Third Text, Vol.
25, Issue 1, January, 2011, 6791
1. This article appeared in
Cinaste magazine, vol IV,
no 3, winter 19701971 level of consciousness we can possibly attain in the present, from looking
(Cinaste carried an acute at the present. Thus, there are no references to the past, merely refer-
accent in its title at the
time, which it subsequently
dropped). It is likely that
the Preface was written by
de Laurot even though it
refers to him in the third
person.
Composing as the Praxis
of Revolution
The Third World and the USA
The Concrete Stages of Realisation: Part 2
Yves de Laurot
PREFACE1
The response to the successive instalments of the book Revolutionary
Engaged Cinema has been increasing progressively, both in the USA
and abroad. A significant evaluation is a special article sent in by David
Cast of Yale, which, among other features, shows that the aesthetic
advanced by Cinema Engag retains its consistency and vigour even
outside and beyond a system of values buoyed up by the moral and
political premises such as are habitually invoked to justify revolution-
ary artistic creation. That, in brief, the theory of engagement has its
objective place within the dispassionate, unbiased rules and rigours of
the history of art.
In the past, the question of subject matter was easily settled, for what-
ever was selected was so chosen because of its known familiarity. The
subject of bleeding saints was historical and (artists) aimed at presenting
what happened in the past in such a way that we might understand them
as a lesson for the future. All this is, of course, retroactive, and what it
implies is that we have slipped away almost unconsciously from a certain
standard of moral and political thought.
Mr de Laurot sets this method on end and uses the subject not
retroactively but futuristically. What we are concerned with, if this is
successful, is not so much the standard we have slipped away from as the
ences to the present. Ideally, what really happens in this method is that
the material is so invested with metaphor that, in this way, attitudes are
unveiled in the mind of the audience as though they already existed
there. The film-maker thus becomes like Socrates when he showed that
his slave had an innate knowledge of geometry.
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2011)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2011.545615
68

Mr de Laurots method is important for a second reason: by empha-

sising the active relationship that can exist between the audience and the
film-maker a relationship that is neither patronising nor subservient
we sidestep the concern of so many film-makers with the status of the
image itself. It is not a just image, says Jean-Luc Godards narrator in
Wind From The East (Le Vent dest, 1969), it is just an image, and this
is a play on words that seems to reveal someone exclusively preoccupied
with the image, not with its function. What Mr de Laurot reasserts is the
importance of this image but only in a particular context where we see a
visible transformation of the world before our very eyes. Where Godard
seems to fail in Wind From The East is that he places the image first and
foremost in his conception of the political world. While this can provide
us with breathtaking images, they are images that refer always to images,
not images that refer to the outside world. This is doubly distressing. By
emphasising the autonomy of the film to the exclusion of all else,
Godard is reducing its importance to that of a private language. Mr de
Laurot, by contrast, outlines a programme that conceives of a wide-
spread function for film that adds a new twist to that old and honour-
able role art once had.
A few responses only, while recognising the originality and value of
the theory of engagement, called for concrete examples of proleptic
films, which could serve as illustrations for the ideas expressed. In
reply, one must say that the very fact that there are no samples of
proleptic or truly revolutionary cinema proves the need for writing these
essays and ultimately this book. Further, if others had done it, there
would be no need now for impregnating them. If you already have
babies you do not need sperm any more. The mentality of people who
ask for Engaged Films Inc or Prolepsis Productions is like the one that,
with equal simplicity, would have asked Marx for a list of countries
where Communism had already prevailed. Propositions of the spirit, and
a truly revolutionary view of the world, are much more concrete than
the actual material exemplifications of them. Spirit proposes such reali-
ties and posits them as so definitely desirable to the artist and the man of
spirit that they become not only more concrete than reality but incite
and propel him to push reality toward their realisation. However, if men
are incapable of holding that which is not as being more real than that
which is, then their minds always and immediately will fall back flatly
on that which merely is. And that is precisely part of the American
condition.
We urge the concerned readers to study the detailed and concrete
analyses of the many sequences and segments from the films in produc-
tion we have quoted. An attentive and imaginative reader should have
no difficulty in tracing their consistency with the theory exposed if
only for the simple reason that the theory had been derived from their
praxis and no difficulty either in noting their active relevance to the
history they tend to co-create.
That is why, as has been requested, we are going to include more
quotations from current scripts, also from sequences related to the
more advanced states of revolutionary struggle in the Third World and
to the rapport between the Third World and the USA. We have traced
the successive stages of the realisation of a film from idea to script
writing, to selection of actors, directing, shooting, to the creation of
 69

Cover of the autumn 1970 issue of Cinaste; Edouard (Yves) de Laurot shooting Listen,
America!

