![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Brecht and the French CP and Algérie
Jul. 15th, 2004 11:06 pmLast night I went to another event of this year's Labor Fest. I am so pleased to be aware of it now. It's yet another thing that I could have known about six years ago and just... didn't. Like the Freight & Salvage, like the Albany Landfill, like the Labor Chorus, like the Sibley Volcanic Preserve. I don't mean to be complaining at myself, actually, just marvelling at all the wonderful things that exist here in the Bay Area.
Last night's event was advertised as a French movie from the '50s about the connections between an anti-imperialist movement and the labor movement, focusing on French dockers and the Vietnam War. Their Vietnam War. I knew there was going to be some music, too, but not what it was. I guess I had the vague idea that it might be French leftist songs or something, since this event was also meant to celebrate Bastille Day.
The reality was a little different than my imaginings, though in a good and surprising way. First, the music BEFORE the movie was a trio, with a very cute woman on the accordion, a guy on guitar, and his wife doing the vocals. She was great -- she had great vocal control for the very demanding pieces they did. And what did they do?
She sang songs of Bertolt Brecht (which I just note I've misspelled in my interests list, which is funny, because apparently other people of LJ spell it wrong the same way), but not the most familiar ones (well, they did do "Mack the Knife", in German, at the end). But these were songs with musical settings by people other than Weill -- with music by someone named Eisler. And I really liked them. I particularly liked the first two -- the "Song of the Moldau", which was about shifting pebbles beneath the structure of society, and a slowly gathering uprising, and the "Ballad on Approving of the World", for which the singer excerpted verses that worked in translation and were the most à propos.
It was about the moral and political daily cowardice of survival, where someone observing his country in the late 20s, after a devastating war and economic collapse, is intimidated into nodding his approval of the government, of the State, of the economy, of bosses, of oppression, of repression, of the judiciary, of all the evils held out as normal, and who ends in being perfectly conscious that his acceptance has helped make possible the gathering storm. It was a disturbing song, which is always Brecht's point.
There were three other songs I wasn't as taken with, though I thought the music was good and the vocal artistry, considerable.
After that, the movie started (I'd been a little concerned, not seeing the screen, at first). I think I had expected a docker's documentary from 1955, but it was a fairly short feature film, black and white, with heroic, manly workers and strong, likable women. Also workers, actually.
My impression grew, throughout the movie, that it was a production of the CP, or at least that its writers, director, and producer must have been members or fellow travelers. First, the focus is on the struggle to unite a labor movement with anti-imperialist demands. Dockworkers in Marseille, only eight years after the defeat of fascism (and the liberation of France, accomplished in part by Communist partisans) are well organized but face the constant problems of a lack of guaranteed work and long stretches of unemployments. There was a kind of logical gap here, actually, which the film didn't address well -- they show the increase in work on the docks after the war with a series of images of sacks of grain being lifted by cranes (the Marshall Plan, in operation?), and the subsequent slump by showing images of war matériel, tanks etc. destined for Vietnam. Why would that mean less work, necessarily?
The connection between dockworkers and anti-war politics is made, finally, by the hero worker, Jean, who recruits friends to do a direct action in the middle of the night and paint a slogan (Peace in Vietnam) on the dock where a ship is about to dock, bringing back coffins and wounded soldiers. They also show Jean's wife, Simone, dropping her daughter off at a sort of informal communal daycare so she can sell copies of a paper whose politics I'd like to know -- La Femme Française -- and help plan the big anti-war part of the Bastille Day celebrations, where little kids attach their wishes for peace to balloons they'll let loose in the parade. Since the celebration also takes place once the strike has been called -- closing the whole docks -- there are also explicit political banners in the Bastille Day parade. I love shit like that; it reminds me of my childhood during Anti War demos and my high school and college years forcing Central America Solidarity and Anti-Apartheid banners into the Evanston Fourth of July Parade. We always had huge contingents and several banners, somehow playing on the year's theme, whatever it was: liberty, justice for all, whatever. Even as Trots, we weren't too proud to take a leaf from the CP's tactics... sometimes Communism COULD be 20th Century Americanism.
