Revolution in 35MM with Samm Deighan
This week, we’re sharing Ian’s talk with Samm Deighan, co-editor of Revolution in 35 MM: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to Grindhouse, 1960-1990, out 9/24/24 from PM Press. Among other things, they discuss the origins of the book, the benefits and limitations of genre storytelling, the forces that shape movie funding, and where to watch some of the films discussed. You can check out Twitch of the Dead Nerve podcast here.
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Featured Tracks:
- Guns of Navaronne by The Skatalites from Studio One Story
- 5-45 by Gang of Four from Entertainment!
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Transcription
TFSR: We are welcoming today to The Final Straw critic and author Samm Deighan with the upcoming book Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990 out next week on PM Press. Could maybe introduce yourself to our listeners and speak to your pronouns on your background as it relates to the conversation we will be having?
Samm Deighan: Thank you so much for having me. As you mentioned, my name is Samm Deighan. My pronouns are she/her. I’m a film writer and film historian. I work as a special features producer for Vinegar Syndrome. I do a lot of special features for Blu-Ray releases. I also write books, usually on more historically focused cinema, so pre-1990, and this is a book that I co-wrote and co-edited with Andrew Nette, who is an Australian writer, film critic, and film historian. We have a lot of other great contributors in the book as well.
TFSR: This book goes wide and it goes deep. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of the book, what your goals were in writing it, and how you went about putting it together?
SD: This is something that I’ve actually been wanting to do for maybe about 10 years now, and I originally envisioned it as a solo book that I would write myself, but I couldn’t quite get my head around what titles I wanted to include, or what the scope should be because it really is, as you said, so broad. But I also think that was a really important part of our goal. When I started talking to Andrew about this, he had similar politics and had done some really interesting books and writing on cinema, but also more radical pop culture. He did this great book for PM Press on radical science fiction novels that’s also a really beautifully designed anthology, so very similar in form to the Revolution of 35mm book. But where it really came from is when I started writing about film, I started writing more about genre cinema, specifically horror movies. I’ve always had an interest in how violence is depicted in films. As I started to write about more political cinema, it made me question how violence, particularly political violence and radical violence, is depicted in films. What does that look like, depending on if it’s a mainstream film, an arthouse film, or something else entirely? The way that we narrowed the scope was we made a list of films that we knew absolutely had to be included. There’s, of course, an essay on Elio Petri and Gian Maria Volonté and their work together in Italian cinema in the ‘70s. They were both really outspoken leftists. There are great photos of them being arrested in protest lines and things like that. There are some obvious choices, but we really wanted to look at some of the less obvious things, to draw some parallels between these different countries, different decades, and different genres. We’re both so proud of how the book turned out, and it creates a lot of connections, some obvious, that maybe wouldn’t have occurred to people.
TFSR: There is a temptation to do two different things at the same time with these movies. One is to look at them as monolithic, and another is to stratify them into microstreams. Early in the book, you attempt to draw a distinction between arthouse and grindhouse cinema. My understanding was that these were essentially markets for the films that became the context for the films through the lens of history. Can you tell our listeners about the similarities and differences between arthouse and grindhouse and further, if it’s possible, can you speak to the audiences for each and maybe talk about if there was any overlap?
SD: Sure. Starting off, when Andrew and I made our list of what could potentially be included, something that I knew I didn’t want included was big-budget mainstream films because to me, you can’t really have a radical mainstream film, and so any depiction of political violence is basically going to be propaganda. Not that you couldn’t also apply that propaganda lens to some of the films in our book for various reasons, but so we said, “Okay, if we’re not talking about conventional mainstream cinema, what’s on the margins of that?” And to me, what’s on the margins would be on one hand arthouse films and the other hand, grindhouse films. Arthouse films certainly are, at times, made for profit. It’s still a business, but they’re not geared toward a mainstream audience in the same way. They’re usually more experimental, playing with form, playing with genre. A lot of the key directors in especially European arthouse films, and East Asian arthouse films, they’re not trying to appeal to that mainstream audience. Your point that these terms describe the markets rather than being a specific genre is totally fair.