metaphors and figures on the screen but at the same time illustrated,
parallel to the aesthetic of these films, the successive stages of the
becoming of a revolutionary consciousness of the world and of revolu-
tionary action.
Consistently then with the spirit and structure of the ideology of
revolutionary cinema and, indeed, with the ideology of revolution itself
in future instalments we shall be delineating further stages of film-
making both as a process and as a praxis, exemplified in parallel through
the advanced stages of revolutionary action. For instance, the overt and
covert levels of the struggle, clandestine warfare training (as much a
moral as a military practice) and the realistic modalities of a takeover of
power thus expanding, also geopolitically, to the Third World and the
70
2. The scenes referred to here
and used to illustrate
theoretical or practical
concepts of engaged
cinema are from the
Cinema Engag production existent (the established) in a manner which is, by its very nature,
Listen, America!, a feature
film which de Laurot was
directing at the time of
writing.
strategic, operational relationship of its struggle to the concrete pre-
conditions in the USA.
EDITING VERSUS COMPOSING:
ANALYTIC VERSUS DIALECTICAL REASON2
The raison dtre of the rapprochement between the final stages of film
production and the final stages of revolutionary praxis is more than a
matter of systematic consistency. It is a suggestive metaphor, that is, a
description of one in terms of the other, and it is also a fundamentally
practical, creative attitude. It proves, among other things, that we cannot
and even should not employ the concept of editing any longer in the
context of revolutionary film-making, but rather re-define it as a mere
aspect of the dialectical process of composition. It is essential to clarify
here that, just as the final stages of the making of a film are misleadingly
referred to as editing, which is an eliminative, castrative and subtractive
concept, so are the final stages and the ultimate meaning of revolution
commonly reduced to a sort of political power editing. By this is meant
editing out, sorting out, eliminating Manicheistically that which is
oppressive, undesirable, established as a system of enslaving power. For
indeed, if revolution is seen only as a concept of editing, as a pure
negation and not as a negation of the negation, as a process of cutting
out that which is wrong, of taking the salvageable and putting the best
pieces together; or as the positing merely of the obverse of what is and
thus arriving at a reactive revolutionary concept then revolution is
conceived in an equally limited and limiting way, as editing is conceived
in a film unimaginatively made, literally unimaginative, for the film
simply would not project the imaginary-desirable. Sometimes the above
elision/obverse concept may work, but such a concept certainly is not
enough and could sustain neither a film nor a society.
In engaged revolutionary cinema, therefore, there is no place for the
concept or practice of pure editing. We propose, instead, composing.
And this is no substitution of words. Rather, it is a transcending
aesthetic process; for editing, instilled and impregnated with prolepsis,
becomes a process of composing during which montage (Eisenstein
et al) becomes just one modality of composing. In this sense, also, film-
making is not just film-making but the making of a film.
In truth, a revolutionary film, or revolution itself, cannot be brought
about unless its advancement proceeds in accordance with the principle
of dialectical rather than analytic reason. For it is precisely the concept
of analytic reason with its ramifications into semantic analysis, prag-
matism, logical positivism and the IQ mentality that has dominated
America on the academic and social levels and is now largely responsible
for the castration of the American minds capacity to invent, propose
and assume a new necessity as the only possible freedom. Dialectical
reason instead proceeds in accordance with the laws of thought by
opposing consciousness to existence, by denying and transcending the
subversive.
We therefore can and even should feel about composing as the ulti-
mate confrontation, a stage at which ultimate conflicts and confronta-
 71

tions not only may but must be made. If there are not conflicts and
confrontations and contradictions that are new to this stage, then we
have failed. If we have only retained that which was in the filmed mate-
rial, we have failed. If we do not invent new contradictions, new
perspectives and new meanings for the filmed material, we have failed.
If, in the last stages of revolutionary struggle leading to a takeover, we
do not use confrontations and do not find contradictions and do not
provoke and enhance conflicts beyond what existed before, then we will
have failed.
We must look at composing, then, as the final stage in a series of
transcendences as a stage which transcends the other stages by raising
them to a higher synthesis. For as the original film-idea is transcended by
the script, the script then by the process of filming, so finally is the film
transcended by composing. But how exactly is this transcendence
effected?

COMPOSING AS PROLEPSIS

Consistently with the general theory of engagement, composing is

instilled with prolepsis. As another dialectic phase in the process of
creation, it is a next and at the same time a possible final stage of tran-
scending that which is by that which ought to be. We view the footage,
the film material as that which is, therefore as less real than that which
ought to be; so we posit the end of composing as a teleological end in
dialectical terms as the regulating idea. We apply prolepsis to that
which is, we question that which is, ie the filmed material, towards that
which we want to project. As at once a moral and ideological need for
transcending the present toward the future, prolepsis produces, when
applied to the existing footage, a definition of lacks, of lacunae and
therefore of desiderata that which is either not visible in the filmed
material, not sufficiently implied, or not sufficiently brought to a contra-
diction yet which would explode to a new level of truth, a truer truth
than the one which the mere appearance of the filmed material provides.
Since the process of composition actually looks for and finds that
which is not, composing is yet another phase in the continuing search for
the ultimate truth, and thus fulfils the most essential meaning of engage-
ment: we are engaged in the delineation of the ultimate truth of every
concrete condition or character, and we assume the enactment of that
truth. Through composing, further contradictions must be found, that is,
deeper truths must be discovered, as absences in the world are defined.
The discovery of absences (lacks, lacunae) and their definition must in
turn lead the film-maker as composer to the subsequent wager against
them to fill these lacks with that which is not, ie with either novel (not
just new) shots, or with paradoxical syntheses of the already existing
shots. An important injunction at this level: to ensure a truly revolution-
ary creativity, composing should start already at the level of shooting.
Shooting a film should be interwoven dialectically with composing: the
praxis of composing should be allowed to feed back and regulate the
propositions underlying the future filming. This of course is not feasible
in conventional and commercial production set-ups where the creative
process must be compartmentalised into (a) the separation of functions
72

(director, writer, editor) and (b) a consecutive (not dialectic) temporal

arrangement of the stages of production: writing, then filming, then edit-
ing, etc. What would constitute bankruptcy for a commercial company
avers itself as a pre-condition for success in a revolutionary film
collective.
If the script is not transcended in the filming and the filmed material
in composing, then the film becomes a case of artistic mental retarda-
tion; for in fact it was largely already ossified, fixed at the stage of the
script. Contradictions which could not possibly be discovered at the
script level no matter how long the script was being written can only
be found during the process of filming. And, in turn, no matter how long
the film were to be in filming, certain contradictions would be found
only through the process of composing. The reason for this is that at
each stage the work in creation passes from its status as subject to its
aspect of object in the mind of the artist. That is, the artist not only
knows the work of art as a fulfilment of a posited ideal which existed
before his work and toward which his efforts have been tended; in the
perspective of time we see this work of art not as a process pointing
towards the expression of an idea, but rather as a starting point, a
completed entity which is to be transcended. Comparably, an editor, ie a
composer, sees rushes (even if he/she is the same person, the director,
plus elapsed time) not only as the result of strenuous activity aimed at

Still from Listen, America! (directed by Edouard [Yves] de Laurot, 1970)

