‘From Here/From There’ (De Aqui/de Alla): The Extraordinary Journey of Luis Cortes Romero / by

_{^{Via PBS}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

Luis Cortes Romero was a smart kid. Growing up in Redwood City, Calif., he excelled in school. He was selected to attend a school for the “gifted.” One of his personal gifts was a supportive, tightly-knit family that held his accomplishments in high esteem even while providing him with the background that encouraged his questioning nature and fighting spirit.

Among Luis’s rewards for his successful school work was a class trip to Europe. But the young undocumented student who had relocated with family from his birthplace in Mexico was unable to get a U.S. passport. Instead of granting Luis a passport, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) deported his father, splitting his family and uprooting his life.

Producer/Director Marlene Morris’s lively documentary From Here/From There is the story of how the headstrong Luis Cortes Romero fought through early setbacks to become an immigration attorney who championed the rights of the undocumented and protected DACA. Romero became the first undocumented attorney to successfully argue before the Supreme Court.

Over the course of U.S. history, immigration has always been a thorny issue. Successive waves of newcomers have always been resisted by those who had originally conquered the land and slaughtered its earliest inhabitants. Differences in culture, appearance, and beliefs threatened later immigrants much as they had the original colonists before leaving Europe. Despite all the self-congratulatory rhetoric about diversity and sanctuary, the U.S. government made acquiring legal status in the conquered land a difficult task.

In 2012, President Barack Obama attempted to ease the path toward citizenship. He established the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) to allow undocumented youth the opportunity to maintain residency and employment. The courts blocked Obama’s attempts to expand the program.

When Donald Trump was elected president, immigration was his earliest target. Trump sought to rescind the Obama program, threatening the 800,000 mainly younger people whom it allowed to live and work in the U.S. The 2017 arrest of Daniel Ramirez was a flashpoint. Luis Cortes, himself undocumented, was asked to defend Ramirez. In the racially profiled Ramirez, Luis saw himself. “I’m brown, I have DACA, and I have tattoos. That could have been me.”

Understanding that the entirety of DACA and immigration policy was under threat from the right-wing Trump administration, Luis sprang into action. He helped gather and coordinate a skilled, experienced team committed to present their case before the increasingly conservative Supreme Court.

In telling the story of this battle, Director Morris allows us to see the importance of the character of Luis’s family—his mother’s tough optimism, his father’s crushed dreams, and his sister who learned tenacity from Luis. Through it all shines Luis’s street-savvy, intelligence, and political awareness of the shortcomings but necessity of the program he was defending. Saving DACA was only the first step in making America realize its promise to all of its people.

From Here/From There (De Aqui/de Alla) will premiere on PBS and PBS.org on Tuesday, July 9, as part of PBS’ VOICES/Latino Public Broadcasting in association with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

_{Michael Berkowitz, a veteran of the civil rights and anti-war movements, has been Land Use Planning Consultant to the government of China for many years. He taught Chinese and American History at the college level, worked with Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Org. with miners, and was an officer of SEIU.}

There’s Still Tomorrow Shows Women’s Fight for Freedom / by Stefanie Prezioso

_{^{Still from There’s Still Tomorrow. (Universal Pictures)}}

Paola Cortellesi’s film There’s Still Tomorrow offers a striking portrayal of working-class women fighting gendered violence in late 1940s Italy

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Delia dances, a disjointed puppet in the hands of her husband, Ivano. He spins her around, throws her into the air, catches her, pulls her by the hair, turns her over onto one of his arms, pitches her back against the wall, slaps her, picks her up again, and strangles her. Two bodies in motion repel, approach, and jostle with each other to the stripped-down rhythm of “Nessuno” [Nobody], a song by Italian singer Mina, famous in the 1960s. Only a bass line, that of the man, sets the tone for the scene. The voice — the woman’s — seems to be mimicking outright madness: “No one, I swear, no one, not even fate, can separate us, because this love will shine with eternity, eternity, eternity.”

It’s an unbearable scene, without screams or bloodshed. It’s a sublimation of the cruelty that Delia endures and has to abstract herself from on a daily basis. We see, in bodily rhythm, a mother’s life pulsating against the beatings inflicted on her by her husband. It does so “in a circular time, where bruises and wounds appear and disappear, repeat, overlap, heal and bleed again, where violence is not a single fact but a Leitmotiv.”

There’s Still Tomorrow by Paola Cortellesi — she is director, female lead, and cowriter of the screenplay — has the effect of a brutal slap in the face, the same one that hits Delia, the heroine she plays, in the first minute of the movie. Filmed in black and white, this cinematic gem plunges us into postwar Italy, a Rome still occupied by Allied troops, but at an indefinite date until the final scene (spoiler alert). The action takes place in the working-class neighborhoods of the capital, where we follow the life of Delia, mother of three children, two young boys and a teenage daughter named Marcella. Cortellesi shows us with great sensitivity the living and working conditions imposed on women. Delia takes on a series of jobs (umbrella repairer, laundress, seamstress, domestic help) for which she is underpaid “because she’s a woman,” while taking care of the family household, her violent husband (played by an astonishing Valerio Mastandrea), and his father with wandering hands, whom she washes and feeds.

