The Big Question

TO ASK what makes a film of use in a revolutionary struggle is to question the nature of all revolutionary motivation and practice. The answer is to be found in objective material conditions rather than in mysticism, romance, or aesthetics; oppression touches the lives of the people most directly and mobilizes them most effectively on the level of the daily quality of their lives, the level that determines their relations with other men and women. Where the contradictions are most obvious between the will of a people to survive and an exploitative politico-economic order-and today this means the Third World-the liberation struggles are most advanced. This is not to say that the most exploited are the most revolutionary; rather, those most conscious of their exploited condition are most capable of liberating themselves.

A Materialist Cinema: It is the duty of the cinematic revolutionary to illuminate, develop, and demystify the daily contradictions that make the revolution-a hope, an option, a necessity, a reality-in the minds of the oppressed. He must never neglect the all-important relation between analysis and praxis, nor ever satisfy himself with the egoistic transformation of polities into Art-the exploitation of revolutionary struggle in the production of an "aesthetic" whole. It is not enough to attack the decadence of the bourgeoisie, to make commodities of their sexual and psychic aberrations, because all "finished products" can be easily digested by the system. Art must be conceived as politics- invented politically -in order to serve the people rather than the aesthetes of the reactionary classes, who control the means of artistic production.

The Right Form: The filmmaker must take a dialectical view of his activity-not as a final synthesis, an outcome, but as the starting point for new ideas and acts. He must vanquish the notion of irrevocable structures and definitive statements, so as to restore the people's faith in their own power to shape history, to invent their own modes of struggle. And this demystification must be achieved in praxis by creating forms that remain open, unfinished, and that include the people and their abilities to analyze, debate, and take action. It is one thing to speak of the people's power and quite another to urge them to exert it. A revolutionary film does not use its audience as means of instrumenting the revolution; instead it openly offers itself as means to be used by the oppressed in clarifying their struggle. A revolutionary film-as oposed to propaganda film-remains an object, something that can be perceived critically.

The Primacy of Form: While individual contradictions-"content"-can be re-packaged and assimilated by the system, a structure of contradictions constitutes a practical, revolutionary tool: the dialectical method, which cannot be co-opted since its sole function is the destruction of the ruling order. The most useful revolutionary cinema, then, is one which translates into cinematic form that ultimate revolutionary weapon, class struggle.