Arthouse films usually aim for maybe a more educated, politically aware, or at least intellectually aware, audience who’s willing to take a chance on a film that isn’t just escapism, that isn’t just telling a familiar story in a conventional way. Grindhouse, on the other hand, these are films that are also not made for a mainstream audience, but are, for the most part, meant to be this cheap cash grab by producers, not necessarily always by their directors. That’s where you have things like low-budget horror movies, sex films, and exploitation movies. The parallel between the two, I don’t know that their audiences are totally separate, but there’s been this understanding, writing about it from an academic or critical perspective, that they are separate because everyone assumes that the arthouse audience is the more intellectual, more politically and philosophically engaged audience, whereas grindhouse people are just throwing popcorn on the ground and misbehaving in the theater, talking over movies. The typical New York 42nd Street, 1970s and ‘80s grindhouse experience, where it was just total chaos in the theater, and people were there to have fun.
Those films, even if the directors don’t always have these conscious political aims, can get away with so much more because they’re not being made for as much money, and there isn’t the same type of studio pressure on “Okay, well, you can’t show this type of violence.” They are, generally speaking, much, much more violent films. So because both of those different markets exist on the margins of mainstream cinema, it just allows for so much more freedom in terms of both form and content, especially for the purposes of this book where violence is concerned.
TFSR: So they were essentially given freer reign of expression due to, I guess, lower expectations.
SD: That’s a great way to describe it. With arthouse films, there aren’t always lower expectations. A really good example of this, which we do cover in the book, is Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Petit Soldat, which was the second film that he made. It’s about the Algerian War, and specifically people being tortured in the Algerian War. Even though it was partly funded from different sources—t’s a Swiss film, not a French film—the French government still put its foot down and said, “No, this cannot be distributed.” So it came out as either his third or fourth film, years after it was made when it was “safe” content. Sometimes the arthouse films are subject to more overhead and censure than the grindhouse films because there are just more eyes on them, because there is an awareness, especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that those films could be money-makers, and so because of that expectation of profit, there’s more attention being paid, sometimes.
TFSR: Would you say that the studios funding these films generally have a common cause with the filmmakers creating them?
SD: Almost never, I would say. Part of why we wanted to avoid bigger studio films is for that reason. Most of the films covered in the book, many of them are independent films. Some of them have things like partial studio funding, like there’s a great chapter from Michael Gonzalez on The Spook Who Sat By The Door, the Ivan Dixon film, which was given partial funding from United Artists because they were going to distribute the film, and they thought it was just this gangster blaxploitation movie. They didn’t bother to read the script, didn’t bother to look at the dailies, and then when they saw the finished film, had a meltdown and yanked it from theaters. A lot of the films mentioned in the book, if they were playing for a mainstream audience, or had any mainstream theater involvement, there was almost always some issue like censorship or just outright removing it from the theater. No, big studios never have radical politics.
TFSR: You’re skewing more towards the genre side of things. What do you think are the political limitations of a conventional narrative structure? It’s an oversimplification, but would radicalizing a bourgeois audience have been the general goal for any of these filmmakers, would you say? I’m thinking of someone like Manchette..
SD: This is a tricky question and something that I’ve been thinking a lot about because of this book. I do think that some of these directors didn’t care at all about their audience. Some of them were being paid to make cheap grindhouse films and use that as an opportunity to put their own politics in, which is the case of some of the more interesting grindhouse movies. But then you have counter-examples, like Italy specifically—I would say Italy and Japan. In the case of those countries, some of those directors making more genre films did put their own politics in, expecting that it would resonate with the audience.
I don’t think that’s true of every country. For example, Italy and even France, people like Manchette, who you mentioned, and Chabrol, to a different degree, who made Nada. But you have these directors who are making spaghetti westerns, poliziotteschi, which are police procedural crime thrillers. They’re following these genre molds, while at the same time including dialogs. I don’t think this film comes up in the book, but earlier, I was watching Fernando de Leos’ Milano caliber 9, and there’s this whole side conversation in a police office where this detective is basically arguing for communism, and his supervisor is just not having it. So that’s something that you see throughout so many of those Italian genre films is these politics being slipped in at a time when it was meant to radicalize more mainstream audiences because it was also, politically speaking, a time when audiences would have been more open to it because they were living under this condition of frequent political violence and were thinking about it more. Same thing with Japan. Does that answer your question? That was sort of a rambling answer.
TFSR: It does, and I’m not sure if this overlaps with that, but would you say that there were mainstream audiences for these movies that would have been receptive to them had market forces permitted them to get into mainstream spaces? Was that at all common for these movies to move from their initial markets into more mainstream markets?
