Filming the Story of Amílcar Cabral’s Revolution / An interview with Flora Gomes

_{^{Amílcar Cabral in 1971. (Lehtikuva / AFP via Getty Images)}}

Interview by Michael Galant

Half a century ago, Amílcar Cabral asked a group of young filmmakers from Guinea-Bissau to bring his country’s independence struggle to the big screen. They’re now completing the project as a tribute to one of Africa’s greatest revolutionaries.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

In the early 1970s, the African liberation leader Amílcar Cabral entrusted a group of four young filmmakers from Guinea-Bissau with documenting the country’s war for independence against the fascist regime in Portugal. Cabral’s movement made a vital contribution to the struggle against the Portuguese dictatorship that culminated in the Carnation Revolution fifty years ago today.

Before they could complete the film, however, Cabral was assassinated. Flora Gomes and Sana Na N’Hada are the last two surviving members of the original group, and now both legendary filmmakers in their own right. They are now raising funds this week through Kickstarter to finally finish their documentary and fulfill their promise to the late revolutionary.

Michael Galant of the Progressive International (PI), with the facilitation of writer and researcher Ricci Shryock, spoke to Gomes about this latest project, his experience in the Bissau-Guinean liberation struggle, and the relationship between cinema and revolution. This interview is republished from the Internationalist, the PI’s newsletter.

MICHAEL GALANT

Let’s start at the beginning. Your path to filmmaking speaks a great deal to the importance that revolutionary movements placed on cinema at the time. How did you become a filmmaker?

FLORA GOMES

I was a high school student at the Pilot School [a school founded by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) for educating party members and their children]. Amílcar Cabral sent us to Cuba with a group of young people to study. Everyone had their own destiny, but it was Cabral who said: “You are going to do medicine.” “You are going to do agronomy.”

And among us, he chose four people who were going to make films. He told us clearly: “You are going to study film. You’re going to study cinema here in Cuba so that you can record the proclamation of independence. I want it to be a child of my country to record this historic act, the proclamation of the state.” That was 1967 that I went to Cuba. I returned in 1972. [The proclamation would take place in 1973.]

MICHAEL GALANT

So it was Cabral himself who tasked you with documenting the struggle for independence. What can you tell us about this time — about the liberation war, Cabral, and what came next?

FLORA GOMES

Yes, it was Cabral, but Cabral didn’t want us to talk about him. He always spoke in the plural. He always said: “we,” “our people,” “our hospital,” “our school.” That means that yes, he was there, but he was carried along by the larger dynamic. For him, it was about the liberation struggle.

I imagine that when he asked us to do this, it was to see and to record the sacrifice of the people of Guinea-Bissau, and the people of Cape Verde. That’s what he asked us to record. Because the struggle was very violent. Like any liberation struggle, it had its very cruel side.

In the liberated zone, we saw children who were in school, on the school bus, who had to flee the planes that came to bomb. There were nurses who were at their jobs, in field hospitals, who were there providing care, but they always had to be ready to flee. And that’s what Cabral wanted to show. He wanted to show the world that it was us, the Bissau-Guineans and Cape Verdeans, who liberated our country.

It’s true that we had the support of the Cubans at the time, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and other friendly countries, not to mention the Republic of Guinea-Conakry, Senegal, Gambia, Mali — all these countries, they gave us what they had. Cabral wanted us to remember that. He always said: we must never forget the people who supported us during this war.

I think that, generally speaking, that’s what Cabral wanted. If we speak of Cabral himself, it’s because he was the leader — he was the man who led an innovation in the way of thinking of a generation, a generation to which I belong.

MICHAEL GALANT

And after the war?

FLORA GOMES

As you know, we lost Cabral in that march for liberation. We lost Cabral on that journey. What does that mean? It means that we lost Cabral just when we needed him most, because it was almost the date of the unilateral proclamation of statehood.

They assassinated Cabral only a week or a few days after he had sent a message to the fighters, to the people of the world who were helping us in this struggle, saying that we would soon be part of the free states of Africa. He was assassinated on January 20, 1973. And then, on September 24 of the same year, there was that historic meeting of the Assembly that proclaimed the State of Guinea-Bissau.

It has to be said that we suffered with the loss of Cabral, because no one else could replace him. He was unique. It hurt us so much that he had died, after independence. And a few years later, in the 1980s, there was the coup d’état in Guinea-Bissau, led by Nino [João Bernardo “Nino” Vieira].

MICHAEL GALANT

Since that time, you and Sana have both become something of legends of African cinema, and cinema in general, with works that often cover the anti-colonial struggle — including your latest film, for which you’re now raising funds. Here’s the big question: How do you conceive of the relationship between cinema and politics? How do you approach making films with a goal of advancing the struggle?

