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So I've been finding as I get older (for reference, I turn 39 in April) I've become more interested in leftist causes and media. I have some ideas about what constitutes the type of film that encapsulates. For instance, I consider Do the Right Thing a fairly transparent example of leftist, veering into anarchist film. Another example would be Repo Man, and yet another would be Brazil. But I'd imagine you could make arguments for other less obvious examples, ones worth watching. I'd like to hear recommendations, discussions, all that good poo poo, and I'll edit this post for recs once we get up and running.
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Mar 11, 2022 20:19
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Are you looking for films that are explicitly leftist propaganda (The Vow, Battleship Potemkin, The End of St. Petersburg) or mainstream films that could be read as having largely leftist beliefs (Snowpiercer, They Live?) Sorry to Bother You is a recent film written and directed by a literal Maoist where unions are presented as objectively good with no downsides, it's also funny as hell. It works as great propaganda and great pop. Warren Beatty's "Reds" is a rare sympathetic look at communists from Hollywood. You should absolutely watch Malcolm X if you haven't and you liked Do the Right Thing. The Act of Killing and its companion film The Look of Silence will gently caress you up for an afternoon, but is a must-watch documentary. Really, the topic is extremely broad, not just due to the history of film but because the definition of "leftist" is so large due to how long and powerfully its opposition has reined. You have Bolsheviks, Stalinists, Maoists, Marxists, Leninists, Anarchists, Social Democrats...
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Mar 12, 2022 05:50
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Bacurau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKTejyk9ZIA Sweet Country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYKBG1znk4A Heavily anti-colonialism films in different contexts, and both fuckin' rad.
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Mar 12, 2022 11:36
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Pirate Jet posted:Are you looking for films that are explicitly leftist propaganda (The Vow, Battleship Potemkin, The End of St. Petersburg) or mainstream films that could be read as having largely leftist beliefs (Snowpiercer, They Live?) Definitely a broad topic, but I think I'd prefer films with leftist messages/themes that aren't full on propaganda, but I'm not gonna discourage people from discussing propaganda. I've seen Sorry to Bother You, I liked it a lot. I remember trying to watch Malcolm X but it was on cable and it was definitely edited for that purpose. Would someone like John Carpenter be considered leftist? They Live certainly feels leftist... El Gallinero Gros fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 15:26
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Slap Shot is a fantastic critical look at class and gender. Like, the main story (or one of them) is all about how gendered expectations are used to keep the working class in line. Men are threatened with being accused of effeminacy to keep them fighting. The violence is used as a release for the frustrations of the working class. The spectacle is, in turn, used to reinforce gender norms. And all this leads up to one of the great payoffs in sports movie history. A neat subtle point from the movie is about how the agency of the female characters is distributed along class lines. The nameless hockey wives are basically dragged along with their husbands. Lily, college educated and from money, has the ability to set her own path to an extent. Francine gets enough money to drive off into the sunset. And, of course, the team’s owner is rich and entirely independent of a man. Not coincidentally, confronting her causes Reg to break and descend into gendered insults.
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Mar 12, 2022 15:36
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Hand Knit posted:Slap Shot is a fantastic critical look at class and gender. Like, the main story (or one of them) is all about how gendered expectations are used to keep the working class in line. Men are threatened with being accused of effeminacy to keep them fighting. The violence is used as a release for the frustrations of the working class. The spectacle is, in turn, used to reinforce gender norms. And all this leads up to one of the great payoffs in sports movie history. This is exactly the kind of stuff I wanted! Plus, she underlined the gently caress scenes
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Mar 12, 2022 15:37
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Slap Shot has some uncomfortable homophobia but I think it makes sense in the context of the setting (i.e. working class hockey playing shitheads in the 1970s). Extremely good movie, maybe my favorite Paul Newman performance. also, to tie it into punk, once you watch it you'll recognize all the samples from Slapshot records https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlWrWojWciQ Uncle Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 17:14
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Not sure how leftist you can say it is, but Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a really unique anti-establishment movie by Martin Van Peebles about a black man on the run after helping a member of the Black Panthers from being beaten to death by crooked cops
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Mar 12, 2022 17:37
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Slap Shot has some uncomfortable homophobia but I think it makes sense in the context of the setting (i.e. working class hockey playing shitheads in the 1970s). Extremely good movie, maybe my favorite Paul Newman performance. The homophobia is definitely put to a purpose, but whenever I'm showing this to friends I'm open that it's coming and there's nothing wrong with not wanting to bother with it. Another movie, not quite so good, is The Trotsky starring Jay Baruchel. He plays a Montreal high school student who is convinced that he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, destined to live out the historical Trotsky's life entirely. The plot revolves around him trying to organize a revolution in his high school, with Baruchel's character gradually winning people over with earnest revolutionary zeal.