SD: I don’t think it was that common, usually because there were these limitations. When you think about films like Godard’s Le Petite Soldat, which I mentioned, certainly when he made the film, there were a growing number of people in France who were upset about the Algerian War but felt like they couldn’t speak out about it because you could be basically sent to prison, fined, have all these things happen to you, in a parallel with McCarthyism in the US. But the films that would have made the biggest impact a lot of the time were pulled or censored, like a lot of the Soviet films and films made in Soviet satellite states that were criticizing totalitarianism, and they were just yanked or had whole scenes cut.
Another great example is Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, which is a Hong Kong film from the early ‘80s that he made all about this wave of bombings tied to political protests. The studio and certainly the government had such an issue with the film that he had to completely reshoot half the film and give it a different plot if he wanted it released at all. He was 20 years old when he made it and didn’t want his whole career ruined, so he said “yes.” That goes back to the point I made earlier about how you can’t really make a bigger-budget mainstream studio film that has real radical politics and real radical depictions of political violence because there’s always some sensor interfering.
TFSR: Thank you. You may have touched on this a little bit in your earlier answer, but in putting this book together, were you looking for a way to talk about these movies specifically, or were you looking for a way to talk about political violence and resistance? I don’t necessarily know if that matters either way, but I feel it’s it’s pertinent.
SD: It’s an interesting question because when I first thought about doing the book at all, when I envisioned it being a solo book, it was because I started to think about how certain films, like some of the new German cinema films, Fassbinder’s Third Generation and some of the spaghetti westerns. I started to be more aware of how certain films that seem like genre films, maybe crime movies and westerns and police procedurals, how a lot of them from the ‘70s had this surprising, to me at the time, theme of radical political violence. So the idea grew out of starting to think about the fact that there were so many films that did that. But when we sat down to actually put together a plan for the book, the aim was thinking about political violence and revolution and resistance and how that shows up in cinema. Especially, I should say the book is focused on films made during the Cold War. It goes from basically mid-’50s Algerian war films to around 1990.
TFSR: Would you say the films highlighted in this book were generally representative of the output of their respective eras? Or would you characterize them as outliers, either in their form or content?
SD: I want to say both because while a lot of the films represent more marginal cinema, there’s so much of it. We could do ten of these books. This is not meant to be a reference book. It’s not meant to be an encyclopedia. There’s so much we didn’t get to cover. Because of the sheer number of films, especially made during the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, it would be hard for me to say, “Oh, this is just a thing that’s happening very marginally” because it seemed so many different filmmakers, especially non-mainstream filmmakers, were interested in these themes and were finding ways to put them in their films. So I think both. That might be a frustrating answer.
TFSR: I understand. I would expect it’s more complicated than this. But do you see a correlation between the size of the nation’s film industry and the level of radicalism permitted in their output? What are some other contributing factors to what is permitted to see the light of day?
SD: When you sent me the list of questions, this one is maybe my favorite. I don’t know if it’s the size in terms of sheer number of people in a nation. But I do think there’s a relationship between the nation’s wealth and what kinds of radical films are being made or not because you certainly have countries, like some very poor Soviet Communist countries, making some radical films during these little windows when they could, you have South American filmmakers making these films, even though sometimes they were jailed or executed for it. In the smaller countries that weren’t as wealthy, it was at times easier to make these kinds of radical films.
The filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski—and this is an issue that’s really, really interested me, and I don’t think it’s featured heavily in the book, but it’s definitely something I was thinking about when writing some of my chapters—I covered him in the book because he wrote this film Devil from 1972. He’s a Polish filmmaker who was forced to leave Poland in the mid-’70s, relocated to France, and made most of his films there. People listening who like cult cinema will probably know him from this movie called Possession from 1981. That’s more of a horror movie. But Żuławski, in interviews, when he was asked if he left communist Poland because of censorship and come to Europe where he could make whatever films you wanted, he would always put people in their place, basically, and would say, “Look, yes, there was censorship in communist Poland, but there’s also censorship in Europe and the United States. If you don’t think there is, you’re insane. It’s just not political censorship spelled out in such literal terms. It’s economic censorship, which is more insidious and far worse.”
