At the Edge (11-13 November 1999)

AT THE EDGE
Towards 21st Century Internationalism

TNI 25th Anniversary (1974-1999)

Film Festival: Imagining the Left

From November 5 through 14, 1999, Club Index organised, in cooperation with TNI,
Imagining the Left: Saul Landau, a film festival at Filmhuis Cavia in Amsterdam. The festival was part of TNI's 3-day conference At the Edge. Towards a 21st Century Internationalism, held at the Balie. The following films and documentaries by Saul Landau were shown:

• Losing just the same (1966)
  Landau's very first documentary is set in a black ghetto, Oakland, San Francisco. It is the story of a single black mother and her 10 children. The main character of the film is 17-year-old Robert, just dropped out of school. When the San Francisco riots break out, Robert joins the rioters. This trancelike interval in the story conveys his hopes and aspirations, but also the enormous walls that keep him captured. When the riots had burned themselves out by the fall of 1966, the sober reality of ghetto life forces itself on Robert and his family. What will be his destiny?
• From Protest to Resistance (1968)
  This film captures the rapid changes in the students' movement that brought forth the pacifist anti-war movement, the free speech movement and the black power struggle. The film is full of street action, dialogues with draft dodgers in Canada, and anti-war activists in various milieus and activities. Horrific scenes of demonstrators lined up facing counter lines of police, youths overturning police cars and police charging, clubs flailing at demonstrators' heads. It's still fascinating to see and hear Stokeley Carmichael speaching, even after 30 years.
• Fidel (1969)
  This documentary is a personal profile of Fidel Castro and a view of the developments since the revolution 10 years before. There is a lot of images of Fidel: listening to complaints, arguing, laughing and philosophising. As he is traveling the countryside in a jeep with the filmcrew, he is trying to explain the Cuban revolutionary experience. There is beautiful footage of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and of Fidel and Che Guevara in the mountains. Also there are interviews with political prisoners.
  

  The great quality of this remarkable film is that it is educational in the best possible sense. It gives you a feeling for what revolution - any revolution - is actually about, what it means in all its implications and how it affects the lives of the people. The task in making this film seems in retrospect to have been enormous and it is a tribute to the makers that they produced such an exciting and illuminating work. I found it completely absorbing from the start to
  finish. A tapistry for history - Ralph Gleason, Rolling Stone

