair, which corresponds to a specific custom in Italy, one which goes back to the time of the bourbons and which one still sees today in the ministries. For the worker in The Working Class Goes to Heaven, I talked at length with factory workers about illnesses specific to their condition such as neuroses, deforming arthritis and pulmonary diseases.

The next stage is a sort of critical, analytical preparation of the character, of his psychology, to determine the general attitude I must have in the film. Then comes the normal dialectical relationship between the actor and the director - we get together and talk until we reach a common view of the problem to be solved, it being understood that the director always has the final say. The psychological analysis of the character is also involved at the level of the dialog, line for line. I think this sort of analysis is part of my work as an actor even in everyday life, that is, on a continuous basis.

GODARD AND FRENCH CINEMA
The French cinema suffers, I believe, from two illnesses - its inspiration is too literary and it is produced by directors from well-off backgrounds. It is a cinema of the bourgeois class. In Italy the relationship of the film-maker to the political dialect of the society is more direct, the social problems are too vital to make a cinema which doesn’t take into account what is happening around us.

Godard, of course, is a separate case. When I worked with him on Wind from the East, he was at a stage of his career when he was questioning himself. He was really trying to do the impossible - to negate himself as a director and see what would happen. He experimented with the possibilities of interaction between the traditional relationships within a film crew and the need for a less authoritarian and more collective work process, but to the point that he wanted to just give the camera to anyone to let them do their part of the film. For me, Godard is the last bastion of a bourgeois conception of the cinema, a bastion who is at one and the same time the most enlightened and the most masochistic of his class. He is too preoccupied with only one type of problem - his problems - which makes him forget the essential - the function of the cinema as a means of communication with the masses, the relationships between creation, production and distribution.

Our contracts were quite limited. He would plant the camera there, and me in front of it, supposedly representing the symbol of American imperialism. His goal was to break the actor, to destroy this form of mediation with the viewer. and he was constantly asking me questions like whether Stalin or Mao contributed most to destroying democracy, to which I answered "Harlequin," and since one doesn't break Harlequin... I think that, in the end, it will be for his contributions in the area of cinematic language and not ideology that Godard will be most noted.

FOR A MILITANT CINEMA
Neither TV nor the commercial cinema in Italy are doing any serious information work , addressing themselves to the whole country. In fact, to take only one example, when Sacco and Vanzetti was broadcast on TV, the word "anarchist" was not used once, instead they would say "radical." So it has become necessary to provide real information - in fact to counteract the official information - and disseminate it through the parallel distribution circuits such as the ARCI theaters.

It was in this spirit that about five years ago an anti-repression film committee was established which brought together about half of the directors, both from the left, such as Nelo Risi, Nanni Loy, Petri, Damiani, and from the right, such as Visconti - yes, I know that Visconti says he's a Marxist, but it's not what you pretend to be that really matters! For the same reasons, the film December 12 was made collectively after the bombing attempts in Milan in December 1969 and the "suicide" by the police of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. It's a film made on the spur of the moment perhaps a bit rashly, and is no doubt quite naïve, but it's something that had to be done quickly to tell and show people what TV and the newspapers were hiding from them.

Another example of this sort of counter-information is the one-hour documentary, La Tenda in Plazza, that I myself filmed in 16mm in the factories occupied by the workers in Rome. It's a film which allowed us to establish a new type of information between the workers in the unions which work throughout the country, sometimes even in the same town, without any contract with one another, and also between this class in struggle against capitalism and other social categories, such as students, to whom the film was shown in certain universities. But I had to produce this film myself, outside the capitalist production/distribution system, whereas it should have been up to a worker’s organization to undertake this kind of cinematic information work! There are so many people and things in this area to agitate around. Another form of action for me as an actor consists of going into the streets to organize provocation performances, to force people to look, to listen. I've been practicing this type of theatre which has become the cultural artifact of a class, and which I think a critique by our group has accurately defined as the "sad nocturnal rites of the bourgeoisie."

But even without engaging in this form of militant art, the actor can assume his role in society by his choice. when I played Sacco in the theatre, then Vanzetti in the cinema, it is evident that I didn't content myself with merely a professional participation. Which doesn't mean either that I was concerned at a personal political level, because I'm not an anarchist and I have never been tempted by this doctrine, but it so happens that the anarchists are currently the militants most exposed to repression. Likewise, December 12, the film on Pinelli and Valpredra, was not actually conceived as a film on anarchism but more on justice and the free functioning of democracy.

In any case, as a militant of the communist party, I don't pose this kind of dogmatic problem for myself. I'm fighting above all for the freedom of expression and for the causes which I feel important to support, without worrying about adhering to party lines or having to give an account of myself. For me, in the same way that the actor's job is only one means among others to do political work within society, being a communist means defending as well as possible the values of democracy.

[This is a slightly edited version of 'Gian Maria Volonte Talks About Cinema and Politics,' originally published in Cineaste (Vol. VII, No. 1, pp. 10-13). The movie stills accompanied the original article.]

Films on Schooling and Education

Schooling has become more or less universal in the contemporary world, with schools found in virtually every corner of the globe. The pervasiveness of modern schooling is remarkable in that it was for the most part introduced globally within the past century. Visitors to schools the world over would be struck by their similarities, the focus on rigid schedules marked off by bells, their age segregation, the arrangement of desks facing the teacher at the front of the room, behind whom is a blackboard and above which is a clock and the national flag. While everyone attends school, few analyze its origins and impacts, with most concerned with getting ahead in the system. One way to wedge open a discussion on schooling is compare and contrast it with education. Although used interchangeably, schooling can be thought of as the institutionalized side of education, which then points to questions of the impact of this institution on cultures and communities and the alternative views on education.

Indigenous and aboriginal peoples were not often served well by schooling, in particular during the late 19th and early 20 century when various racist government policies informed the schools they often forcibly attended. A famous example is depicted in an episode of 'The American Experience' TV series that focuses on the schools set up by Richard Henry Pratt, famous for his statement 'kill the Indian to save the man.' The title of the 1992 episode, In the White Man's Image, sums up the story well. Pratt's plan to civilize the Indians involved making them more like white folks by shearing their hair, changing their clothes and forbidding their language. This was done after kidnapping children from their tribal families and shipping them hundreds of kilometers away to boarding schools, such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where in addition to be stripped of their Indian identity they were also trained in various menial tasks, perhaps testimony to the attitude of the schools toward their potential. The irony of these policies, and other similar policies the world over, was that even if one accepts the premise to use schooling to make native peoples more white, they would still not be accepted into white society until racist attitudes and cultural beliefs were corrected, suggesting perhaps that for such policies to be truly effective white people would have to also be 'civilized' into accepting racial, cultural and other forms of diversity on an equal footing.

