(1977, 2008; Le Fond de l'air est Rouge, French with English-version narration) For a dedicated radical leftist, communist, socialist involved in the politics of the '60s and '70s, Chris Marker's 3-hour documentary, entirely of archival film clips, of the history of the New Left might be of interest. Somewhere the dream lives on, but this was like viewing a corpse. I found the narrative at times difficult to follow; the booklet accompanying the DVD is helpful.

Divided into two parts, "Fragile Hands" and "Severed Hands," the first focuses on Vietnam, Che Guevara's death, and the various demonstrations of May 1968; the second begins with the Prague spring, rises to the high expectations of a union of the Left, and deflates following President Allende's untimely death in Chile.

In hopes that the Indo-China conflict with America's engagement in Vietnam will inspire a collective spirit of international (spiritual) brotherhood - an enthusiastic US pilot describes the effect of his bombs bursting ("Look at it burn!") and the napalm to follow ("That's great fun!") is juxtaposed with images of burned Vietnamese victims - of rebellion against materialistic imperialism, the political left rallies its forces upon this "convergence of the world's contradictions."

A Vietcong prisoner receives a crude form of waterboarding torture, another electric shocks, at the hands of American interrogators. Neo-Nazis demand that Hanoi be bombed and Negroes be sent back to Africa. In Berlin German students demonstrate against an official visit by the Shah of Iran; their organized violence to develop public conscience and awareness of oppression leads to imitation of their aggressive resistance to authority elsewhere. A Black Panther rally in San Francisco features Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.

Politics changes faster than the protest music as the New Left emerges from the cultural revolution of 1967 in Paris. Cuba's Fidel Castro (notice his habit of touching the microphones as he speaks) and Che Guevara (the phenomenon of the latter taking a hold on idealistic imaginations exceeds his personality after his death) command prominence on the world stage. (For those fascinated by this history, see Steven Soderberg's docudramatic diegesis Che.)

Systemic exploitation once again proves that "Marx isn't old-fashioned." But disappointments in Latin America especially raise the question: Does guerrilla warfare lead to a revolution of national uprising? Apparently not.

Will the workers join in pulling with their collective strength on the rope in the fragile hands of the students, demonstrating on campuses across the world, to overturn the middle class? A wave of labor strikes causes concern, though ironically for all the consternation in the halls of power, the powers-that-be were never under any serious threat of a coherent strategy on the part of the Left to grab the levers of power. (For weren't the students and the workers themselves mostly by then among the middle class?) Would they have the courage of "sacrificing identity [to the Party] to be effective"?

However, in Prague during August 1968 as a socialist democracy erupts spontaneously, the Czech revolt against Soviet control creates discomfort in many quarters of the Left. Castro addresses the contradictions of a socialist country's army invading another from both a legal and a political standpoint, coming down in favor of the Soviets because the socialist camp must prevent victory for the imperialists and isolation of one of their own, especially since (he asserts) the West's capitalist agents have been responsible for the revolt.

Yet Castro's success in Cuba of establishing his revolution as an institution no longer seems a plausible model for others. "The cat is never on the side of power," says the narrator. The ideal (Jeffersonian) is for new ideas to continuously churn below, percolating to the peak of the power structure. Some apologists say that China represents evolution within revolution.

Discredited Stalinism can be seen as a serious distortion of the ideology. Like the Roman Catholic Church's rationalization that its faults are the result of sinfulness in its human membership, not the blameless body of Christ itself, communists say that the pure idea of Communism cannot be corrupted by corrupt officials, thus excusing unfortunate excesses of the past.

A new future must also have a new past. A dictatorship of the proletariat (appropriate under conditions Lenin confronted in Czarist Russia) is not necessarily, or even preferably, the path for communism in Europe where in France (de Gaulle having been jolted by the left and then deposed by the right) the Communist Party (de-Stalinized, de-Leninized) makes alliance with the socialists, rejecting the extreme left. "Nothing would be the same." But such ambiguity engenders anxiety.

Also in 1969 Prague mourns its martyrs; funerals for failures against the existing power structure outnumber public demonstrations. At political rallies in Chile President Allende expresses disappointment with the lack of participation by workers, on whom the Left bases its raison d'être. French journalist Regis Debray says that the revolution will go on but not end in victory.

In those heady days, the dream of revolution (civil war?) was in the air, leaving behind romantic memories of those who participated in its intoxicating political activities but nothing more substantial. That's the grin without a cat.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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