A nod to neorealism, the movie alternates between drama and comedy. Music plays an essential role. Cortellesi delegates to song the irony of the situation of women, imprisoned in an Italy emerging from war and fascism, yearning for change. A longing embodied by the young Marcella, for whose future Delia is ready to make any sacrifice, but who is enraged by her mother’s submission: “I’d rather die than end up like you,” she tells her. But it is also through music that the director wants to make us aware of the continuity of the oppression suffered by women in the peninsula and elsewhere, bringing into a black-and-white film very contemporary sounds, those of Fabio Concato, Lucio Dalla, or Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Cortellesi tells us about the discrimination suffered by women in a patriarchal, sexist society where physical and verbal violence is a ritual — accompanied by the injunction to remain silent in both public and private. Delia symbolizes the gender segregation suffered by the overwhelming majority of women in terms of pay, status, and position in society, but also in terms of spatial organization, including at the family table, where she is not welcome. Dispossessed of her poor little basement apartment, Delia is also dispossessed of her body (“When you leave,” Ivano tells his daughter, “there won’t be a woman left in this house”). She is the prisoner of her husband, a tyrannical janitor; her friend Marisa warns her that he’ll end up killing her.

Crossing Streets Free of Violence

“The streets that women cross are streets free of violence”: the slogan of the Italian feminist organization Non Una Di Meno (Not One Less) seems echoed in Delia’s quick, confident stride as she crosses the city each day on her way to her various jobs. From the seemingly submissive woman in the family sphere, she becomes determined. She defies her husband’s authority, notably by stopping at the garage of her childhood sweetheart, a kind, shy man who is about to leave to look for work in the North and who invites her with his eyes to accompany him. But she also — above all — defies convention with her best friend, Marisa, with whom she smokes, laughs, and drinks coffee at the bar, sweetening it generously under the bartender’s reproachful gaze.

Marisa, masterfully played by Emanuela Fanelli, is Delia’s closest confidante. She is a strong woman who suffers the absence of children in her life, which paradoxically puts her in a better position than Delia. All the women who appear in this film are important, whatever their role: from the laundresses to the neighbors with whom Delia’s daughter sits as she waits for the latest violent scene in the family home to end. But it is undoubtedly Marcella, played by a dazzling Romana Maggiora Vergano, who is the key figure, the catalyst for Delia’s emancipation. It is for her sake that Delia withholds part of the money she earns from her husband, for the bright future she wishes for her daughter, first and foremost within the framework imposed by Italian society: a good marriage to the son of a petty bourgeois family, owners of a café, enriched by their trade with the Nazis during the bloody nine-month occupation of Rome.

Beyond Marcella’s anger at her mother, the director weaves the mother-daughter bond through the glances they exchange: Marcella’s, a mixture of fear, compassion, and despair, a haunting gaze in which the violence suffered by her mother is imprinted, and Delia’s, tender and harsh at times, but in which hovers the hope of a better future for her daughter, in which she knows she must play a prime role. Isn’t her own submissiveness setting the tone for Marcella to do the same? Isn’t her own liberation the condition for her daughter’s freedom?

Empowerment

Suddenly, a bang: the café of Marcella’s future in-laws burns down under the watchful eyes of Delia and William, a young African American GI who has seen the marks left on her body by Ivano’s blows. They met by chance during her travails in Rome. Also an oppressed man, lost in an eternal city whose language he doesn’t speak, William has lost the only link to his distant family in the United States, a photo that Delia discovers on the ground in the mud and returns to him. William wants to help her get out of hell. Their various encounters unfold like a dream, culminating in the surreal scene of the café explosion to prevent Marcella’s marriage to the man who turns out to be a variation of Ivano.

Delia rebels against the commandments of a patriarchal, sexist society that is also preparing to crush her daughter. Cortellesi entrusts her heroine’s empowerment to a letter, the first one she receives. Delia reads it, hides it, crumples it up, throws it away, picks it up, reads it again, loses it. . . a letter that the director makes us believe is from the other man, the good man, the mechanic, her childhood sweetheart. But wouldn’t it be rather limiting if that was all it was?

In a whirlwind, the last minutes of the movie reveal the meaning of this folded envelope — a ballot paper — and this story, a story of struggle for emancipation. Not just Delia’s, but that of all the women who came together in public for the first time on June 2, 1946, to make their voices heard after twenty years of fascism. On that day, Italy chose the Republic over the monarchy, which had collaborated closely with Fascism. Not just any election, but a vote that reflected the achievements of several years of armed resistance to fascism, in which women had participated.