FLORA GOMES

It’s true that to make movies, you need the means to do it. Cinema is very expensive. But we don’t want money just to make a film. We want money to tell a specific story.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that we have the experience today to tell the story we want to tell. But I don’t think I’m really a film legend. I just consider myself someone who wants to paint a picture but doesn’t have a brush. We’re not interested in money. What interests us is the story we’re going to tell — how the painting will come out, how it will be understood.

Personally, I’m a product of the struggle and of politics. Everything I say today is what I’ve lived. Personally, politics has shaped me. Life is politics. You can’t separate these two things. Cinema is important as the images are freer, and you can interpret them as you want to interpret them.

MICHAEL GALANT

Why now? Looking at Guinea-Bissau, at West Africa, and indeed at the entire world, what do we have to learn from this film today?

FLORA GOMES

I think this film has a simple aim, which is to pay tribute to the people, starting with Cabral and the people with whom Cabral created an unforgettable story in Africa. It’s very important that we hold on to this story today — that we talk about it — because there’s so much misinformation circulating through our media, through social networks.

I think that generations of Africans, young people, need to understand that this country didn’t have the luck to achieve independence like the Senegalese did, without a [violent] struggle. We had a struggle that lasted eleven years, in which we lost friends, families, colleagues, acquaintances. And we can’t let that memory disappear. Cabral will soon be a hundred years old, in September. We wanted to record something that would remain in the memory of the youth of Africa — and (why not) the youth of the world.

As far as lessons to be learned, I think there’s one thing that’s obvious, which is that Cabral imagined a new role for women in the struggle. That’s something nobody was talking about. We talk about the role of women today, but where does this story come from?

The possibility of reserving women a particular place in a government or in an organization — Cabral had this idea. Parity. Cabral had done this in the 1960s. There was an organization of parties — he said: “There must, obligatorily, be a minimum number of women on each committee.”

Another thing that Cabral taught, in my opinion, is to not be afraid. Because the people lived with a lot of fears — of marabouts, spirits, things like that. Cabral always believed that man should be free in his thinking.

He wasn’t afraid that someone might shoot him — of the Kalashnikov, of the army. He taught you to think with your own head and walk with your own feet. That’s Cabral’s idea. You shouldn’t wait for people to tell you what you are going to do. That’s how we came to proclaim independence as we did.

As far as the struggle against colonialism was concerned, Cabral was very clear about the word “colonialism.” He said: “We are fighting against colonialism, against Portuguese fascism. We are not fighting against the Portuguese people.” And I think it was very intelligent of him to mark this difference, to say: “We are fighting because the Portuguese people are also suffering like us.”

It was not just the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean people who were going to do the fighting. He said that the struggle against fascism was the struggle of the Portuguese people. We were fighting colonialism. In this struggle, we found ourselves alongside the Portuguese people.

It was very important not to conflate the Portuguese with the colonial system. It was also important not to think that we were fighting the Portuguese because they were white. He said that we were also fighting against black Africans who wanted to replace the white colonizers.

These are things that I think are worthwhile for young people to take up and cultivate. Cabral cultivated a practice of taking every day, of respecting, of appreciating culture. He was very deep, Cabral. He was like any other human being — he liked music, he liked being with women, and all that. He was not a god. But I’m completely into his thoughts. That’s why I invite all young people to read and listen to Cabral.

_{Flora Gomes is a filmmaker from Guinea-Bissau whose work has received multiple awards.}

_{Michael Galant helps lead the Economics and Trade Subcommittee of the DSA International Committee, and is a member of the Progressive International’s secretariat.}

A Brief and Unflattering History of General Motors on Film / by Eileen Jones

_{^{Interior shot of a General Motors factory from American Factory. (Netflix, 2019)}}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

_{With the UAW’s historic strike wins this week, we look back at the history of US auto manufacturing in movies — with a focus on films that show how the auto industry has tried to shaft workers over the decades.}

According to a Bernie Sanders bulletin, the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike is ending with a tentative agreement reached that Sanders sums up like this:

_{Workers won a 25% wage increase over the life of the agreement, temporary workers will get raises of over 150%, there are increased retirement benefits, and they won the right to strike over future plant closures.}

_{In other words, in addition to wage and benefit hikes, they sent a message to the Big Three that they can’t keep closing plants and hurting our communities without consequences.}

On such an occasion, it seems right to mark it with a “why we strike” commemoration, looking at films that show us the typical ways the automotive industry has tried to shaft the worker over the decades.

General Motors (GM), for example, has an unusually large profile in film history, and not at all a flattering one. “The largest automotive company in the world,” as it has so often billed itself in its long, hubristic history, seems to generate resentful portrayals in the entertainment industry.

Even an innocuous light comedy like The Solid Gold Cadillac was inspired — according to coauthor Howard Teichmann, who was working with the legendary wit George S. Kaufman — by a chance remark he overheard that he found hilarious: “Poor General Motors!”

_{^{Paul Douglas and Judy Holliday in The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956) / Columbia Pictures}}

Because who could possibly pity 1950s GM, which bestrode the narrow world like a colossus?

