Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema (Web Exclusive)
by Morgan Adamson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 304 pp., illus. Hardcover: $108.00 and Paperback: $27.00.

Reviewed by Irina Trocan

While the essay film has been gaining cultural prestige in recent years, this increasingly popular subgenre is often seen as merely a sophisticated alternative to traditional documentaries or classical narrative cinema that elevates the role of the auteur. Although many noteworthy recent essay films no doubt reflect auteurist aspirations, the genre, throughout its history, more often than not has adhered to radical political ambitions that coexist with formal innovations. It is therefore refreshing to see, in Morgan Adamson’s Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema, the revered auteur figure of Chris Marker, the artist associated with fallible memory, wanderlust,¹ and poetic voice-over, make his appearance in his most politicized cultural role—inventing participatory filmmaking by recruiting workers in the SLON filmmakers’ cooperative and editing the Black Panthers’ unfinished documentary about the People’s Republic of Congo. Adamson allows space for a brief history of the essay film in the introductory part of her volume but then consistently focuses on its openly activist subspecies, singling out for detailed analysis a handful of post-’68 collective endeavors: New York Newsreel’s Columbia Revolt, Ogawa Pro’s The Battlefront for the Liberation of Japan—Summer in Sanrizuka, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers’ (who collaborated with filmmakers Peter Gessner, Stewart Bird, and Renee Lichtman) militancy in Finally Got the News, the Roman Feminist Cinema Collective’s L’aggettivo donna, as well as pioneering work in the realm of video by the Raindance Corporation and the Radical Software journal.

The fact that these works are not in the essay film pantheon is likely related to their intricate ties to the historical moment of their production, as well as the larger New Left project of social change, which they reflect. This makes them harder to either discuss or teach within a canonical framework in which aesthetic standards are the only yardstick of quality. It is also hard to separate their revolutionary urgency from a contemporary vantage point that concedes that the New Left project ultimately failed. Is this a solid basis for value judgment? Of course not. It would imply that, say, Jorge Sanjinés’s Yawar Mallku/Blood of the Condor (1969), which helped to spur on the Peace Corps’ expulsion from Bolivia, is, in the final analysis, a better film than the Afro-Cuban Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera/One Way or Another (1977), which failed to solve Latin American machismo or class and racial differences within a revolutionary society. (If anything, the comparison proves that the distribution efforts of Sanjinés and his crew to make the film accessible to the indigenous group the film pays tribute to—the Quechua— paid off.)

This inclination toward in-depth analysis of lesser-known titles leads Adamson to consciously omit several artistic movements that might provide important connection points: the retrospectively labeled LA Rebellion movement was formed by a group of student filmmakers (much like the Newsreel collective behind Columbia Revolt) inspired by Third Cinema aesthetics and dedicated to presenting a more accurate depiction of African American life, contrary to the mainstream norm—which up to that time had been blaxploitation, where every in-joke and authentic detail was weighed down by abundant violence, eroticism, and standard male-fantasy scenarios. Granted, by focusing on militant filmmakers’ output, she can argue how “aspects of the struggle are woven into the very fabric of the film.”

Adamson’s argument for the radical power of the essay film takes the work of Guy Debord, the Situationist theorist who coined the term “society of the spectacle,” and one of the most idiosyncratic polemicists and filmmakers to come out of the Sixties, as its departure point. Analyzing the film adaptation, or “translation,” of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, she argues that the film itself includes an object lessson in how to liberate ourselves from the illusory realm of “the spectacle.” By including footage of the Watts riots of 1965, which to the Situationists symbolized resistance to what was termed “counterfeit life,” Debord’s essay film “gives us access to a different theory of the cinematic image, one that affirms the primacy of resistance and its nonlinear temporalities.” While the Situationists’ concept of détournement (i.e., the re-contextualization of already existing images) has often been identified as a key influence on found footage and essay films, Adamson diligently shows the subversive process at work within Debord’s own audiovisual work and even suggests that his films can be deemed more insightful than his theoretical corpus.