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Mar 12, 2022 21:10
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For a more recent one, The Platform should also fit, as a pretty straightforward critique of capitalism. It's about a number of people locked into a featureless vertical prison, two each per level. Every day, a platform laden with the day's food comes down, passing each level in succession. Unsurprisingly that means those in the highest level get their pick, and only dregs are left for those below. As you can already tell, the metaphor is as subtle as a brick, but it's paced well enough to keep it interesting the whole time through.
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Mar 12, 2022 22:37
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El Gallinero Gros posted:Would someone like John Carpenter be considered leftist? They Live certainly feels leftist... A Carpenter super fan would be free to correct me here, but I think if you straight up asked him about his politics he’d probably just call himself a liberal. In the US especially, where liberalism is just defined as anything that’s not a conservative, further-left viewpoints get squashed under that same umbrella and the general public still thinks of it all as two parties in opposition. I wonder a lot about what filmmakers are liberals but would be leftists of any shade if they ever had to actually leave LA for any reason.
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Mar 12, 2022 23:48
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Aside from Green Room, any recent punk movies worth watching?
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Mar 13, 2022 19:00
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I'd say that Carpenter (and Cameron) are liberals who have held onto some 60s-era values that a lot of Boomer liberals have discarded. Namely, they're more skeptical of the police and the military-industrial complex.
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Mar 13, 2022 19:48
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Machuca is a great movie about how middle class liberals are fake allies.
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Mar 13, 2022 19:56
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Almodóvar's earliest films are pretty punk and sort of left (they're all anti-fascist): Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!, and Entre tinieblas. (He's got strains of this stuff in most of his films, though.) Liquid Sky is a fun punk curio. Maybe a little slow. The Battle of Algiers is a classic anti-colonialist movie. Blue Collar is a great Paul Schrader union movie. A good companion to Sorry to Bother You. In general you can find lots of great stuff in these two lists: https://www.criticker.com/films/?filter=e5 https://www.criticker.com/films/?filter=e4136
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Mar 14, 2022 04:53
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Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968) and its predecessor short film, Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933), embrace anarchic rebellion, in this instance against the boarding school system that satirically stands in for society-at-large. Jean Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange (1936) espouses the values of the anti-fascist Popular Front of the mid-30s through its small scale drama of a publishing company.
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Mar 14, 2022 05:56
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TychoCelchuuu posted:Blue Collar is a great Paul Schrader union movie. A good companion to Sorry to Bother You. I don't think it is a great union movie. Blue Collar is very anti-union, like On the Waterfront. I recommend Salt of the Earth (1954) which is about striking miners and was made by blacklisted filmmakers at the time.
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Mar 14, 2022 21:47
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Punishment Park is a great piece of agit-prop. A mockumentary about the US government rounding up leftists during the Vietnam war and giving them the option of either jail time or surviving "Punishment Park" which is essentially a 'most dangerous game' kinda scenario where the captives are given a head start to run some absurd distance through the desert before the cops/military chase them down. Some might criticize it for being a bit too on the nose but since satire is dead we all know being on the nose means just being correct in most cases. The whole thing is on youtube and I've sampled the hell out of the movie. As for some movies that may or may not be political but definitely have a punk ethos are Sarah Jacobson's films (gone too soon, she only really has Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore and I Was a Teenage Serial Killer), the SOV in Tampa classic Rot (also on youtube), Half-Cocked and of course, despite being as offensive as possible to everyone and anything I'd say Troma's movies are close to as left wing as you can get.