• Conversation with Allende (1971)
  This interview was conducted shortly after the shooting of QUE HACER was finished and just after Allende won the Chilean elections of 1970, the first socialist president to be elected in a Latin American country. Throughout history no ruling class ever gives up its powers and privileges without a fight. But when the people know their goals
  they will defend them, defend their own power by any means necessary. Just three years later, General Pinochet overthrew the Allende government, with help from their powerful neighbour to the north. The people of Chile never stood a chance.
• Que Hacer (1971)
  A spy story-musical feature film that brilliantly weaves documentary coverage of the Allende election and turmoil afterwards, with a fast-moving story of political intrigue. A young woman Peace Corps worker becomes involved with a mysterious American 'businessman' and subsequently joins with Chilean revolutionaries. This Brechtian treatment of the Allende
  election and the imperial politics that intervenes in the Chilean affairs, features the songs and acting of Country Joe McDonald as well as President Allende himself. It was filmed on location during the historic elections of 1970. QUE HACER is still, after 28 years, a deliciously playful film, with a lot of cinematographic tricks and ingenous cutting, reminiscent of Godard's A BOUT DE SOUFFLE.
  Awards at Cannes, Venice and Mannheim.
• La Lucha Continua (1972)
  A trip through the society of prisoners and jailers, transvestites, murderers, drunks and sadists. Film in the San Francisco County Jail over a 3-month period. This film portrays not only the faces and movements inside of a modern jail, but the society that evolves, one in whuch guards and jailers alike participate. Although there are candid scenes and frank interviews, many of the political statements made by the inmates sound forced. The soundtrack, completely recorded inside the jail itself, contains the most exciting dialogue and music ever produced by a prison documentary crew.
  First prizes on Ann Arbor and Berlin Film Festivals.
• Robert Wall: Ex-FBI Agent (1972)
  This documentary was made together with Paul Jacobs. They had worked together to make a television program about two FBI agents provocateurs whose job it was to seduce leftist groups into violent activities. But under pressure of the TV network and a libel/slander/subversion charge of the FBI signed by J. Edgar Hoover, the film was censured. Then
  came the story with the former FBI Special Agent Robert Wall. The film was shot in only two days, the first together with his wife and family and the next day in Washington DC, where he had spied on people and instiitutions. In cold professional language Robert Wall describes how he surveilled Stokeley Carmichael, tried to break unity in peace march demonstrator groups by writing letters of infiltrating.
  Ann Arbor prizewinner.
• Who Shot Alexander Hamilton (1974)
  An unusual portrait of the Watergate Congress at work. Watergate has a special place in contemporary history. It emphasizes the media's glorious role, thanks to heroic efforts to two Washington Post journalists, attacking the government and bringing down a President of the US. During the Watergate hearings a lot of dirt was uncovered, the
  burglary into the Watergate building was only small potatoes.
• Song for Dead Warriors (1974)
  Examines the reasons for the Wounded Knee occupation in the spring of 1973 by Oglala Sioux Indians and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The film captures the conflict between AIM, the Sioux militants, the government's Bureau of Indian Affairs and those allied with the US government.
  Winner of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
• Zombies in a House of Madness (1975)
  A four minute poem. Michael Beasley, a jail house poet, reads his poetry, illustrated by the footage taken inside the San Francisco jail, in 1972.
• The CIA Case Officer (1978)
  An in-depth character portrair of a former CIA official, John Stockwell, who served the CIA for 12 years, mostly in Africa and Vietnam. Soon after his last assignment as chief of the Angolan Task Force during 1975 and early 1976, he resigned from the CIA. Stockwell talks with candor and introspection about his career and the disillusionment, which let to his decision to leave the CIA. He reveals heretofore unknown information about CIA practices and policies. This documentary raises questions about conscience, morality and intelligence gathering.
• Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang (1980)
  

  Paul Jacobs

  A poignant and potent political documentary that exposes the government's suppression of the health hazards of low-level radiation. Paul Jacobs is himself a victim of lung cancer, that would kill him before this picture was finished and which his doctors believe he contracted while he was investigating nuclear policies in 1957. He interviews civilians and soldiers, survivors of nuclear experiments in the 50s and 60s, testing the effects of radiation. By the time this film was made, a lot of them had died from the radiation. The footage of an atomic test explosion in Nevada is still of nightmarish beaty. There are also interviews with people who live near and work in several government facilities around the nation, as well as with government scientists, some of whom were fired when their research indicated the dangers of low-level radiation.
  This film won the 1980 EMMY Award for best TV programme, the George F. Polk Award for investigative journalism on TV, the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award for journalism, and the Mannheim Film Festival first critics' prize.

• Steppin' (1980)
  At the end of the 70s there was a vigorous fight for socialism in Jamaica. In this film Landau made a portrait of Michael Manley on his tour in Jamaica, during election time.
• Quest for Power. Sketches of the New Right (1983)
  This film is about the values, the style and goals of a new and radical right-wing movement in the United States. The so-called 'New Right' consists of creepy reverends, electronic preachers, vicious TV ads, rightwing strategies, the king of hate mail, military and nuclear crazies. A whole army of people inciting fear and hatred. Most of them are still around these days and have gained respectable positions in society. This populist explosion, ranging from President Reagan down to a Californian constituent, who is 'tired of giving taxpayers money to the poor', have tried to bend the agenda in the US, to all kinds of 'evil' things like abortion, arms control, the dangerous Liberals/Reds and homosexuals. If you can control your stomach, it should be funny too.
• Target Nicaragua. Inside a Covert War (1983)
  

  Landau filming with Wexler in Chiapas

  The US-instigated war against Nicaragua is, of course, no secret anymore, nor is there much confusion now about the exceptionally dirty and vicious nature of the contra-campaign, although public knowledge about these issues seem to be fading. The reality of the destruction of Nicaraguan society emerges vividly when one actually sees the faces of the victims and hears the explanations of the mercenaries. The film traces the line of responsibility, from the arms dealers who profited from their deals with the contras, to the people in the smart suits in the Pentagon, CIA and the White House. Again it is Haskwell Wexler who is doing the superb photography. In 1983, there was still hope of countering the hit-and-run Low Intensity War. The then consul general of Nicaragua in the USA, said on seeing the film: The US can only win this war if it turns my country into a mass graveyard. In the end that's exactly what happened.
  