 73

expressing a certain feeling, idea, etc, but as something which exists as

an object from an a posteriori point of view. In particular, as directors
we should resent and rebel against the fact that the footage exists as an
objective reality that has been filmed and fixed forever with a power of
its own. We should place the footage ahead of us, not behind us, want to
do more with it, and therefore come back again to the subjective view,
which becomes a teleological one a regulating idea.
Our main objective, then, at this stage of production is the creation of
a composing consciousness. Composing consciousness can be paralleled
to the creation of a proper revolutionary consciousness that leads to the
final stages of revolutionary struggle, the ultimate confrontation and
the taking over of power. Thus, the creation of consciousness in the
composer to define lacks, needs and objectives is tantamount to the
creation of revolutionary consciousness, followed by the creation of
proper capacity to fight, which is like giving weapons to a man whose
consciousness has already been created and therefore ideologically
directed towards a certain objective, and who yet has no weapons. So
the weapons in the case of composing are precisely the figures of the
screen, syntactical, aesthetic, formal procedures which are emotionally
born out of the composers prolepsis toward the existing material that he
must transcend in composing. To sum up: a dialectic use of the prolepsis
is, first, to define ideologically the lacks as we view the footage and
define further contradictions; second, once ideologically defined, such
lacks elicit in the person as composer an artistic, personal need to
express them; and third, aesthetically they become new figures of the
screen.

THE INVISIBLE THIRD WORLD

It is helpful to start with the simplest possible examples, both ideologi-

cally and aesthetically. A few of the figures of the screen should suffice to
show concretely how they are created through composing. The sequence
designated as Minatory Labour, for example, was created as an Invisi-
ble Metamorphosis once the potential of the shots depicting the
oppressed daily toil of Third World peasants was perceived. By prolep-
sis, the labourers carrying their tools were transformed into a potential
peasant army of the revolution displaying their weapons as a threat. The
minatory aspect of their tools was elicited by a voice shouting, Brothers!
Your bosses have given you the power to be free! Youve got it in your
own hands! Use it!
Whereas a radical documentary, such as Fernando Solanass film
essay La Hora De Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), would
have seen no further than the victimisation of these peasants at the hands
of imperialist oppression, the proleptic film expressed what will be as
already existent yet metaphorically. It used the bare facts of reality to
express their truer truth, their visible appearance to express their invisi-
ble essence: it saw in the tools of their oppression the means to their
liberation. It refused, so to speak, to call a spade simply a spade.
It should be apparent that whereas in conventional editing the inher-
ent polyvalence of images is brought to univalence by selection in accor-
dance with their homogenous or heterogenous visible characteristics, in
74
3. Westherman, also known
as Weathermen and later
Weather Underground
Organisation (WUO), an
American radical left
organisation, was formed
in 1969 by a faction of the
Students for Democratic
Society (SDS) and aimed at
creating a clandestine
revolutionary party for the
violent overthrow of the
US government and
establishing a Marxist
dictatorship of the an original and important statement in itself, already on that level; yet,
proletariat. even that, upon having been filmed, has been by far transcended by a
dialectical composing the images significance must be conjured out of
its invisible characteristics. The composer, informed by his moral and
political vision, must perceive the metaphoric emanations of a shot the
invisible fields of force it radiates toward its dialectical complement.
More precisely, he has to see the shots potential as a metaphoric
element into the shot.
However, sometimes the proleptic projection onto a given shot
demands the creation of the dialectical complement of that shot
demands that the invisible be made visible. Such was the need that
resulted in the creation of a Visual Paradox. In the original image, black
children are competing for the candy a Santa Claus is throwing to them
from a moving jeep. This imperialism incarnate, and in motion, renders
the indigenous populations of Third World countries accomplices in
their own oppression. Since this contradiction was only latent in the
shot, it was brought out as a paradox in an added shot: Santa Claus was
made into an accomplice too as he unmasked himself to reveal that he
was black as well!
We have cited this sequence again to point up an important principle
in composing: that, just as every idea is liberating only so long as it has
not been realised and inevitably becomes an oppression when it has
been so does the filmed footage become an oppression and must there-
fore be denied not its existence denied, not its quality denied, but the
ultimateness of its statement as a projection, as a prolepsis, denied. You
must assume in fact, you must make yourself know that you can find
contradictions within that which, in the process of filming, was already
then opposed to the script. You must uncover contradictions within
concepts that otherwise, at first, seemed to be opaquely unified, and
were therefore filmed as such. Now, since all active, creative thought
proceeds by sub-dividing concepts, you must split apart this ostensible
unity and find conflicts within entities that had initially appeared harmo-
nious and finite.
MEMBERS OF THE WAKE
The denial of the filmed footage gives rise, on the level of a sequence, to
a process of successive development in which both ideological and
dramatic precision are attained in parallel and by successive layers
through the dialectic of the praxis of shooting and composing. An appo-
site example of this process is the The Wake sequence. As those who
are familiar with it will recall, The Wake starts as a revocation scene of
a secret Weatherman-type work session during which candles that were
camouflaging dynamite sticks are lit and metaphorised into votive offer-
ings as a paradoxical tribute to the prematurely self-slain companions
who, inefficient and careless, had literally hoisted themselves on their
own petards.3 Thus, the first phase of proleptic creation was to tran-
scend the merely documentary reconstruction of an authentic work
session towards its deeper political truth: that, in fact, within that
concrete situation the dynamite sticks tended, through the metaphor,
toward their dialectical essence the votive candles! Undoubtedly this is
 75

proleptic deepening with involved persons, not actors of the realised

scene toward the ultimate truth of the situation rendered. This projec-
tion, as recent historical events confirm, has been proved politically and
dramatically correct even prophetic, and of fundamental, if ominous,
import to the perspectives of developing a Third World type of Left in
this country.