In addition to this documentary feature, Indian and Aboriginal schools have been the topic of a couple of films. The 1997 Canadian film The Education of Little Tree includes a telling scene in one such school. The title character, Little Tree, an aboriginal boy being raised by his grandparents, is taken by court order to an Indian School. Upon arrival, he is told that once he enters the gates of the school he shall not 'speak Indian' again. When Little Tree meets the school headmaster, he is told that 'Americans don't name children after objects,' and is given a new name randomly selected from a book: Joshua. When asked if he understands this, a bewildered 'Joshua' replies, 'no sir.' He fares no better once classes begin. During a biology lesson, when the teacher asks the students to describe a picture of two deer, students mechanically drone 'running' and other half-hearted barely conscious responses. But Little Tree enthusiastically calls out that the deer are 'mating,' which he no doubt recognized from living in the forest with his grandparents. But for offering this answer in the class (which is actually correct), he is beaten by the teacher and brought to the headmaster. While walking the boy to an attic room for solitary confinement, the headmaster asks, 'do you know what you have done?' Little Tree again replies, 'no sir.' He has no idea that he has done anything wrong, because he is not yet acclimated to the ways of schooling, although he is eventually bludgeoned into submission like the other students. These scenes suggest that the knowledge Little Tree brought to school is a liability in the white man's world and that the goal of the school is to do as Pratt recommended, 'kill the Indian to save the man.'

A similar story is told in the 2002 Australian film, Rabbit Proof Fence. In this case, three aboriginal girls are forcibly removed from their families by court order and sent hundreds of kilometers away to a boarding school, where they will be taught to serve white folks as maids and seamstresses, again in the name of the white man's civilizing mission. In one telling scene, the director of Indian affairs visits the school and examines one of the girls to see if she qualifies to be taken to a special advanced school. The examination consisted of lifting her shirt to examine her skin color, which being a rich brown meant she failed the 'exam.' Based on a true story, the film points out that schools such as this were part of government policy in Australia for until the mid 20th century but which were eventually closed, with their tragic result of having created a 'lost generation.' This idea of being lost as an aboriginal person in the dominant white society is a factor of colonialism in general, and one could find similar instances of both internal colonialism (as in the US and Australia) and external colonialism (as is in Africa, India and Latin America) wreaking havoc on the communities and cultures of indigenous peoples.

While these films focus on the outcomes of racist policies, often highlighting the tenacity of individual Native Peoples to survive in such a system, these films were more or less produced to inform, and especially entertain, White audiences, making the rounds on the festival circuit and garnering several awards. However, there are also a number of less well known instances of communities redressing the imbalances and healing the damages of colonized institutionalized schooling. For example, a series of films produced by Proyecto Andino de Tecnologias Campesinas (PRATEC) in Peru focuses on the regeneration of indigenous knowledge and communities. The 2005 film 'Iskay Yachay: Two Kinds of Knowledge' focuses on the attempt by peasant farmers in the Andes to reclaim their rich ecological and agricultural wisdom from the halls of government run schools that undermine local knowledge in favor of Spanish language and the usual slate of school subjects. But what is unique about these communities, as suggested by the title of the film, is that they are not simply rejecting the 'modern knowledge' of the schools part and parcel. Rather, they want the schools to teach 'two kinds of knowledge,' that their children should have the option to remain in the Andes and live a traditional agro-centric life, which has its own requisite knowledge that is ignored in modern schooling with its focus on urban life and language. At the same time, they should also not be impaired if they feel the need to migrate to urban areas, which requires Spanish language and facility with reading, writing and arithmetic. It's a good antidote to the usual sad story of schooling creating an alienated class of people neither here nor there, and the work of PRATEC is exemplary for the close collaboration between schools and communities.

It is this dual attitude toward knowledge in a cooperative relationship that makes PRATEC interesting and worth following, and their work has been the subject of the 1998 book The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development. Other films made by PRATEC, including 'Loving Teacher' and 'Culturally Sensitive Education,' focus on the role of teachers among the indigenous communities. In Perus as elsewhere, with a Ministry of Education system in control of schools, urban college graduates are sent to rural areas for two years before they can qualify for jobs in the cities, a common policy where state subsidized education is in a sense 'paid back' through service in places where there are shortages. The problem is that these teachers have no connection to the communities in which they are placed, and are often at best indifferent to the local culture, and at worst hostile toward it. PRATEC sought to intervene in this bad ecology of knowledge by helping local communities have a say in the way their own schools are run and recruiting teachers who are either from the communities or who at least would be sympathetic to the concerns of the community.

Beyond this question of the impact of schooling on indigenous peoples, the topic of modern schooling as a global phenomenon in general has received a great deal of attention in the mainstream media, in particular through the efforts of the BBC in conjunction with the Open University, through a four part documentary series: African School, Chinese School, Indian School and, most recently, Syrian School. Each series consists of five one hour episodes or ten half hour episodes profiling a selection of schools in each of the four regions. While fairly wide ranging and covering many issues related to the politics and economics of schooling and the ongoing social changes in each region, the four series share an emphasis on competition as a defining feature of schooling. Several episodes of each series focus on the high stakes examinations that still define formal schooling in many places, although the emphasis is on those who succeed in the competitive marketplace at the expense of those who do not. The series would be more useful, and representative, if it also had something to say about the losers within this system of high stakes schooling, which in many cases would likely outnumber the winners. Perhaps it is to be expected to applaud the few who succeed, given the source of these programs in the former colonial powers and hosted by over educated white folks, but it's also tragic to ignore the consequences of these successes for the many who are failed by the system. This aspect of schooling as a lopsided and biased social sorting mechanism, which was identified long ago by Martin Carnoy in Education as Cultural Imperialism, needs as much attention as the success stories of the few.

The sorting function of schooling works internally, as in the above examples, but it also operates internationally, where nations compete for prestige, wealth and power, the road to which often passes through the halls of modern schooling. A common theme in recent American documentaries about schooling is how the USA is losing its political and economic edge in the world, with the blame being laid at the doorstep of schooling. As an example, the documentary Two Million Minutes, which spawned several sequels, compares schooling the US, India and China, and using math and science as a criteria for success shows how American students are falling behind their Third World rivals.

Two Million Minutes can be seen as a form of scare mongering, in some sense along the lines of the 1980s discourse that emerged with A Nation at Risk and several similar reports that also decried Americans losing ground to their rivals, which at the time was focused on Japan. In fact, this discourse could be traced back to the infamous Sputnik launch in the 1950s, which also caused a great deal of hand wringing on the part of American politicians and educational technocrats, who saw the early Soviet success in the 'space race' as an indication that the USA was falling behind. Some interesting quasi-agitprop pieces emerged from that era, such as the ABC television report Meet Comrade Student, which took post-Sputnik American viewers into Soviet Schools. But all this emphasis on competition, economics and politics, emphasizing ideological battlegrounds and focusing mainly on the question of winners and losers, almost as if schooling is a competitive sport, neglects other bigger questions, such as those posed by Ivan Illich in his influential and classic work on Deschooling Society. Rather than just winners and losers, crucial questions revolve around what kind of person is created by schooling. While this question may have no definitive answer, it needs constant asking.

