Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind nicely sums up the excitement and frustration of the film festival experience. Inspired by the work of Howard Zinn but outreaching him in poetic resonance, this 58-minute film by John Gianvito is a thrilling, one-of-a-kind picture, and by all rights ought to be the election-year movie of 2008. What's frustrating about it is simply the possibility that it may not be widely seen (though the first three minutes have already made their way to YouTube; watching it can give you a taste of Gianvito's method but little sense of how powerful it is in its total cumulative effect). A noble and beautiful piece of work, it amounts to a chronological history tour of the American progressive tradition, as represented in tributes to the dead: gravestones and death markers for such figures as Crazy Horse, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Eugene V. Debs, Medgar Evers, I. F. Stone, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, and on and on, as well as those killed in various clashes between striking workers and police. These images are intercut with nature photography, and the effect seems to be to suggest an ongoing, organic connection between some extraordinary lives and the physical environment these people were a part of. Ironically, despite its having been shot in so many graveyards, it gives you a deep, restorative sense of the continuing relevance of the American past. The movie only stumbles when Gianvito gives in to the temptation to make his point explicit with a climactic montage of contemporary political activists in the streets and a few bars of Paul Robeson singing "Joe Hill". The movie doesn't need these visual and aural cliches, and in this context, the sound of Robeson's voice is far less eloquent than the birds chirping and the tree leaves and bushes rustling in the breeze. Among the many striking quotes chisled in stone or set into plaques here, one stands out: the words of the martyred labor activist August Spies, who said, "The day will come when our silence will be more important than the voices you are throttling today." Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind makes you feel that these voices will never really be silent.
An interview with the director is featured here.