A lot of people, especially liberals or centrists or people who think of themselves as not very politically engaged have this mentality that if you’re in a democratic, capitalist country, you can make whatever movie you want, and it will never be censored. But the reality is your film just won’t be made because no one will give you the funding, no one will distribute the film, no one will see it. Even if you somehow scrounge together money, your film basically doesn’t exist. We do talk about that in the book a little bit with somebody like Robert Kramer and his film Ice, which is very hard to see, it almost doesn’t exist. To me, that really gets at the heart of this issue of the size of a country, how wealthy the country is, and what radical films are being made. If it’s a wealthy, capitalist country there are more restrictions than if it’s a smaller, maybe more politically tumultuous country.
TFSR: Can you point to the first film, or maybe the first couple of films in which you saw the political revolutionary potential that is expressed in this book?
SD: Definitely something like Elio Petri’s Investigations of a Citizen Above Suspicion. I’m a huge Elio Petri fan. Learning that there was a director who was making these crime films with some really subversive themes and finding out that he, from a really young age, was a member of the Italian Communist Party and was involved in radical politics even before he became a director, that’s when I started to pay more attention to who else is doing that. Another big inspiration for me is someone Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who made a lot of incredible films. He made over 40 films, even though he died well before the age of 40. Something like The Third Generation is this really scathing look at the failure of radical politics when it becomes an empty gesture. Definitely, a lot of the films that inspired the book are films that also interrogate leftism. To me, they don’t feel like propaganda because they’re more complicated.
TFSR: In your piece on Sarah Maldoror, you write: “With Sambizanga and much of her later work, Maldoror seems to suggest that a liberation struggle is not just about fighting and experiencing violence. It’s about living within a vibrant community.” I found this to be very insightful. Can you talk a bit about Maldoror and how film culture fits into the political concerns of the moment? Is today’s film culture keeping up with political developments? Is there a context in which art is leading the way?
SD: Sarah Maldoror is another really, really important figure. This honestly goes a little bit back to my answer to your last question, which is the fact that I knew I wanted to include films that don’t have this black-and-white trajectory of “we’re unhappy, we commit political violence, and overthrow this government or this state or this corporation or whatever it is we’re overthrowing, and that’s the end.” The reality is it’s way more complicated than that. The best films in this sort of loose category really explore what comes next. It has to be about more than just revolution or more than just this one main act of violence, and Sarah Maldoror is somebody who really looked at how are communities involved in changing things for the better. So it’s not just about overthrowing some sort of villainous colonial movement that’s there subjugating you and exploiting you.
It’s also about how the community works together to lift each other up, but also to inspire things like feelings of hope and optimism, which are honestly absent from several films in the book. Some of them, especially the films made in the late ’70s, do feel pretty defeatist. There are a lot of political reasons for that. I mentioned Fassbinder’s Third Generation. It is not a very hopeful film. But the filmmakers who came from Europe, like Sarah Maldoror grew up in France, and was the daughter of Guadalupean emigres, moved to Africa and got involved in different revolutionary struggles herself. She worked with Pontecorvo on the Battle of Algiers. Her training as a young aspiring director was in some very political cinema. She went to Moscow in the early ‘60s and studied film there. She just has the most incredible life story. But because she was someone who was directly involved in such a personal way and traveled so much and saw so much, especially in that key period in the ‘60s where she was living in Africa, making films in Africa—that’s where she made Sambizanga. Because she’s so much more intimately involved than some of those white European directors who were thinking about this in more intellectual terms, she cared more about what’s happening in the community on the day-to-day. That film in particular gives you the sense that these are real people. They’re not just these political figureheads who are fighting for something. They’re mundane people. They have day-to-day lives. They’re just regular people. Focusing on that gives her films this much more emotional core that you don’t always see in the more arthouse political films. Godard’s films, especially in the later ‘60s and early ‘70s, when he becomes more radical, don’t have an emotional core in remotely the same way. Having someone like her such an inspiration, especially the way she involves communities and women and it’s not just about young men fighting for something. It makes it feel a whole different experience.
TFSR: You mentioned Godard, which was part of my next question. I feel you characterized Godard’s more politically charged later work as more mature. Do you see these later works as a departure or an extension of the existentialist concerns that marked his early work? And could say a little bit about Dziga Vertov Group and how they related to everything else that was going on?
