At the Cheri The Revolutionary

HOLLYWOOD continues to colonize Youth, as in past years, exploiting our styles, our ideas, our culture, as if it has the right to grab up and sell back to us what we have created. This year they are peddling our Revolution too, at $3 to $4 a ticket. Aren't the ironies strikingly obvious by now, even to the capitalists? Or could they be just crazy enough to destroy themselves for a little more of our gold? Sadly, they are not. Bourgeois democracies expect and even rely on a certain amount of safe "dissent" they can absorb gracefully and thus maintain the dynamic equilibrium that is their power base.

Most of this year's "revolutionary." productions-films like Z. Woodstock, Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement, and M*A*S*H -provide such "safe outlets" and are easily assimilated into the Structure, generation a quasi-militant excitement and then exorcising it like a demon. They reduce revolution to a few thrills, chills, heroics, and laughs, and leave the audience emotionally "satisfied."

The Revolutionary, on the other hand, is a very quiet, honest, unsensational film that refuses to stop being heard after the last frame-unexhausted by a dramatic catharsis and unwilling to go straight to its shelf in the Universe of Ideas. Paul Williams has directed a work that both resists and concerns resisting assimilation by the bourgeois mind. The main issue in the film-as in the film industry, or anywhere else-is that of mind control and how to fight it.

Williams treats it on a level of such abstraction that the film presents no arguments-ideological, moral, or otherwise-but simply models for revolutionary existence. Hans Koningsberger's screenplay (from his novel) schematically recounts the evolution of the central character, the hypothetical A. (Jon Voight) through all the leftist possibilities in some indefinite (through modern) place and time, (hypothetically) "somewhere in the free world," from liberal protest to bomb-hurling, as he half drifts, half-extracts himself from the morass of liberal mystification.

A. begins with the usual faith in modifying the system through university politicizing, "the free play of ideas," etc., etc., then is silenced and jailed. Immediately he lies down in his cell to scribble a political statement on a roll of toilet paper, but the next morning he's released without being charged or heard. "The cruelest persecution." he learns, "is the persecution of silence," the repressive tolerance accorded him by the State, which renders all his actions not only ineffective but unreal. The Revolutionary asks much the same question as Zabriskie Point about the nature-or possibility-of real experience in a banal, totally artificial society.

Both directors emphasize the same abstract, other-worldly existence of buildings as independent of men, although where Antonioni absorbs himself in their bizarre, plastic intricacies, Williams presents them as simple, symbolic monoliths, usually from only one perspective. The Revolutionary attempts no overview (literal or figurative) of society, portraying it with an austere, dialectical frontality. At one point after deserting from the army. A. goes into a strange town to warn that troops are coming and ends up talking for several moments into a stark, dimly-lit building occupied by militants, a surreal scene of paranoia and alienation, in which he is finally sent away without seeing beyond the facade.

Shot mainly through the revolutionary's individual perspective, the film rarely exposes more than a minimal depth of detail about anything. Williams objectifies the complete one-sideness and distortion of the bourgeois media by excluding them almost totally from the film, portraying a virtual knowledge-vacuum through the anaesthetic quietude, the dull-colored monotones, and the looming stillness constantly before the camera. Society he presents as a Kafkaesque, corrupt, and abstract unknown, which represses with perfect, restrained expediency and provides nothing concrete for the opposition to attack. The issues are vague and predictable for a post-industrial giant-war, imperialism, racism-but the specific atrocities are inconsequential, since it is the entire system that must be destroyed and replaced.

Corollary to his lack of knowledge, A. is very much alone and becomes more so throughout the film. Whereas the system isolates men from each other in the first place. the revolutionary's politics make his isolation both inevitable and necessary, detaching himself from the system, as well. CAPITALISM-WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL, he paints on a building and is almost beaten up by working-class-authoritarian types for being a commic. He both repudiates and is kicked out of home. university, and the Radical (liberal) Committee, and ends up with an Old Left style workers' group. which rejects and distrusts him.

His love affair with Helen (Jennifer Salt). a totally innocent and uncomprehending rich girl. alienates him even further. Williams edits quickly, without transition from one incongruous sequence to another, from factory life to a dinner party with bankers back to labor organizing emphasizing A.'s fragmented, confused, isolated world.

He finally gets his existential shit together when he meets Leonard II (Seymour Cassel), a fiery wild-eyed money burning Jerry Rubin style terrorist and gets into a back-up bomber action at a conspiracy trial. Williams aims at more than "realism" by portraying this final sequence as unsenstional, without crowds or reporters. The cerie setting he comes an apotheosis of the existential situation: the problem of the individual's depth-perception, the limits of the revolutionary's knowledge into his support and his justification. The People are no where to be seen, and an oppressive silence dominates, as in the rest of the film. The trial is over and a handful of people trickle out, the judge through a side-door, slowly and discreetly, when Leonard II lobs his bomb and runs. but without result, it is a dud, and the judge keeps on walking.

A. rises, bomb-in-hand to confront him, blocking his path, gazing into his face, stern, sad, man-to-man, judge-to-judge, and the film ends with that frozen image, exactly at the right instant. The director would have negated all the force he had coolly built up had he answered the question for us, either alternative being a catharsis that would allow us to dismiss and assimilate the work immediately. Instead he leaves on the screen the formulated proposition, the existential choice, to be or not to be a revolutionary, the ultimate opportunity and necessity for real action. (There is no safe outlet here, no wish-fulfillment fantasy-exorcism that Antonioni provides in Zabriskie Point. )

And the choice rules out, of course, all possibilities of argument. It is either or. Either the revolutionary has nothing to say to the oppressor or he is already assimilated. syncretized, digested as an alien but allowed point of view, to be heard but not listened to. For the same reason the film makes no argument, no appeal to the liberal mind: A. espouses no revolutionary ideology-no Marx, Lenin, or Mao-only obscure observations of Pascal, Rochefoucauld, and Herzen. Also The Revolutionary remains on a level of abstraction that defies quibbling over the analysis of specific locales or historical events. Williams simply focuses his efforts against cultural syncretism, and avoids drowning in bourgeois reasoning and rhetoric. His anti-ideological polemic takes a form similar to the thought of Fanon:

The colonialist's work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native's work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the colonialist. On a logical plane, the Manichaeism of the settler produces a Manichaeism of the native. To the theory of the "absolute evil of the native" the theory of the "absolue evil of the settler" replies. The appearance of the colonialist has meant in the terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy, and the petrifaction of individuals. For the native. life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler. This, then, is the correspondence, term by term, between the two sets of reasoning.

Revolutionary situations and revolutionary art must rule out bargaining with the system and the give-and-take of "dissent." For capitalism, like colonialism, depends for its power on dividing the people and maintaining a "community of individuals" who fear and distrust each other, where each of the oppressed also acts as oppressor. Semiradical films like Getting Straight and M*A*S*H work to sustain this reactionary disunity, for when Elliott Gould comes on with a cute male-chauvinist line, putting down women and smoothing it all over with a few chuckles, he contributes to the process of syncretism. Individual alienation is cemented into group consciousness, resulting in a general subservience and thought-control, keeping us together by keeping us apart.

Against this background "The Revolutionary" really encourages me. While Hollywood keeps on trying to exploit and assimilate us like the grand, sick monster it is, it's great to see a new director win out-at least temporarily-within and over that system.