When Harris was scheduled to be arrested by U. S. Marshalls, the film crew was at the Harris home to record the event as were representatives of the national press. Marshalls deliberately delayed the arrest four days to make the event coincide with the Apollo moonshot last July. Now, shortly after the first anniversary of the arrest, "Carry It On" [the film] has been completed by UPA... of DEI... whose major income source is NASA. So NASA is now publicizing an event they once inadvertently helped to cover up. Crazy business.
About as crazy as the good old days and Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Joan Baez "This land is your land, this land is..." the Ameri-can Indian's communal estate. "If I had a hammer, I'd..." get a sickle. "Any day now, any day now, I shall..." explode! And we memorized the words. Ted Mack brought us The New Chad minstrels with the same voice that brought us Geritol. Even the little girl down the street was learning how to play "folk guitar" and guys with guitars on their backs were wanderin' clear 'round the country to find their way into "The Jackson Twins" comic strip. Meanwhile Joan Baez, Ganhdi's newest disciple of non-violence, sublimated herself into the path of low-energy resistance.
IV.
The more high energy our music got, the more the establishment tried to kill it; They sent out Frankie Avalon and Fablan, exemplars of honkey culture. Lawrence Welk. Or listen, now to top-40 radio: the same awful shit; songs of boys driving around in cars trying to pick up girls, or vice versa. Most pop music is still low energy music.
The contradiction I'm trying to point out is between low-energy and high-energy life. Low-energy culture prepares people to fit into the consumer-passive-system. A high-energy culture prepares, you for revolution-equals constant high energy change. It's the difference between eating something and turning it into shit vs. turning it into energy to build things with.
A WELL-KNOWN romantic early-American oil has a bandaged fifeplayer and a drummer playing a set to kill British and Indians by. The Indians were supposedly (according to the white man's textbook) psyched up by their own percussion accompaniment to the war dance. Hitler broadcast Wagner's pulsating nationalistic themes. So now, since Thunderclap Newman is telling us "we gotta get it together because the revolution's here," we should begin to feel that musical high-energy rush bursting through the dam. Singles such as "Seize the Time" and albums such as "The Last Poc?s" are the adrenalin of the black community. Everywhere liberals and radicals are being energized to a higher revolutionary level by the Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers album: among the lyrics on the first cut "We Can Be Together" are: "We are all outlaws in the eyes of America... Tear down the falls, motherfucker" sung with the power of a black Southern Baptist revival choir.
The Airplane, however, are still taking more than enough money than is necessary to live from and their lyrics of yet express no class-consciousness. It took the Kent State massacre to bring Neil Young down from his "Helpless, helpless, helpless" ness into the high-energy world of "Four Dead In Ohio." The title of The Dead's new album is somewhat deceptive-"Workingman's Dead" is neither the Marxian manifesto set to music nor the high-energy level music produced by the fists of labor (Dead fans will be glad to know that Garcia is alive and well, sunk in country funk).
Sly and The Family Stone, Buddy Miles, The Stones, Ten Years After all have the potential to become power suppliers for the domestic front. One could go to sleep by the theme to Marat/Sade "the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor... we want a revolution NOW!" and wake up to thirty minutes of repeated portions of "We're Not Gonna Take It" from The Who's Tommy classic rock-opera. One thing is certain: the morning I wake up with tanks in front of me, Guard beside me, and pigs behind me, the last thing I want to hear is some English millionaire crooning gold-plated words of wisdom, "let it be, let it be."
If any revolution which comes from within America does more than transfer power from one minority group to another, all of the people must be educated by media whose content reflects the ideology of the revolution and whose form is truly revolutionary. One way is to shoot up that content with aggression, emotion, libido, pulse. There are others.
V.
JUST A FEW months ago Jean-Luc Godard leaned into the future to answer a criticism of his past.
"It will only be after the true revolution that I can make a truly revolutionary film."
The questions, asked of Godard and one of his co-workers, reflected that the American student movement must be at least ten years behind the new French revolution. We had thought of ourselves as revolutionaries because we could apply some of Marx and a little Lenin to the world situation as reported to us by the White Corporate Press, because we weren't afraid to throw bricks anymore, because we were tired of individualism and exploitation on some levels, because the gullibility gap between our parents and ourselves had reached its illogical extreme....
But for years Godard has been redefining, re-evaluating, re-applying Marxist-Leninism-Maoism, black liberation, women's liberation as have many other French "progressives" (Sartre, Genet, Fanon, De Bouvier, Marcuse). Godard himself always try to ask the most relevant questions at that stage of the movement which he is recording. He obscures the line between information and propaganda, between content and form.
I would just like to establish that all we have been doing in cinematography up until now was a 100 per cent muddle and diametrically opposed to what we should have been doing.
In 1970 Godard would point his finger at the "Academy Awards" and re-em-phasize Vertov's disgust. A former French individualist, Godard is now a member of a film collective "where we are all directors, actors, actresses, cameraman or camera-women." The collective is named for Vertov. It decides spontaneously what to shoot and devotes itself to experimentation and self-criticism. It acts on Godard's off quoted assumption that "In order to become an intellectual revolutionary, it is necessary to give up being an intellectual." The collective members have not become scholars of ancient revolutions but rather what Stokeley Carmichael calls "students of the revolution." Their studies have taught them the importance of high-energy media: in Sympathy For The Devil (1+1) the Rolling Stones build from a low-key ballad to a revolutionary anthem ("I killed the Czar and his ministers") while Godard's smoothly moving camera records the potential relationship of the media to the Black Panthers, and the use of media in determining sexual roles (the pornography store scene and the interviews with Eve scene.)
The collective calls the variety of format it suggests "cinemarxism." In the final scene of a moving camera being lifted between a solid red flag and a solid black flag, while the Stones get higher and higher emotionally, the group has shown that it has replaced the production number.
In Le Gai Savoir, the Dziga Vertov group show that, in both content and form, they have become the revolution: they draw from Wittgenstein, the Whorfian hypothesis, and Rousseau to begin unlearning the current culture at its roots. The collective attempt to show you the way both the language of words and the language of cinema have shaped us and what must be cha(lle)nged. The authority of See You at Mao stems from an accurate application of Marxian rhetoric to contemporary image, from an unpretentious sound-image montage, and from the use of the camera as Vertov's "Kine-Eye" which sees all and knows everything.
The use of films by the Panthers and student radicals is not yet highly evolved; yet at this stage, the function of films by liberation groups must be primarily dissemination of information. (As is the function of The Black Panther Community News Service and Women's Lib publications such as Off Our Backs.) Felix Greene's China and Inside North Vietnam are good examples of the documentary forms as the dissemination of information. American people have been told so many times that the Huntley-Brinkley Show which they are shot up with every night is "news" that the documentary and newsreel are more effective as opinion-makers than the narrative, which is usually called entertainment. Films such as Z and Battle of Algiers have demonstrated that the line of demarcation between narrative and documentary is not clearly fixed.
Change blossoms: this year for the first time a conference was called to discuss the inventing and evolving of alternative media. The movement within America has neither found new forms of communication nor named a new Eistenstein and Shastakovich to maximize the energy of old ones. What has been found is a new emotional dynamic, a whole new way of understanding, which when channeled, will serve as the source of education and power to all the people.