In the hit play of 1953, which became a successful 1956 Judy Holliday film, Teichmann wound up renaming the ubiquitous, filthy rich, and highly corrupt corporation something even more generic — International Products (IP). The plot is about a nice, honest woman who owns ten shares of IP stock and begins attending shareholders’ meetings, soon disrupting the whole company by asking a series of commonsense questions of the board of directors, starting with, “What do you do to earn your salary?” When she gets the vague and highly unimpressive answer, she offers the indignant comment, “Talk about overpaid!”

She winds up leading a small shareholders’ revolt against the board, which is a good illustration of the mutinous spirit that GM inspires in film.

The rest of the films are documentaries. Most famous of them is Michael Moore’s film debut, the still-bracing Roger & Me (1989). Moore centers the film on his own hometown of Flint, Michigan, a GM company town that boomed during the postwar era and became one of many Rust Belt ruins when the bust came. GM relocated its Flint factory to the Texas-Mexico border, chasing cheap labor. It was a common practice in the “race to the bottom” that characterized American corporate practices of the 1970s and ’80s.

_{^{Still from Roger & Me. (Warner Bros.)}}

Moore structured his documentary around his quest to have a meeting with GM chairman of the board Roger Smith and plead the case of Flint, Michigan as a representative GM town. It was very Solid Gold Cadillac of him, proceeding from the assumption that of course an Ordinary Joe could stand up in person to the chairman of the board of an immense corporation and bring him to reason. Wearing his ubiquitous winter parka and trucker hat, the heavyset, shaggy-haired Moore would go schlumping up the steps of the glass-and-steel edifice of corporate headquarters as if he fully expected to be ushered into Smith’s presence by blazer-wearing lobby guards. Cameras would roll on the scenes of him being turned away repeatedly by suited security guards there to make sure that highly paid executives never actually had to deal with lowly members of the public.

Moore became famous overnight with this film because he seemed to have found a formula for representing bleak realities in a bracing fashion, capturing the cruelty and corruption of insanely overpaid executives who feel they owe nothing to the workers who make their profits for them, and the grim pleasure that can be taken in exposing their abuses and fighting them.

But other documentaries about GM tend to be so infuriating, and ultimately so depressing, that they’re quite hard to watch. If you want to see encapsulated the deliberate destruction of the American working class along with any practical hopes for a better future, you can just watch these films to see it play out.

The 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? lays out the way the combined forces of the auto industry, the oil industry, and the federal government set out to destroy the highly promising GM experimental model released in California — the EV1. Don’t look to see the EV1 on the road anywhere, because it exists no more outside of beautiful dreams. It seems it wasn’t enough to simply halt the manufacture of the small, beautifully sleek, ultramodern electric car — it wasn’t even enough to confiscate all the cars that were leased by people lucky enough to get ahold of one, many of whom begged to buy the cars or at least continue leasing them, and were threatened with legal action if they didn’t return their EV1s.

No, GM actually confiscated all the cars, sometimes with platoons of police holding back protesters, and destroyed them — had them crushed to bits of metal and plastic so that no trace of the lovely cars would remain to tantalize the public and make them wonder why they hadn’t been able to buy environmentally beneficial electric cars a long, long time ago. An accompanying disinformation campaign put out false consumer testimony claiming that people didn’t actually like or want electric cars like the EV1.

_{^{Still from Who Killed the Electric Car? (Sony Pictures Classics)}}

And the next big trend in order to boost profits for the auto and oil industries was to popularize Hummers, gigantic SUVs, and obscenely massive pickup trucks.

One lone EV1 survived somehow, and got donated to an automobile museum. “That’s number ninety-nine,” says the sales rep who worked at GM during the brief heyday of the EV1, tearing up when she recognized the wonderfully sporty little red car. “That one was Christine’s.”

All very melancholy, but nothing compared to the despair-inducing experiences of two HBO documentaries made by Stephen Bognar and Julia Reichert about the same factory in the Rust Belt town of Moraine, Ohio. The first is The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009), which brilliantly relies on footage shot by the workers themselves, who smuggled in cameras during the last days of work at the Moraine Assembly plant that was the employment mainstay of an entire community. If you want a blast of the canniness and gallows humor characteristic of workers at their best, you should watch it, painful as it is. There’s a wonderful scene when workers on the line mock the idiots in management who, having no idea how the cars were actually made, botched a final work order, bringing the line to a halt far sooner than intended.

But their grief makes the far greater impression, because it’s not just a workplace shutdown, which would be plenty bad enough. Lifelong friendships, community structures, a town’s prosperity, are all broken up with the closing of one GM plant.

In 2019, Bognar and Reichert returned to the abandoned factory to document its reopening when it was taken over by a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass Industry Group. American Factory, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s company Higher Ground Productions, and winner of the Best Documentary Academy Award, shows us how many of the workers who’d been unemployed or underemployed in the ten years since the GM plant had closed got hired back at crushingly reduced wages. People who’d lost their houses, lost everything, crept back and expressed gratitude for making eighteen dollars an hour at the same place where they’d once made twenty-nine.