Sometimes the focus in the winner/loser dyad is on the losers, and there are a number of documentaries that focus on the disenfranchised and downtrodden, mainly women and children, who are unable to attend school and who are instead locked into lives of poverty and despair. A recent BBC series entitled Hunger to Learn focuses on the difficult lives of children in conflict zones, and how school is ironically a respite from the lives made difficult by the mis-educated adults around them. Similarly, the TVE program Educating Lucia focuses on the limited options for girls in a male dominated society that prefers to educate its sons over daughters. In addition to its function in reproducing social ills, the oppressive structure of schooling has been the focus of several films. Most notable perhaps is Abbas Kiarostami's documentary Homework, which consists of interviews with schoolboys on the role of homework in their lives. When asked what happens if they did not do their homework, they all said they were punished by an older sibling or parent. Kiarostami then asks the children if they know the meaning of the word 'encouragement' and none do. Punishment without encouragement, not by teachers and principals, but in the home in what amounts to an extension of the authority of schools beyond their walls. One wonders again what type of person is created by such a system, irrespective of grades and successes. In contrast, the award winning Japanese documentary Children Full of Life profiles a 4th grade teacher who took the radical step of encouraging his students to get in touch with their emotions.

Why this is seen as radical, of course, speaks reams about the oppressive nature of modern Japanese schooling, which forces conformity and high stakes testing upon students to such a degree that suicide is common a way out for increasing numbers of youths. While emphasizing in various ways the dark side of society and schooling, these programs subtly offer up the possibility of hope through entering mainstream schooling. In Homework, a parent intervenes in one of the interviews with a short speech about the need for reforming Iranian education. While no sane person would be against helping the unfortunate and making the lives of children better, by relying on schooling (either more of the same or by tweaking the system) as the primary answer to poverty and alienation, many of these programs reinforce the hegemonic grip of schooling over minds and bodies that cannot conceive of other ways to live and learn. In fact, to the privileged white viewers of the European and American networks who watch such programs, they also serve the additional function of having viewers feel thankful for their schooling. What is missing from all this talk of the haves and have-nots is the question of alternatives.

While the mainstream news media are constantly emphasizing the successes and failures of modern schooling, meaningful alternatives are almost completely absent from their programming. However, this neglect, or ignorance, of alternatives should not be confused with an absence of alternatives. If they are unable or unwilling to locate alternatives and instead obsess on the closed dyad of the haves and have-nots of schooling, the onus is on viewers to seek out the meaningful alternatives that don't rely on the 'more of the same' treatment that Ivan Illich decried in Deschooling Society. Before getting to those, it might be worth reviewing some of Illich's main points. In fact, the title is in some way misleading, if it is taken to mean closing down schools. Illich had a far deeper plan in mind, which could be better described as the de-institutionalization of society, but since schools play a major role in the 'schooled society,' it's worth dwelling for a moment on the possibility of life without schooling.

Rid society of school? The mere proposition that Illich suggests in Deschooling Society may seem preposterous, even treasonous, to many people. How can we live without school? Where will our children go? What will they do about jobs? When will they learn the heritage of their civilization? Civic values? Literacy and numeracy? But such questions only prove Illich’s rule: we are addicted to schooling. And this addiction is to such an extent that it seems unthinkable to question the very existence of schooling. But is it really so hard to imagine society without school? After all, modern schooling is less than a century old in most parts of the world, and a little over a century old in its birthplaces in Europe and America. Prior to schooling, communities often found various ways to answer all the above questions, ways that were meaningful in their own cultural, historical and social contexts. Young people learned language, religion, cultural values, and social responsibility by living life. Apprentices learned trades by practicing them with those who had more experience. Education was often casual and informal, and such an education was part of life, which was a life of learning.

Modern schooling arose with other institutions of modern society, first in the West and then around the globe with colonialism. As Foucault suggested in Discipline and Punish, prisons, schools, hospitals, asylums, armies and other institutions of modern society are all of the same mind set. They are places of social control and conformity to order, they are places where others decide what to do, when to do it, and for how long, and they are places that created, in Illich’s words, a ‘schooled society,’ which is a society that expects not a life of learning but lifelong subservience to a system that is beyond their reach and control. At the core of Illich’s analysis of the schooled society lies consumerism, not the narrow form of consumerism that one finds proliferating in shopping malls today, but the broader idea of consumerism, that people can no longer think or do things for themselves, that they are addicted to consuming ideas, habits, practices, as well as products, from professional producers. Such a society is one that has ceased to think for itself, and it has ceased to be creative. Illich would perhaps say that it has even ceased to be human. The schooled society can only do one thing: seek more schooling. While this may benefit the bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians that control modern societies, its benefits for the multitude are dubious, and, in Illich’s view, downright alienating and even destructive.

Of course, there are perceived benefits of schooling. The commonest defense of schooling is that it prepares one for citizenship and the world of work. Yet the irony of this defense is that schooling in most modern societies has become a holding zone for those unable to find employment or who are unemployable, which in the end is only a way of deferring the inevitable condition of joblessness. Even those who succeed do so only at the expense of the majority of their peers in the system. So, if jobs are scarce at graduation – while remaining the main reason for schooling – then why submit children to twelve or more years of schooling? Similarly, what passes as citizenship education is in many ways nationalist indoctrination. In the film Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh, a community elder notes how the imposition of schooling divided along religious and ethnic lines, and which emphasizes competition and fighting as the way to solve problems, has created schism in the city of Leh and may be even implicated in sectarian violence. These are no doubt serious complex social problems, but the inability to conceive or effectively deal with such questions and observations beyond recommending further institutionalization may only prove Illich's point about schooling.

Fortunately, there are a number of places in which alternatives to conventional schooling are taking shape. A good place to begin a survey of alternatives to schooling is India. Several independent films have highlighted a variety of efforts at coming to terms with the detrimental and destructive aspects of schooling and finding ways to participate in alternatives rooted in communities that are pursuing different strategies. Leaving school altogether is the subject of several independent documentaries produced by Shikshantar and Abhivekti. For example, the 2004 film 'Walkout,' accompanied by an occasional newsletter entitled Swapathgami, tells the stories of young people who have been failed by modern schooling and have taken it upon themselves to walk out and find other ways of living and learning. The 2002 Unfolding Learning Societies meeting in Udaipur is profiled in the film 'If the Shoe Doesn't Fit,' which includes interviews with young people who are exploring alternatives to modern schooling and the institutionalized lifestyle. Similar conversations about imagining life without schools, which took place at the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai, are documented in the film 'Other Worlds of Power.' These works raise a second question, that besides the reasons for people walking out of schooling, there need to be viable alternatives to walk into. The work of Arvin Gupta and others has promoted the creation of children's toys made from natural or found objects, even at times trash, as an antidote to the dependency on products built by others. Some of these are highlighted in the short collection 'Homemade Toys and Natural Playthings' and 'Toys from Everyday Stuff.'

