Bringing Consciousness to Conscience: Field Notes on a

Cinema of Commitment

John Gianvito

South Central Review, Volume 33, Number 2, Summer 2016, pp. 3-14 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scr.2016.0017

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/626944

Access provided by The University of British Columbia Library (2 Jul 2018 17:41 GMT)
Bringing Consciousness to Conscience / Gianvito 3

Bringing Consciousness to Conscience:

Field Notes on a Cinema of Commitment1
John Gianvito, Emerson College

About twenty-five years ago I received a copy of a special edition of the

French daily newspaper Libération.2 Conceived in conjunction with the
50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival under the direction of critics
Louis Skorecki and Serge Daney, the journal asked 700 filmmakers from
around the world the seemingly simple question: Pourquoi filmez-vous?
(Why do you film?). The range of responses as well as participants was
broad. Those invited included still surviving directors whose careers
had begun in the silent era like Jean Painlevé, Joris Ivens, Lillian Gish
(who, while it is little known, directed a now lost film, Remodeling Her
Husband, made in collaboration with writer Dorothy Parker and Gish’s
sister Dorothy), Manoel de Oliveira (who was still directing films at 105
years of age), such prominent figures as Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray,
Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Agnes Varda, Francis Ford Coppola,
as well as an array of filmmakers from Algeria to Zimbabwe. As might
be expected, there were among them the very loquacious and the very
succinct. Bresson’s reply, unsurprisingly, was but 2 words—“Pour vivre.”
It’s easier for me to recollect many of the briefer responses—Jean-Luc
Godard’s “In order to avoid the question ‘why,’” Sergei Paradjanov’s
“In order to sanctify the grave of Tarkovsky,” or the late Theo Angelo-
poulos’ response, “Today I make films for my friends, and to sweeten
the passage of time.”
So, regarding “Why Do you Film?”, I found it to be, and continue
to find it, a good direct question. Certainly similar inquiries have been
made to individuals in other creative fields. Among favorites is this from
poet Adrienne Rich who, in a speech in 1984, summed up her whole
reason for writing with just 7 words: “the creation of a society without
domination.” Or Susan Sontag who, when asked by The New York Times
to define the nature of her life’s work, remarked: “To keep alive the idea
of seriousness. You have to be a member of a capitalist society in the late
20th century to understand that seriousness itself could be in question.”3
It happened one day that I received an inquiry from an Argentine jour-
nal asking me to respond to this very question and I thought it time that
I too confront it head on. My response, in part (having never mastered

© South Central Review 33.2 (Summer 2016): 3–14.

4 South Central Review

the economy of Bresson), was the following: “If I choose to make films
today it is to remind myself and others that there are a lot more important
things than films. But how best to express this desire? Making films,
watching films, reading texts such as this, is a privilege, a luxury even,
unfathomable for much of the world’s population. [. . .] While filmmaking
is but one of the means by which I assume my social responsibility, I am
convinced that it affords me a voice richer, more resonant, and further
reaching than the one I project as a speaker or writer. To this end, I also
make films in order to get better at making films.”4
Contesting the relationship between art and politics is obviously noth-
ing new. In Books 4 & 10 of The Republic, Plato famously decried not
only the uselessness of poetry but even its potential negative effects (the
sole exception being those verses sung in praise of the Gods or famous
men). Arguing that poetry appealed to the lower faculties of men, i.e.
emotion, that it “feeds and waters passions instead of drying them up,”
Plato concluded by extending an offer to “grant to those of her defend-
ers who are lovers of poetry [. . .] permission to speak in prose on her
behalf: Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to
States and to human life and we will listen in kindly spirit, for, if this
can be proved, we shall surely be the gainers—I mean, if there is a use
in poetry as well as a delight?” That “delight” itself might have “use”
seems to have been out of consideration.
Within the vast spectrum of what moving images can aspire to do, my
intention here is an attempt to breath a little life back into the notion of
a “cinéma engagé,” an engaged cinema, a committed cinema—to reaf-
firm value in the conviction that cinema has always had, and continues
to possess, the capacity to meaningfully contribute to the confronting of
the injustices of one’s time.
I invoked earlier the word privilege. In his seminal essay “The Re-
sponsibility of Intellectuals,” Noam Chomsky puts it plainly: “Privilege
yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities”: something,
in my view, that ought to be an accepted baseline. But what does it
mean to be a responsible filmmaker? Responsible to what? To whom?
To oneself? To one’s audience? To one’s producers (for those fortunate
enough to have any)? I leave these questions in the air for the moment.
When asked if he thought the cinema could have a political role,
French director Jean-Marie Straub once replied, “Of course it has a
political role. Everything is political, everything that you do in your life
is political. Thus cinema, the art that maintains the most direct relation-
ship with life is the most political art form. This doesn’t mean that so
Bringing Consciousness to Conscience / Gianvito 5

