Tag: Politics and the Movies

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Politics and the Movies 4: Spartacus

Vladimir Lenin supposedly said “There are decades when nothing happens, then there are weeks when decades happen.”

Although it was not evident at the time, the 1960 film Spartacus was at the center of one of those historical nexuses Lenin had in mind. The story began in 73 BC, when a group of 78 escaped Roman slaves led by a former gladiator named Spartacus gathered marauded through Italy. Eventually their movement grew into a force of about 120,000. After two years of rebellion, the Roman armies, led by eventual Triumvirate member Pompey, cornered the slave army in the toe of Italy’s boot and massacred them, crucifying at least 6,000 of Spartacus’ followers on the Appian Way.

The story of Spartacus’ rebellion, which became known as the Third Servile War (yes, there were multiple slave rebellions in Roman times), was overshadowed by events that followed, when some of the war’s major players were involved in the transformation of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. The defenders of Roman slavery became the biggest enemies of Roman democracy. But there was a subset of people who never forgot about Spartacus: Socialists. It seems natural that Karl Marx, the guy who told workers to rise up because “you have nothing to lose but your chains”, counted Spartacus as a personal hero. During World War I, when it became obvious that the German cause was lost, a Communist faction called the Spartacus League agitated to end the war and institute socialism in the country. But, just like its namesake, the Spartacus League was crushed after the war by the nascent Weimar government and its leaders executed.

The Communists had better luck in Russia, of course, and after allying with the Capitalist West in World War II, mutual suspicions and opportunistic politicians on both sides made America and the Soviet Union enemies in the Cold War. Hollywood, a supposed nest of Communist subversives, was one of the first targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). There were a lot of leftists in Hollywood, and some people, such as screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, had actually joined the Communist Party of the United States while Russia and the U.S. were still allies in the war. Trumbo was no subversive: He wrote the classic 1944 war film 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, and rightly considered publicly advocating for his political views as his Constitutional right, no matter how unpopular they may have been at the time. When Trumbo was called in front of HUAC in 1947, he refused to name any other writers, actors, or directors who had been members of the CPUSA. As a result, Trumbo was convicted of contempt of Congress, and, after losing an appeal to the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds, sentenced to 11 months in prison. He was kicked out of the Writer’s Guild and became the most prominent member of the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, unable to work in the industry.

Trumbo’s story was dramatized last year, when he was played by Bryan Cranston on the big screen. Much of the running time of Trumbo is dedicated to the 1950s, when Trumbo ghostwrote dozens of films, including pulpy titles like From The Earth To The Moon and Oscar winners Roman Holiday and The Brave One.
The same year Trumbo was blacklisted, a young actor named Kirk Douglas made a splash playing next to Robert Mitchum in Out Of The Past. By the late 1950s, Kirk Douglas’ star was rising, and he wanted an iconic role to play after being passed over for the lead in Ben Hur. Douglas chose Spartacus, and brought on Trumbo in secret to adapt a biography of the revolutionary. Trumbo, a noted aficionado of amphetamines, cranked out the epic length screenplay in two weeks under the pseudonym Sam Jackson.

The historical epic proved expensive and logistically very difficult to pull off. After a week of production, Douglas, who was serving as exec producer, fired the director Anthony Mann and persuaded Stanley Kubrick to take his place. Kubrick at the time was an acclaimed b-movie director who had worked with Douglas on his anti-war film Paths Of Glory (which really should be the subject of a Politics and the Movies column on its own), and at $12 million, Spartacus would be the biggest project of his career. It was also the first time Kubrick had worked without total creative control, and to say he hated the process is a dramatic understatement. He famously sidelined the cinematographer Russell Metty, forbidding him to get near the camera. (Metty got the last laugh when his name was on the Oscar for Best Cinematography Spartacus won.)

When Douglas realized he had a hit on his hands, he publicly outed Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter. The American Legion protested the film’s premiere, but when newly minted president John F. Kennedy crossed the picket lines, it effectively ended the Blacklist, and Trumbo worked openly in Hollywood until his death in the 1970s. Kubrick’s hard feelings didn’t stop when the film proved to be a huge hit and garnered acclaim as one of the best historical epics ever produced. He disavowed the picture and never worked with Douglas again.

Viewed today, the combination of Trumbo, Douglas, and Kubrick is fire. Game Of Thrones owes much of its formula of action, gore, sex, and politics to Spartacus. The screenplay is equal parts sword and sandals potboiler and thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom. If you didn’t know the history of Spartacus as leftist icon, the politics are mostly confined to the distance between Roman opulence and the cruel lives of the slaves. Coming as it did on the eve of the Civil Rights movement, the subject of slavery held special resonance with American audiences.