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Mar 15, 2022 00:30
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Silky Slim posted:Punishment Park is a great piece of agit-prop. A mockumentary about the US government rounding up leftists during the Vietnam war and giving them the option of either jail time or surviving "Punishment Park" which is essentially a 'most dangerous game' kinda scenario where the captives are given a head start to run some absurd distance through the desert before the cops/military chase them down. Great movie, and to again tie it into punk, it gave the title to the excellent recent debut LP by UK hardcore act Big Cheese - dialogue from the film is sampled in the track “Tired Children in D Minor” (about 8:30 in the video below). One of my favorite records of 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czg2kzRRlZk Uncle Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 00:36
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Punishment Park sounds wild. Don't see it on any of my streaming apps but I'll have to find a way to see it. What about movies featuring fictional punks (preferably as protagonists since I know it was sorta trendy to make them villainous for a short while, thanks a lot Jack Klugman) Also gonna listen to that Big Cheese record... This looks interesting https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=viSiO-ccJsU El Gallinero Gros fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 14:17
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Bronx Warriors and Bronx Warriors 2: Escape from the Bronx. Are you a bad enough dude to kill the CEO?
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Mar 15, 2022 14:36
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Punishment Park is amazing, definitely seek it out. Death Promise is a 70s exploitation movie about dudes who know kung fu hunting down their piece of poo poo landlords
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Mar 15, 2022 17:53
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhMtWePgzB4
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Mar 15, 2022 17:58
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Repo Man is the greatest punk film ever made, how has that not been stated yet?! Smh
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Mar 15, 2022 18:07
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Blood Boils posted:Repo Man is the greatest punk film ever made, how has that not been stated yet?! Smh I mentioned it in the OP, my good man
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Mar 15, 2022 19:36
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Oh, so you did. Lol
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Mar 15, 2022 23:50
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Oh boy, this is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. Punk Films Films about punk rock, punk subculture or embody a DIY punk ethos. - Afro-Punk (2003) - Another State of Mind (1984) - A Band Called Death (2012) - Blank Generation (1980) - Border Radio (1987) - Christ: The Movie (1990) - Class of 1984 (1982) - Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986) - The Day the Country Died (2007) - Dead End Drive-In (1986) - The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) - The Decline of Western Civilization Part III (1998) - Decoder (1984) - The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle (1980) - Green Room (2016) - Hype! (1996) - Jubilee (1981) - Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982) - Liquid Sky (1982) - The Lost Boys (1987) - No Skin Off My rear end (1991) - Out of the Blue (1980) - The Punk Singer (2013) - Repo Man (1984) - The Return of the Living Dead (1985) - Rude Boy (1980) - Sid & Nancy (1986) - SLC Punk (1998) - Suburbia (1983) - Summer of Sam (1999) - Straight to Hell (1987) - Terminal City Ricochet (1990) - There Is No Authority But Yourself (2006) - Times Square (1980) - We Are the Best! (2013) - We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen (2005) - You Weren't There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977 - 1984 (2007) No Wave Related to punk, No Wave was a DIY independent filmmaking movement prominent in the New York punk scene in the late 70s and early 80s. It gave rise to artists like Jim Jarmusch, Susan Seidelman, Lydia Lunch, Lizzie Borden and John Lurie. The movement also spun off the Cinema of Transgression, exemplified by filmmakers like Nick Zedd and Richard Kern. - Black Box (1979) - Blank City (2010) [Documentary about the movement, a great introduction] - The Blank Generation (1976) - Born in Flames (1983) - The Deadly Art of Survival (1979) - The Foreigner (1978) - Geek Maggot Bingo or the Freak from Suckweasel Mountain (1983) - Kidnapped (1978) - Men in Orbit (1979) - No J-ps At My Funeral (1980) [Feature length interview with an IRA member on the run] - Permanent Vacation (1980) - Police State (1987) - Rome '78 (1978) - She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) - Smithereens (1982) - Stranger Than Paradise (1984) - Subway Riders (1981) - They Eat Scum (1979) - Underground U.S.A. (1980) - Unmade Beds (1976) - Variety (1983) - Vortex (1982) - Working Girls (1986) - You Are Not I (1981) By no means are either of these lists even close to exhaustive. I was going to get deeper into actual ideological leftist films but I'll come back and perhaps actually write a bit about some of this stuff. I can tell you about everything from Soviet cinema to Jean-Luc Godard to the Third Cinema movement to Koji Wakamatsu's leftist pornography to radical queer cinema -- it's a vast world out there.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:30