SEQUENCE NINE: MEMBERS OF THE WAKE

(sound)
Dialogues here to be developed and Segment: Vertical Coffins
vernacularised by the participants.
Sound track 1: Theme foco to city
Sound track 2: Circumst.
Sound track 3: Effects
Track vox: Intones votive offering: A stick is lit, imminent explosion?
For Sh, for V, for K, for No: its a candle!
T, for N, for R, et al.
CRISIS ONE
CRISIS ONE
The litany continues until
The explosion! Long rumbling
successive detonations
(image)
From preceding sequence: The
Foco
A series of leaf-camouflaged guer-
rilla heads
forces of the future in a montage
tradition
dominate the countryside
Then, a head turns out to be a
solitary bush the sundown of the
country
Transfades into:
The blackness of the city middle-
class basement
hands handling dyna-sticks, sepa-
rating from tallow candles
Becomes votive as is lifted up and
placed on a face-concealing beam
above turning the man into a
vertical coffin!
and another
and another
Image cut to:
(Reminiscent flashback)
LS: A fugitive silhouette through
smoke
and another
76

Voice (A): and then all I

remember is that I ran and ran Freeze
though I was cold and naked but on haze-veiled ruins grotto-like
I just didnt realise it until much crater smoking
later I just kept running, running a cavernous window blown to
away bleak skies beyond
exhaling
Silence
Segment: DIALOGUES IN THE
DARK (
Henceforth, for security, the faces
of the participants are not seen, only
solitary candles silhouetting them
and faintly revealing a pageantry of
American mixed with flamboyant
militant posters on the wall.
Each time we hear a voice, camera
angle changes not to a face, but to a
given persons typical habitat,
background, within the under-
ground basement.
Voice: But what had really A militant poster, candlelit
happened?
Voice: Were you people tired or An old eagle clock and an El
something? Fateh poster
Voice: Did you know what you A tennis racket and a faint Mao
were doing? poster

Silence
Voice (Another Habitat): Screen returns to darkness and to
Yes, did you know how to handle hands handling dyna-sticks
this stuff I mean fuses, relays and
all?
Voice (Another Habitat): Candle (backlit faces turn up to
Yeah, relays can get tricky espe- speak)
cially when theyre transistorized.
Silence Still all faceless
Voice (Faint Image): Was it do
you think it was sabotage? I mean
counter-sabotage?
Voice: Was there an informer A gesticulating hand
among you?
Voice: Shut up! Let her talk.
After all she was there not you!
Silence Hiatus Invisible faces turn to her
 77

(Suddenly her voice [A], low and

as if muffled): No (Pause), they
were (Pause) theyno, we we
were tripping.
CRISIS TWO
The handling of dyna-sticks stops
petrified, heavy shocked silence. Handling dyna-sticks more
Faint multiple breathing, then the cautiously
sound of handling dyna-sticks
resumes

Voice (unexpectedly): So what?

Voice (shocked): So what!

Voice (again): Yeah so what, man? Maybe (Contrary to the

expected condemnation, the voice reverses the vector of the scene. As if
in consolation to her): maybe they were tripping maybe you were
tripping too but you shouldnt kill yourself over that. Think now
just because they did. I mean, just because they did trip. (Now at every-
one): Well, maybe if they hadnt been tripping, they wouldnt know
which way to go to make revolution

CRISIS THREE
Voice (Sharp): You you are here, with us, and do you really think
you can just trip into revolution? Is that what Revolution means to you?

Silence

Handling of dyna-sticks is heard

Voice (Hip Profile):4 Man, your problem is that you think revolution is
just one thing and that everybody just suddenly gets there. But Im tell-
ing you that theres all kinds of ways to get to revolution (Pause) You
see since this thing happened in the townhouse and other places
Ive been thinking

Voice (Latin American): When North Americans say, Ive been think-
ing, something negative always comes up.

Voice: Yeah, Ive been thinking. Well, Ive been actually feeling it that
maybe we had been mistaken that maybe revolution has already
happened, man all over this nation (Gets carried away) Yeah, people
are into revolution in many new creative kinds of ways. Insubordination,
man! From coast to coast the weather has been changing. Ive seen
communes spring into life and people starting to reach out and feeling
and coming together and Ive already seen beautiful wild-haired chil-
dren, beautiful organic children tripping out on the land. Dig, man, in
4. Hip is a contraction of
the new communes people grow up in a Yakki kind of way. They are
Hipster. getting their shit together and theyre down on the enemys hard drugs
78

How? Well, they fight them with soft drugs! Thats the peoples organic
drugs to trip meaningfully, to expand their consciousness, to raise their
consciousness, to relate to collective trips and experiences, to create a
liberated, revolutionary LOVE! Thats our Spring Offensive!

The word resounds against the sound of dyna-sticks being handled

Voice (Black Profile) (Slowly): Man if I can still call you that Man,
how do you propose to bring down Imperialism with grass? You wanna
wait until imperialism, oppression and exploitation will die organi-
cally? The truth is but you dont want to face it that Love, Creativity
and Communing will not liberate the Third World. No, man, imperial-
ism will not die organically: well have to kill it. (Pause)

Silence

Get this, just to be ready to die does not make you a revolutionary you
have to be ready to kill! Because, face it, revolution IS armed struggle; it
IS violence; it IS war!

Still Silence

Another Voice: Right on! Up Against the Wall!

Another voice (Matter of fact): Hand me that timer.

Voice (Black Profile): If you can talk about all kinds of revolution,
you cant even have an idea what were fighting for. Is this the kind of
future were making?

Voice: Man, I dont know anything about the future I know about
now.

Someone confirms from deep dark

Voice: Well, if you dont know about the future, what gives you the
right to kill the enemy now?

Voice (Hip): Listen, man, I dont know who the enemy is as much as I
know who my friends are and theyre all over.

Voice (Cuts in): Right. Also in the Third World. And if youre their
friend youll have to kill to make them yours!

Suddenly, out of the darkness comes a savage shriek and the hip appears
wheeling madly in a pantomime of a frenzied war dance
He then reaches out to an invisible comrade and snatches a dyna-stick
out of his working hand, puts the stick across his mouth, yelling:
Kill! Kill! Kill! Thats all weve been talking about thats all weve
been wanting to do: Kill! Kill! Kill!
He circles in a self-conscious mockery, rabidly, at the invisible comrades.

Silence of crisis
 79

CRISIS FOUR
Voice (Unexpectedly): Right! Terrorism is wrong.

The mocking hip revolutionary stares into darkness in panting

disbelief

Voice (Hip): So so you agree.

Voice: No. (Pause) Your terrorism is wrong.

Voice (Hip): What dyou mean by that?

Voice: That!
Points at his pantomime.
He takes the stick out of the hips mouth and returns it to the work
table.

The Hip receding into darkness again:

Remember, man youve been blowing things up yourself.

