Cinema is not magic; it is a technique and a science, a technique born from science and put in service of a will: the will of workers to liberate themselves.

— Class of Struggle, 1968

 

Please Mr Foreman… Slow down the assembly line
Please Mr Foreman… Slow down the assembly line
You know I don’t mind workin’
But I do mind dyin’

— Joe L Carter, ‘Please Mr Foreman’, 1968

It is a matter of perspective, and time. In 1895, workers – mostly women – leave a factory in Lyon, an everyday routine captured, at 16 frames per second, on 17 metres of 35mm film. Their exit from the workplace is also an entrance, of sorts, with Louis Lumière’s camera infusing the scene, through its mere presence, with dramatic qualities: composition, choreography, suspense. The whole act lasts 46 seconds, if you’re counting, but La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon transcends its temporal confinement through the sheer power of its existence. The eeriness of it: mass obliviousness in the face of new spectatorships, new subjectivities, new intensifications of the male gaze. The untold implications of this historical precedent: these people do not yet know.

The cinema we’ve come to understand developed in tandem with shifts in how labour was organised. Funded by white moguls who contracted white unionised workers, the canon emerged from market interests underpinned by racist logics. In the same moment, the medium’s techniques and innovations allowed for other possibilities. While Henry Ford’s assembly lines were eventually satirised in Charlie Chaplin’s  Modern Times (1936), the medium’s nonfiction and experimental forms have afforded alternative lenses through which to comprehend and articulate the everyday conditions, rhythms and desires of working life. Cut to, for instance, an interior of the MG assembly line at British Motors in Cowley, Oxford, in 1968, in which workers – in contrast to those in the Lumière Brothers’ film 73 years earlier – are fully aware of the camera’s steady-stare surveillance and mechanical, crab-like movement along the shop floor. One intertitle in Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Henri Roger’s British Sounds (1968) reads FORD USA, with the last letter of each word scribbled out.

Cut to. Montage, pioneered by the Soviet propagandists and championed as a key tenet of documentary filmmaking, is a persuasive suggester of connections and continuities, of threads and through-lines. Entailing the sequential arrangement of information as well as the simultaneous juxtaposition of image and sound, editing conditions and complicates one’s understanding, one’s spatial orientation, of narrative. With powerful economy, the opening montage of Finally Got the News (1970), a documentary focusing on the labour activism of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit, situates its contemporary picture of labour tensions in the USA within the context of the Atlantic slave trade and the relocation of its imperatives to the racial liberalism of American unionism. One slogan, seen on a placard in the film, reads: FROM THE COTTON PATCH TO THE AUTO PLANT.

Finally Got the News should also be understood against the backdrop of a so-called golden age for the union, which began with Ford’s recognition of the United Auto Workers in 1941, and which ended with the wildcat strikes of the 1960s and 1970s. The film is a product of intersecting interests: a long-fomenting discontent at top-down conditions, a growing distrust in the union, a desire for proper representation of worker demands within the media, the need to seize the means of communication for more radical purposes, and the escalation of Black militancy, which saw people of colour recognising and leveraging their centrality to production within the auto industry to effect meaningful structural change. The film itself veils the agonistic forces at play, in both its production and the political structures of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers: made by an all-white crew of New York Newsreel filmmakers, who themselves had encountered difficulty in funding the project, Finally Got the News was made in collaboration with members of the League’s central staff, a Marxist-Leninist vanguard represented in the film by John Watson, Chuck Wooten and the attorney Kenneth Cockrel as well as Ron March, Chairman of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement – each of whom fires off Marxist rhetoric with all the generosity and impossible eloquence of a machine-gun.

Seen today, Finally Got the News is a bracingly direct film. Its agitated meld of ironic image-sound contrasts and the third-world revolutionary rhetoric of its interviewees are made all the more remarkable for their verbalisation of a socialism that is unapologetically internationalist as well as fiercely intersectional. Between the film’s male-centric aggression and alluringly assaultive verbiage, however, it is possible to trace the tensions and contradictions of a passing moment – from the life-sucking, monotonous miseries of Fordism to the emergence of a newly precarious, post-industrial workforce. The film’s absence of women is in this context significant: though right to recognise the central position of Black people within the car manufacturing industry, the League leaders are unable to foresee or predict how the same inequities that determined their own emergence as a political force will soon make the low-pay, ostensibly unskilled jobs overwhelmingly reserved for women – and women of colour especially – a norm for large sections of the working class. They, too, do not yet know.