• Counterpoint. The Sandinista Perspective (1984)
  This film describes the fight of the Sandinistas against Somoza on the end of the 70s. There is an interesting interview with the Sandinista ambassador to Washington. He gives his perspective on the US intervention and the Nicaraguan experience.
• The Uncompromising Revolution. Cuba and Castro at Middle Age (1988)
  There's something oddly fascinating about THE UNCOMPROMISING REVOLUTION, that looks at current-day, 30 years after Fidel Castro's nationalist revolution. It shows the people, landscapes, large and small themes, to show the texture of Cuba after three decades of revolution. Weaving together archive footage, occasional flashbacks from earlier Landau pictures, recent personal interviews with Castro and scores of on-the-street and on-location interviews with women, professionals and workers. Landau tries to capture filmically what political scientists have tried to do empirically, that is, to understand Cuba 30 years after the revolution. Unlike his earlier films about Cuba, this one shatters any romantic notions about revolution. Cuba is more like a normal country. Although most people seem thoroughly convinced that the Cuban style of socialism if preferable to any other form of government, it is not any more with the enthusiasm of the years shortly after the revolution. A 102 years-old woman recalls the days of the Spaniards and the arrival of the Americans in 1898. The black and white images of history, marines charging San Juan hill, occupying the island, gambling and having fun in the casino's - make clear why Cubans remember their history and why the Americans and the rest of the world seem to have forgotten it.
• The Sixth Sun. Mayan Uprising in Chiapas (1996)
  

  Landau interviewing Subcommandante Marcos

  Just before dawn on New Year's Day 1994, armed Mayan Indians declared war on the government. They immediately seized eight towns in Chiapas and set in motion events that ripped away a facade of prosperity and stability to reveal 'the other Mexico'. They demanded land, public services and Indian autonomy - the right to communally own and farm land. They called themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). This documentary featurtes in-depth interviews with people from the EZLN, among them Subcommandante Marcos, with Bishop Samuel Ruiz from San Cristobal de las Casas, who is an outspoken practitioner of liberation theology and human rights activist. And all other sorts of actors in the conflict: peasants on the estates they have occupied, angry ranchers forced from their land, church activists, conservative Catholics, government officials, and the notorious 'guardias blancas', the private army of the landowners. THE SIXTH SUN portrays an epic confrontation pitting impoverished peasants against large landowners and government forces in Mexico poorest state, Chiapas. The film raises important questions as to what is to be judged expendable in the rush to global economic integration - whether the destruction of whole peoples and cultures that have survived over centuries is simply to be accepted as the price of 'progress'.
  Best Director Award, First American Indian Intercontinental Film Festival, Santa Fe, 1996; Golden Apple Award, 1997: Best Picture, North Carolina Smoky Mountain Film Festival, 1997.

• Laboring on the Border's Edge. A Tale of Two Mexico's (1999)
  The corporate globalisation process on the US-Mexican border, the so-called 'new' Mexico, is contrasted with the traditional Mayan civilization in Chiapas. Since the uprising of the Zapatistas, Chiapas is constantly disturbed by motorized army convoys that trespass on Indian villages. The women washing clothes in the river may soon become the women inserting wires into telephone jacks at the factories in Juarez and Tijuana. The film shows the
  newly arrived workers, in the maquilas (foreign owned factories), and portrays the indigenous Maya struggling to maintain their land and their identity. Furthermore, there are interviews with maquila owners, developers and a foreign plant manager. The ideas of progress and destruction of a culture are analysed in the context of over 200 abducted, raped and mutilated women in Juarez.