Voice: Perhaps I was but with a different feeling and for different
reasons.

Silence

Voice (Another): Yeah and I gave it up for different reasons.

From the image of a candle

suddenly the screen cuts to (Remi-
niscent Flashback): a street image
as a swarm of plainclothesmen
burst out of unmarked cars, swoop
down on two young men, separate
them, and question them sepa-
rately, captiously, insistently.
Evidently, unprepared as they were
to coordinate their statement in
advance, the young men reveal a
discrepancy and are promptly
shoved into the cars. One of the
arrested mens clenched fist
appears fugitively and forlornly in
the unmarked cars rear window.
Back in the Wake Location:

His Companions Voice: No. They didnt beat him at all. (Pause) The
way they did it was (he halts) there was a kind of gallery, all around
the inside prison yard. They said hed fallen from the top floor.
80

The screen cuts to (Reminiscent

Flashback): an apartment door
being rammed in from outside.
The lintels are cracking. Inside,
two young men are grasping
sawn-off rifles but, as they turn
round, they face the third one,
who abstains.
They stare at him with dawning
disbelief.

Voice (Police outside):

Theres been a noise complaint! Open
up!
The ramming thuds are deafening.
Back to the Wake

Voice: Christ! We had spent eight months with him. Every day, eight
months! How could I know? He even planned that action on the
World Trade Center and he taught me how to build a Bangalore
torpedo, he did (Pause) Eight months Shit!

Voice: You want to know the truth Cut to: A pair of gloved hands
now how they got the next one? The
one who called us uptight. Youd
never believe it! This thing he left in
the subway you know that cooking
timer and all it never went off so
they got his fingerprints right off of it!
Laughs briefly, and halts.

Voice (Another): That sure was no reason for you to beat it to the mid-
west. Voice (As Before): No. Youre right. That was not the reason.
(Haltingly) I just thought the whole thing was wrong. Wait! (He pulls
a candle to a roll which, unfolded, looks like a teletype sheet. He reads
haltingly): Since one of the main objectives of the clandestine vanguard
is the political engagement of the masses, the mindless advocacy of
terrorism by the irresponsible North American Left is, at this stage,
politically incorrect. By choosing adventitious objectives and by produc-
ing erratic human victims, acts of self-gratifying terror will provide the
enemy with a plausible rationale for further repression and retaliation
against the potential of the very masses whom the clandestine vanguard
seeks to engage, and will alienate the masses themselves from identifying
with the vanguard objectives.

Silence of crisis

CRISIS FIVE
Voice: There is a difference between terrorism and sabotage.

Voice (Another): Not here. Not now.

 81

Voice (Another): I agree. Terrorism is wrong, here and now. (Pauses, as

if for effect) But terrorists are right.

Silence

Same Voice Continues: Yeah, theyre right right for the task. We dont
need terrorism but we need terrorists, if only to (he suspends his voice)
To organize, for instance. Thats right, terrorists as militants, really
committed, totally dedicated fighters thats what should be at the basis
of every revolutionary. Sometimes it is easier to kill yourself than some-
one else. So that kind of dedication of self-sacrifice is required if
only potentially.

Voice (Another): Potentially! Man, only real military action can create
militant consciousness; only revolutionary acts can be called revolution-
ary action. It is your duty as revolutionaries to change the love and
cultural revolution into a revolutionary culture that comes out of acts
of continuous challenge and struggle through a physical confrontation.
We define ourselves by destroying the enemy. Sooner or later well have
to make them face our terror.

Silence

Voice (Hip Two): Just like I told you, man I used to believe that too. And
now now something is telling me that people are people Yes, even
among the pig structure you can find people. Theyre just ignorant, thats
all. Maybe we could blow their minds first before we blow them up.

Voice (Agitated): Thats it, man, Screen cuts to: An eerie view of
thats it! I was tripping the other what hes describing. The astro-
day and guess what I saw? (Pause) nauts on their trip
I saw astronauts in their capsule
reaching out for something floating
about in the air guess what it
was? (Exultant) A joint! Grass!
Marijuana, man astronauts actu-
ally turned on to pot!
Out there in space! Far out!
Voice (Joining in): Spaced out,
man, spaced out. The Astro-Pots!
Too much!

Voice (Another): No, seriously. You know what Mao said? He said,
that in America, if you cant have revolution, apply dissolution! He must
have meant just that!

Another Voice (Extrapolating): Sure he did. (Wistful, unaware of his own

contradictions) We should all come out halfway to the people to the
workers, to the farmers, even to the pigs, and expand their consciousness.
Yeah, we should be committed all the time to revolutionary action not
82

be just part-time secret revolutionaries. We should be dedicated with all

that we are, with all our lives but when I think of Ted and the others
I dont want to see people run screaming through smoke again. I want to
light fires of love everywhere and then make the revolution with it!

Silence

Suddenly, a voice that has been silent for a while pronounces. with epic
undertone the simple words, all the more ominous for their simplicity:
Youre a hippie, John, youre just a hippie!

Silence

CRISIS SIX
Voice (Hip): Well, I dont know. Maybe Im just an American revolu-
tionary. See, I used to talk like you. I used to be committed like you
hung up, I call it now Yeah, I used to be a really single-minded fighter,
I used to be a terrorist as you describe it a really dedicated revolution-
ary I used to

Voice (Cuts in; mockingly): I used to be a saint!

Voice (Hip; taken aback): What! Whats that got to do with it?

Voice: Everything. To say, I used to be a terrorist is like saying, I used

to be a saint. (Pause) Either you really were one or not! If you had really
been one, youd be one now. Or else youd never really been one at all!

Voice (Hip; suddenly): Well, maybe I dont want to be a saint I just

want to be a human being.

Previous Voice: And maybe maybe you cant be fully human unless
youre more than only human. I think I understood that after I ran away
to Europe and returned Yes, maybe thats the failure of all of us of
the whole American left (to the invisible presences in the dark) You
know, Ive never seen your faces but I do know your voices. Ive heard
them before, many times, in many places wherever American revolution-
aries get together and start speaking of action of why they want to act
what forYes (he hesitates, becomes humbler) Yes, I feel I am all
there when others look at me from outside but inside inside, at the center
of me theres a hollow core some lack of divine certitude, of (he halts).
So I feel that its the same void that makes us distrustful and weak the
same lack that undid you as terrorists that may undo us as revolutionaries.
And I think we all feel that way deep down but we wont admit it.