“I had nothing, and I mean nothing,” said one former employee with sad dignity on the day of his return to the factory. “Now I’m just thankful I’ve got something.”

_{^{Still from American Factory. (Netflix)}}

American Factory is often compared to the fictional Ron Howard movie Gung Ho (1986), starring Michael Keaton, which is about a Japanese takeover of an American auto plant, mining comedy out of the culture clash. A lot of attention in the documentary is paid to the tensions between Chinese management and American workers. The language barrier is an enormous problem, but also allows each group to insult the other freely, with the Chinese managers particularly confident that no American will understand them when they complain, for example, about the Americans’ “fat fingers” that prevent them from doing the more dexterous jobs on the line.

The major complaints from the Chinese contingent concern the supposed slowness and laziness of the American worker, a particularly horrifying claim considering what we know of the grueling physical labor of life on the line. When a group of American workers are sent to China to observe the labor practices in a Fuyao plant, it’s chilling to hear the accounts of labor abuses that are accepted there, right under the huge painting of Mao. Women on the line talk about not seeing their children except on rare holidays, because they work such long daily hours and don’t get weekends off as a rule.

A Chinese manager says with quiet contempt that the American eight-hour day with weekends off is “pretty soft,” and an American manager — seemingly anxious to curry favor — agrees fervently with him that Americans need to toughen up and follow the Chinese model if they want to prosper again.

We see a ghastly neglect of safety standards at the Chinese factory. Workers crouch over a huge mound of broken glass discarded by the factory, having to pick through it without equipment or protective wear of any kind. “Look at the gloves they’re wearing,” exclaims one shocked American worker to another, of the ordinary cloth gloves the workers wear. “That glass will slice right through! That is fucked up.”

The Chinese labor union that factory members belong to, we’re informed, works hand in glove with factory management, with hardly any separation between them. It operates according to the same ideological stance as the factory bosses, with union reps arguing that the workers need to dedicate themselves entirely to the factory’s success, because if the factory fails they’re all out of work.

Here we get a look at how far we still have yet to fall in the United States in our international “race to the bottom.” The rights to weekends and eight-hour workdays and safety regulations, won by unions in brutal labor struggles that took generations, are all on the chopping block.

So let’s celebrate what seems to be a spectacular UAW win, and the American labor history that still has strength enough left in it to allow for these struggles and triumphs to occur.

_{Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck.}

How Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus Broke the Hollywood Blacklists / by Taylor Durrell

_{^{Woody Strode (L) and Kirk Douglas (R) in gladiatorial battle in a publicity still issued for the 1960 film Spartacus.(Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

May 1, 1946 was an unparalleled May Day for the Left in America. Recently discharged veterans joined with teachers, writers, artists, lawyers, and other workers to march triumphantly through Manhattan. “The number of paraders, as we counted them, was over 150,000, and when they packed Union Square, cheering left-wing and Communist leaders and speakers,” the Communist writer Howard Fast wrote in his memoir, Being Red, “one would have said that the future of the left in America was extremely bright and of course they would have been wrong.”

By May Day of 1948, the same Communists who were celebrated only two years earlier became the targets of violent reactionary crowds chanting “Kill a commie for Christ!” Fast was leading the Communist Party’s “culture block” made up of thousands of academics, artists, and writers who quickly found themselves in a street fight with anti-communist students from a nearby parochial school.

The second parade was a bad omen. With the advent of the Second Red Scare and Cold War, Communists soon became the national enemy, seen not as freedom-fighting progressives, as they had been by many on the broad left, but instead as anti-American authoritarians and dangerous subversives. Fast himself was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was imprisoned when he refused to name names.

Fast was blacklisted from the publishing industry. He was only one of a generation of artists who were purged from America’s mainstream, the blacklist ruining their careers, consigning them to obscurity and often poverty. Many books from that time still remain unpublished and screenplays unmade; cultural figures, once famous, have been largely erased from America’s history.

But within the unwavering terror of the McCarthyist period are stories of resistance. Fast’s experience in prison, for example, led him to write the novel Spartacus, which was later adapted into a screenplay by the Communist writer Dalton Trumbo. When the movie was screened in 1960, after a decade of remaining underground, two Communists’ names illuminated the beginning of the film, a giant middle finger to the reactionaries of the era. This is the story of Spartacus, or how Communists first broke through the blacklists.

“Today’s Prisons Will Be Tomorrow’s Victory”

Howard Fast is one of those forgotten figures in the spotty memory of America’s literary canon. He published his first novel at age eighteen, and spent several decades building his career in publishing, emerging as a popular novelist. He was also an active member of the Communist Party. Before being blacklisted, he was passionately involved with supporting Spanish Republican fighters; in 1945 he joined the executive board of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. The group was hardly subversive, bringing in donations from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Lehman, the wife of New York governor Herbert Lehman. But political currents shifted, and in 1946 Fast was issued a subpoena to appear before HUAC to give over the donor list.