It would be wrong to think, as some critics have suggested, that Cortellesi reduces women’s emancipation to the chance to cast a vote. In fact, June 2, 1946, was the culmination of the victorious struggle of a collective movement, to which the explosion of the collaborators’ café also refers. It was a vote for social change that paved the way for republican Italy and the writing of the most progressive postwar constitution, which has been under constant attack for over forty years by the forces currently in power in Italy.

To the tune of Daniele Silvestri’s “A bocca chiusa,” a choral ending that thumbs its nose at the silence imposed on women, the final scene resembles a women’s demonstration:

I’m singing today in the middle of the people / Because I believe or maybe out of decency / That participation is freedom, of course / But it’s also resistance . . . to that old idea that we’re all equal . . . with just this tongue in my mouth and if you cut my tongue too, I won’t stop and I’ll sing with my mouth closed . . . look how many people know how to answer with their mouths closed too.

The power of this collective of women who decide to take part in the vote and who sing “even” with their mouths closed stuns Ivano. It links Delia’s individual fate to that of the women on the march, to that of Marcella, who for the first time, full of recognition and emotion, looks at her mother, whom she has liberated and who liberates her in return.

In Italy, Cortellesi’s movie outsold not only Barbie (released at the same time), but also Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful. This success proves, if proof were needed, that the director has succeeded in speaking to a new generation of women and men, in a country where a woman dies every four days at the hands of her partner or ex-partner; a country that only legalized divorce in 1970 and abortion in 1978, a law that is trampled underfoot every day by the refusal of entire gynecological departments across the peninsula to enforce it; a country that only outlawed “honor killings,” i.e., legal feminicide, in 1981 and only changed the definition of rape in 1996 (until then, it had been associated with a “crime against public morals”); a country recently condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for gender stereotyping and sexual violence; a country now ruled by right-wing parties that refused to ratify the Istanbul Convention on gendered violence in the European Parliament.

“To write women’s history is to fight against the great nocturnal silence that always threatens to swallow them up,” wrote French historian Michelle Perrot. Cortellesi’s film is a particularly successful representation of this ongoing struggle, in which nothing is ever taken for granted, because there’s still tomorrow. Poetic, moving, political, dreamlike, and surprising, this is a great modern fable not to be missed.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in French in AOC.

_{Stefanie Prezioso is associate professor at Lausanne University and author of numerous works on European anti-fascism.}

Pan-African Film Festival: The disappearing Black farmers of America / by Ed Rampell

_{^{For anyone interested in all the details of Black-owned farms, this is the movie for them.}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

_{The 32nd Pan African Film & Arts Festival, America’s largest Black-themed filmfest, took place Feb. 7 – Feb. 19 in Los Angeles. During Black History Month, PAFF annually screens movies ranging from Hollywood studio productions to indies, foreign films, documentaries, low budget productions, shorts, etc. Films span the spectrum from Oscar nominees to hard-to-find gems from Africa, the Caribbean, America, and beyond that L.A. viewers are unlikely to be able to see at any other venue. People’s World culture correspondent Ed Rampell reviews just a few of the films audiences had an opportunity to see this year.}

Co-executive produced by TV weatherman Al Roker and Eternal Polk, Gaining Ground: The Fight for Black Land provides an in-depth look at African Americans and agriculture, from urban gardens to family farms and beyond.

The Polk-directed documentary’s cast of commentators includes row crop farmers, academics, landowners, attorneys, and more who have direct ties to tilling the soil and feeding us. Ground includes some refreshing perspectives and astonishing facts.

We have been conditioned to think that Black people provided the brawn to work on America’s plantations, but author/screenwriter Natalie Baszile, who has written for the Queen Sugar TV series directed by Ava DuVernay, asserts that Black Africans were enslaved and brought here to work the land because of their brains, filled with agricultural knowhow.

Row crop farmer Phillip Haynie III of Virginia’s legacy Hayne Farms and chairman of the board of the National Black Growers Council is a fount of fascinating stats. In 1920, there were one million Black farmers (who presumably owned land), but today, there are only 10,000. In 75 years, the number of acres owned by Black Americans dropped from 16 million to 2 million. The loss of generational wealth is calculated to be more than a third-of-a-trillion dollars for Black America.

What accounts for this dramatic decline? According to some of Ground’s interview subjects, including Shirley Sherrod (whose husband, Charles Sherrod, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer and Civil Rights hero, who is glimpsed in archival footage), racism by white supremacists and government bureaucracies are among the culprits.