SD: Sure. In the case of Godard, I really love him, and what I’m about to say comes from a place of love, it isn’t as bad as it sounds. Certainly, he is an innovator of cinema and especially mainstream genres. But in a lot of his films from the early ’60s, the energy to a lot of them is like “My girlfriend broke up with me, and I’m mad about it.” So they all have these kinds of repeat themes about frustrated love and men who are very frustrated with the women in their lives. Then when he started making these more radical films, it’s like he forgot about himself for a minute, and to the point where with Dziga Vertov Group in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the way those films were credited was to the group. It was not to Godard. They were collaborative projects. So it represents a big step for him because he’s not just telling these small, emotional, personal stories, but he’s concerned with the world, finally, and what’s happening in different countries.
He wanted very badly—and I’m pretty sure they turned him down because they didn’t know who he was, or they just didn’t trust him—but he wanted to go to Vietnam and make a film, more of a cinéma vérité, documentary type project about communism in Vietnam and the struggle that they were going through. I don’t think they outright told him no, but they brushed him off because he had formerly been this arthouse director, making movies about gangsters and their girlfriends. Having him start to look at the world around him—he had Black Panthers and radical Black activists involved in some of his Dziga Vertov Group films. He got involved with Jane Fonda around the time she became really radicalized—so because it’s so much more of a communal project, it feels a whole… You could watch one of his films from the early ‘60s, like Vivre Sa Vie or something, and then watch one of the Dziga Vertov Group films, and it really is just remarkable to see a filmmaker change that much in less than a decade. That doesn’t happen very often in the history of cinema.
It’s really incredible to see. Those films aren’t always accessible for people because he’s basically shouting at you. He’s so radicalized and so passionate that revolution is coming and things are changing that he just has no time for anything else, which is the opposite of Sarah Molderer in a lot of ways. Because Sarah Molderer does not come from an upper-class white Swiss family. She comes from the total opposite of that, and in her day-to-day is living the opposite of that and sees people involved in these struggles. For her, there’s just this more grounded realism. Like I was saying, these are real people in real communities, and how are they supporting each other? How are they engaged in these revolutionary struggles? Whereas Godard’s just shaking his finger at you a little bit, coming from a place of love and passion because he wants those changes so badly, but it is just such a different approach, in a way that makes Molderer’s films more accessible.
TFSR: The last specific thing that I’m gonna try to pin you down on is can you talk about The Working Class Goes To Heaven? It struck me as sort of a tonal outlier among these films. Is that accurate?
SD: I don’t know if I would say it’s a tonal outlier, but maybe I just haven’t thought about it in those terms because I’ve seen all of Elio Petri’s films, and when I do that, when I watch a director or a particular filmmaker’s whole body of work, it becomes harder for me to separate things out. The Working Class Goes To Heaven is sort of an outlier in Elio Petri’s career in the sense that a lot of his films were genre movies, like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is this a really clever twist on those poliziotteschi thrillers in that it shows this high-ranking police investigator, played by Gian Maria Volontè, and he also stars in The Working Class Goes To Heaven. He was a big collaborator of Petris, as I said a little bit earlier because they shared the same politics. Citizen Above Suspicion is using this genre framework to show police corruption, and that’s pretty much what the whole thing is about. It’s a really clever, beautifully shot, well-acted thriller, but The Working Class Goes To Heaven feels so different, maybe a little bit more like Lina Wertmüller’s films. She’s also a pretty outspoken leftist making some very angry anti-capitalist films. But The Working Class Goes To Heaven is all about this guy who becomes radicalized because he’s trying to be the best worker in a factory, and when he gets injured and he finds out that really all his hard work means nothing and no one cares, that’s when he starts to look outside the factory walls at these student protesters, and his whole life is transformed, but no one around him gives a shit and really actively tries to change him back to how he was and say, like, “Oh, why are you getting involved in those protests? It’s never going to go anywhere. Nothing’s ever going to happen. Why are you causing a fuss?” basically. It’s one of the most relatable films in the book, especially if you’re someone who grew up in a middle-class American environment, where, certainly for me growing up, and I’m sure a lot of other people, it felt like it was very “don’t rock the boat.” You can be verbally progressive, but not too much. That’s really what he’s experiencing, when he says, “We should want better wages, we should want fewer work hours, a more realistic work-life balance.” People will say, “Yes, of course. I agree with you.” But then when he goes and actually protests, everyone’s like “What the hell are you doing?”