called ‘agit-prop’ films are the most political ones—often the opposite
is true. But cinema is the political art form par excellence.” In citing
this, it is important that it be understood that what I am affirming not
be interpreted as an admonition against art for art’s sake, film for film’s
sake, or signifying an overall condemnation of film as entertainment.
The boundaries of what I am describing are neither so distinct nor so
easily defined, and the ways in which one’s energies are catalyzed are
complex. That said, I could make the argument, as I have elsewhere,
against a spectrum of work that I characterize as the Cinema of Distrac-
tion and Alienation (alienation in the Marxian not Brechtian sense)—an
empty-calorie cinema that offers the viewer nothing in the way of real
nutrition and that, in its worst guises, becomes little more than a form
of drug-peddling and spiritual rape.
What is meant by a political film? For Jonas Mekas, any film that
causes you to think differently after seeing it ought to be regarded as a
political film. For Luis Buñuel, films should ideally aim to convey to
audiences “the absolute certainty that they DO NOT LIVE IN THE BEST
OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS.”5 Echoing the earlier remark by Straub,
British scholar Mike Wayne states: “All films are political, but films are
not all political in the same way.” What constitute useful political films
for Wayne are works that, “in one way or another address unequal access
to and distribution of material and cultural resources, and the hierarchies
of legitimacy and status accorded to those differentials.” Wayne, at the
same time is quick to point out that, “What counts as political is indeed
a political question in itself. The bourgeois separation of politics and
economics, representation and commerce, is far from innocent, while
the spread of the political into the personal and the cultural was a major
aim and achievement of feminism.”6 To this I would add that any film
that re-sensitizes us to our humanity, that opens one up–however tem-
porarily–to a renewed sense of connection to the world around one, can
be said to be performing a useful political function.
Ultimately, like any other activity or gesture, the bringing of a film
into the world does not happen in a vacuum. Energy expended in one
direction is energy not expended elsewhere.
And, as Percy Shelley wrote in his heavily scorned and politically
influential poem “Queen Mab,” “There is no unconnected misery.”7

We open our eyes. We close our eyes. We make a choice.

6 South Central Review

Proof Positive

It is not difficult to find the viewpoint, frequently expressed,8 that

films, whatever their merits, whatever their aspirations, are fundamen-
tally powerless when it comes to affecting social change—a sentiment
expressed not only with regard to films but toward the political efficacy
of virtually all creative and artistic expression. “Poetry makes nothing
happen,” W.H. Auden famously wrote.9 To which the much less famous
radical filmmaker Marc Karlin responded, “Poetry may not be able to
stop a tank. But it can alert us to a tank.”10
Toward the goal that making a film, writing a novel, producing any
work of art, might in some way actually change the world, I readily
concede that such ambitions must be approached with considerable
skepticism and the utmost humility. In addition to which, in most cases,
being able to truly measure and quantify the material impact of a film is
a virtual impossibility. In most cases, but not all.
In 1966, British director Ken Loach aired a film called Cathy Come
Home on the BBC. The story of a young married couple who fall on
hard economic times and eventually face eviction and homelessness,
the film was, on its first broadcast, seen by 12 million people, a quarter
of the British population of the time, and directly led to the formation of
CRISIS, a national charity organization, offering year-round education,
employment, housing and health services, as well as lobbying the gov-
ernment for political change that prevents and mitigates homelessness.
In 1969, Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjines released his now classic
The Blood of the Condor, a film that disclosed the practice of forced
sterilization of indigenous women secretly conducted by the U.S. Peace
Corps. Within two years of the film’s release, the notoriety of Sanjines’
film would lead to the historically unprecedented expulsion of the Peace
Corps by the Bolivian government.
In 1988, Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line proved that a man, Randall
Adams, who was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a Dallas
police officer was in fact innocent, ultimately resulting in Adams’ con-
viction being overturned. Not unlike what happened to Robert Elliot
Burns in 1933 following the outcry against the barbarism of southern
penal systems as depicted in Mervyn LeRoy’s I am a Fugitive from a
Chain Gang leading to a new appeal of Burns’ case and his release. More
recently, the producers of the film West of Memphis themselves funded
new investigations, including new DNA testing, helping lead to the
release of the so-called WEST MEMPHIS 3, three teenagers tried and
convicted for the murder of 3 young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas.
Bringing Consciousness to Conscience / Gianvito 7