One interviewee asserts that prominent African Americans such as successful farmers were more likely to be lynched than Black men accused of acting “inappropriately” towards white women, as a way of keeping the you-know-who down. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, too, is criticized for double standards and practices biased against farmers of color, which resulted in class action lawsuits and more. Heirs’ Property is also one of the perpetrators this doc points at.

Gaining Ground is an award-winning, exhaustive chronicle of the history, plight, and current circumstances of Black farmers—to be sure, this is an important topic, which Raoul Peck also tackled in his latest documentary, Silver Dollar Road. But this lengthy film could have been titled Everything You Want to Know About Black Farmers (But Were Afraid to Ask), and those not particularly interested in the topic are likely to find this nonfiction film to be exhausting.

Polk seems like one of those directors who never heard of the word “Cut!”, as the same talking heads repetitively reappear to make the same or similar points, over and over again, and it becomes boring. For the general public, Ground grinds on and on, and this nonfiction film could stand to lose footage. A Dede Allen-like skilled editor should cut this 96-minute extravaganza down to about 45 minutes or so for the layman. Sometimes less is more.

A production of Al Roker Entertainment (the meteorologist has produced 40-plus movies—who knew?) and John Deere, the ag machinery manufacturer, have co-made what feels like a made-to-order, commissioned industrial film (albeit about an agricultural subject!) that doesn’t have any of the poetic grandeur of the Depression era, New Deal-produced 1936 and 1938 black and white classics helmed by Pare Lorentz, The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River.

On the other hand, anyone who is really interested in the issue of African Americans and agriculture will find Ground to be a thorough, essential primer on a subject which, as an interviewee states, is threatened with becoming extinct. Citing one of the film’s startling facts, Phillip Haynie III notes there are more bald eagles—a species threatened with extinction—than Black farmers owning 1,000 or more acres of land in the USA.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian and critic, author of “Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States,” and co-author of “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.” He has written for Variety, Television Quarterly, Cineaste, New Times L.A., and other publications. Rampell lived in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, reporting on the nuclear-free and independent Pacific and Hawaiian Sovereignty movements.}

Rustin the Liberal Biopic Versus Rustin the Labor Activist / by Dustin Guastella

_{^{Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin in Rustin | Netflix, 2023}}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Netflix’s new feel-good Bayard Rustin biopic, Rustin, claims the civil rights hero has been forgotten because of his sexuality. But it was his fiery and provocative class politics that makes him both controversial and prophetic today.

Rustin, directed by George C. Wolfe and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, is largely a retelling of the mythic story of the civil rights movement but now with the addition of a new character — Bayard Rustin, played capably by Colman Domingo. Here once again is Martin Luther King Jr (Aml Ameen) as the savior and singular embodiment of the movement. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is presented as the apotheosis and catalyst for the triumph of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. But in order to seamlessly fit Rustin into this familiar narrative, the filmmakers depict him as the long forgotten sidekick of Dr King. In one of Rustin’s final scenes, MLK looks back wistfully at Bayard just after he finishes his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Voila! Bayard has been redeemed and the mythic narrative of the civil rights movement is preserved.

Anyone even passingly familiar with Rustin’s life and work should find this version offensive. Not because it fudges some historical details (it’s a movie), but because it’s an insult to Rustin’s actual contribution while shoving his political vision completely out of frame. In this way, Rustin does more to help us forget what Bayard actually stood for — especially his cutting critique of the failures of the Left — than it does to honor the man and his contribution.

Neglected History

That Rustin has been forgotten in the canonical story of civil rights is a kind of starting point for the film’s premise. The director seems to think he’s letting us in on a secret. For, according to his telling, Rustin was tragically forgotten because he was gay. And only because of that. Rustin is thus reduced entirely to a tragically persecuted, but tirelessly dedicated, martyr for the cause. The way we are meant to repent for our historical neglect of this great figure is to properly remember Rustin as a gay man first and foremost. Only then can we place him in his rightful place among the pantheon of civil rights greats.

It’s not that Rustin’s sexuality was irrelevant to his public life; indeed it was a major and integral part of who he was and a major part of why Bayard was so often pushed into the background. But there is something peculiar about how the film makes Rustin’s sexuality so central, with the filmmakers even going as far as to create an entirely fictional relationship for Rustin just to demonstrate this.

Elias Taylor (played by Johnny Ramey), the only purely fictional character in the film, is a gay black Christian but also one who is married with a baby on the way. But Rustin’s real life relationship with the young socialist Tom Kahn — who does appear in the film, played by Gus Halper — was far more interesting. It was this duo, Rustin and Kahn, who would work together on the pivotal essay From Protest to Politics, probably Rustin’s chief strategic statement on civil rights after the March on Washington. Khan’s actual role in the film, though, like so many other important characters, is reduced to the status of faithful henchman and perhaps a onetime lover. Why? Because to develop Kahn’s character a bit more — a white socialist — would complicate the film’s message.