Inspired by Krishnamurti, whose books and lectures suggested new ways to think about life and learning, the film 'School Without Walls' highlights a community of self directed learners in Andhra Pradesh. Influenced by the 1976 publication Danger! School, the animated short film 'Do Flowers Fly' focuses on what is lost by the overly restricted regimentation of modern schooling, which seems more geared toward creating domesticated automatons than enabling whole persons. This works suggest that one way to humanize schools is to integrated them more deeply with community life and development and create settings where students can learn by doing. This approach is profiled in the documentary 'Development Through Education,' which focuses on the Vigyam Ashram learning community near Pune. Similar community based experiences can be found in Kerala, such as those depicted in the 2001 film 'Kanavu Malayilekku: To the Dream Mountain.' This sampling suggests that there are viable and diverse alternatives to conventional schooling, even if they are ignored by mainstream officialdom.

One could find many kindred efforts in the Americas as well, such as the work of PRATEC in Peru to integrate local culture and communities with education, as noted above. In Mexico, the Universidad de la Tierra was established by Gustavo Esteva in Oaxaca as a place where young people can explore learning with one another and from artisans and experts in various fields in a free-flowing, supportive and self-directed environment. Students articulate their experiences at UniTierre in the film 'Nuestros Caminos,' which also includes interviews with Esteva, who is also the author of Escaping Education.

In North America, an important example of a truly humanistic educational experience is Black Mountain College, which operated from 1933 until 1957. An outgrowth of the progressive education movement, it centralized the arts in its curriculum and featured luminaries such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller on its faculty, and counted among its alumni the painter Harrison Begay and the poet Jane Mayhall. The college has been lovingly portrayed in the 2008 documentary film 'Fully Awake,' which features interviews with former students and teacher interspersed with archival materials. Black Mountain College has also been the subject of a number of books, including Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, which features an extensive collection of photographs, and the definitive account by Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College.

Universities have also been the subject of a number of films and videos, in particular on questions of reform. At a 2005 international workshop held in Malaysia, a number of academics and activists met to discuss reform of social science curricula in Third World universities. Excerpts from the workshop assembled into a video as part of the Multiversity project feature a variety of perspectives on this question, including the late Malaysian thinker Syed Hussein Alatas revisiting his work on the 'captive mind' and discussing its implications for ethics within social science curricula. Vinay Lal from India spoke on the 'disciplines in ruins,' focusing on the 'mathmetization' of political science at the expense of other possibilities such as exploring grass roots movements, which are virtually ignored in contemporary political science departments. There was considerable discussion on the prospect of 'walking out' or 'dwelling in the ruins,' as posed by Yusef Progler from Dubai, with participants weighing in on both sides. Claude Alvares of India and Wasif Rizvi of Pakistan advocated walking out of universities and into alternative learning spaces. Fred Chiu of Hong Kong disagreed with the notion of walking out, as it smacked of 'escapism,' and suggested instead that academics remain in the system but learn to 'create viruses' of different ideas and perspectives from within, while Clemen Aquino and Farid Alatas outlined efforts at localizing the social sciences in their respective universities in the Philippines and Singapore.

[This article is extracted from a longer work in progress by J. Progler. It was first published on TV Multiversity in June 2010 and has been bumped to correspond with 'back to school month' 2011.]

'La colonia penal,' a Film by Raoul Ruiz

A journalist arrives on the Latin American island of Captiva, where a dictatorial President rules capriciously over a society that seems to consist mainly of males in military uniform, speaking a polyglot language. We learn from a voice-over that the island was first turned into a penal colony by Ecuador in the late nineteenth century, then occupied by the United States from 1899-1920, until it achieved independence and once again became a penal colony. In 1954, the United Nations assumed responsibility for it as an experimental society and it has been independent since 1972. The President is evasive and apparently anxious about the report that the journalist will deliver. At her hotel, she is importuned by a poet, who is exposed as a pickpocket by the ever-present troops. The President's behaviour becomes even more eccentric, and he vehemently denies that there is any torture on the island. A party of troops serenades the journalist before she is unceremoniously bundled off to the prison to witness scenes of punishment. A native woman recites a bizarre fable about a man who is bewitched, drowned and reborn in Europe as a little girl, only to have 'her' husband murder her daughter, at which point the whole continent sinks into the sea.

The journalist challenges a soldier (who may also be a writer) about a series of improbable coincidences between disaster and atrocity stories reported first from other Latin American countries, then mysteriously repeated or exaggerated in Captiva. She finds that her baggage has been searched by the soldiers and when she protests to the President, he accuses her of having already written lies about the country. The President tries to shoot himself, but is restrained by the troops; he addresses a gathering of distinguished visitors to thank them for their support. Soon after, while broadcasting to the island by radio, he is assassinated. The journalist inspects a number of bodies in the morgue and assures a soldier that the grant requested should soon come through. In a closing voice-over, she says that her report was favourable and was accepted by a majority of press agencies.

Like a message in a bottle from Allende's Chile, 'The Penal Colony' reaches Britain after a series of adventures too complex to detail here, in a version that lacks all credit titles and which may be some seven minutes short. In this state, which is almost certainly the best achievable, it is not a film to be approached without some contextual information. Even more than most of Ruiz's work, it stands in a perversely oblique relationship to its ostensible script and subject. It is certainly doubtful whether the innocent spectator would deduce from a single viewing that the basic industry of Captiva is the manufacture of news on behalf of international press agencies. Yet only this realisation lends coherence and satirical point to the otherwise erratic sequence of events and encounters that constitute the main body of the film. It explains the ambiguity of the scenes of torture and execution, which appear both playful and savage, and the range of stereotyped attitudes struck by Luis Alarcon's President for the benefit of the visiting journalist, a declared "specialist in underdeveloped countries".

The sequence of the the night-time prison visit, where some form of torture seems to be in progress (off-screen), ends with an enquiry as to whether she is impressed, which is probably only comprehensible if one already appreciates that she is in search of the quintessential Latin American news stories of repression and atrocity. One deduces that the soldier to whom she complains about the plagiarised Captiva news must be a correspondent with some responsibility for 'producing' the island's staple export. But then the converstation takes a more precisely ironic turn when the journalist claims to have just witnessed a scene straight out of one of the soldier's novels; to which he replies that this is just what 'Garcia Marquez and that other lad Fuentes did.' Magic realism indeed! The general strategy of 'The Penal Colony' is in fact common to all of Ruiz's Chilean films: deceptively casual reportage of the fantastic seen in everyday terms. In his first feature, 'Three Sad Tigers,' violence and self-deception were shown as elements in the everyday life of many Chilean marginals. For the film that came immediately after, 'Nobody Said Anything,' a story by Max Beerbohm about a pact with the devil served to structure a study of a group of minor intellectuals 'who live in their own reality and believe that it is in fact Chile.'

Here the starting point was Kafka's parable about a famous explorer called upon to witness a model execution in a remote settlement, which ends with the condemned man escaping and the officer in charge destroyed by his own execution machine. Ruiz displaces Kafka's central irony of the 'perfect execution' into a more complex ironic commentary on Latin America's strenuous efforts to conform to the stereotypes by which it is commonly represented abroad. Ruiz has since reflected that his concern at this time with torture and military dictatorship now seems something of a presentiment of what was soon to happen in Chile and other Latin American countries. Now that we also know his European work better than his Chilean career, 'The Penal Colony' can clearly be seen to foreshadow his recent deadpan irony and play of stereotypes, while many of its more bizarre and mysterious details - the rattling of sabres, a swordfight reflected in a window, the President singing for his guest - recall Ruiz's beginnings as one of Chile's first playwrights of the Absurd.