So it’s a film that goes back to what I was saying earlier about how the most interesting films in the book question the effectiveness of radical violence and protesting and things like that, which also a lot of the Japanese new wave directors do, which is why I don’t think The Working Class Goes To Heaven is as much of an outlier. It’s just not a genre film. It is a really incredible film, one of my favorites that we talked about in the book. But I always go back and forth on whether I feel like it’s a more optimistic film or a more pessimistic film because, on the surface level, it does feel pessimistic, but it’s coming from a place of optimism, or maybe that’s just how I’m desperately trying to read it.
TFSR: In general, are these films hard to see? Have they been taken up by some of the boutique reissue markets at this point? Do you think that there are any setbacks or hindrances that have come from the boutique market in terms of how people watch films? And the last part of it, can you speak to any movies discussed in the book that will be easily available for audiences to watch?
SD: Off the top of my head, probably about half or more of the films in the book are things that you could find streaming online if you’re clever enough. For example, YouTube often has a lot of film streaming for free because there are people who know that no big distributors are paying attention, so they upload things. Another channel, Tubi, has so much stuff on there, that I don’t understand how it’s legal. It’s incredible. Chances are, if there’s something in the book that you really want to see and you search either Tubi or YouTube, you’ll be able to find it. Even on Amazon.
But also, the book has come out at such a fortuitous time because there is more of an interest in radical cinema and political cinema. Right now, I don’t know how long it will be up for, but while we’re recording this interview, Criterion channel has a whole series on Yusuf Shaheen, this really incredible Egyptian filmmaker. I wrote about him for the book because he is such an important figure. He made all these incredible films in a period where he was able to get away with a lot in terms of Egyptian cinema. Certainly, Criterion just released this Ousmane Sembène set. They do have a lot of the more arthouse films, they have Le Petit Soldat on Blu-Ray. The more arthouse films you can find through Criterion.
Where the boutique labels factor into this is trickier to answer because this gets at one of your very first questions about this divide between arthouse and grindhouse. Boutique labels in general are more focused on genre cinema because there’s such a big audience for it. Vinegar Syndrome, who I work for, started off making these limited-run DVDs and Blu-rays of films that are really hard to find, low-budget horror movies and sex films, and we’ve really branched out since then. We have put some arthouse films out. I don’t know if we really have much of an audience for the types of political films in the book unless they’re things like crime thrillers and spaghetti westerns, those more genre films. But you do see some boutique labels, like Kani is a great example of this. They’re based in Hong Kong. They’re so wonderful. They have been putting out more East Asian films that would count as a crossover between arthouse and genre cinema. They’re releasing a new restoration of a Lino Brocka film that’s coming to the New York Film Festival. He, of course, is covered in the book. It’s a perfect time to be trying to see some of these films. Certainly, some of them, if you want to see them, email me and I could send you a file, but I would say probably anywhere from 50-80% of them you should be able to find online.
TFSR: Thank you. In preparation for this, and out of interest, I’ve been listening to your podcast Eros + Massacre recently. I’m not sure if you mentioned it there or in the book, or maybe both, but there seems to be a sentiment, a strain that watching films with the maximum level of context is extremely beneficial to the experience, which is a pretty obvious statement, but can you speak to what audiences and what people getting into cinema, and maybe, particularly this kind of cinema, might do to prepare themselves? That’s a big question and maybe an ambiguous one.
SD: What can you do to better prepare yourself? This is a question that I get asked a lot because my entire career is formed around this question. It is challenging because if you grow up, as the majority of us have, mostly experiencing mainstream films that are made in a very specific context—like the difference between growing up in Japan and culturally the way they approach cinema versus growing up in America and the way that we expect cinema to adhere to certain conventions, sets you up for failure if you’re going into these more experimental, arthouse, radical films. You pretty much need the context. Otherwise, you’re like, “What the hell am I watching?”