Another Voice: And why dont you admit that youre a middle-class
individualist.

Previous Voice: And youre my Brother. Dont forget that.

Someones Voice: Youre right were all brothers and sisters, a whole
family of the American Left sitting at our own wake
 83

Awkward Silence

CRISIS SEVEN

The screen cuts to another habitat: a

poster with the lapidary maxim: iustum
est bellum quibus necessarium at pia arma
ubi nulla nisi in armis spes est.
A hand is scanning the poster with a
candle.

Voice (as if to break

the awkward silence): Say,
man, Ive always wondered
about that poster over there its Greek to me.

Voice: Latin. A patrician poet wrote it two thousand years ago.

Voice: Yeah, he must have been one. This whole idea looks like an irrel-
evant, elitist ego trip to me. (He pauses) What does it mean anyway?

Voice: The way I read it, it says: NECESSITY MAKES THE WAR
JUST, AND HOPE HALLOWS THE ARMS WHERE NO OTHER
HOPE OBTAINS.

All are silenced.

Voice: Well, maybe its true for them in the Third World but I dont
want revolution to be imported from anywhere I dont want to be
taught revolution by anyone. Not even by those smart-ass revolutionar-
ies that kidnap our ambassadors!

Voice: Well, I respect their struggle and all that, but, man, thats where
most of this heavy rap is coming from all this constant talk about dedi-
cation, honor, thats a macho concept sacrifice, responsibility, all that
discipline drag, that organization jazz, that security paranoia all
these are down things, down trips; but the whole purpose of revolution
is to raise things up to people, see!

Another Voice, hitherto silent: I do see. The weathers changed. It really

has.

Another Voice (promptly): Yes. The Fall is here.

Silence. The handling of dyna-sticks has subsided.

Suddenly, with resumed resolve, a voice: Listen! Everybody, listen! I

thought we had all come here to (something halts him briefly) had
come here to make decisions on matters of strategy: to decide which way
were going, but instead (Pause) listen! (This time he himself starts listen-
ing, resumes in a different tone) Listen! (Outside, footsteps are heard
approaching, first soft and cautious then manifest and ominous. One,
two candles are snuffed out, but most remain burning)
84

Silence. All listen now.

Suddenly, a resounding thud is heard,
and, vehemently pushed, the door-barricading
sandbags collapse in an avalanche.
Shrieks, commanding voices.

A thin investigative shaft of light.

Then another and another. The inter-
rupting flashlights, now pale, subdue
the candles light one by one.
And now, one by one, members of the
wake, scattering, are caught in the
scissoring flashlights pursuing, encir-
cling, pinioning them against the inex-
orable walls one after another
hide now their faces not from
imminent blows but from the flash-
lights violating glare that robs them
of their only prize: anonymity now
raped, their identity unveiled, humili-
ated, they cringe and back up against
their own flamboyant militant post-
ers lining up the walls, one by one
hands up
up against the posters raised fist, up
against the menacing ikons, up against
the gratuitous pageantry of hip revo-
lution surrendered
one by one, one after another
hands up!
up against the wall!
Fast fade-cut to: next sequence
The Intermessage

THE POSITIVE NEGATION

As we know, history has confirmed many of these insights, and more are
boding to come true. Yet the import of such a sequence extends far
beyond mere prophecy that is, a prediction based on an accurate and
imaginative assessment of the latency in a given situation. It is a most
naive conception that advocates as do political films that a motion
picture be a sort of blueprint for action. In fact, were they properly
politically trained and theoretically educated, those film-makers would
know that, both dialectically and dramatically, the contrary is true! For
beyond the phase of composing, it is up to the public to become the
negation of the negation, of the content of the film viewed. Even the
artist does not consider his work as finished; the terminal point merely
marks the beginning of another stage of transcending which he may or
may not return to. Only a critic sees a work as finished; because he is a
non-creator, he cannot view the work as a phenomenon he can see it
 85

only as a fetish. This openness of a work of art should become an invita-

tion for the spectator to give resonance to it.
Paradoxically, militants such as those in The Wake could have been
saved by the very qualities they are indiscriminately out to combat. For it
is precisely their lack of qualities that have been developed and sharpened
by the previous bourgeois and aristocratic classes cultural refinements
and a sense of judgment and evaluation of other human beings that has
permitted deep investigative police penetration into their own ranks.
The purely analytical, eliminative conception of revolution the American
Left has devised relinquishes these achievements and refinements of
the previous classes an error Marx warned against when he cautioned
revolutionaries of his own time not to throw the baby away with the
bathwater.
It is, in fact, the hallmark of a culturally privileged class the aristoc-
racy or the genuine upper bourgeoisie of Europe to be able, as Jean-
Paul Sartre once pointed out, to recognise each other at sight. Or, as
the timeless truth has it: Only quality can recognise quality.
Conversely, then, lacking such cultural refinement and antennae, over-
whelming numbers of North American revolutionaries, both black and
white, have been unable to detect the human and ideological inauthen-
ticity of an informer in their very midst and consequently have need-
lessly been arrested and even destroyed by the system. There is a
dialectic between the struggle revolutionaries are waging against the
dominant class and their need for its accomplishments a dialectic
expressed by a line in The Leaders Soliloquy: Aristocracy will be abol-
ished as a class only when revolutionaries become the aristocrats of
mankind.