As a director, I look at the huge battle scenes Kubrick staged with equal parts envy and horror. On the one hand, wow, who wouldn’t want to command a literal army of 20,000 Romans? On the other hand, they had to feed and clothe 20,000 people for what amounted to about five minutes of screen time.  

Politics and the Movies 4: Spartacus (2)

But of course, the film’s most lasting legacy is in its final scenes, among the most iconic and deeply moving moments in American film history. The cry of “I’m Spartacus!” has been adapted by many movements, and parodied many times. But the scene has lost none of its power, and in context, coming after two hours of triumph and tragedy, it’s absolutely devastating. They just don’t make ‘em like Spartacus any more.

Politics and the Movies 4: Spartacus

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Politics and the Movies 3: Olympia

If you want to open a can of philosophical worms, watch Olympia.

Leni Riefenstahl filming the famous diving sequences for Olympia in 1936,

I originally decided to add Olympia to my Politics and the Movies series while watching the Olympics. I thought it would be a good way to talk about propaganda, a subject that is more important than ever as we try to sustain democracy in the information age. What better way to approach the subject than tackling the work of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl?

Her film Triumph of the Will was presented as a documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, Germany. But, seeing as it was commissioned and paid for by the Hitler regime that had, at that point, only been in power for a year, it’s the textbook example of state propoganda. I don’t know if I can really recommend watching Triumph of the Will (I had to watch it in a film class a long time ago), but you’ve seen echoes of the imagery Riefenstahl created to glorify the Third Reich. The final scene of Star Wars, where the heroes are given medals, is a direct lift from Triumph of the Will. In its opening scenes, Hitler arrives at Nuremberg in an airplane, greeted by a hoard of adoring followers. This has been Donald Trump’s MO through much of his campaign. As quoted in the Wikipedia article about Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl said her instructions from Hitler were, in retrospect, chillingly simple: “He wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics.”

The iconic long shot of the Nuremberg rally in Triumph Of The Will. George Lucas would later reference this image for the closing scene of the original Star Wars.

Just as today, Hitler was interested in quickly impressing the “low-information voter”. There’s no question that all of Riefenstahl’s work, including Triumph of the Will, is visually beautiful. She had an unerring eye for composition and a strong experimental streak she inherited from the German Expressionist filmmakers with whom she worked as an actress in the 1920s. Triumph of the Will is fascism putting its best foot forward. The appeal of fascism is the natural human urge to belong to a tribe, and for that tribe to be strong. To belong to a tribe means you will be protected, and that difficult questions such as “What is my place in the world?” and “What will I do when I grow up?” have easy answers. Fascism promises to ease the psychic pain of being an individual in a chaotic world.

Riefenstahl’s images of nude athletes were inspired by classical Greek statues.

Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels were so impressed with Triumph of the Will that they commissioned Riefenstahl to create a documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The modern games had been going on for 40 years at that point, but no one had ever made a serious attempt at filming them before. Riefenstahl set about the task with typical forethought and attention to detail. One of the many innovations the Nazis brought to the Olympics was the torch relay, and Olympia uses it as a powerful opening sequence to connect the world of classical Greece to the present of 1936.

The torch lighting sequence from Olympia.

Here’s the thing about Olympia: It looks like pretty much every Olympics you’ve seen on television. Or rather, all of the ways you have seen The Olympics on television were invented by Leni Riefenstahl as part of a Nazi propaganda film. She uses slow motion, extreme close ups of the athlete’s faces and bodies, candid footage of competitors warming up and chatting before events, and shots of the crowd cheering for their countries favorites. (The “USA! USA!” chant was already familiar to the crowd, but the one laugh out loud moment for me was a chant by English track and field fans: “We want you to win!”) There’s plenty of rooting for the home team, too. Different cuts of the movie were released in English and French. The cut of Olympia available on YouTube is the original German, and the Nazi athletes are referred to as “our men.” But it’s ultimately much less biased than NBC’s primetime coverage of the gymnastics competitions, where it sometimes looked like the Americans were the only ones competing. Propaganda works because people like it.

Jesse Owens in Olympia

But Olympia fails at its mission of being pure Nazi propaganda. Hitler wanted the 1936 games to prove his theories of Aryan racial superiority, but he didn’t count on Jesse Owens, one of the greatest athletes who ever lived, and who just happened to be both American and black. In Olympia, Owens doesn’t just win his races, he demolishes the competition in a way not seen again until Usain Bolt took to the track. Riefenstahl doesn’t sugar coat it, even for German audiences. People who have never done any film or video editing don’t realize how much power the editor has. Riefenstahl was working with hundreds of hours of candid footage shot by a small army of cameramen. It would have been easy to pick images of Owens when he was badly lit, or grimacing, or, like NBC did with the non-American gymnasts, just edit him out entirely. Riefenstahl does none of that. It’s clear from Olympia that Owens was the most physically fit person on the field, and he had kind, intelligent eyes and a magnetic smile to boot. Riefenstahl’s camera loves him. And it’s not just Owens. American distance runner John Woodruff won a dramatic 800 meter race with a combination of daring strategy and sheer speed. He was also black. The Japanese won gold and bronze in the marathon. Indians, Africans, South Americans are all represented among the athletic excellence Riefenstahl filmed. The humanist message of the games shines through the layers of attempted propaganda, giving Olympia a remarkable, and perhaps unique, tension.