[This review was written by Ian Christie under the title 'La colonia penal (The Penal Colony) (1971)' and was originally published in Monthly Film Bulletin, 52: 612/613 (1985), p. 18. An extract is available online at Rouge Press. Information about the director Raoul Ruiz is available on Mubi and the film is briefly mentioned in South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography by Tim Barnard (University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 224-5.]

Cinema Criticism and Social Class

Art films, middle cinema and commercial films in India all depend on the middle classes for legitimacy and critical acclaim. Even those producers and performers who stridently proclaim the supremacy of popular taste, or denounce the elitism of the art-film critics, are on the defensive when there is a sharp criticism of their wares in the media. Indeed, the way the producers of each of these kinds of movies try to win friends and influence middle-class opinion give the lie to their declared dependence on only the opinions of the 'common Indian.' The common Indian is rarely influenced by what Kumar Shahani says of Manmohan Desai. But Desai was distressed when Shahani took him on while Shahani in turn resents that his films do not get the patronage or support of those for whom is radical hear bleeds, whereas Desai mobilizes such support with casual ease. Nevertheless, there are clear differences in the cultural thrusts of the three; to gauge the appeal or lack of appeal of any of these forms, one must first identify the thrusts.

First, the commercial film tends to reflect and be protective towards the implicit cultural values of the society. If it criticizes traditions, the criticism tends to be indirect, latent or unintended. if for instance there is criticism of untouchability, it is grounded on the traditional concept of a humane society; if there is criticism of religious violence, the criticism invokes not so much the secular values of a modern polity as the perennial values of the religions involved.

Of course, the emphasis on cultural self-expression or cultural self-defense is also simultaneously a defiance and unwitting criticism of middle-class values. The commercial cinema in India does tend to reaffirm the values that are being increasingly marginalized in public life by the language of the modernizing middle classes, values such as community ties, consensual non-contractual human relations, primacy of maternity over conjugality, priority of the mythic over the historical. But even such indirect criticism of middle-class values is cast not in the language of social criticism but in that of playful, melodramatic, spectacles.

In art films and middle cinema, on the other hand, the emphasis on the expressive function of art of the reaffirmation of cultural values tends to be muted. High-brow films usually provide sharp criticisms and deep analyses of the social pathologies associate with tradition, which contrasts markedly with their shallow or superficial criticisms of the violence and exploitation associated with modern institutions. The high cinema in India has never been particularly sensitive to the growing threats to lifestyles, life-support system and non- modern cognitive orders, or for that matter to the values those in the 'survial sector' of the society - a sector not primarily concerned with the goal of a good life (as it is defined by modern Indian), but with mere survival and the protection of whatever little the survivor has by way of access to the global commons, traditional technologies, knowledge of health care, and community self-sufficiency outside the monetized sector of the economy. The feelings, attitude and values associated with the survival sector are the ones that the commercial cinema consciously or unconsciously exploits but in the process also unwittingly supports, even if only partially and even while mouthing the slogans of the dominant culture of politics. Commercial cinema romanticizes and, given half a chance, vulgarizes the problems of the survival sector, but it never rejects as childish or primitive the categories or worldviews of those trying to survive the processes of victimization let loose by modern institutions. The makers of commerical cinema cannot indulge in the luxury of such rejection, given the kind of audience they seek. (This tacit refusal to reject cultural values and embrace modernity uncritically also partially explains the enormous popularity of the Indian commercial cinema in parts of the erstwhile Soviet Block which had rich native traditions of art cinema patronized by the state.)

Second, the middle cinema is - some may say was - the true heir to pre-Independence popular cinema and its occasional, mostly unsuccessful attempts to be arty (by which I simply mean the scattered attempts by some movie-makers to turn cinema into a new artistic medium of cultural and personal self-expression in India). P.C. Barua, V. Shantaram, Debaki Bose, and Bimal Roy did not make art films, nor did they lay down the basis for future directors of art films. (Satyajit Ray has often claimed that he learnt little from these makers of what were popularly seen as clean, socially relevant, technically competent films; he had virtually to create his own medium and style.) Though the middle cinema is often viewed as a compromise between art and commerical cinema, it could be more appropriately seen as a further development of the style that once catered to the middle-class culture of the 1930s and 1940s. The middle cinema has in fact a tradition to build upon, the tradition of the 'good popular cinema' of yesteryears.

Indeed, the middle cinema can claim to originate from an even wider cultural current - the current represented by a galaxy of well-crafted, less-than-great creative products, from the work of Ravi Verma to Premchand, Girish Chandra Ghose to Prithviraj Kapoor, from Marathi stage music to K.L. Saigal. Viewed thus, the middle cinema caters to that part of the middle-class consciousness which has during the last century and a half played a creative role in Indian society by sustaining a dialogue at the popular plane, however imperfect, between the traditional and the modern, the East and the West, the classical and the folk.

What we call popular cinema today is certainly popular but its links are now weakening with the pre-war popular cinema and the middle-class experiences that sustained that cinema. Popular cinema now (for the sake of clarity I shall stick to the term commercial cinema) has more links with the growing mass culture in India. However, though these links are getting stronger every day, they do not monopolize commercial cinema; nor are they likely to do so in the near future. So do distinctive ways of telling a story, the styles of acting, and the set-piece interactions of stereotypes. Above all survives a structure of myths that has proved remarkably resilient to all demands for change.

Third, commercial cinema has to take an instrumental view of cultural traditions and worldviews and present them theatrically and spectacularly. To do so, it has to generalize the specific problems of its different audiences and then exteriorize the psychological components of these problems. To this extent such cinema is anti-psychological: it presents conflicts as if they were conflicts among social types or products of a unique conjunction of external events. This point is further explored in Ashis Nandy, 'The Popular Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles,' India International Centre Quarterly, 1981, 9, pp. 89-96; and The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New Delhi: Viking and Penguin, 1989), Ch. 1.

Thus, for instance, the grandiloquent stylization of the Muslim aristocratic traditions of north India, Goan Christian simplicity and love of a good life, Rajput valour, Bengali romanticism; they are all essential to the basic style of the commercial cinema. Thus also the dependence on stereotypical 'external' events or situations to sustain its story-line. Together they allow commercial cinema to 'spectacularize' and de-psychologize everything it touches - violence, dance, music, death, dress and love - and subject every sentiment and value to the judgment of the market. On commercial film as a spectacle in Roland Barthe's sense of the term, see the above cited article, 'The Popular Hindi Film.'

I sometimes suspect that this double-edged 'sensitivity' to culture is one of the few valid grounds for a social criticism of popular movies, not the violence and sex they depict nor what urbane critics say about their irrationality, crudity and use of stereotypes. In fact, the lack of realism and the dream-like quality - the 'cultural dream work,' one may call it - is deployed to deal with the concerns of low-brow viewers, concerns which most art films and middle cinema do not touch upon. The basic principles of commercial cinema derive from the needs of Indians caught in the hinges of social change who are trying to understand their predicament in terms of cultural categories known to them. The strength of the commercial cinema lies in its ability to tap the fears, anxieties and felt pressures towards deculturation and even depersonalization that plague a growing number of Indians who do not find the normative framework of the established urban middle-class culture adequate for their needs and yet have been pushed to adopt it in everyday life.

