Esperanza Quintero: Whose neck shall I stand on to make me feel superior, and what will I have out of it? I don't want anything lower than I am. I am low enough already. I want to rise and to push everything up with me as I go.
JayRaye does so much of a better job chronicling Southwestern labor struggles in DK so here the emphasis is on thinking about a notion raised earlier, about cultural capital and cultural labor. More specifically how mediated an understanding of labor in the full-length feature Hollywood film was historically constrained but not totally politically neutralized by the McCarthy era of The Blacklist. A reexamination of those issues has occurred since then including the rehabilitation of many of the original members of the
Hollywood Ten and cinematic biopics have been attempted ranging from Woody Allen's
The Front among others mentioned below. What seems still vital to discuss is that the cinematic apparatus has a political economy that extends beyond the production process on both sides of the camera to the distribution, circulation and consumption of cultural capital commodities.
Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television was an anti-Communist tract published in the United States at the height of the Red Scare. Issued by the right-wing journal Counterattack on June 22, 1950, the pamphlet-style book names 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others in the context of purported Communist manipulation of the entertainment industry. Some of the 151 were already being denied employment because of their political beliefs, history, or mere association with suspected "subversives". Red Channels effectively placed the rest on the industry blacklist
Every profession and every cultural unit has a blacklist whether it's the informal gossip in the workplace or even in DK with its various versions of
trolling. Similarly the Blacklist era continues however informally and dictated by capital as chonicled in"
You'll never have lunch in this town again", and more recently in the
hacking of Sony internal correspondence. Ideological motives abound not only with the former event but with the recent American Sniper movie manufacturing heroism. But labor heroism is more than the stories of Norma Rae, Silkwood, or Erin Brockovich. Like
Harlan County USA, the documentary genre gives a closer examination of the historical circumstances from which struggle can derive and even in the examination of labor processes that transect classes can some activist lessons be derived even in fictional constructions much different that the citizen digital video records we are now getting from unjust police power. Imagine that you could watch the documenting of your beating or shooting on your mobile device as you get killed.
In the latter instance viral images of unarmed persons being shot in the back by pursuing police are visceral images that have a kind of "wage" however cognitive or affective and whose value becomes further mobilizing in an era of social media. Many of the same policy issues are being revisited currently, government secrecy and prosecution in the name of national security including the revisiting of the goals and even the offspring (Koch Brothers) of some of those same oppressors from the McCarthy era. That there are still institutional and industrial issues of corporate media versus independent production and that the relative scale of these enterprises signifies the asymmetry of capitalist power and control over the distribution system. How independent is the unedited/modified work of cinematic artists when one has an Independent Film Channel network (IFC) owned by AMC in the US that still shows commercial advertisements.
Clinton Jencks, born in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1918, was a labor organizer in New Mexico. In 1954, he was convicted of lying about being a member of the Communist Party of the United States. During his trial, the government refused to produce documents relied upon by prosecution witnesses who were FBI informants, a move that prompted the passage of the act.
Clinton Jencks starred in the 1954 movie Salt of the Earth which was a dramatized version of his struggles organizing labor.
Having had an opportunity to view this film in high school and college during a period when it was difficult to even get copies of the film, this was an important moment to understand, as a matter of cinematic historiography, that film making as cultural practice had an important role beyond propaganda and which is now being expanded in digital social media. And the creative labor of making stories about labor are the kinds of histories important to the current struggle given how much of the demystification discourse in DK is to debunk the role of working people as irrelevant to the professional managerial classes, and to suggest that the continuing alienation of creative labor as a class is no different than at any moment in history with the dependence on institutional patronage or capital to realize projects of a collaborative/collective scale significant to contribute to political and social change. In the European socialist context that has not been an issue whereas the US bears much of the blame for producing mind-numbing dreck that structurally depends on an economic system less interested in the transformation of consciousness than in the production of accumulated capital and surplus value.
A drama film, based on the making of the film, was chronicled in One of the Hollywood Ten (2000). It was produced and directed by Karl Francis, starred Jeff Goldblum and Greta Scacchi and was released on September 29, 2000 in Spain and European countries. It has not been released in the United States as of 2011.
The troubled career of blacklisted director Herbert Biberman, who endured a considerable struggle to make the 1954 pro-Labor film Salt of the Earth, provides the centerpiece for this historical drama. The film opens at the 1937 Academy Awards, where Biberman's wife, Gale Sondergaard (Greta Scacchi), wins the first ever "Best Supporting Actress" Oscar. Although the anti-Fascist sentiment in her acceptance speech gets her labeled a "commie" by some observers, she and Biberman (played here by Jeff Goldblum) are placed under contract at Warner Bros. Ten years later, with Cold War paranoia growing, a group of predominantly Jewish Hollywood directors -- Biberman, Sondergaard, Danny Kaye, and Dalton Trumbo among them -- are labeled Communists and questioned before Congress. Refusing to name names, Biberman is thrown in prison for six months; his wife's similar refusal to testify severely threatened her career as well. After his release from prison, Biberman, no longer able to work in Hollywood, strikes out on his own with other blacklistees, producer Paul Jarrico (John Sessions) and writer Michael Wilson (Geraint Wyn Davies), to make Salt of the Earth. Biberman's production is far from easy, however, as it comes under attack from both the FBI and redneck vigilantes. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi
Cineaste review The many 50th Anniversaries of Salt of the Earth
The Hollywood Ten
Herbert J. Biberman
Lester Cole
Edward Dmytryk
Ring Lardner Jr.
John Howard Lawson
Albert Maltz
Samuel Ornitz
Adrian Scott
Dalton Trumbo
Alvah Bessie
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/...