Jesse Owens prepares to set a world record at the Berlin Olympics.

The examples of beautiful art created by loathsome individuals lie thick on the ground all around us. Pablo Picasso was perhaps the 20th century’s greatest visual genius, but you wouldn’t want your sister to date him. Ezra Pound, who not only wrote incredible poetry of his own but also edited T.S. Eliot, was much more clearly a true Fascist believer than Riefenstahl. Must we throw out “The Wasteland”? In film, there’s Roman Polanski, whose Chinatown is on the shortlist of the greatest films ever made, but who has been on the run from a statutory rape conviction since 1977. Woody Allen is widely admired as a filmmaker, but he had an affair with and ultimately married his adoptive stepdaughter. Does that make Manhattan any less of a film? Right now, the most anticipated film of the fall is Birth Of A Nation, a drama about the Nat Turner slave rebellion that sold at Sundance for the largest amount ever paid for an indie film. When it came to light that director Nate Parker was accused of rape in 2001, and his accuser committed suicide in 2012, the American Film Institute cancelled a scheduled screening. I haven’t seen the film, but if Parker, who was acquitted in a trial, really was guilty, does that automatically mean the film is bad and should not be viewed? Are the Olympics tainted because the techniques and images that made the games an icon of modernity came from a Nazi propagandist? Democracies use propaganda, too, and advertising has perfected the techniques Riefenstahl pioneered. The tools are neutral, it is the purpose to which they are put that matters.

Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl.

Since I believe that authorial intent is secondary to audience reaction in the creation of meaning, I tend to advocate separating the artist from the art. So what to make of Riefenstahl? If you’ve ever tried to raise money to make a film—or raise capital to start any kind of business, for that matter—you might have found yourself in a situation where you had to decide whether or not to take money from an unsavory character. Filmmakers in the Hollywood system constantly find themselves in a position where they must compromise their visions in favor of their financiers political whims. When I wrote a paper on Riefenstahl in college, I came away with the impression of a woman whose primary motivation was making beautiful images, and who was willing to let the ideological chips fall where they may. But that doesn’t excuse Triumph of the Will. Some bridges are just too far to cross. 

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Politics and the Movies 2: Citizen Kane

This afternoon I popped the old Citizen Kane DVD in the Blu Ray player and sat down to fast forward through to the parts about politics. I ended up watching the whole thing, not only because it’s the legit best movie ever made, but also because it’s pretty much all about politics.

It’s the sign of a great work of art that you can see something new in it every time you experience it. Orson Welles’ masterpiece is film’s version of the Great American Novel; it’s the story of a specific person who stands in for something in the national character. Charles Foster Kane is the national character, in the same way the bald eagle is the national bird.

If Welles’ only involvement with Citizen Kane was as its lead actor, it would still be one of the greatest achievements in film history. Welles plays Kane at almost every stage of his life. (Even Buddy Swan, the young actor who plays Charlie at age 8, bears a frightening resemblance to Welles.) The details of Kane’s life are famously based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, but I think Welles was going for something deeper than a thinly veiled biopic. Citizen Kane is about the kind of person who would seek power.

One of the great gifts George Washington gave to American democracy is the reverence for Cincinnatus, the Roman general who, when given dictatorial powers over the Roman Republic, resolved the military emergency, handed in his crown, and returned to his farm. The most worthy leaders, we believe, should be those who serve reluctantly, recognizing the corrosive effect of power on the soul of the wielder.

Kane is not like that. Upon taking control of his newspaper, the fictional New York Inquirer, his first act is to lower the editorial standards and print sensation instead of what the stodgy old staff considers news. Later, he abuses the power of the press to drum up a fake war that becomes a real war—his motivation, like Hearst’s, seems to be beyond just selling more newspapers. Kane starts a war just to see if he can. 