Fast refused to name names, assured by lawyers that contempt of Congress wouldn’t result in any jail time. But later that same year he was subpoenaed again, this time for a book he’d written on the Yugoslav revolutionary, The Incredible Tito, and his future became uncertain. In 1947, he and ten others from the Refugee Committee were sentenced to prison.

Fast and his comrades had faith in their appeal, but there was little to be done for his reputation and career. “My new book, The American” — a portrait of John Atgeld, the progressive governor of Illinois — “was being trashed mercilessly,” Fast recalled. He was also now under constant surveillance. “My telephone was tapped. Featherbrained FBI agents were slipping into my apartment [during fundraisers] . . . and other agents were following me through the streets,” he remembered.

In 1949, New York schools were instructed to remove any copies of his historical-fiction book, Citizen Tom Paine, from their shelves. J. Edgar Hoover sent agents ordering New York Public Library librarians to destroy Fast’s books. The FBI blocked publishers from printing new works of Fast’s, even some he had written under the supposed anonymity of a pen name.

By 1950, anti-communism had spread, and Fast’s hopes for a reversal of his prison sentence were lost. Fast was booked in a district prison, an experience he recalled as distinctly dehumanizing:

There on long benches sat about a hundred men, black men and white men, all of them naked. They sat despondently, hunched over, heads bent, evoking pictures of the extermination camps of World War Two. . . . The dignity we had clung to so desperately was now taken from us.

He was put in a five-by-seven foot cell with a frightened eighteen year old who’d been in and out of prison since he was twelve and, according to Fast, had been raped by other prisoners over a hundred times. Fortunately for Fast, he was transferred to Mill Point, a minimum security prison in West Virginia.

To those outside the United States, Fast and his imprisoned comrades were martyrs. Rallies and fundraisers were held in support of the imprisoned as international solidarity poured in. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote the poem “To Howard Fast,” praising Fast’s writing about “black heroes, of captains and highways, of the poor and of the cities,” and lamenting the tyranny of the Second Red Scare, what Neruda called the “gestapo reborn.”

Fast’s imprisonment was a calamity for free speech, but there were also silver linings. He spent much of the end of his term with the Communist novelist Albert Maltz and found solace in his daily work building structures for the prison — his masterpiece was a functioning replica of the famous Manneken Pis statue. The warden of the prison was oddly kind, offering up a typewriter for Fast to write after his daily prison duties.

Fast, himself hoping to use the time to write, was unable to bring himself to commit any words to paper. Instead, he took to researching. He was particularly interested in a 1914 German movement founded by Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg that later merged with the Communist Party of Germany. The name of the group was the Spartacus Group. It was his experience in Mill Point, with all the anxieties and fears that being in prison often invokes, that inspired him to write his novel, Spartacus.

“I never regret the past,” he wrote, “and if my ordeal helped to write Spartacus, I think it was well worth it.” It was in prison, after all, where he “began more deeply than ever to comprehend the full agony and hopelessness of the underclass.” As Neruda wrote in his poem dedicated to Fast, “Today’s prisons will be tomorrow’s victory.”

After his months in prison, he was released into a world where the Second Red Scare was in full swing. “The country was as close to a police state as it had ever been,” he wrote in his 1996 introduction to Spartacus. “J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the FBI, took on the role of a petty dictator. The fear of Hoover and his file on thousands of liberals permeated the country.” In this environment, Fast began the journey of writing a manuscript chronicling Spartacus, the slave who was trained as a gladiator and led a fictionalized slave revolt in ancient Rome.

But with the writing of a book also comes the finding of a publisher. And publishers, in the case of blacklisted writers, were as accessible to them as yachts are to the poor — which is to say, not at all. Fast’s longtime publisher, Angus Cameron at Little, Brown and Company, loved Spartacus and agreed to publish it swiftly and with pride. But then Hoover sent a federal agent to Boston, where he met with the president of the publishing house and delivered direct instructions from Hoover to not publish another book by Fast. The publishing company abandoned the book, causing Cameron to resign in protest.

After several failed attempts at securing other mainstream publishers, Fast resorted to self-publishing. His name and notoriety were enough to spark interest even without a publisher. The book sold well enough. His family shipped forty thousand hardcover copies of the book out of their home.

It would be years before the book would be picked up by mainstream publishers. Eventually it would sell millions of copies and go through over a hundred editions in over fifty-six languages. It would also be turned into a famous film of the same name. But first, Fast and his collaborators would need to break the grip of anti-communism on Hollywood.

Time of the Toad

By 1947, Hollywood was increasingly divided into two polarizing factions: Communist Party members and their sympathizers, and anti-communists who were devoted to rooting them out of the industry. It was the reactionary Motion Picture Alliance that pushed the industry into these opposing camps, with scarcely any room remaining for neutrality.