The novelty of Enduring Images among writings on the essay film is its very thorough contextualization in economic theory—although it’s distinguished by a prominent focus on North American capitalism in the not-yet-homogeneous world of the Seventies. Tensions within Detroit automobile factories in Finally Got the News anticipate mainstream unions’ indifference to working-class ferment and the imminent, post-Fordist restructuring of the economy in order to prevent workers’ uprisings, which ultimately resulted in losses for workers, militant or not. The stories of American-born victims of these economic shifts confirm the relevance of studying militant cinema that emerges primarily from more developed countries (“[F]or many black Americans, the Third World already existed within the First.”) Adamson’s preference for terming these films “militant” rather than “Third Cinema,” however, and her propensity for repeatedly using the American economy as a yardstick for post-’68 social transformations, often leads to simplifications. The anticolonialist writer Édouard Glissant is mentioned in passing, but the relevance of postcolonial theory to Seventies activism is never expanded upon. French philosophers Debord, Deleuze, and Foucault are mentioned repeatedly, but only in passing. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s election becomes the only reference point concerning political developments to explain the ascension of the New Right in French society. The 1968 Argentinian manifesto film Hour of the Furnaces is repeatedly quoted as a source of inspiration, but with no further discussion of what curbed the revolutionary energy of Latin American cinema in the Seventies.

Of course, the entire scope of political changes during the 1970s is too much for one book to cover—and the sheer variety of historical shifts during that era gives credence to Adamson’s argument that these films deserve an attentive re-examination of their pertinence to our current moment. Still, reading about the Godard/Gorin/Miéville Ici et ailleurs/Here and Elsewhere (1976) without anchoring it in the Palestinian crisis, or Marker’s Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin Without a Cat (1977) without any mention of Cuba, seems quite myopic. It is obvious that working class or feminist solidarity, deeply felt in different areas of the world, did provide a fertile ground for militant filmmaking to spread in the Seventies, but it is also difficult to discount the common wisdom that the intensity of radical political movements (and radical filmmaking in particular) was fueled by drastic political shifts such as the emergence of socialist regimes and the newly gained independence of former colonies.

Adamson’s balancing act in pleading for these films makes the book an engaging read, and even somewhat suspenseful: she, despite qualifications, believes that militant filmmaking is still a vital force that needs attention while acknoledging that the state possesses an uncanny ability to defuse revolutionary strivings. These strategies include the Keynsian agreement to raise manual workers’ wages while devaluing them through inflation, implementing the framework of debt-inducing consumer credit for keeping low-earning and potentially rebellious citizens in check; or countering subversive images not by censorship, but by the “inflation” of images where any transgresiveness becomes immediately co-opted. On the one hand, it seems that these films, while providing a daring and insightful glimpse of the recent past are just one step behind the capitalist system. On the other hand, ignoring the radical potential of May ‘68, a historical moment where a better world seemed possible, would only accelerate our alienation and misapprehension of the potential for social and political change.

In approaching early video work of the Seventies and the technological developments (some, precipitated by cable television) that anticipate the digital turn, Adamson identifies the revolutionary potential of early video experiments that are still pertinent to contemporary practitioners of political cinema. Despite the familiar arc of hope and disillusionment, these experiments are worth a fresh, open-minded look—it is worth remembering D. N. Rodowick’s speculation that digital moving images, rather than having their ancestry in cinema, are more closely related to previous generations of electronic images.

Enduring Images covers a branch of audiovisual works that have too often been chided for not living up to their revolutionary aspirations and offers them due respect. Adamson’s attempt to resuscitate largely overlooked landmarks in political cinema, which pays heed to the dynamics of race and gender within the ranks of collecive filmmaking, make the book a welcome addition to studies of militant film practice. Sharing her optimism about these films’ ability to resonate outside of the confines of the screening room requires a certain amount of wishful thinking. But, despite the dark times we live in, despair is not an option.

Irina Trocan teaches Film Studies in Bucharest, Romania, and writes for such outlets as Sight & Sound, MUBI, and Photogénie. Her doctoral thesis focuses on video essays, tracing their roots in the more established tradition of essay cinema and found-footage films. She has most recently coordinated the anthology Romanian Cinema Inside Out: Insights on Film Culture, Industry and Politics 1912–2019.

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