Anyway -- the plot of the film: younger brother of hero worker Jean, Robert, falls for a woman who works in a cookie factory. Robert works on the docks, too, but is not active in the union, where his brother is the equivalent of the president of the local. Robert wants to marry his girl and get an apartment, virtually impossible in Marseille then. A labor spy slimily tries to separate him from his brother's politics as the strike gets underway, insidiously trying to convince him that "chacun pour soi-même" (everyone for himself) -- Jean is morally outraged by that sentiment, and the two brothers nearly come to blows. Meanwhile, his fiancée sees an example of strike solidarity in action when a delegation of the cookie girls saves her from being canned, and she is so overwhelmed by class solidarity in action that she starts politicizing, and becomes, eventually, the coordinator of the whole strike solidarity committee from their factory. Robert crosses the picket line, after persuasion by the labor spy. He is alone in doing so, and happens, finally, to hear the spy being berated for failing to deal with Jean Fournier, the union leader (who is meanwhile rallying the wavering workers by brandishing a copy of L'Humanité at them, promising sympathy strikes by gas workers in Paris). Robert realizes he's been duped, slaps the labor spy, and tries to get back across the picket line, just when the police attack strike supporters. He fails. He feels like he has destroyed everything worthwhile in his life, and the comic relief in the film tells him it's true, he IS a traitor and a loser, but maybe his girl will forgive him anyway. He doesn't believe it, and begins walking dejectedly across the same wooden gangway we see at the opening of the film -- only to hear his fiancée (man I am embarrassed to have forgotten her name) calling to him. She forgives him and they walk into the silhouetted industrial skyline of the port. We never learn what happened to the strike.
I loved it, actually. The thing that was interesting to me was the emotional freight placed on betrayal of your class. That would have been true in my family, too. Break a strike? Shit, don't come home again. There are some very powerful treatments of that side of solidarity in a few of the movies that came out after the British Miners' Strike of 1984. There was a whole raft of those movies -- Full Monty, Brassed Off, and that one about the boy who wanted to study ballet. I think the third one (not remembering the title -- it's on the tip of my tongue... some boy's name? Billy something? Billy Elliot) had one of the most affecting depictions of what strikebreaking meant, when the father almost scabs for his son's material benefit, and then doesn't. That's what I remember anyway.
Anyway, as I said earlier, I found the whole film permeated by what struck my CP filter. In some ways what I lack in gaydar occasionally is made up by an acute sensor for people (usually old women, but not always) who were once in the CP. The politics, the tactics, the morality, the culture and use of film culture, the imagery. There is a film family whose son I knew from politics -- a friend of my dad's and something of a mentor to me for a time. His father, Ben Barzman, was a CPer and went to Prague or somewhere with his family to accept an award for a film in the '50s. And while they were out of the country, the State Department cancelled their passports, so they were stranded in France. So John Barzman grew up there. His mother, Norma, was recently interviewed for a book I haven't read yet called Tender Comrades and I want to see what she says about their experience of the Hollywood Blacklist. And I wonder if she knows about this film and what its provenance was.
Boy. I was trying to write shorter entries, but this definitely doesn't qualify. I'll finish quickly: after the movie, there was (in a lovely intentional irony, I'm sure) Algerian music to further celebrate the French independence holiday with an anti-imperialist twist. The only thing they could have added was perhaps some Haitian oratory or poetry.
It was a great event and I enjoyed every minute of it. I love getting to do something that is, at one and the same time, cultural, educational, political, and enjoyable. I'm really happy that I went.
Last night's event was advertised as a French movie from the '50s about the connections between an anti-imperialist movement and the labor movement, focusing on French dockers and the Vietnam War. Their Vietnam War. I knew there was going to be some music, too, but not what it was. I guess I had the vague idea that it might be French leftist songs or something, since this event was also meant to celebrate Bastille Day.
The reality was a little different than my imaginings, though in a good and surprising way. First, the music BEFORE the movie was a trio, with a very cute woman on the accordion, a guy on guitar, and his wife doing the vocals. She was great -- she had great vocal control for the very demanding pieces they did. And what did they do?
She sang songs of Bertolt Brecht (which I just note I've misspelled in my interests list, which is funny, because apparently other people of LJ spell it wrong the same way), but not the most familiar ones (well, they did do "Mack the Knife", in German, at the end). But these were songs with musical settings by people other than Weill -- with music by someone named Eisler. And I really liked them. I particularly liked the first two -- the "Song of the Moldau", which was about shifting pebbles beneath the structure of society, and a slowly gathering uprising, and the "Ballad on Approving of the World", for which the singer excerpted verses that worked in translation and were the most à propos.
It was about the moral and political daily cowardice of survival, where someone observing his country in the late 20s, after a devastating war and economic collapse, is intimidated into nodding his approval of the government, of the State, of the economy, of bosses, of oppression, of repression, of the judiciary, of all the evils held out as normal, and who ends in being perfectly conscious that his acceptance has helped make possible the gathering storm. It was a disturbing song, which is always Brecht's point.
There were three other songs I wasn't as taken with, though I thought the music was good and the vocal artistry, considerable.
After that, the movie started (I'd been a little concerned, not seeing the screen, at first). I think I had expected a docker's documentary from 1955, but it was a fairly short feature film, black and white, with heroic, manly workers and strong, likable women. Also workers, actually.
My impression grew, throughout the movie, that it was a production of the CP, or at least that its writers, director, and producer must have been members or fellow travelers. First, the focus is on the struggle to unite a labor movement with anti-imperialist demands. Dockworkers in Marseille, only eight years after the defeat of fascism (and the liberation of France, accomplished in part by Communist partisans) are well organized but face the constant problems of a lack of guaranteed work and long stretches of unemployments. There was a kind of logical gap here, actually, which the film didn't address well -- they show the increase in work on the docks after the war with a series of images of sacks of grain being lifted by cranes (the Marshall Plan, in operation?), and the subsequent slump by showing images of war matériel, tanks etc. destined for Vietnam. Why would that mean less work, necessarily?