THE INVISIBLE FRAME

On the level of the praxis of revolutionary films, the question that now
arises is what to do with the figures of the screen that have been created
in the early stages of composing. A useful concept, a practice, for work-
ing these separate moments together into a dramatic and coherent
whole is that of the Scaffolding. Conceived roughly as voiceover
speeches that explicitly express the idea that the sequence as a whole
will have to communicate, it acts as a frame around which all the
elements will have to be shaped. Since all the elements montage,
voices, sound effects and music have an expressive potential which
emerges in the course of composing, the more that can be said by
them, the less need there is for the idea texts. So that by the time the
sequence lives on its own as a dramatic entity, the verbal scaffolding
has withered away!
A particularly good example of this is the Inter-message text, a
proleptic statement of the spirit and strategy that the forces of the Third
World project to North American revolutionaries, its co-oppressed.
Absorbed into the sequence, the text at the same time proposes itself as a
scaffolding for revolutionary praxis. The following selection represents a
middle stage in the metamorphosis from a theoretical tract to a work of
art a tentative plan of an assemblage. It is one of many such plans that
must be formulated and transcended as the dialectic between theory and
86

practice, between word and image, drives toward the totalisation that is
the achieved work of art.

INTERMESSAGE

(sound) (image)
Voice: Prometheus to Sparta 1 KW Transmitter adjusted to
Prometheus calling Sparta frequency
Attention! Attention! Blackouts (for code) Latin Clan-
All Communications operators destino speaking into micro-
under code 3 phone
This message from 3 frequency 2 Unidentified arm to transmitter
As per code 2 frequency adjustment
check 3
Authentication
Voice (Clandestine):
Sure, the authorities they try to
intercept us. They determine the
frequency; they de-
code the cipher; and then they Triangulation charts
jam our transmission
They triangulate, of course:
this way (shows) and that
from the US mainland and from
ships.
Yes, thats it! They know that
theyve made the fix! On an island
on this island. They always find an Grid and compass
island and think its the source of all
directives for intercontinental
insurgency activity But in fact,
revolution is coming to them
from all over Symbol of plane on chart A
from all over plane wing!
A pilotless cock-pit!
Radio Voice: Speakers from planes then echo:
Sparta to Carthage signals
Sparta to Carthage from the fishermens nets
Before the dawn rises, the dew will Plane wing against sun rising
eat out the eyes over oceans horizon
Before the dawn rises, the dew will A clothesline turns out to be an
corrode the arms aerial! on a city roof in the
USA.
Radio: Unidentified hand adjusting
Musical Identification Theme receiver
Voice (Female, decoding): Senders on plane
Decode: General text intentionally
intelligible for broadcast and enemy
interception specific classified
parts in code as per
 87

(Now, the decoding female voice Over TV sets, radios, to the New
in staccato word-blocks inexora- Left
ble):
SINCE-U.S.-IMPERIALIST-
POWER-SYSTEM-NEOCOLO-
NIALIST-PHASE-IS-CHIEF-
CENTRAL-ENEMY-OF-ALL-
INSURGENT-PEOPLES-OF-
THIRD-WORLD-THE-STRATE-
GICALLY-DECISIVE-STRUGGLE-
INSIDE-POWER-BASE-UNITED-
STATES-WILL-AS-PER-CODE
NO-LONGER-REMAIN-UNDER-
CONTROL-OF-NORTH-AMERI-
CAN-LEFTIST-MOVEMENTS-
ALONE-
Code signal hiatus
THE-AMERICAN-LEFT-AT-
LARGE-HAVING-FAILED-POLIT-
ICALLY-TO-CREATE-AN-
IDEOLOGY-AND-THEREBY-TO-
INCREASE-ITS-POWER-
HAVING-FAILED-MORALLY-
TO-DEVELOP-DEDICATED-
AND-DISCIPLINED-REVOLU-
TIONARIES-AND-HAVING-
FAILED-ABOVE-ALL-MILITAR-
ILY-IN-NOT-COORDINATING-
ITS-POTENTIAL-WITH-THE-
GROWING-ACTIVE-FORCES-
OF-THE-INSURGENT-PEOPLES-
OF-THE-THIRD-WORLD-IS-IN-
ITSELF-AND-BY-ITSELF-INADE-
QUATE-TO-FULFILL-THE-ULTI-
MATE-OBJECTIVES-OF-THE-
SECOND-FRONT-
Code signal hiatus New Left reactions
IN-VIEW-CONTRADICTION-
BETWEEN-INSURGENCY-
TIMING-OF-FORTHCOMING-
ARMED-STRUGGLE-AGAINST-
ALL-MILITARY-AND-
ECONOMIC-FORMS-OF-
NEOCOLONIALIST-AGGRES-
SION-ALL-OVER-THIRD-
WORLD-AND-THE-UNRELI-
ABLE-LONG-RANGE-POTEN-
TIAL-OF-NORTH-AMERICAN-
NEW-LEFTIST-(NEW)-ACTIV-
ITY-THE-ONLY-CONCRETE-
EFFECTIVE-SUPPORT-TO-
88

INSURGENT-REVOLUTION-
ARY-FORCES-OTHER-CONTI-
NENTS-WILL-HENCEFORTH-
BE-NOT-THROUGH-PROCESS-
OF-OVERT-LEFTIST-TACTICS-
BUT-THROUGH-CODE-3-
COVERT-IMPLICIT-REVOLU-
TIONARY-FORCE-ACTING-
STRATEGICALLY-AS-CLANDES-
TINE-SECOND-FRONT-
AGAINST-POWER-SYSTEM-
BEHIND-ENEMY-LINES-
REPEAT-ALSO-BEHIND-
ENEMY-LINES.
Code hiatus
As per code 2
Link signal

