Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:30:00 GMT

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.

Time Magazine's History of Race in the Movies

Phil Nugent — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Richard Corliss at Time honors Black History Month by naming "the Twenty-Five Most Important Films on Race". Many of the films aren't by conscious design on race so much as they are touchstones in the hundred-year fight by black artists for their right to be seen onscreen and to use film as an expressive medium, and two movies by Spike Lee might be one too many even if one of them wasn't Bamboozled. (It also seems a bit odd that he says that he included Cooley High because he thought the selection would benefit from the inclusion of "a flat-out comedy." I guess he must think that Richard Pryor Live in Concert is a film noir.) The first half of the feature serves a useful tribute to some of the African-American talents who made a smaller mark on movies than they might have, given the size of their talents: not just Paul Robeson (Body and Soul, 1925), but such performers as Nina Mae McKinney (the "black Garbo" who starred in King Vidor's 1929 musical Hallelujah!), Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, and Lena Horne, whose 1938 debut, The Duke Is Tops, was later rereleased with Horne's name at the top of the credits and with the title changed to The Bronze Venus; and such directors as Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, Jr., whose The Blood of Jesus (1941) is now included in the National Film Registry, though Williams himself is probably best remembered as one of the stars of the TV version of Amos and Andy. Williams not only directed but also produced, wrote, and starred in The Blood of Jesus, and the fact that a man who was a pioneering, quadruple-threat force in black film made his biggest mark in a sitcom whose title has, rightly or wrongly, become synonymous with a racist outrage says a lot about the complicated, tangle history of race and the movies. So does the career of Stepin Fetchet, to whom Corliss, writing about the Will Rogers vehicle Judge Priest, pays compelling tribute: ". . . anyone looking at Fetchit's performances today has to notice their subversive, anarchic, movie-altering force. His drawn-out drawl and living-dead pace instantly stopped any scene in its tracks, brought the pace to a halt and monopolized the screen. When Fetchit was on, you watched him, because his acting style was unique. The rest of the players were striving for movie naturalism, and he, with a turtle's intensity, was doing Kabuki."

The Screengrab : paul robeson

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind"

Time Magazine's History of Race in the Movies