As Arnaud Hée remarked in 2018, promoting a season of documentaries at the Centre Pompidou’s Bibliothèque Publique d’Information, curated to mark the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968: ‘The documentary serves as a labour archive. It is the memory of a present about to disappear.’ Within the context of the global intensification of labour struggles throughout the 1960s, such notions of disappearance are double-edged. The promise of the moment is ensured by its apparent failure. The wildcat strikes and student barricades; the nationalist battles for self-determination and civil rights; the seething anti-war protest songs and self-mythologised anecdotes of French auteurs holding the projectionist’s curtains shut at the 1968 edition of Cannes Film Festival. These apparitions are all laced with an acute sense of the extent to which neoliberalism, in subsequent decades, has seemingly prevailed.

As energising as it is agonising, the process of willing another set of conditions into fruition is a dialectical endeavour. To proceed with confidence, conviction and hope is already to entertain, however vaguely, their opposites. Such is the agitator’s lot: to strategise and sustain optimism amidst the eternal threat of despondency, confusion, despair. To survive long enough to overthrow a system hostile to your survival. Hence the gut-wrenching poignance of Class of Struggle (1968), a collectively made document of labour activism in France, whose concluding intertitle, ‘à suivre’ – to be continued – recalls the powerful ellipsis suggested by the closing lines of Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917), the seventh and final chapter of which was abandoned so that its author could participate in revolution rather than continuing to write pamphlets about it.

Class of Struggle is attributed to the Groupe Medvekine , a collective formed by workers in Besançon, France – birthplace, as it happens, of the Lumières – with the assistance, and perhaps insistence, of Chris Marker. Named after the Russian documentarian Aleksandr Medvedkin – subject of Marker’s 1993 film The Last Bolshevik – the collective emerged from the conditions in which Marker had made his previous film, À bientôt, j’espère (1967), with the communist Mario Marret and the film cooperative SLON. A frontline dispatch from France’s first factory occupation since 1936, which saw 3,000 workers strike at the Rhodiaceta textile plant, the earlier film had received some frank criticism when it premiered at the region’s cultural centre: workers who had participated in its making claimed it was exploitative, romantic, that its women appeared only as workers’ wives. In parallel to its production, however, Marker had initiated a series of workshops to equip interested workers with basic film techniques. Formalised thereafter as the Besançon Medvedkin Group, the workshops deployed handheld 16mm cameras, tape recorders, an editing table brought in from Paris, and adhered to a collectivist mode of production.

Class of Struggle, the Group’s first film, is credited to 45 people, listed alphabetically – including Juliet Berto and Jean-Luc Godard, who did not contribute directly – in addition to five names likely responsible for its actual completion, including Pol Cèbe, a Rhodiaceta employee and president of the local cultural centre where Marker’s previous film had screened and out of which the Medvedkin Group would operate, and Suzanne Zedet – worker, militant and leading subject of the film. Zedet, an employee of the French watchmakers Yema, articulates labour struggles throughout the film as cultural struggles: that culture is not the reserve of an elite. The film’s production context, necessitating workers’ active assumption and command of artistic means, is a direct expression of this argument. In its fusion of montage, vérité-style documentation, talking-head interviews and pop music, Class of Struggle is alive to its historical moment.

As such, the two films in Proclaim Loudly What Is Happening are perhaps best viewed less as snapshots of failure than as incomplete: necessarily, excitingly so. Put another way, neither film is so much an attempt to change the world as it is an articulation of how the world is changing. Both films epitomise a blink-and-miss present-tense – showing not the past, as the Brazilian documentarian João Moreira Salles has put it, but history in action. To be, may we say, continued…?