In 1999, the film Rosetta by the Belgian filmmakers the Dardenne

brothers inspired a new law, nicknamed the ‘Rosetta law’ prohibiting
employers from paying teen workers less than the minimum wage.
In 2009, the Academy-Award winning documentary The Cove drew
enormous attention to the practice of dolphin hunting in Japan. Recently
I read an interview with the film’s director Louie Psihoyos, where he ad-
dressed the question of those who say, four years after the film’s release,
“that the slaughter’s still going on. The film didn’t have any effect.” And
while it’s true that these mass dolphin kills persist, Psihoyos points to the
fact that in the intervening years the demand for dolphin-meat in Japan has
now dropped by two-thirds. He also points out another consequence—as
important as any other result of The Cove for Psihoyos is that one person
saw the film, became a vegan, and decided to get into filmmaking. That
person, Judy Bart, was directly inspired to finance the film Blackfish.
Quoting Psihoyos, “There’s a ripple effect that happens with a film, and
sometimes it’s not as knee-jerk a reaction as you’d like to think—that
you do something and it ends the problem right away. This is a much
more systemic kind of disease that we have in the public consciousness
where we subjugate intelligent, sentient animals for entertainment, and
we think that’s okay. That’s changing now very rapidly, more because
of Blackfish than The Cove. And to me it doesn’t matter who gets the
credit for this.”11
In 2012, Kirby Dick’s film The Invisible War was released exposing
rampant sexual assault within the military. Just two days after viewing
the film, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta issued a directive ordering
all sexual assault cases to be handled by senior officers at the rank of
colonel or higher, which effectively ended the practice of commanders
adjudicating these cases from within their own units.
To be sure, it is also the case that such power can just as readily inspire
negative social impact. For instance, in a newly released book by David
Cunningham entitled Klansville, USA he describes how by the early
1870s the Ku Klux Klan had effectively disappeared as an organization,
remaining dormant for about 45 years. “In 1915 however, Birth of a Na-
tion is released nostalgically looking back at the Klan as a heroic force
after the Civil War supposedly restoring order in the South, including
racial order. In the film a cross is burned. Living in Atlanta at the time, a
man named William Simmons uses the Atlanta opening of the film as a
way to create the Klan’s rebirth. What he does as the Klan’s first public
act is to organize a rally that features a cross burning on Stone Mountain
outside of Atlanta. So cross burnings really were a fictional symbol that
appear in this film that are taken up by the reborn Klan.”
8 South Central Review

Proof Negative

There is of course an inverse way of making my argument. Namely,

if films truly had no power to influence things, then why would such
concerted efforts have been made and continue to be made to suppress
and restrict access to them? Why, for example, as early as 1906, would the
film Re-Enactment of the Massacre at Wounded Knee have been banned
nationwide? This, despite the fact that it was directed by virtually the
most recognizable celebrity of the time, Buffalo Bill Cody. Why would
Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin have been banned in
the United Kingdom, a ban that remained in place until 1954, and was
then, upon release, “X-rated” by the British Board of Censors all the
way up until 1978? Why in 1946, when director John Huston appeared
at the Museum of Modern Art to screen his new documentary Let There
Be Light, a profile of the psychiatric treatment of US soldiers suffering
from what was then called “shell shock,” did military police show up,
confiscate the film, and refuse to let it be seen for the next 35 years?
Why would the BBC suppress the broadcast of Peter Watkins’ film The
War Game, a film they themselves had produced with the intention of
screening on August 6, 1965, the twentieth anniversary of the bombing
of Hiroshima, continuing to refuse to air the film for another 20 years?
Why, in France in 1966, was The Battle of Algiers banned for more than
five years after its release, despite immediate and widespread interna-
tional acclaim? Why in 1966 and again in 1988 were all the negatives
of the films of Lebanese filmmaker Christian Gazi intentionally set on
fire? Why were the personal film archives of French director René Vau-
tier destroyed in 1985? One need only browse through 40 years of the
journal Index on Censorship to find example after example. At the worst
edges of the problem are the instances of those filmmakers who have
been injured, tortured or killed as a direct reaction to their work. I think
of filmmakers like the “disappeared” Argentine filmmaker Raymundo
Gleyzer—director of Mexico: The Frozen Revolution, The Traitors and
The Land Burns—kidnapped in May 1976 by the military dictatorship,
last seen in the infamous Vesubio Torture Center and missing to this day.
I think of Chilean cameraman Jorge Müller Silva, who photographed the
landmark film The Battle of Chile, directed by Patricio Guzman, and who
was eventually kidnapped by Pinochet’s military police, tortured, and
whose whereabouts are still unknown. I think of Dhondup Wangchen, the
Tibetan filmmaker beaten and imprisoned since 2008 in China on charges
related to his having made a short 25-minute documentary Leaving Fear
Behind, built around conversations with Tibetans expressing their views
Bringing Consciousness to Conscience / Gianvito 9