There can, of course, be political and aesthetic criticism of films catering to the mass culture. But it is possible that public lamentation about the alleged aesthetic and moral failure of the commercial film only reinforces its appeal for its audience which is unconcerned about the aesthetic and the ethics, the absurdity of 'immorality,' because it has the secret code by which to decipher the film's latent social message in the context of its life-world. It is actually willing to read such lamentations as final and satisfactory proof of the commercial film's defiance of culturally alien aspects of middle-class morality.

Fourth, there are differences in the way art films and commercial films, so to speak, see themselves and see each other. The main difference is that for the art film there is a clear artistic break between it and commercial films; for the commercial film there is only a commercial break. The partisans of art films see themselves as champions of a proper medium of individual and cultural self-expression; to them, commercial films are technically competent, high-paying financial ventures with no artistic legitimacy or social relevance. When the votaries of art cinema grant social relevance to the commercial film, they do so in negative terms, seeing the commercial cinema only as an index of social pathology.

To the partisans of commercial films, on the other hand, art films constitute an artistic continuum with the commercial cinema. They hold that the art-film maker is usually careless about the producer's money and can therefore afford to indulge in useless, baroque detailing as a private ego trip at public expense. The applause the art-film maker receives is primarily the work of pedantic film critics pretending to be entertained when they are actually bored to tears. Such art films are distinguished mainly by their cultural inability to gauge public sentiment and their ability to fail at the box office. The situation is actually more complicated. Like Hindu nationalists who constantly speak of themselves as representatives of Hindu sentiments but have never managed to get more than one-fifth of the Hindu vote, commercial filmmakers are not great prognosticators of the public taste. As already mentioned, according to informal trade estimates, in India 80 percent of all commercial films fail at the box office; another 15 percent barely recover their costs. Less than 5 percent are hits. Obviously, there is no one-to-one relationship between popular taste and commercial cinema. To get an idea of what popular taste may be reading into commercial cinema, see Nandy, 'The Popular Hind Film.' There is also the fact that many famous and commercially thriving film producers have, at some stage of life, approached distinguished directors of art cinema, such as Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, to make films for them.

The two kinds of film-makers also regard censorship differently. Commercial film-makers dislike censorship for the same reasons that businessmen hate social controls on business. They are out to sell their wares to the public and they feel that censorship, reflecting middle-class prudery, interferes with entrepreneurial freedom. Like other sections of the corporate world, they are convinced that what is good for the commercial film is also good for India. However, there is in them a deeper acceptance of censorship, as is evident from their frequent attempts to justify their films by pointing out how standard family values and politically correct public norms are upheld in them and by their spirited denial that their films include pornographic elements and anti-women attitudes of that they promote consumerism and violent vigilantism. Commercial film-makers never argue openly for great freedom to express eroticism or realistic violence or political dissent. They only argue that they are even more conventional in these respects than many others (such as the makers of low-brow Hollywood films that get past the Indian censors).

Art-film makers, in closer touch with the haute bourgeoisie, take a different line. They feel that their work need not be censored, for all art films by definition have mature and responsible viewpoints, unlike the commercial films which are (by definition again) infantile, irresponsible and deserving of censorship. True, art-film makes would like the censorship not to be too prudish or anti-political. But, on the whole, they consider the makers and consumers of commerical films to be eminently educable in matters of public morality and they believe censorship to be an instrument of discipline and socialization. The partisans of art cinema do not deny that they appeal of the commerical cinema lies precisely in its 'immaturity' and 'childishness'; they merely deny that immaturity can be defiance and regression rebellion, for they equate the child with the primitive waiting to be civilized and educated. The champions of the art film cannot afford to keep a space in the public realm for the undersocialized self of the viewer that registers, however imperfectly or crudely, the political presence of Indians at the margins of modern India.

[This essay was extracted from 'An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema' by Ashis Nandy and originally published in The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 202-207.]

Under the Skin of the City

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's 'Under the Skin of the City' animates an essential question of political filmmaking: how to balance fidelity to social reality with the often more compelling and convincing dictates of dramatic fiction. In the opening scene of the film Tuba, a late-middle-aged woman, stares with bewilderment into the lens of a documentary crew's camera and is unable to answer their questions about an upcoming election. She and her fellow gray-haired, shawl-covered factory workers are too involved in the problems of their everyday lives to be concerned. She says that she hopes the politicians will address these issues. Her coworkers' voices join hers, creating a cacophony that seems to chase the image away as the screen fades to black. We continue to hear their voices while the opening titles roll. When the image returns, it is in the midst of a fictional world, or at least a world where the camera does not acknowledge its own presence.

The film chronicles the lives of Tuba (Golab Adineh) and her family, each of whom rather schematically represents a different economic and political position in Iranian society. Tuba's husband Mahmoud (Mohsen Ghazi Moradi) is a dissolute, ineffectual, politically jaded man. Injured in a student protest years ago, he is disabled and unable to work, leaving his financial and parental obligations to his wife. Abbas (Mohammad Reza Foroutan), the eldest son, does odd jobs and deliveries that allow him to move between Tehran's legitimate and underground business worlds. On the periphery of both, he dreams of getting a visa so that he can go to Japan for a while and earn some real money that will lift himself and his family out of their poverty. Abbas's brother Ali (Ebraheem Sheibani) is a student who has become involved in an anti-government student group. He no longer attends class regularly, devoting all of his time to debate and secret meetings. An elder daughter Hamideh (Homeira Riazi) has been married off to a brutal husband, whose family, allows him to regularly abuse her. The youngest, Mahboubeh (Baran Kowsari), is a schoolgirl, who talks about pop music with her best friend and next-door neighbor, Masoumeh (Mahraveh Sharifi-Nia).

The plot turns on Abbas's desire to leave Iran. He and his father have schemed behind Tuba's back to sell their house, the family's only valuable asset, in order to get the money for a fake passport and visa. Tuba is violently opposed to this plan, but Abbas is convinced that he can buy her four houses if he gets the chance to work abroad. As Abbas travels through the city running errands for his employer and making plans to get the visa, he encounters opposing opinions about his trip. A young friend who had worked in Japan for a few months before being deported as an illegal alien speaks of the country as a promised land. He practices his Japanese by wooing a poster of a Japanese flight attendant, much to Abbas' amusement and fascination. An older man who runs an architecture firm chastises Abbas, complaining about the brain drain caused by low Iranian wages, and asking Abbas if he has no feeling for his country. The impact of the Iranian government on the flight of intellectuals and professionals is notably missing from the scene and the discussion. Abbas stubbornly sticks to his plan and leads the family into ruin. When the people who promised Abbas a visa disappear with his money, the house is lost. Abbas makes a last desperate, futile attempt to earn the money back, and the film ends in tragedy.