It would signal to the viewer that maybe the real ongoing historical neglect of Rustin was, in fact, political in nature; that Rustin’s views — on race, economics, and political strategy — were no less a reason for his official erasure from canonical civil rights history. In a cruel twist, it seems, Rustin’s sexuality has been weaponized yet again. In Rustin’s lifetime, it was used as an excuse to forget him — in his death it’s employed now to make us forget what he stood for.

And these ideas, as we will see, are arguably more intolerable to liberal audiences today, than they were even during his lifetime.

The Cult of Youth

Rustin’s relationship with A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) is another partnership badly butchered by the film. If you didn’t know better you would assume that Martin Luther King Jr was Rustin’s best friend and confidant. Randolph, the father of the civil rights movement and Bayard’s beloved mentor, is portrayed as a doddering old adviser. You get the sense that this guy mattered personally for Rustin, and historically for the movement — but not that he mattered all that much. It’s a depiction that hardly honors Randolph and the remarkable relationship he and Bayard had. And it is one that conveniently privileges younger characters at the expense of the wizened chief.

In one scene Bayard plans his march in a room full of beautiful and stylish young people. A host of intersectional personalities then present foolish ideas in turn, taken straight from the contemporary nonprofit playbook. Yet in this film these kids are depicted, instead, as inspired strategists. In the scene, Rustin swoons as one of them insinuates that not only should the heads of major civil rights organizations speak but so too should the young activists themselves. It’s a perfect demonstration of the Cult of Youth that has captured the liberal mindset for half a century or so. And a cheap way to flatter the sensibilities of the Millennial and Zoomer NGO employees in the audience today.

But not only is it a total fabrication — the very spirit of it goes against every principle Rustin upheld in both his work and his writing. The truth is that Rustin was highly critical — and explicitly so — of the emerging tendency among young radicals to “substitute self-expression for politics” and often complained about the shortsightedness of youthful exuberance getting in the way of reasoned deliberation. All of which is to say Rustin was anything but a youth fetishist. And as for the youth themselves, there was no love lost with them either. In the later 1960s, in fact, the real Rustin would perpetually rumble with the students of the New Left, who took special care to skewer Bayard in their polemical essays and speeches.

Instead of spending his time with wet-behind-the-ears radicals, the real Rustin spent long evenings planning with veteran generals. Not only Randolph but also labor leader Norman Hill, who gets almost no attention in the film, and socialist A. J. Muste, who is portrayed as an out-of-touch peacenik who tells Rustin to get back in the closet, accusing him of reverse-racism — a dramatically useful caricature of the Old White Man.

The problem with leaving these characters out, or distorting their roles, is not merely that certain Great Men didn’t get their due, but that these particular figures represent a now dead political world that this film desperately wants to keep dead. Unfortunately, in Bayard Rustin, the filmmakers have resurrected a historical figure whose actual politics could not be more at odds with the ones they desperately wish he had held instead.

Invisible Labor

Rustin himself credits Randolph for coming up with the very concept of a March for Jobs and Freedom. The first mention of this name for the march, though, is hardly remarked upon in Rustin. The filmmakers seem so embarrassed by the very mention of “jobs” (and jobs first) that they bury it in a meaningless conversation. Again, these aren’t just mistakes. The hip young activists are meant to replace labor and socialist movement veterans like Randolph, Muste, and Hill as the real protagonists of history, just as the Democratic Party has spent years trying to replace their old union voters with “the youth.”

Though expected for any Hollywood film, the extent to which the labor movement is made invisible here is genuinely remarkable. As a friend of mine complained, it’s as if the only reason the unions are consulted at all is because march organizers need more money for latrines. Fitting. Worse, this is precisely the kind of attitude Rustin railed against all his life. “I must confess I find it difficult to understand the prejudice against the labor movement currently fashionable among so many liberals.” Rustin carped in 1970, “These people, for reasons of their own, seem to believe that white workers are affluent members of the Establishment.”

Ironically, the march itself was meant to mend and solidify the relationship between labor and the civil rights movement — not simply legal protections for racial minorities, but economic redistribution and social renewal for all, ideas barely mentioned in Rustin. The real Rustin warned against the fraying of the progressive coalition and worried that both race-forward militancy and a focus on young “stylish liberals” would destroy any social democratic horizon.

It’s with truly remarkable prescience that Rustin fretted in 1969 that a new liberal coalition was forming “to be comprised of the forces at the top — middle-class professionals and the wealthy of good conscience — and the minorities and the poor at the bottom.” But Rustin’s favored coalition, with organizations of the civil rights movement and labor at the center, was dead before it was born. Born in 1912, he was a man of the Old Left. By 1972 he lamented: “What was, at the time of the 1963 March on Washington, a reflection of broad interracial cooperation is, no longer a movement, but a series of causes, each vying with another for ascendancy.”