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Blood Boils posted:Repo Man is the greatest punk film ever made, how has that not been stated yet?! Smh Weird way to spell Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains but ok.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:31
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Harlan County U.S.A. is required viewing, and I think a bit ahead of its time. I feel like the full realization of the destruction of our unions was realized by the late 90s, but the film sets with a clear point of view of the labor rights and the union being part of American Heritage.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:36
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TrixRabbi posted:Weird way to spell Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains but ok. it's actually Return of the Living Dead. Fabulous Stains is great, though. And to tie it in with a conversation upthread, both The Fabulous Stains and Slap Shot have the same screenwriter, Nancy Dowd, one of Framingham, MA's greatest exports. Uncle Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Mar 16, 2022 |
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Mar 16, 2022 00:39
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TrixRabbi posted:Oh boy, this is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. My man. I will peruse this.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:53
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I need to give The Day the Country Died a watch, I've been on an anarcho-punk kick lately. The new Rudimentary Peni reissues sound great. If you're into the DC hardcore scene, I cannot recommend strongly enough the documentaries Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington D.C. and especially Instrument: Ten Years with the Band Fugazi. The latter has editing rhythms that I think are absolutely fascinating even if you're not a fan of the band (though, caveat: they are my favorite band). Directed by Jem Cohen who went on to make the very good indie drama Museum Hours in 2012.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:58
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Would 1982's Made in Britain, starring Tim Roth fit in here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLNpsf1k_Yw
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Mar 16, 2022 02:16
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:I need to give The Day the Country Died a watch, I've been on an anarcho-punk kick lately. The new Rudimentary Peni reissues sound great. I've seen Instrument, it's great. It's how I heard "I'm so tired" which is great and as a suicide attempt survivor resonates deeply. I want to see the Day the Country Died and I'm also quite interested in the Poly Styrene documentary her daughter made. One I'll submit to the thread is Never Get Tired, the Jeff Rosenstock doc. Does Made in Britain glorify skinheads? El Gallinero Gros fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Mar 16, 2022 |
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Mar 16, 2022 02:35
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El Gallinero Gros posted:Does Made in Britain glorify skinheads? Not really, no. It follows one around, but it becomes apparent that Tim Roth's character is using racism and racist imagery as a way to provoke normal society rather than as a real ideology. Though that does get into the idea that you are what you pretend to be. The movie shows a young man who is alienated from society for reasons that aren't made especially clear, though it may have to do with a broken home life. He's clearly very intelligent, does a lot of anti-social things to provoke a reaction, and is on a glide path for prison. Great soundtrack though! The music in the opening scene is the song "UK82" by Scottish punk rock band The Exploited.
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Mar 16, 2022 02:52
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El Gallinero Gros posted:My man. I will peruse this. I was gonna say Penelope Spheeris's Suburbia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DAhIHu7mYE
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Mar 16, 2022 03:52
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Pride from 2014 is a comedy about gay activists travelling to Wales to help out Welsh miners in the 1980s and its lovely, wholesome and very funny. Fantastic cast too.
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Mar 16, 2022 13:40
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here's another classic that's available in full on youtube: N.Y.H.C. the documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT2bujjYlTY Shot in 1995, released in 1999. A snapshot of a particularly interesting time in one of the world's most vital hardcore scenes. If you like New York Hardcore, this movie is essential. If you don't, this movie will probably make you hate it even more. Worth it for the Lord Ezec interview segments alone.
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Mar 16, 2022 14:30
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Strike
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Mar 16, 2022 15:57
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Gorn Myson posted:Pride from 2014 is a comedy about gay activists travelling to Wales to help out Welsh miners in the 1980s and its lovely, wholesome and very funny. Fantastic cast too. This was on one of my streaming apps and should look for it Uncle Boogeyman posted:here's another classic that's available in full on youtube: N.Y.H.C. the documentary I'm glad you posted this but I'll pass as I really dislike NYHC
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Mar 16, 2022 16:05
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