on a range of issues from the Dalai Lama to the 2008 Beijing Olympics
to the human rights situation in Tibet.
More famously, in December 2010, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was
sentenced to a six-year jail sentence and a 20-year ban on directing any
movies, writing screenplays, or giving any form of interview (a circum-
stance that, to his credit, Panahi continues to resist). Much less widely
known, an article appeared in Agence-France Presse last year reporting
on a young Cameroonian director by the name of Richard Djimeli, who
was kidnapped, interrogated for 11 days, and tortured for a political fic-
tion seen as lampooning President Paul Biya’s longevity. Djimeli insists
that his film, entitled 139 . . . The Last Predators, about an imaginary
nation’s leader who has been in power 139 years and shows no sign of
stepping down, is not a reference to the 80-year-old Biya, who has been
in power for three decades. “My finger was chopped off,” said Djimeli,
“I was starved and lost 10 kilos [. . .] My kidnappers wanted to kill me
and dump me in a swamp but one of them helped me to escape.” Two
days before his abduction and just following the film’s release, Djimeli’s
troupe of actors had received a threatening text message, “Tell your
friend Richard Djimeli he is digging his own grave. His film is part of a
destabilization plot that has already been unmasked. If he wants to play
the patriot, he will be decapitated. Victory is near.”12
To further underscore this point about inverse proof, I offer the fol-
lowing case study:
Here in the United States, there was once a group of men and women
who got together to form their own small film company. They called it
Independent Productions Corporation, born of the desire, in their words,
to tell “stories drawn from the living experience of people long ignored
in Hollywood—the working men and women of America.” They began
researching and developing possible projects—a film about the 1931
Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama, another about a divorced woman who
loses custody of her children after being accused of being a Communist.
During this time, two members of the group, Paul and Sylvia Jarrico,
returned from vacationing in New Mexico and began recounting what
they had learned about a miners’ strike there among mostly Mexican-
American workers, a strike that had lasted a year and a half and ended
up securing a number of significant victories for the strikers and their
families. The company had found their story. The film they ended up
making, Salt of the Earth, is, in my view, one of the rarest, most unusual
and most significant films in American film history.
Before I go further, let me jump back a bit. Seven years before the
making of the film. 1947. The House Committee on Un-American Activi-
10 South Central Review

ties (at times chaired by Joe McCarthy) holds nine days of hearings into
alleged communist propaganda and influence in the Hollywood motion
picture industry. Of the eleven “unfriendly witnesses,” only one, émigré
playwright Bertolt Brecht, ultimately chooses to answer the committee’s
questions. The other ten refuse, citing their First Amendment rights to
freedom of speech and assembly. The crucial question they refuse to
answer is now generally rendered as “Are you now or have you ever
been a member of the Communist Party?” Such membership was not
then nor had it ever been illegal.
Two of those who would make Salt of the Earth were among these so-
called “Hollywood 10”: director Herbert Biberman and producer Adrian
Scott; two others, Paul Jarrico and Michael Wilson, who helped produce
and write the screenplay, were also among the many blacklisted artists.
Even before the cameras begin to roll, The Hollywood Reporter pro-
claims that a “commie” film is being shot in New Mexico under “direct
orders from the Kremlin.”13 Meanwhile in the small town of Silver City,
upwards of 400 people are invited to read as well as to comment on the
script beforehand. Casting is done from all around the area, with only 5
of the roles in the film played by professional actors. The lead character
of Ramon is played by a real-life local Union President.
Despite enormous pressure from Hollywood making it nearly impos-
sible to hire union crews, a production team is assembled. As filming
gets underway, Republican Congressman from California Donald Jack-
son goes onto the floor of the House of Representatives and delivers a
20-minute address attacking the film as “a new weapon for Russia [. . .]
deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds and to depict the United
States as the enemy of all colored people.” He promises to do every-
thing in his power to prevent the showing of the film “in the theaters of
America.”
On location, the actors who play the “Anglo” sheriffs are forced to
leave town by vigilantes. Businesses that help the film receive anonymous
phone threats. From time to time shots are fired at the set and at vehicles,
while periodically a small plane buzzes overhead making it difficult to
record sound, and noisy music is broadcast over loudspeakers. In one of
the most dramatic events, lead actress Rosaura Revueltas is arrested by
U.S. Immigration officials on a supposed passport violation (her passport
wasn’t stamped on entry, a government error) and soon flown back to
Mexico. As a consequence the filmmakers have to employ a double for
some of the final sequences of the movie.
Bringing Consciousness to Conscience / Gianvito 11