Today, we live in the long shadow of that era. Rustin succeeds only in making certain that we forget that there was indeed a road not taken.

Anti-Racist?

In the film, we get the impression that Bayard is the consummate anti-racist, modeled in today’s ideological mold. In a key scene he stares down Washington, DC police officials and lectures the cops about what it means to be a “racist” as if the very threat of the word is supposed to shake them. Of course, today, “racist” is the worst thing a liberal can call someone or be called. Yet not only was the word relatively alien to Rustin, but “race prejudice” (the far more common phrase for the time) was not, according to him, even the main problem he was trying to solve.

The real Rustin warned that “we get such a kick out of calling people racists” that we are incapable of seeing the fundamental conflict in society, let alone doing anything about it. That conflict, again according to Rustin, “is between poor people and affluent people. That’s where the problem is, and where it will always be. And it won’t be easy to solve.”

Throughout the film this view is alternatively erased or perverted beyond recognition. Even the very words used are designed to distract or otherwise reframe the problem in ways that Bayard would have found inconceivable or detestable. For instance, instead of discussing “inequality,” screenwriters opted for the word “inequity,” a little sleight of hand that allows Rustin to fit perfectly with today’s dominant anti-racist ideology but was likely nowhere to be found in any of Rustin’s actual writings or speeches.

These little changes make it easy to forget that Rustin’s actual views were controversial on the Left in his time and perhaps even more so today. “To talk about blackness is silly,” Bayard complained in 1968, “anybody who talks of the black agenda is a reactionary.” I wonder how this would play on Twitter/X today? Yet, this is a typical Rustinism, repeatedly expressed, in different ways, across several magazines, in speeches, in union halls, and university lectures. For him, race tribalism was tied to race hatred. “Prejudice,” he was fond of saying “is of a single bit.”

And he noticed that race came to replace many of the issues that he found much more pressing: “I’ll bet you there is not a class on this campus that hasn’t discussed racism,” Rustin charged in a 1969 speech to Clark College. “Our fixation on racism, as important as the problem is,” he continued, “has obscured the effects of the technological revolution,” and the economic roots of so many social ills. A focus on racism was “a cop-out for whites who are titillated and delighted to be called racists.” It served to satisfy their masochism more than anything it did for working-class blacks: “And thus Stokely can come back to the United States and receive $2,500 a lecture for telling white people how they stink.” Sound familiar?

Yet this Rustin could never be shown on the screen today — in fact, this Rustin couldn’t even be tolerated. Instead, liberals today embrace his gay identity because they reject his ideas. Can you imagine a major black character in a prestigious movie or television show railing against the abuses of anti-racism today? Famously, a magician once convinced a live audience that he made the Statue of Liberty disappear by simply turning the stage beneath their feet. For Rustin, race politics operated like that — race activists were illusionists who made the class problem, and all its attendant political complications, disappear.

Now, thanks to Rustin, Bayard himself has become a prop in the illusion.

Thanks, Obama

Leave it to the Obamas to make this movie. Amid a small revival of interest in Rustin’s ideas, shared across journals on the Left and in the political center, they’ve swooped in to make certain that Rustin’s most important contributions, and especially his warnings to the Left, would be forgotten entirely. It’s a tragedy. Because a showcase of Rustin’s ideas could have served as a useful starting point for probing just what went wrong in the late 1960s that has led the Left down such a disastrous path.

Instead, we were served a beautifully staged feel-good film that ultimately allows those of us on the Left to feel self-satisfied at falsely remembering a lost icon. As such we are no better off. And until we’re willing to confront Bayard’s critique seriously, we will continue to make the same basic mistakes that the real Rustin properly warned us against more than fifty years ago.

We will continue to confuse therapeutic protest for meaningful political interventions. Bayard insisted that the Left ought to push for larger economic investments and the socialization of the economy and complained of “dramatic confrontations” that “in no way further the achievement of radical social goals.” Yet today, when riots of frustration break out, Congress responds with guilt and pity instead of investment. In 1969 Rustin groaned that “payments from the rich to the poor” have begun to “take the form of ‘Giving a Damn’ or some other kind of moral philanthropy.”

We will continue to demand radical-sounding solutions that serve conservative ends. Rustin would have argued that the activist demand to defund police budgets can sound too similar, especially in resource-starved neighborhoods, to the conservative call to defund public schools — and the notion that government cannot do anything to solve our problems, that government is the problem. As Bayard warned in 1969, “deracinated liberals may romanticize this politics, nihilistic New Leftists may imitate it” — but ordinary black workers “will be the victims of its powerlessness.”