The majority of screen time is spent on Abbas's exploits, but Tuba is at the core of the film. Although she is the force that holds the family together, and the main wage earner, she cannot stop her husband and son from selling the house. For all her hard work in sustaining the family, she has no legal or social standing inside or outside of it. Through her study of Tuba and her two daughters Mahboubeh and Hamideh, writer-director Bani-Etemad reveals their powerlessness and the compromised position of women in Iran. After a particularly cruel beating, Hamideh returns home, but is told immediately that she must go back to her husband, even though everyone in the family acknowledges that she is being mistreated. Masoumeh runs away after her drug-addicted brother beats her for going to a concert with Mahboubeh. After searching in vain for her friend for several weeks, Mahboubeh finally discovers that Masoumeh has become a prostitute who works in a park along with many other young runaways. We learn of this transformation through an accumulation of subtle details - a little too much eye shadow and cracked purple nail polish.

More interesting than the larger melodramatic situations in 'Under the Skin of the City' are Bani-Etemad's close observations that reveal how life can be bearable under a repressive government and in seemingly intolerable circumstances. Before Hamideh is returned to her husband, Tuba has a conversation with her daughter's mother-in-law. The two older women discuss the situation as they hang their laundry in a windy backyard. Avoiding direct confrontation, or accusations, Tuba cajoles and prods the other woman into saying that she will try to keep her son's behavior in check. Tuba's position forces her to work behind the scenes and through networks of other women. Early in the film, on payday, Abbas decides to take the family out for pizza. Seeing an Iranian family at a fast-food Pizza Hut-like restaurant is surprising to Western eyes, which are veiled by assumptions about Iranian isolation. Through Abbas's connections they get four pies for the price of three, but Tuba is still embarrassed by the extravagance of eating at this 'fancy restaurant.' The next day in the factory lunchroom, she shares the leftovers with her fellow workers, out of generosity, but also to keep her support network intact.

Through Abbas's dreams of wealth and his pursuit of a woman he can afford to marry only if he is able to work abroad, the film makes palpable its characters' longings and unfulfilled hopes, hampered by poverty and social and religious conventions. Ali's energetic political activity contrasts with his father's apathy and defeat, while Tuba's practicality stands out against Mahboubeh's passionate outrage. These juxtapositions and the sense of broken dreams paint a picture of a country where it is difficult to have faith in rhetoric and principles, and where optimism and despair exist side by side.

At the end of the film, when everything has fallen apart, Tuba addresses another film crew and pointedly asks about the purpose of making films when people are suffering and the films make no difference in their lives. Bani-Etemad seems divided on the question. An established filmmaker, having made documentary and fiction features, her film is passionately engaged with the politics of Iran, but it also betrays an uncertainty as to how such issues should be addressed on film. The self-reflexive opening and closing sequences of the film directly reference the mixed style of many recent Iranian films. But Tuba's annoyance and despair in these scenes betrays Bani-Etemad's ambivalent feelings towards this style and the movie craze in Iran - and perhaps about the political efficacy of cinema itself.

[This review was written by Rahul Hamid and was originally published in Cineaste (Fall 2003), pp. 50-51. 'Under the Skin of the City' was produced by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Jahangir Kowsari and was directed by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, who also wrote the screenplay along with Farid Mestafavi. The film features cinematography by Hassein Jafarian, editing by Mastafa Kherghehpoush, production design by Omid Mohit, sound recording by Asghar Shahverdi, and sound design by Mohammad Reza Delpak. The second video clip above features Bani-Etemad speaking about her 2002 documentary 'Our Times.']

Apolitical Alienation in 'The Passenger'

Recently re-released in North America and Europe, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 film 'The Passenger' (also known as 'Professione: Reporter') represents a crystallization of the subjectivist themes and attitudes that characterize much of his previous work. Instead of portraying the alienation of the times dialectically, against the background of social, economic and political interconnections, the film presented a static depiction of stylized despair - angst packaged for popular consumption. At another time in history such an approach could have been easily dismissed, but at the time of its release the treatment of alienation as a purely subjective phenomenon carried an extraordinary credibility with contemporary film audiences.

The narrative begins with David Locke (played by Jack Nicholson), a British correspondent, traveling by jeep through the streets of an oppressively hot, North African village. Locke appears bleached out, confused and in search of something or someone. He tries to make contact with the natives, but they respond indignantly either by walking away from him or gesturing for a cigarette and then refusing to talk. His frustration appears to be mounting when he mysteriously finds an English-speaking guide who agrees to lead him to a clandestine group of guerrillas. But the guide is soon frightened off by a passing patrol of soldiers and Locke disconcertedly returns to the jeep alone. The jeep gets stuck in the desert sand; Locke gets out and kicks the tires and hollers what appears to be his first coherent insight into his thoughts and feelings, 'All right, I don't care!'

 

The motif of Locke's alienation and personal suffering slowly begins to come into focus, but not before he dejectedly wanders back to his hotel and finds that a recent acquaintance, David Robertson, has died of a heart attack in his bed. Locke seizes the moment and begins an act of self-transformation. He decides to kill himself metaphorically by assuming David Robertson's identity. Locke switches the pictures of their respective passports and puts on Robertson's clothes. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, David Locke is deceased. Using Robertson's air ticket, which appears to be made out for most of the major capitals of Europe, and a date book filled with mysterious appointments, Locke begins a journey that is as whimsical as the fatalism that seems to have motivated it. He arrives in London first to check out a locker with a key he had discovered among Robertson's possessions. He finds a briefcase filled with diagrams of guns, but has no clue as to their meaning. Soon thereafter, Locke is approached by two men who think he is Robertson; they reveal themselves as agents of a guerrilla force fighting somewhere in North Africa. Locke hands the gun diagrams over to them, finding himself in the role of a political gunrunner inadvertently committed to the cause of national liberation.

Locke then flies from London to Munich to Barcelona in an effort to keep up with Robertson's 'appointments.' It is in Barcelona where he coincidentally meets The Girl (played by Maria Schneider). We learn little about her except that she is a student of architecture who suddenly abandons whatever plans she has in order to join Locke. He persuades her to help him escape from his former wife and director-friend who frantically searching Barcelona for 'Robertson' because they believe he was the last person to have seen David Locke alive. The Girl complies readily, neither protesting nor explaining her decision.

They travel through Spain together to Robertson's various 'appointed' destinations, only to find that time after time there's no one to meet them. Locke knows that everyone is catching up with him - his wife, his director, the police and the past identity from which he is trying to escape. He keeps on, resigning himself to his ill-fated future while doing nothing to alter the predictable course of upcoming events. Locke and The Girl finally end up in a small, dismal, hotel; the fantasy seems to have played itself out. He tells The Girl to leave him, and in her absence he is killed by agents of the established colonial government that David Robertson had opposed by shipping guns to the local guerrillas. The Girl returns long enough to identify the body of David Robertson. Locke's former wife appears on the scene only to claim that she has never seen the man before. Thus, David Locke dies as meaninglessly as he lived, and the film ends without any sort of hope that could be translated into political terms.