The last days of shooting the film take place under “near siege” con-
ditions with the state highway patrol guarding the roads to protect cast
and crew. Upon the filmmakers’ departure, the home of the actor who
played Jenkins (the Anglo organizer), as well as the Union Hall, are both
burned to the ground. The troubles however don’t end here. One by one,
film labs ignore or reject the film for processing. Howard Hughes, at that
time president of RKO Studios, writes a letter to Congressman Jackson
in which he explains that “the studios could effectively kill the picture if
they denied the production access to the facilities they needed—to edit,
dub, score, and otherwise prepare the movie for theaters.” Eventually
the company succeeds in getting the film processed by sending it to dif-
ferent labs under various pseudonyms, including at one point titling the
picture, “Vaya Con Dios.”
Once post-production begins, editing rooms regularly shift location
so as not to be found out, including for a time the use of a ladies’ room
inside of a closed movie theater. Four months along, chief editor Barton
Hayes quits. It is later discovered that he has been a plant for the FBI.
For the scoring, it’s decided to have the music recorded without the
musicians or technicians being told the true identity of the film. Since
no experienced negative cutter can be found, the regular editing team
undertakes the job, but as a result a number of technical errors are made.
March 1954 (tellingly, the same year as On the Waterfront is re-
leased)—one theater after another backs away from showing the film.
After the first of two scheduled press screenings, the projectionists union,
ironically, boycotts the screening of the film. Despite some excellent
reviews and good attendance, the film closes within less than a month
in New York after which no distributor is willing to handle the film
nationally. Now esteemed critic Pauline Kael writes that the film is “as
clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years,”
describing the story as “ridiculously and patently false” and “a proletar-
ian morality play.”14 Salt of the Earth would not be properly released in
the United States until 1965, 12 years later.
All of this—just because of a movie.
So, what was so dangerous? What message was the film trying to
impart that warranted such concerted efforts to keep it from view? Quite
simply—the belief that working people could in fact successfully organize
themselves and thereby improve their lives and working conditions, an
affirmation of the equality, dignity, and cultural richness of the Mexican-
American people, and a conviction in women’s equality and assertion of
their strength and their capacity to lead.
12 South Central Review

In the absence of Proof

Finally, what is to be said about all those politically-minded films

that have never been suppressed or censored, all those films that never
succeeded in re-writing laws or freeing the innocent or helping to bring
the corrupt to justice? In other words, the majority of films, my own
films included. If my intention is to reaffirm a conviction of the value
of politically committed cinema, what about all those hundreds of thou-
sands of films?
Speak to anyone seriously engaged in social justice work of any kind,
and they will tell you that commitment to such ideals is the undertaking
of a marathon and not a sprint. One rally, one protest march, one petition-
drive rarely if ever singularly produces the desired result. Neither does
one film. Measuring success by such standards is a recipe for failure,
simply feeding into the modern craving for instant gratification, instant
results. As with the other arts, an encounter with a film can work upon
the viewer across a very long period of time, sometimes in unpredictable
and subterranean ways, and, most often, in ways unknown and unknow-
able to the person who has made the film.
For those who argue that such films are often doing little more than
preaching to the converted, I would, first of all, question the use of the
term “preaching,” but I happily extol the value of reaching the converted.
Like most folks I know, I continually draw sustenance from the hard
work of many artists, writers, thinkers, activists, in order to keep not only
better informed but in order to continually rekindle my own energy and
motivation to fight harder, to work more diligently.