And when we learn that working-class whites have suffered startling declines in life expectancy, or that overdoses rates have again broken new records, or that Democrats are failing to convince larger and larger shares of non-white working-class voters, we will ignore these problems too. Because we will continue to “get such a kick out of calling people racists.”

In his time, the political pathologies Rustin identified, and the coalition that advocated them, were in their infancy. Maybe we are witnessing their final years today. Or perhaps we are once again trapped in what Rustin would call “a cycle of frustration,” where the hopes of the Obama era have crashed hard on the rocks of Trumpism. Either way, we are at least this lucky — the entire political experience of the late 1960s through today has proven many of Rustin’s most trenchant critiques not only valid but urgent.

It’s best that we don’t forget that.

_{Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia.}

Basqueing in it / by Rita Di Santo

_{^{Janet Novas in The Rye Horn Photo: IMDb}}

_{Reposted from Morning Star: The People’s Daily}

IN the beautiful Basque country, the 71st San Sebastian Film Festival maintained its innovative spirit, and audacious political character.

This year the Golden Shell Award went to Spanish director Jaione Camborda for The Rye Horn, a film about solidarity and sisterhood set during the Franco regime.

Maria, a solitary midwife, who lives on an island near Galicia, secretly helps young women terminate their pregnancies, but when one of her patients dies, she must flee to Portugal. The escape drives her out of solitude, as always, when a woman comes forward to help.

The whole movie merges landscapes and character with such force that, once seen, you will never forget it. A quiet, yet highly dramatic film, that doesn’t try for polemic but simply tells what looks very much like the unalloyed truth. Its win, however, was unexpected as it is fairly a conventional production.

The festival showcased a great swarm of Latin American movies.

Puan by Benjamin Naishatat and Maria Alche, is the story of a university professor, Marcello Pena, who has devoted his life to teaching philosophy at the Public University of Buenos Aires.

**_{^{Marcelo Subiotto as Marcelo Pena and Leonardo Sbaraglia as Rafael Sujarchuk in Puan Photo: IMDb}}**

A prodigious thinker, but a clumsy man, he lives in a modest house with his activist wife. When his mentor Professor Caselli dies unexpectedly, Marcello is the most obvious candidate for head of Department. However, his plans turn upside down with the surprising appearance of another protege, charismatic and sexy, Rafael Sujarchuk.

Extremely funny and light-hearted, the whole story seems to revolve around the empty seat of the head of the department, but as it develops instead sees the closing of the faculty, and the academic solidarity between students.

The result is a remarkable political film that offers strong support for the cause of public education. A highly entraining comedy, it carries a powerful message against the Argentinian far-right presidential candidate Javier Milei, and his plans to abolish free healthcare and privatise the education system. The election is coming up this month.

Also, Puan has many clever references and reflections on Argentine society. The fixed idea persists that its thinkers maintain themselves in dutiful inferiority to the philosophers of France and Germany, and yet arrogantly consider themselves superior to the rest of Latin America, as revealed in a scene where Marcelo mistakes a Bolivian professor for a cleaner.

Another Argentinian film-maker, Martin Rejtman, escapes Argentina, setting his new film in Chile, as if to find a neutral terrain, far from the tumultuous political climate. The Practice sees yoga teacher Gustavo become obsessed with an absurd cult of wellness.

An entertaining comedy, packed with jokes, but beneath the humour Rejtman makes deeper points. It seems impossible for Gustavo to escape tensions and problems as he must face a broken knee, earthquakes and most of all his fear of life.

Blondie is a promising debut by young female director Dolores Fonzi who questions the role of the mother in modern Argentina. A teenage mother struggles to care for her daughter and seeks support from her mother and sister.

Without the strictures of fascist traditionalism, a new family balance has to be built, not vertical but horizontal, with a new assessment of responsibilities and duty, and one based on solidarity and real bonds.

It is an excellent first feature because of its care and refusal to indulge its audience with either sentiment or melodrama. A wholly remarkable film whose oddities as a first-time feature seem less to to be flaws than the mark of a film-maker finding her voice.

Among the Spanish films that deserved attention was Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal’s They Shot the Piano Player. It is both homage and investigation, delving into the life of the young Brazilian pianist Tenorio Jr, who went missing one night in Rio in 1976 under mysterious circumstances.

A docu-animation, it describes how a New York Times journalist becomes obsessed by the disappearance of the musician while researching a book on bossa nova.

Consisting of a mix of interviews with musicians, including luminaries Joao Gilberto and Gaetano Veloso, the movie explores the personal and political life of Tenorio Jr and his disappearance, that seems to have been connected to Operation Condor and the Latin American dictatorships of the ’70s.

It is a masterpiece of inventive animated fantasy, which very well captures the tragic end of a talented and innocent musician, accused of nothing more, seemingly, in the end than his comradeship and intellectual “communist tendency,” kidnapped and murdered on the way to buy a sandwich.