Antonioni's refusal or inability to portray anxiety and insecurity as products of history leads him throughout the film to utilize devices that clearly fail to legitimize alienation as part of the human condition. He uses flashbacks, for instance, in order to lend some depth to the personality and character of David Locke. While the flashbacks do lend coherency to the initially disjointed images of the film,they never provide us with adequate insight into the psycho-social dynamics behind Locke's life or the milieu of which he is a product. They serve as little more than simplified connections that allow us to follow the story.

The dialogue throughout the film is banalized by the weight of the existential malady it so strongly tries to project. At one point in a hotel room, for instance, Locke reveals to The Girl the depth of his angst through a story he tells about a blind man. The blind man, it seems, regained his sight at the age of forty, only to see how poor and filthy the world actually was. When he had been blind, he had been able to cross the road with a stick, now that he had his sight, he was afraid to leave his house. He finally killed himself. In another scene, Locke is sitting in a Barcelona park where he meets an old man. The old man looks at the children who are playing nearby and tells Locke that the ninos are so sad because everything for them will simply be a replay of history, and isn't it unfortunate that they will have to grow up and relive the oft-repeated tragedies of the past. Dialogue of this sort strains too hard to fit comfortably within the contours of the film's philosophical message and ends up hollow and barren of any concreteness, reduced to nothing more than alienating and alienated verbiage.

The characterizations follow suit. Although some critics have suggested that Locke is a man who years to walk amidst the risks and dangers of life, such a suggestion presupposes a quest to live, regardless of how that quest may translate itself. There is nothing Locke's character to indicate that for him living is anything more than what Sartre called 'a senseless passion.' Lock appears to be the paradigm of a single, undiluted message - make an end with things as they are, to end it quickly, and in this case to wait for the moment of final release, the liberating act of uncontested death. As The Girl, Schneider seems miscast, projecting little or no feeling at all for the part. The character's devotion to Locke appears fatuous and unrealistic and so she fails to provide any sort of ideological or explanatory counterweight to Locke's development. While she does query Locke about his immediate circumstances, she never attempts to question the ethical, political or philosophical basis of his action. She doesn't appear to care either.

Whatever element of revolt is present in the chief characters is vitiated by formless despair and evasive, non-militant individualism. Locke and The Girl are one-dimensional participants on the world stage. Their horizons are limited by their immersion in the moment, a moment divorced from both history and authentic rebellion. This rebellion remains a purely private affair and therefore it exists innocuously in the face of brutalizing social reality - it has no lasting consequences. There is never the choices they make, or whether they have attempted to understand the nature of the alternatives with which they were faced - they seem empty of any content.

Nevertheless, some critics have claimed that there is an element of rebellion in the film. They are right, but it is more poetic than practical. Herbert Marcuse rightly commented on the nature of such 'rebellion' - 'It is divorced from reality inasmuch as it creates a world of beautiful illusion, of poetic justice, of artistic harmony and order which reconciles the irreconcilable, justifies the unjustifiable.' In other words, it doesn't contain the truly negating power of political art. Thus, although throughout 'The Passenger' one encounters a strategy of defeatism and failure, most of the important scenes are presented against stunning visual imagery and color. Against the despair of David Locke we have incredibly beautiful shots of the desert; against the hollowness of personal resignation in the face of a world waiting to be transformed we have the colorful street life of Barcelona and the stark, alabaster villages of North Africa. The sense of alienation as a primary force in the film blends into a brilliant montage of color, imagery and style. Style, in successfully subordinating the message of 'eternalized despair' to its own laws of beauty.

But in the end it is Antonioni's perspective on alienation that rakes across the viewer's intellectual and political sensibilities. this perspective determines in the final analysis the narration, distinguishes the important from the trivial, and gives shape to both the episodic and the superficial aspects of the film. All this adds up to a film narrative that is far from new - people are alone facing the abyss that overwhelms their desire to live. Such a theme may seem shopworn to some, but the fact is that people are in trouble, and the trouble is ominous; such a theme should be seen as neither shocking nor foolish. But the real questions that become important in such a film are the subordinate ones - How is their trouble to be explained and described? What should people do about it? These are the questions that Antonioni not only fails to answer properly, but he falls back upon a sloppy existentialism that weds people to the politics of despair.

To simply depict the alienation of the contemporary West, without explaining its social and historical roots, represents a political methodology that seems to fly in the face of Antonioni's recognition of the need for change. He utterly fails to go beyond the mere apprehension or depiction of angst. Instead of placing it critically in the system of relationships  within which it exists, he isolates it and reduces it to an ontological fact. By defining his characters as ahistorical and asocial, Antonioni has deprived them of their right to participate in their own history. David Locke and The Girl live in a social and political vacuum punctuated only by the immediacy of the moment. Authentic engagement in 'The Passenger' is never portrayed. the film is filled with the motif of flight - flight from family, a society, and a general emptiness which is felt to be catastrophic. Between the personalized anguish and boredom, we are given glimpses of the catastrophes of our times - guerrilla war, bloodshed, torture, fear and cruelty. The world appears to be dark, and for Antonioni's characters there seems to be only one solution - to retreat into one's own psychic wilderness.

Antonioni's 'The Passenger' shares a common theme with the works of Camus, Beckett and the young Sartre, who also set out to divorce man from society and to portray him as the mysterious agent of 'timeless despair.' Such a position clearly reveals Antonioni's political roots and places him squarely in the existential camp. People are certainly more than the mere mask of their social character, but the tendency to turn them into formless actors in a play of cosmic mysteries is to blot out their social and individual identities while leading them into a world of nothingness. Such a world has never existed, except in the minds of those who erect their fortunes on the foundations of an oppressive status quo.

There is one scene in 'The Passenger' in which the 'real' Locke is on assignment, interviewing a Western-educated, African witch doctor. Locke queries the man with a series of humiliating questions until the witch doctor points out to Locke that his questions expose a great deal more about himself than any answers might expose about the witch doctor. Antonioni's film may be judged the same way. If we are to hold Antonioni responsible for making films about his time, then it follows that he cannot be exempt from political judgment concerning the consequences of his work. Antonioni has not only failed in this film to retrieve people from the 'culture of silence,' he has also reneged on his ethical responsibilities be perpetuating the mystification of an oppressive order. The themes of the 'The Passenger' are quite clear - life is absurd, we are all victims, communication is worthless, everyone is alone, etc. In a necrophilic manner, Antonioni has transformed isolation, despair and alienation into eternal and incontrovertible verities.

Man is a social being and represents more than the eternal cycle of birth, pain, anguish and death. Antonioni's rejection of man's ability to transcend the limitations of his time is the bulwark of political ignorance, not progressive change. Herein lies the failure of both Antonioni and 'The Passenger.'

[This is a slightly edited version of an essay written by Henry Giroux that was originally published in the journal Cineaste, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 1975, pp. 37-39. Giroux has subsequently written widely on media and education, including a 2001 book on Disney entitled The Mouse That Roared, and he has explored similar themes of alienation in a recent book on Youth in a Suspect Society (2009).]