Hollywood Communists were open in their opposition to antisemitism, fascism, racism, and labor exploitation, contributing under their real names to “dangerous” publications like People’s World, New Masses, and the Daily Worker. “They saw the danger — real danger — to the people in the industry posed by the labor practices of the period,” the liberal California lawyer Carey McWilliams, later editor at the Nation, said in an interview with Trumbo biographer Bruce Cook. “And they knew the Nazis were not playing make-believe.”

After HUAC subpoenaed Hollywood’s “unfriendly nineteen,” more than seven thousand people gathered for a rally at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium before the group’s departure to the capital. They made the most of their trip to Washington, holding rallies in Chicago and New York before arriving at the hearings. Of the original nineteen, the eleven individuals who refused to cooperate with the committee came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. (The eleventh was German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was living in the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany and then, after his hearing, fled the United States for East Germany.)

Among them was the group’s highest-paid screenwriter and also the committee’s most unfriendly witness: Dalton Trumbo. “[Y]our job,” Trumbo told chief investigator Robert E. Stripling after he instructed Trumbo to answer “Yes” or “No,” “is to ask questions and mine is to answer them. . . . I shall answer in my own words. Very many questions can be answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ only by a moron or a slave.” On his way out, he yelled, “This is the beginning of an American concentration camp!” That late October of 1947, the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt of Congress. All were sentenced to prison, Trumbo to a year.

HUAC and the 1947 Waldorf Agreement, the studio-executive pact that enforced the blacklists, devastated many in the entertainment industry. “People would be stunned at the suicides from the period, and incredible things that happened then,” McWilliams recalled. “The use of freedom,” Trumbo wrote in The Time of the Toad (1949), “the actual invocation of the Bill of Rights, is an exceedingly dangerous procedure.” Trumbo directed his moral outrage at not only the conservatives, but also the liberal collaborators with the anti-communist witch hunt, and those who sat by passively.

But far from completely purging the industry of Communists, the blacklists forced them into the shadows. The blacklists created a new market in Hollywood: the black market. Screenplays by blacklistees were sold under false names or under the names of other writers. While waiting for his appeal to go through, Trumbo made a modest living writing pulpy screenplays for the King brothers, a B-movie production house. Between the hearing in 1947 and his entrance into America’s penal system in 1950, Trumbo, under fake names, pumped out eighteen screenplays. “None,” he insisted, “was very good.”

The Ashland Federal Correctional Institute in Kentucky was, for Trumbo, similar to Fast’s experience at Mill Point — that is, fortunately uneventful. Trumbo was not completely on his own in prison. In fact he was only a short distance, twenty-four inches to be exact, from another Hollywood Ten member, John Howard Lawson. They were later joined by Adrian Scott.

Exhausted from the constant rallies and screenplays, Trumbo almost welcomed certain aspects of prison life. In prison he met moonshiners, bootleggers, and counterfeiters, many of whom were illiterate. He read and wrote letters for one moonshiner named Cecil, whose wife was caring for five sick children on her own, struggling to keep them warm and fed. Those eleven months in Ashland changed Trumbo in many ways. Once a night writer, he now only wrote in the day. Once unaffected by the sound of a whistle, he now stopped instantly to fall in line. But he never abandoned his principles.

After serving their time, John Wexley, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Ian Hunter, Dalton Trumbo, and many other blacklistees lived in exile in Mexico City, seeking work and refuge from the persistent harassment of the FBI. One day, the Canadian-born blacklisted screenwriter Hugo Butler dragged Dalton and Cleo Trumbo out to watch some bullfighting. One bullfight ended in an indulto, or pardoning of the bull, which is given after the crowd waves handkerchiefs in support of a bull’s showcase of bravery. The event inspired Trumbo’s film, The Brave One (1956), a drama following a boy and his bull. The film went on to win an Oscar under Trumbo’s pseudonym, Robert Rich. It was the first fracture in the wall that was the blacklists.

Press caught onto rumors that Trumbo was Robert Rich. Instead of confirming them, he exposed how extensive Hollywood’s black market was by pointing the press to other blacklisted writers who might have written it. By 1956, Trumbo was back in Hollywood and had mastered the art of the black market. He had numerous pseudonyms and writers volunteering their names to help them get into the industry. John Abbott, Sam Jackson, C. F. Demaine, and Peter Finch were just some of his alter egos. What he proved in his strategic elusiveness was that any screenplay could be written by a Communist using a fake name or a front writer. The blacklist was only as effective as the employers willing to enforce it — and the tide was turning.

“I’m Spartacus”

The first draft of the screenplay for Spartacus was written by Fast, but he wasn’t quick enough to finish the job in time. Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators, a movie with a similar theme, was on the way to production, and Kirk Douglas’s production company, Bryna Productions, which was producing Spartacus, needed to beat it to the screen. So Douglas turned to the fastest pen in the West, Dalton Trumbo — signed under the pseudonym Sam Jackson.