This is a really stupid answer, and I’m sad that I’m saying it, but I feel the easiest way is after you watch the film, or maybe even beforehand, not necessarily the plot, but just look at a Wikipedia article, look at an Encyclopedia Britannica article, like who’s the director? Having that context of what decade a film was made in, what country it was made in, and what genre can be so helpful. With a lot of the films mentioned in this book, because there are more arthouse films, there is a lot of good writing available online. Certainly, Criterion’s website and other great websites, like Senses of Cinema is a really good one, gives a lot of context for who the directors are and why are they concerned with these themes, both visual themes, but also plot themes. Another way is listening to commentary tracks and listening to podcasts. I feel like I’m cheating by saying that because that’s what I do, but it is pretty helpful. This is a sneaky thing to say, but there are a lot of websites out there that rip commentary tracks and upload them for free. My job is getting paid to record commentaries, but I’m certainly not going to stop you if you want to listen to some free commentary tracks because like it’s a lecture about the film. Certainly, a lot of them have production history, but a lot of them talk about the environments and conditions in which these films were made, and it can be really helpful. You could listen to it the way you’re listening to a podcast and gain so much knowledge. When I script out and plan commentaries, it’s almost like I’m preparing a course lecture.
TFSR: Final question. Can the era discussed in the book be replicated? Do the characteristics of today’s market make it easier or harder for films like this to be made, and if they do get made, are they easier or harder to be seen? Would the arthouses and grindhouses of today just be different streaming services?
SD: Yeah, this is a question that makes me really sad to answer because the answer is probably no. I’m not a fundamentally pessimistic person, so I want to think that things could change. But something that I thought a lot about when editing this book is how a lot of films, and I mentioned this earlier, from the ‘70s do feel gloomy and pessimistic and just really violent because so many of the intellectuals and filmmakers, people involved in radical politics were so convinced that things were going to change in the late 60s, and when they didn’t, and just got worse, it was just this huge sense of defeatism. And we are dealing with that now. But for me, thinking about it as a film historian, there’s this interesting seesaw thing happening, where on one hand, you have Blu-ray companies, but also different restoration companies who are rescuing these films from obscurity, restoring them and releasing them to new audiences, which is a really hopeful thing.
Maybe two weeks ago, I went to a restoration screening of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, which, as I said, was pretty much yanked from theaters by United Artists, but also by the FBI, and was lost for decades. You could see it in a shitty bootleg and there are some 35mm prints floating around. But to see this film at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in this enormous theater with this packed audience, the writer, Sam Greenlee, and his family were in attendance, and he fought to have his novel and the film recognized for decades. Ivan Dixon, the director, and his family were in the audience. There’s this great Q&A afterward with all these academics. So here’s this lost film, this totally repressed film being beautifully restored. All this money and time is put into it, and it is being shown to new audiences. It’s touring around the country right now. That makes me feel hopeful. It makes me feel people want to see these types of films.
Whether they’re being made, is another question. There is also some hopefulness there because we just see so much more representation in film now. There are so many more queer and radical and non-white characters telling so many different types of stories. Audiences want these stories. They want different kinds of films. So that makes me feel if you can get more conventional films, more conventional types of storytelling made with non-mainstream, compared to, let’s say, Hollywood of the ‘90s types of stories, maybe we can also have some radical politics in there too. Like that Pipeline film that came out recently. That is something that suggests that there is hope.
TFSR: Okay. Is there anything that didn’t come up in our discussion that you would to mention?
SD: I don’t think so. Mostly just this is a book that will probably appeal to the people interested in the historical documentation of radical politics. While these are all fictional films… Actually, that is something that I should say. One of the restrictions we put on ourselves because we just had to find a way to keep the list of what we wanted to include manageable. The restrictions that we put on ourselves were that had to be made during the Cold War because those films also feel connected to each other historically in a certain way. But we also excluded documentary films because they just have different concerns. Because of that, something that we really struggled with how to get around but couldn’t figure out is that there are no Palestinian films in this book. The reason for that is because most of the Palestinian films made before 1990 were destroyed or seized and put into a vault by the Israeli army, and to even find some feature-length, non-documentary films made in Palestine before then is difficult, let alone films to have these kinds of radical political themes that wouldn’t have just been set on fire is very challenging. I hope they’re out there, and we just don’t know about them. But the things that were excluded, there were good reasons for it, but it’s a little bit heartbreaking. Hopefully, a book like this will help some of those films see the light of day and get more attention to them. I also think I started with a point that I immediately forgot as soon as I started talking about Palestinian cinema.
TFSR: That happens. Samm Deighan, thank you so much for your time today, I really appreciate you talking to us.
SD: Thank you so much for having me on the show and for reading the book and having so many amazing questions.
TFSR: You take care, okay?
S: Thanks. You too.