The connection between dockworkers and anti-war politics is made, finally, by the hero worker, Jean, who recruits friends to do a direct action in the middle of the night and paint a slogan (Peace in Vietnam) on the dock where a ship is about to dock, bringing back coffins and wounded soldiers. They also show Jean's wife, Simone, dropping her daughter off at a sort of informal communal daycare so she can sell copies of a paper whose politics I'd like to know -- La Femme Française -- and help plan the big anti-war part of the Bastille Day celebrations, where little kids attach their wishes for peace to balloons they'll let loose in the parade. Since the celebration also takes place once the strike has been called -- closing the whole docks -- there are also explicit political banners in the Bastille Day parade. I love shit like that; it reminds me of my childhood during Anti War demos and my high school and college years forcing Central America Solidarity and Anti-Apartheid banners into the Evanston Fourth of July Parade. We always had huge contingents and several banners, somehow playing on the year's theme, whatever it was: liberty, justice for all, whatever. Even as Trots, we weren't too proud to take a leaf from the CP's tactics... sometimes Communism COULD be 20th Century Americanism.
Anyway -- the plot of the film: younger brother of hero worker Jean, Robert, falls for a woman who works in a cookie factory. Robert works on the docks, too, but is not active in the union, where his brother is the equivalent of the president of the local. Robert wants to marry his girl and get an apartment, virtually impossible in Marseille then. A labor spy slimily tries to separate him from his brother's politics as the strike gets underway, insidiously trying to convince him that "chacun pour soi-même" (everyone for himself) -- Jean is morally outraged by that sentiment, and the two brothers nearly come to blows. Meanwhile, his fiancée sees an example of strike solidarity in action when a delegation of the cookie girls saves her from being canned, and she is so overwhelmed by class solidarity in action that she starts politicizing, and becomes, eventually, the coordinator of the whole strike solidarity committee from their factory. Robert crosses the picket line, after persuasion by the labor spy. He is alone in doing so, and happens, finally, to hear the spy being berated for failing to deal with Jean Fournier, the union leader (who is meanwhile rallying the wavering workers by brandishing a copy of L'Humanité at them, promising sympathy strikes by gas workers in Paris). Robert realizes he's been duped, slaps the labor spy, and tries to get back across the picket line, just when the police attack strike supporters. He fails. He feels like he has destroyed everything worthwhile in his life, and the comic relief in the film tells him it's true, he IS a traitor and a loser, but maybe his girl will forgive him anyway. He doesn't believe it, and begins walking dejectedly across the same wooden gangway we see at the opening of the film -- only to hear his fiancée (man I am embarrassed to have forgotten her name) calling to him. She forgives him and they walk into the silhouetted industrial skyline of the port. We never learn what happened to the strike.
I loved it, actually. The thing that was interesting to me was the emotional freight placed on betrayal of your class. That would have been true in my family, too. Break a strike? Shit, don't come home again. There are some very powerful treatments of that side of solidarity in a few of the movies that came out after the British Miners' Strike of 1984. There was a whole raft of those movies -- Full Monty, Brassed Off, and that one about the boy who wanted to study ballet. I think the third one (not remembering the title -- it's on the tip of my tongue... some boy's name? Billy something? Billy Elliot) had one of the most affecting depictions of what strikebreaking meant, when the father almost scabs for his son's material benefit, and then doesn't. That's what I remember anyway.
Anyway, as I said earlier, I found the whole film permeated by what struck my CP filter. In some ways what I lack in gaydar occasionally is made up by an acute sensor for people (usually old women, but not always) who were once in the CP. The politics, the tactics, the morality, the culture and use of film culture, the imagery. There is a film family whose son I knew from politics -- a friend of my dad's and something of a mentor to me for a time. His father, Ben Barzman, was a CPer and went to Prague or somewhere with his family to accept an award for a film in the '50s. And while they were out of the country, the State Department cancelled their passports, so they were stranded in France. So John Barzman grew up there. His mother, Norma, was recently interviewed for a book I haven't read yet called Tender Comrades and I want to see what she says about their experience of the Hollywood Blacklist. And I wonder if she knows about this film and what its provenance was.
Boy. I was trying to write shorter entries, but this definitely doesn't qualify. I'll finish quickly: after the movie, there was (in a lovely intentional irony, I'm sure) Algerian music to further celebrate the French independence holiday with an anti-imperialist twist. The only thing they could have added was perhaps some Haitian oratory or poetry.
It was a great event and I enjoyed every minute of it. I love getting to do something that is, at one and the same time, cultural, educational, political, and enjoyable. I'm really happy that I went.