They quickly began filming, but the original director, Anthony Mann, butted heads with Douglas. Apparently forgetting that Douglas was not only the star of the film but also the boss, Mann got himself fired. Douglas replaced him with Stanley Kubrick, whom he referred to as a “cocky kid from the Bronx.” Many problems ensued throughout the filming of the movie. From the censors limiting any vaguely sexual or homosexual content to the bribing of Spain’s Franco government to use soldiers in a scene, the movie was a vast and complex undertaking.

It wasn’t clear at the time of filming whether Trumbo and Fast could be credited on screen. The 1950s were coming to an end, and it was unclear how effective the blacklists were at this point. The debate heated up when Mann spread the news that it was Trumbo, not Sam Jackson, who wrote the movie. Gossip columns picked up the news, and for the first time in a decade Trumbo’s cover was blown.

And then the January 19, 1960, edition off the New York Times was published, proclaiming on the cover that Trumbo would be credited as the screenwriter of Otto Preminger’s upcoming production Exodus. Hollywood was dipping its toes in the tides of the blacklists. Would there be a crackdown in response? If not, would that mean McCarthyism was over? Would audiences boycott the film, or celebrate it? Upon Spartacus’s release, theaters across the country displayed a giant middle finger to the anti-communist repression of the era. Audiences flocked to see a movie whose title screen displayed the names of two convicted Communist subversives, Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo.

Pickets ensued, but they were relatively reserved. A group called the Catholic War Veterans were the most vocal. (They had been, however, in full support of the English film that came out earlier that year called Conspiracy of Hearts, about Catholic nuns protecting Jewish children from Nazis. The screenplay was credited to Robert Presnell Jr, but was actually written by Dalton Trumbo.)

The blacklists were, for all intents and purposes, broken. In 1960, Kennedy was elected president, and shortly thereafter, he made a trip to a movie theater with his brother. With a number of films they could’ve seen, the Catholic brothers chose no other than Spartacus, crossing the Catholic War Veterans picket to deal a final death blow to the blacklists. When Kennedy exited the theater and was asked what he thought of the film, he responded simply: it was a good film.

“The terrible penalty of crucifixion has been set aside on the single condition that you identify the body or the living person of the slave called Spartacus,” a Roman soldier yells out in a famous concluding scene of Spartacus. Kirk Douglas rises, but is followed in unison with his two neighbors who yell “I’m Spartacus,” as a thousand other slaves rise behind them. Spartacus became a pseudonym for resistance, for liberty.

The story of Spartacus is also the story of the story of Spartacus. Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo were two of the thousands of Communists in the United States who struggled to survive through the Red Scare. It was a time when, as Trumbo put it, “devils persuad[ed] us that freedom is best defended by surrendering it altogether.”

_{Taylor Dorrell is a writer and photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. He’s a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, a reporter for the Columbus Free Press, and a freelance photographer.}

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City Will Please His Fans and Infuriate His Skeptics / by Eileen Jones

_{^{Scarlett Johansson as Midge Campbell in Asteroid City. (Focus Features, 2023)}}

_{Originally published in Jacobin on July 1, 2023}

Asteroid City dials up the “Wes Anderson” to 11, leaving an emotional void in its wake.

By this time, you’re either a diehard Wes Anderson fan or most definitely not. So presumably that’ll decide whether you see his new film Asteroid City. He’s become so extremely Wes Andersonian over the years that people who merely liked his early films like Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) have fallen away gasping for relief, unable to handle the increasing airlessness of his authorship.

Asteroid City, ironically, is about the vastness of space and the grand mysteries of life and death, involving the attendees at an astronomy convention in a tiny American desert town that becomes the site of an actual alien landing. But Anderson’s way of handling such expansive topics is to make everything tight and contrived and stage-bound. It’s possible that he’s trying to convey the limitations of human experience, and the way we tend to live stuck within stiff, diorama-like architectural arrangements and confining social conventions and stodgy habits of mind, no matter what extraordinary things happen to us.

But I don’t think so. Lately especially, Anderson movies — no matter what the premises or plot developments — always use complex frame stories and theatrical settings. It just seems to be because he likes the effect.

This particular one features a “Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets” convention in 1955 in the remote desert town of Asteroid City, where a crater left by the supposed falling of a meteorite ages ago is the main tourist attraction. A motel manager (Steve Carell, replacing Bill Murray, who had COVID) runs the only tourist accommodations in town, a series of rudimentary guest cabins. There’s only one restaurant — a diner. Atomic bomb testing nearby sends up occasional mushroom clouds, which accounts for the strong military presence, led by General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright).

During the convention, a small group of brainy teenagers are awarded prizes for their space-related inventions, and their parents and other adults are there to witness the ceremony. They include war photographer and grieving widower Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), movie and TV star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), teacher June Douglas (Maya Hawke), and astronomer Dr Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton).