But, just like Roger Ailes’ fall from the pinnacle of Fox News, his lax journalistic standards come back to haunt him. When Kane runs for Governor of New York, he claims to be, as his best friend Leland (Joseph Cotton in a performance for the ages) says, “the great liberal.” Next we see Kane giving a stump speech in a scene that would not look too out of place on the 2016 campaign trail, and his pitch is pure demagoguery. He claims to be fighting for the “underpaid and underfed”, but his only real policy pledge is to arrest and prosecute his political opponent, the allegedly corrupt Governor Jim Gettys (Ray Collins). But Kane the political dilettante gets his comeuppance that very night, when Gettys reveals what a real cutthroat politician can do. Kane has been having a typically reckless affair with the cabaret singer Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore), and Gettys gives him a taste of his own medicine by ensuring the story gets splashed on every newspaper in the state that Kane doesn’t own, generating delightfully written headlines such as “Entrapped By Wife As Love Pirate, Kane Refuses to Quit Race.”

Like Donald Trump, Kane is a spoiled rich boy. “I always gagged on the silver spoon,” the unreflective Kane says as he is being deposed as the head of his media empire. “If I hadn’t been rich, I could have been a really great man.”

Leland says all Kane ever wanted was love, and he ran for office to get the voters to love him. Like most politicians, his personality is built over a bottomless hole that can never be filled. Welles, however, is hinting at something more complex. The last time we see Kane in the film, he’s a beaten man, walking between two mirrors that create an infinity of reflections, as if his relentlessly self-constructed identity has been shattered, and all that is left are shards of imperfect images. Ambition is our national malady, and too much is inevitably fatal. As Kane himself says in the opening newsreel detailing the events of his life, “I am, have been, and always will be one thing: An American.”

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Politics And The Movies 1: All The President’s Men

Today, as neofascist candidate Donald Trump prepares to accept the Republican nomination, I’m beginning a new series on the Film/TV/Etc blog. Politics And The Movies will run approximately weekly until the election on November 8. I’ll be examining films whose subject or themes are explicitly political in an effort to relate them to the moment where we now find ourselves.

Dustin Hoffman, Penny Fuller, and Robert Redford in All The President’s Men

All The President’s Men was released in the election year of 1976, when Republican Gerald Ford, the only American president to ascend to the office having never received a single vote for either it or the vice presidency, faced Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter, a Naval nuclear engineer from Georgia. Ford took office upon the resignation of Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate affair, which was uncovered by the reporting of Carl Bernstien and Bob Woodward. One of director Alan J. Pakula’s best touches is the way he uses the constant drum of TV news reports of the 1972 presidential election as a counterpoint to increasingly paranoid plots taking place inside the newsroom of the Washington Post. Although the media environment of the mid-70s seems completely tame compared to the ravages of the 24 hour news cycle, the jarring tonal differences between the upbeat but sober reporting of Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman)’s journalistic cloak and dagger shenanigans struck a chord with the filmgoing audience. Not only was it nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, but it also made an impressive $70 million on an $8 million budget.

All The President’ Men is a story about the inevitable intertwining of politics and media.Watching it today, the first thing that jumps out at you is the complete lack of computers on the desks of the Post newsroom. Our heroes spend much of the film on the phone, including an incredible extended take where Woodward wakes up a White House official in the middle of the night and tricks him into incriminating himself. Redford’s words are controlled and flat, but his body language and subtle facial expressions steadily ramps up the tension. Hoffman is similarly superb, rendering Bernstein as a neurotic ball of energy held together with nicotine and coffee.

The film leans heavily on its ripped from the headlines context. Nixon had only resigned eighteen months before, so events that Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman mention in passing carried much more weight in 1976 than they do 40 years later. But the movie left indelible impressions on film history. The X-Files ripped off its scenes with mysterious informant Deep Throat wholesale, with Mulder frequently meeting his exposition partner Mr. X in shadowed car garages. 2015’s Best Picture winner Spotlight is practically a remake, substituting rapist priests for crooked politicos.

Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat.

But I think the greatest contribution to political discourse is it introduction of the term “ratfucker”. Bernstein tracks down Donald Segretti, played by Robert Walden, who was the head of dirty tricks for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Over coffee and cigs, Segretti admits that any underhanded tactic was in play against the hated Democrats, but defends himself by saying that he and his colleagues only did things with “a little wit”.

Politics And The Movies 1: All The President’s Men

The ratfuckers got fatally caught in the Watergate scandal, but the culture of dirty tricks and demonizing the opposition thrived in the Republican party for decades. From the October Surprise to the Brooks Brothers Riot to Dan Rather’s forged poison pill, ratfucking has been at the heart of right wing electoral success for the last half century. We take it for granted now, but All The President’s Men shows that the amoral, win-at-all-costs philosophy that brought us candidate Donald Trump was once so shocking that it cost a president his job. The film’s commentary on the power of the press to create and destroy leaders rings just as true today is it did in 1976, but its faith in the basic decency of the Fourth Estate and the Americans who follow it seems like a rosy anachronism.