_{Rita Di Santo}_{is a film critic, a programmer, a script developer, a film reviewer, and a former editor of 35mm. She lives in London writing regularly for national newspapers and magazines (Daily Mirror, The Tribune, Morning Star, Culturale Matters). She is Vice President of FIPRESCI and a member of the UK Critics’ Circle. She has juried some of the most venerated film festivals, including Toronto, Venice, Berlin, Moscow, and Cannes – three times!}

‘The Unknown Country’: An Indigenous woman’s road trip into Indian Country and beyond / by Albert Bender

_{^{Lily Gladstone as Tana in ‘The Unknown Country.’}}

_{Reposted from People’s World}

NASHVILLE—The Belcourt Theater, for the second week in a row, showcases another Indigenous film. This showing on Sept. 14, entitled The Unknown Country, by writer/director Marissa Maltz, was a reflective, humanistic rendering that is a combination of soul-searching and reconnecting.

The viewer follows the travails of a young Indigenous woman on a thought-provoking road trip that goes through the Indian Country of South Dakota and culminates in a surreal ending in the rugged climes of south Texas. Interspersed in the film are real-life interviews with real people, giving it a documentary flavor.

The story begins with Tana, played by Lily Gladstone, who is Blackfeet and Nez Perce (she also stars as the female lead in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming and much acclaimed film, Killers of the Flower Moon). Tana is grieving over the loss of her grandmother. She leaves Minnesota and embarks on a road trip to South Dakota after being invited to her cousin Lainey’s wedding to the love of her life, Devin.

This is her Lakota family whom she hasn’t seen since she was a child. Tana’s relating to her extended family is very poignant and joyful. She revels in playing with Jasmine, the couple’s young daughter, and there is the celebration at a local bar drinking beer with her relatives. This vignette flies in the face of the stereotypes of drunken, fighting Indians. Everybody is just having a good time. That sequence reminded this writer personally of similar gatherings where everyone just felt bonds of camaraderie and closeness over some rounds of alcohol.

Then, there is the tribal wedding ceremony itself, which is again, a very moving and evoking reflection. Devin breaks into tears while saying his wedding vows.

There is also the visit to Lainey’s grandfather, who is Tana’s great uncle, being the brother of Tana’s deceased grandmother. He tells Tana that she looks “just like” her grandmother and gives her a suitcase full of her grandmother’s belongings. It is a very reflective scenario filled with sentiment.

Tana finds a photo of her grandmother taken in Texas years earlier. Hence, Tana’s trip takes her south to Texas, and she winds up at an outdoor bar, where she makes new acquaintances as her journey continues.

Among the interesting encounters with real-life folks is an engineer who left a successful career to run a lonely motel with his wife. There is also a Texas dance hall owner who bought the hall just so Flo, a 90-year-old woman, would have somewhere to dance every Friday night.

What comes through in the film—indeed, the common thread winding its way along in the production—is the humanity of it all, the very human stories encompassed in this documentary, and the narrative aspect of the lives of some everyday people.

Other salient mini-episodes striking this writer’s senses included a scene where Tana is made obviously uncomfortable by two palpably drunk white guys who want to get too friendly with her.

Another sketch that really hit home was when Tana is driving in the right lane going the speed limit and is passed by another vehicle in the left lane obviously speeding. Shortly, Tana sees the blue flashing lights of the highway patrol behind her. The officer gets out of his vehicle and menacingly asks Tana for “driver’s license, registration, and insurance.”

In both of these instances, my mind was flooded with images of the dangers faced by Native females traveling alone and of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). What the film does in these instances is to take the viewer to the brink of imagined, potential disaster and then moves on to the next sequence, which is a good thing.

Ultimately, the film travels to the surreal with Tana searching for further meaning in her grandmother’s life in the rugged terrain of south Texas. Keep in mind the grandmother’s solitary photo taken in Texas. What does it mean?

The film is a very reflective, thought-provoking, and evocative rendering that provides poignant glimpses into Indigenous life and the lives of others through the lens of a young Native woman searching for answers in the wake of great loss.

This film was conceptualized and written by Gladstone, Maltz, editor Vanara Taing, and Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, who appears in the film as Tana’s cousin. Throughout the film, Gladstone comes in contact with persons playing either a version of themselves or just themselves.

The film is well worth seeing and reflecting upon.

_{Albert Bender is a Cherokee activist, historian, political columnist, and freelance reporter for Native and Non-Native publications. He is currently writing a legal treatise on Native American sovereignty and working on a book on the war crimes committed by the U.S. against the Maya people in the Guatemalan civil war He is a consulting attorney on Indigenous sovereignty, land restoration, and Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) issues and a former staff attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Oklahoma (LSEO) in Muskogee, Okla.}

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.}