Samuel Brody Interviewed by Tony Stafford in Jump Cut no. 14, 1977
Q: What was the impact of Dziga Vertov? Why did you decide to translate writings by that director in particular?
A: I happened on the writings of Vertov in issue of Barbusse’s Monde. Not only did they confirm my conviction that the film medium was at its most effective and powerful level when its raw material was reality itself rather than the re-enactment and artificial recreation of it. But also, they revealed a new approach to filmed reality which in effect outlined a special grammar and syntax for what until then had been rather rudderless. I still believe that Vertov’s contribution to film will someday be recognized for its watershed importance in the evolution of what came to be known as the “documentary,” the film of reality.
Q: In your article “On a Theory of ‘Sources,’” you stated, “Hollywood is the monster-filter of capitalism through which is sifted American reality.” How did you mean this in 1931 and what does it mean today?
A: The Workers Film and Photo League carried on the struggle on two fronts: (1) by making films aimed to bring the proletarian message of class struggle to the working class audience; and (2) to expose and combat the Hollywood lies that fill the American screens. During the early Fascist films we would boycott and picket. We occasionally went so far as to plant stink bombs in the theater. And today Hollywood films still replace what ought to be, and has the potential to be, a highly progressive art. But there are so many books being published, so many films being made that the more escapist films you present to the people the less room there is for their creativity. And in that sense these Hollywood films are reactionary.
Q: So in that case, all films are political.
A: That is precisely what I believe. Exactly. By displacing other films, and by intrinsically being what it is—pap, filler for so-called entertainment.
Q: In the same article you wrote, “Sociological implications can never be avoided, no matter how aesthetically disinterested either a novel, a play or a film may be.” Could you elaborate on this briefly?
A: Indeed. I am not a disinterested art-for-art’s-saker. The most “escapist” art is, by that very fact, sterile at best and reactionary at worst. This art abdicates the artist’s responsibility to society and social progress. Daumier, Goya, Eisenstein, Balzac, Robeson, Hogarth, YES. De Kooning, Hollywood, Emshwiller, Anger, Kandinsky, Kline, NO! This is especially true in times of social and economic crises such as we are at present experiencing. What is art if it is not “engagé”... and “enragé” too, Potamkin longed for the aesthetic of “negritude.” I wanted art at the service of black liberation.
Q: What do you think a political film can do? Whom should it reach? Godard used to speak of the “cinema as a gun.” To what extent do you think a film can bring about social change?
A: What is a political film? Or, conversely, what isn't? I've already touched on this question in a previous reply. At this juncture of history, I think that films should be slanted to reach the widest spectrum of the population, including the disaffected sections of the middle class and intellectuals, but appealing most directly to the most decisive component of our capitalist society: the working class. I'm not quite clear as to what Godard means by “cinema as a gun” (after all, he’s a Maoist and carries his barricades in his backpack). I'm afraid to take this too literally. We've hardly reached that stage, don't you think? If he’s simply setting that up as a metaphor for the class struggle, well, that’s another matter. No single medium, be it literature, painting, theatre or whatever can of itself bring about social change, of course. But in historical conditions ripe for such change, the film can certainly make a potent contribution in this regard, probably more so than other creative media. ...
Q: T.W. Adorno has asserted that the only choice of a politically committed artist at this point in history is to create a negative art. Do you agree in the context of the thirties and today?
A: I emphatically disagree with Adorno. What the hell is a negative art? Are dreck like TOWERING INFERNO. HINDENBURG, KING KONG, and JAWS “positive” then? Is POTEMKIN positive or negative art? And if “positive,” what is the criticism? I find such pronouncements a mere juggling with words. What the “politically committed artist” owes the people at this juncture is revolutionary art dedicated to revolutionary transformations of society. Any other formulation is mere intellectual obfuscation. Are THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, THE BATTLE OF LENINGRAD, and HEARTS AND MINDS positive or negative? You tell me, was Daumier a “negative” artist? Was Goya? Was Z negative or positive? I think the work we did in the thirties, crude and amateurish as were so many of our efforts, could hardly be characterized as “negative.”
Source: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/BrodyInt.html