I mean what is the quantifiable value of a song by Woody

Guthrie?

While one cannot always change reality, one can change the ways
we look at reality and, thereby, increase the possibility of changing it.
A strong political film can be a spur to individual conscience, can be a
catalyst contributing as one of many contiguous elements leading toward
a shift in public consciousness. In their perceived powerlessness, such
films can also be akin to those small and quiet droplets of water that,
over time, have the ability to wear through stone.
Ultimately, I think, it is about doing it regardless. Regardless of cer-
tainty of outcome. Regardless of pressures for verifiable proof. We move
through a world full of continuous distractions, continual seduction of
our attention, inviting us to look here and not there, to gravitate whenever
Bringing Consciousness to Conscience / Gianvito 13

possible toward the pleasurable, the comfortable, the easy rather than
face up to facing the painful, the uncomfortable, the difficult.

Fortunately for most of us, hard realities do, periodically, break

through.

Even if it’s at the periphery of vision, we are aware that things are
not as they ought to be.
We have a sense of the burgeoning problem of global warming and
its effects on climate change;
We have some cognition of the exponentially widening chasm between
the obscenely rich and the desperately poor, that, in the 21st century, 2 to
3 billion people still live in extreme poverty, without sanitation, educa-
tion, or employment;
That today alone, some 21,000 children will die around the world
from largely preventable causes;
That only 10% of edible fish remain in the ocean and that this number
is rapidly declining.
More broadly, if the low estimate of the number of species is true—that
is, that there are around 2 million different species on our planet—then
that means between 200 to 2,000 extinctions occur every year, but if the
upper estimate of species is true—that there are 100 million different
species co-existing with us on our planet—then between 10,000 and
100,000 species are becoming extinct each year.
That we awaken daily in a world beset with gargantuan problems
and the uncomfortable truths of nuclear proliferation, toxic waste, war,
torture, rape, genocide, human trafficking, economic gangsterism, every
manner and kind of discrimination, greed—the list is long, the crimes
innumerable . . .
“The trouble is,” as the wonderful Indian writer and activist Arundahti
Roy reminds us, “that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once
you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act
as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
It’s not that I don’t personally ever feel conflicted about such matters.
One does not film with impunity. I not only recognize, but I insist on the
recognition of the thorniness of the relationship between cinema and so-
cial change. This said, the pivotal issue of the domination of the rich and
the powerful is not an immutable law of nature. And the study of history
reveals that the projecting of a film can also project the viewer into newly
awakened states of consciousness and moral clarity, the consequences
14 South Central Review

of which are faced daily—in what we notice in the world around us and
what the mirror reflects back to us, dare we look.

We Open Our Eyes. We Close Our Eyes. We Make Choices.

Notes
1. Adapted from a talk delivered on April 17, 2014 in conjunction with The Uni-
versity of Iowa Department of Cinematic Arts Annual Film Studies Lecture.
2. Libération, Numero Special, “Pourquoi Filmez-Vous?” Mai 1987.
3. Leslie Garis, “Susan Sontag Finds Romance,” The New York Times Magazine,
August 2, 1992.
4. Pablo Acosta Larroca and Florencia Gasparini Rey, eds. “Special Dossier Gru-
pokane: Why Do I Make Films?” GRUPOKANE, October 2011, http://www.grupokane.
com.ar/index.php?view=category&id=61%3Acatfilm&option=com_content&Itemid=63
5. Robert Hughes, ed. Film: Book 1 The Audience and the Filmmaker (New York:
Grove Press Inc., 1959).
6. Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (London: Pluto
Press, 2001), 1.
7. Newell F. Ford, ed. The Poetical Works of Shelley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1975), 13.
8. E.g. Werner Herzog, “Movies do not change anything . . . movies do not have
that power,” CBC Radio, September 12, 2011.
9. W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B.Yeats,” in Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957
(New York: Random House, 1967), 142.
10. Patrick Wright, “A Passion for Images,” Vertigo I. 9 (Summer 1999): 5.
11. Robin Kawakami, “‘The Cove’ Director on the Impact of Winning Oscar,” http://
blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/02/06/the-cove-director-on-the-impact-of-winning-oscar/
12. http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/2013/04/29/cameroon-director-kidnapped-
tortured-for-film
13. Mike Connally, The Hollywood Reporter, February 10, 1953.
14. Pauline Kael. 1954 review from Sight & Sound reprinted in I Lost It At The
Movies (New York: Bantam, 1966), 298-311.