"Movies have an accessory and not a decisive usefulness in the various events and elements that contribute to the transformation of society. It is naive to believe that you can start a revolution with a movie and even more naive to theorize about doing so. Political films are useful, on the one hand, if they contain a correct analysis of reality, and, on the other, if they are made in such a way to have that analysis reach the largest possible audience."
--Franco Solinas, screenwriter of The Battle of Algiers
Those of us who are concerned with political storytelling often hear that the goal of a political film is to convince--to sway people who are on the fence on a particular issue. We are frequently cautioned against "preaching to the choir." The unspoken corollary is that if you are speaking to the "middle," you must moderate your message. You must not be too strident, too angry, too militant. You must not be too "one-sided" by showing oppressors as they really are (particularly if that depiction challenges the dominant narrative). You must not demand the audience sympathize with characters who may make them uncomfortable (like, for example, the pair of would-be suicide bombers in Paradise Now), or have demands and goals that seem unreasonable.
Personally, I do not think being "moderate" or "toning it down" is the best way to convince someone; I think telling the truth and being unapologetic is. But more importantly, I do not think convincing the fence-sitters is the best, most powerful use to which political films can be put.
I think of the great political films I love--The Battle of Algiers, Milk, Salt of This Sea, Bloody Sunday, The Time That Remains, to name just a few. Did any one of these films really convince someone to change their mind, to support gay rights or Palestinian liberation or resistance to oppression? Probably not. Bigots and defenders of colonialism were not the target audience for those films. They weren't made for homophobes and Zionists and racists. They were made for us, or as Harvey Milk said, for the us-es. They are our stories reflected back to us.
In a film, the protagonist is the person with agency--it is her action toward a goal in the face of obstacles that drives the plot. "A movie is about someone who wants something and is struggling to get it," was the mantra drilled into us in film school. The protagonist is the person from whose perspective we see the world and with whom we identify and empathize. So choosing your protagonist is often the most political choice you make when writing a film, because you are effectively choosing who to give agency to, and who is worthy of empathy.
Marxism begins from the point of view that ordinary people make history. We are the protagonists of the story of the world. On the most basic level, one of the purposes of political art is to allow oppressed and marginalized people to see themselves represented as the subjects of the story--the subjects of history--not its objects; as beings with agency and the ability to control their own destiny, even if it is only their destiny within a movie.
This is not in itself enough to defeat oppression. Oppression is defeated through struggle; through protests, strikes, mass movements and revolutions. But it is powerful, and liberating, to see the truth of your experience reflected on film, and to watch other people who don't share that experience sympathize with it and root for someone like you. It's a reminder that our tales are worthy of being told; that we are worthy of being the hero of the story; that there are others like us; that we are not alone. To remind ourselves that our stories have power is to remind ourselves that we have power.
For the member of an oppressed group, it is a moment of saying, "That is me. That is my reality and my struggle being represented on screen as something worthy of empathy." For the ally in solidarity it is saying: "That could be me. That person is just like me, just as human as me. My life could be theirs if not for circumstance. I understand what they are fighting for, and if I was in their position, I'd be fighting too."
This is why political films must always be true--not necessarily true in a factual sense, but in the sense of accurately representing things like oppression, resistance and power. For the filmmaker this means really understanding your subject matter: researching it if it is not your own life experience, and being able to fully and unhesitatingly identify with the wants and needs of your characters. It also means being honest and unflinching about the world you are portraying, even when that may confuse the expectations of people for whom it is not their lived reality.
The best way to have political films reach the largest possible audience is to make them good, and that means making them truthful. Studios are not going to help you there. The layers and layers of assumptions behind Hollywood studios' self-fulfilling prophecies about who the American movie-going audience is and what they want to see deserve fuller consideration in another post. Suffice to say that most Hollywood films are like fast food in a poor neighborhood. Of course people will swallow crap if it's the only thing around. It doesn't mean they don't hunger for something better.
The audience for a political film is not the kind that's built through studio marketing divisions and subway ads and building-sized billboards on Sunset Boulevard, even if studios ever had an interest in doing that. It's going to be built like a movement, from the grassroots--by the people it sets on fire because it touches something deep inside them, because it reflects things they know to be true but have maybe never seen on screen. These people become the film's champions. They rave to all their friends about it, blog about it, tweet about it, organize screenings of it because it speaks to them and moves them and they have never seen anything like it. When you see a film that speaks the truth, the effect is electric.
There is a moment I love in the beginning of Salt of This Sea, when Soraya, the main character, arrives at Ben Gurion Airport. Unsurprisingly, she is searched by a couple of humorless Israeli security agents. They even search her voluminous curly hair. Both times I saw this film in the theater, people laughed at that scene. In that laughter is a moment of release from alienation. It's the laughter of relief, of realizing, "Oh, there's someone else out there who gets it." Other times, the exact same feeling can make you cry. There are several scenes in Milk that have that effect on me every time.
People make films for all kinds of reasons, but for me, it's always in pursuit of that moment--to feel it myself and to be able to bring it to others. I haven't set out to try to tell the stories of oppressed, exploited and marginalized people out of some abstract sense of political mission. I write those kind of stories because they're the ones I identify with. I don't think there's anything special about me. If I can identify with them, then other people can too. That means there is an audience for those kind of films--a powerful, passionate audience if you know how to connect with it. After all, we the us-es are the majority.