Although this sequence comes more than halfway through the film, its
essence haunts the film from the very beginning through images of the
Third World. As the film opens, with a proleptic sequence filmed from
a helicopter, we think first that we are flying over Vietnam or some
other beleaguered Third World country. Then we find that it is over
America that we are really flying! And yet, although it is America,
there is still something of the Third World in it! We are flying over
Harlem, with the machine guns pointing to the slums! Then, the finger
of destiny the machine gun descends from the sky to ground level,
from a helicopter to a tank, and rides first through the American
countryside and then through a cemetery.
Suddenly we hear eerie, phantasmic groaning: the suppressed
mumblings of a human voice struggling to surface from under the
ground. Instantly, over a cut, the camera bursts through two institu-
tional portals into the middle of a courtroom scene towards a man
bound and gagged in a chair, straining to communicate something to the
magistrate before him, and to all.
A conventional political film would tend to use this image to arouse
righteous and compassionate indignation in the viewer. It would
continue this shot to make the point that the chained man was a victim
of just-less justice, assuming a priori that he was the good guy and the
judge the villain. But this is too simplistic a view; here, facile, automatic
denunciations of the system viewed Manicheistically would be banal,
even nihilistic. The forces of the establishment are like the forces of
nature, in the sense that they are that against which the revolutionary
tests his capacities. And so, the point is not that he is chained to the chair
but why he is there in the first place whose fault is it? Thus, the image
that follows is that of a Negro judge sitting at the bench, proleptically
judging the gagged man.
And so, the film drops dialectically to another level of meaning.
Not surprisingly, this transcendence occurred during the course of
composing, as a negation of a negation. The gagged man, a negation
of the establishment, was himself negated by the black judge: he is
 89

seen as guilty not of the accusation brought against him by the system
but of having been caught guilty of being his own victim, so to
speak.

VISION OF THE INVISIBLE

It is through the gagged black man, then, that the presence of the Third
World is introduced into the film. For the Third World is not only a
geopolitical category; it is a moral-political one as:

with personal contacts can produce good audiences with the added
advantage of families being able to attend. Other groups seek to
establish outlets just outside the factory areas so a worker can see a
film going to or coming from work without wasting travel time.
Others are demanding the right to show films within the factories. In
Genoa, the dock workers have a large center right on the piers where
films can be shown throughout the day, workers coming whenever
convenient for them, with continuous discussion in the nearby caf
area.

The establishment of any one centre is no great feat. The Italian

ferment is a mass phenomenon hundreds and even thousands of
permanent centres are needed to begin to make a significant impact.
The emphasis of Italian revolutionary cinema on workers rather than
on students indicates the higher stage the Italian movement has
reached. Film festivals such as Pesaro where some more or less radical
films are shown to a random audience of more or less Leftist critics
and artists simply will not meet present Italian demands for a revolu-
tionary culture. A thoroughly politicised student movement is already
a reality. What remains to be done is to carry the most revolutionary
ideas possible into the factories, piazzas and countryside. Several nuclei
have taken as their full-time activity the work of getting revolutionary
films to this mass audience. Many local sections of political organisa-
tions have people doing this type of work as part of their regular
duties.
One interesting aspect of the Italian audiences is their desire to see
revolutionary films by Americans. Finally Got The News, the film by
the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, has been widely screened
and has had an excellent reputation, as have some of the films by
Newsreel. The Italians hunger for revolutionary films about America
and their definitions of revolutionary do not include Easy Rider or
even Ice. Films from Angola, Palestine, Latin America and the Far East
have set a standard of seriousness which has deeply moved Italian
film-makers. American film-makers who are satisfied that the under-
ground scene is revolutionary have set their goals much lower than the
Italians have. Rather than writing off American workers and even
Nixons Silent Majority as hopeless reactionaries, American film-
makers might start making films that could begin to change conserva-
tive attitudes. Radicals might begin to establish contacts so that work-
ers could learn what a revolution would mean from revolutionaries
90

rather than through the corporate-controlled mass media. If such a

task is difficult in Italy with its long Marxist traditions, it is a
hundredfold more difficult in America, yet all the more important for
just that reason.

COMPOSING AS THE PRAXIS OF REVOLUTION

Indeed, the revolutionary in the USA is a member of the Third World

but only if he is not a member of the Wake. The relevance and strategic
effectiveness of the Third World forces, inside and outside the United
States, will be contingent upon their respective abilities to apply political
prolepsis. For the unity based on anti-imperialism, as it has been until
now, is not enough unless it is invigorated by a common vision of the
invisible as a most concrete force.
In order to create such a force, we, also as film-makers, must first
render articulate the present messages expressed by the titanic meta-
phors: on the one side, the poignant plea soaring up from the forlorn
fishermens nets as they are metamorphosed into transmitting antennae;
on the other side, the inchoate mumblings of the gagged man the voice
of the North American Left. It is also our task, then, to engage the
masses of public in the enactment of that dialogue.
In the next instalment, therefore, we shall dedicate ourselves to the
study of and proposal for an active relationship between the film as a
revolutionary idea and its potential audiences.
Ya-Ta-Hey! Alcatraz is a documentary film of actual events which
have taken place during nearly one and a half years occupation of
Alcatraz Island by American Indians of all tribes. The motivating force
behind the Indian invasion and occupation has inspired the creation of
the film Ya-Ta-Hey! a Navajo exclamation meaning go-well-on-your-
way! the intention being a sensitive portrayal of the lifestyle which
the Indians bring with them and that also evolves during the one and a
half year struggle to maintain life on a twelve-acre rock in the middle of
San Francisco Bay. Within a few months after the invasion, water and
electricity supply was cut off by Government agencies. The analogy of
prison to reservation life since the early 1800s is enacted in real life,
allowing the film to materialise as evidence of a regeneration of Indian
conscience in the contemporary urban chaos of the world. After one
year and four months of work to date photographing and editing, we
have arrived at the crucial stage of near completion and financial
impasse. With most of the bulk footage shot and edited in workprints,
and the work tape of the composite soundtrack composed for mixing,
another full-day trip to Alcatraz is necessary to film details for titles,
burned buildings and the dark interiors of cell-blocks, with more
material for the ending of the film. Sound recording as well as battery-
portable lighting equipment must be rented and a boat contracted to
stand by for a fourteen-hour workday. This will make final the photog-
raphy and recording to finalise the material of work in progress. The
expected cost to reach first release print is almost $3000 and in order to
finish the film by the end of the summer, the film-makers are now grate-
 91

fully accepting contributions. A prospectus of the film is available to all

contributors.
21 Cover
Still from
of the
Listen,
autumn
America!
1970 issue
(directed
of Cinaste;
by Edouard
Edouard
[Yves]
(Yves)
de Laurot,
de Laurot
1970)shooting Listen, America!

Thanks are due to Gary Crowdus and Cineaste magazine for their permission to
reprint this article, which was an edited version of the fourth essay in a series on
Cinma Engag the theory and practice of a socially engaged, revolutionary cinema.
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