Then there’s an actual space-alien landing, and an extraterrestrial — an amusingly elongated, pop-eyed animated creature, with Jeff Goldblum as the actor playing him behind the scenes — who touches down in the crater. This stunning event temporarily alters everyone’s experience, until the routines of family and professional life overtake them all again.

All of this is presented in Anderson’s patented, extremely stylized way, of course, with a distracting and quite beautiful color scheme featuring an intensification of Southwestern colors like turquoise and coral. The most memorable images in the film are probably the flat, frontal shots of Johansson as Midge, in Elizabeth Taylor–like raven-black hair and cat-eye makeup and red lips, framed in her cabin window, talking to Schwartzman as Augie, similarly framed opposite her, as they conduct a deadpan love affair between “two catastrophically wounded people.” Johansson in particular seems to have found the key to delivering Anderson’s semi-sedated dialogue effectively, and she credits Schwartzman — an Anderson favorite ever since he starred in Rushmore way back when — with helping her figure out how to do it.

The movie starts in black and white with the old, square Academy aspect ratio to convey a 1950s TV image featuring a typically stiff, solemn male narrator of the day (Bryan Cranston) describing a landmark televised play called Asteroid City. It’s by a noted American playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), whom we see at work on the play. Then his characters begin to populate the stage. The image opens out into widescreen color as we watch the more open-air and realistic version of the events of the play, though a basic staginess remains in the ticky-tacky look of the “sets” and the somewhat narcotized performing style of all the actors. But the narrative keeps on shuttling back and forth between these characters, in color, and the actors playing the characters, and Earp at work, in black and white.

In interviews, Anderson talks about his youthful obsession with director Elia Kazan, who’s the inspiration for the rampantly macho director of the play Asteroid City, Schubert Green (played by Adrien Brody). Like so many explanations for what Anderson is supposedly doing in his films, this one draws a blank, because no filmmaker ever seemed less inspired by Kazan, who was a member of the Group Theater and cofounded the Actors Studio, dedicated to a theater of leftist social commentary, before selling his soul by naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a director, Kazan specialized in raw emotion, social injustice, and the agony of the American experience in films like Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), and A Face in the Crowd (1957).

In contrast, Anderson’s approach seems designed to keep you at an emotional distance, without any, say, Brechtian political theory or any other theory to justify or make sense of it. Though some people find this film incredibly moving, in spite of all of Anderson’s best efforts at distance. Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri was brought to tears. And to do him justice, he has a take on all of Anderson’s films to account for his emotion:

There’s a point to all this indulgence. Anderson’s obsessively constructed dioramas explore the very human need to organize, quantify, and control our lives in the face of the unexpected and the uncertain. The regimented universe of Moonrise Kingdom is sent into a spiraling decline by the mania of young love. The Mitteleuropaïsch candy-box milieu of The Grand Budapest Hotel is undone by the creeping evil of authoritarianism. The romantic, Continental fascinations of The French Dispatch are hit with protest, injustice, and violence. Asteroid City might be the purest expression of this dynamic because it’s about the unknown in all its forms. Death, the search for God, the creation of art, the exuberance of love, the mysteries of the cosmos — in Anderson’s telling, they’re all facets of the same thing.

I love movies about “the unknown in all its forms” and think film is a medium amazingly suited to contemplating it. I also love film formalism, with wildly inventive and attention-getting uses of cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound. This ought to mean I love Wes Anderson. But his filmmaking in recent years has completely lost me. My reaction to Anderson films such as The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch is frothing rage. Asteroid City created the same effect.

At the end of Asteroid City, the credits play over the song “Freight Train,” with its upbeat tempo, bright Southern twang, and grim lyrics: “When I’m dead and in my grave / No more good times here I crave / Place the stones at my head and feet / And tell them all I’ve gone to sleep.” It’s clearly meant to reflect the film’s combination of sunny desert setting and youthful space cadet convention with atomic mushroom clouds of doom hanging over them — which by extension evoke our current state of doom and denial.

Then, in the middle of that culminating song, a crudely animated roadrunner appears at the bottom of the screen and does a herky-jerky dance that lasts till the final image. Hard to explain why it’s so infuriating, and has such a huge fuck-you-losers effect. Does this nerd from suburban Texas think he’s exempt from the human condition just because he lives in Europe now and hangs out with the cultural elite and wears bespoke suits?

Speaking of his suits, a friend of mine said that Wes Anderson seemed like somebody who, as a kid, was dressed by his parents in a miniature seersucker suit, as worn by desiccated Southern gentlemen, just to see how precious he’d look. Then he never stopped wearing it, having larger and larger seersucker suits made until he developed a kind of seersucker suit of the soul. His films, even at their best, were affected and aligned with the elite, and they get more removed from the concerns of ordinary suffering humanity every day.

Anderson just attended the Cannes Film Festival, where Asteroid City premiered, in a seersucker suit. It seems appropriate.

_{Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck.}