More fascinating has been the
RW attack by such reactionaries as Ann Coulter on a forthcoming biopic on Dalton Trumbo starring Bryan Cranston.
Bryan Cranston’s mustache practically won its own Emmy at August’s award ceremony, but the Breaking Bad star was already hard at work on his next big project. Cranston was letting it grow to play Dalton Trumbo, the successful Hollywood screenwriter who was blacklisted by the studios after he failed to cooperate with Congress’ House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947.
Trumbo, directed by Jay Roach, tells the story of the writer’s stand against the communist witch-hunt at the height of the cold war, his professional exile, which included an 11-month stint in prison for contempt of Congress, and his battle with powerful red-hating gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren).
Trumbo—who had been a member of the communist party during World War II when the Soviets were a major American ally—was punished for his principled stand for free speech and the Constitution, and the ensuring uproar, in which others like Elia Kazan did name names, ripped Hollywood apart. Eventually, Trumbo found his way back into Hollywood, writing several scripts under pseudonyms during his exile. Two of them—Roman Holiday and The Brave One—won Academy Awards, and in 1960, Kirk Douglas weakened the blacklist when he publicized Trumbo’s work on Spartacus.
So the more theoretical stuff is below the fold primarily to give some context for the film industry in its early US phase, as well as trying to indicate the possibility of integrating the analysis of the general analysis of value with the cinematic apparatus.
Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable time, and human labour as a particular activity that has a specific useful effect.
As economically valuable time, human labour is spent to add value to products or assets (thereby conserving their capital value, and/or transferring value from inputs to outputs). In this sense, labour is an activity which creates/maintains economic value pure and simple, which could be realized as a sum of money once labour's product is sold or acquired by a buyer. The value-creating ability of labour is most clearly visible when all labour is stopped. If all labour is withdrawn, the value of the capital assets worked with will normally deteriorate, and in the end, if labour is permanently withdrawn, nothing will be left except a ghost town situation.
As a useful activity of a particular kind, human labour can have a useful effect in producing particular tangible products which are used by others, or by the producers themselves. In this sense, labour is an activity which creates use-values, i.e. tangible products, results or effects which can be used or consumed. The creation of use-values is highlighted, when goods and services of poor quality are created, which are not supplied on time and mainly useless to the consumer. Labour must be applied to produce usable products, regardless of how much they are sold for, otherwise there are no use-values. If labour produces useless products or results, it is simply a waste of labour-time.
By exploring a set of films made since the late 1920s, Beller argues that, through cinema, capital first posits and then presupposes looking as a value-productive activity. He argues that cinema, as the first crystallization of a new order of media, is itself an abstraction of assembly-line processes, and that the contemporary image is a politico-economic interface between the body and capitalized social machinery. Where factory workers first performed sequenced physical operations on moving objects in order to produce a commodity, in the cinema, spectators perform sequenced visual operations on moving montage fragments to produce an image.
The Red Channels list
(see, e.g., Schrecker [2002], p. 244; Barnouw [1990], pp. 122–24)
Larry Adler, actor and musician
Luther Adler, actor and director
Stella Adler, actor and teacher
Edith Atwater, actor
Howard Bay, scenic designer
Ralph Bell, actor
Leonard Bernstein, composer and conductor
Walter Bernstein, screenwriter
Michael Blankfort, screenwriter[c]
Marc Blitzstein, composer
True Boardman, screenwriter
Millen Brand, writer
Oscar Brand, folk singer
Joseph Edward Bromberg, actor
Himan Brown, producer and director
John Brown, actor
Abe Burrows, playwright and lyricist
Morris Carnovsky, actor
Vera Caspary, writer
Edward Chodorov, screenwriter and producer
Jerome Chodorov, writer
Mady Christians, actor
Lee J. Cobb, actor
Marc Connelly, playwright
Aaron Copland, composer
Norman Corwin, writer
Howard Da Silva, actor
Roger De Koven, actor
Dean Dixon, conductor
Olin Downes, music critic
Alfred Drake, actor and singer
Paul Draper, actor and dancer
Howard Duff, actor
Clifford J. Durr, attorney
Richard Dyer-Bennet, folk singer
José Ferrer, actor
Louise Fitch (Lewis), actor
Martin Gabel, actor
Arthur Gaeth, radio commentator
William S. Gailmor, journalist and radio commentator
John Garfield, actor
Will Geer, actor
Jack Gilford, actor and comedian
Tom Glazer, folk singer
Ruth Gordon, actor and screenwriter
Lloyd Gough, actor
Morton Gould, pianist and composer
Shirley Graham, writer
Ben Grauer, radio and TV personality
Mitchell Grayson, radio producer and director
Horace Grenell, conductor and music producer
Uta Hagen, actor and teacher
Dashiell Hammett, writer
E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, lyricist
Robert P. Heller, television journalist
Lillian Hellman, playwright and screenwriter
Nat Hiken, writer and producer
Rose Hobart, actor
Judy Holliday, actor and comedienne
Roderick B. Holmgren, journalist
Lena Horne, singer and actor
Langston Hughes, writer
Marsha Hunt, actor
Leo Hurwitz, director
Charles Irving, actor
Burl Ives, folk singer and actor
Sam Jaffe, actor
Leon Janney, actor
Joe Julian, actor
Garson Kanin, writer and director
George Keane, actor
Donna Keath, radio actor
Pert Kelton, actor
Alexander Kendrick, journalist and author
Adelaide Klein, actor
Felix Knight, singer and actor
Howard Koch, screenwriter
Tony Kraber, actor
Millard Lampell, screenwriter
John La Touche, lyricist
Arthur Laurents, writer
Gypsy Rose Lee, actor and ecdysiast
Madeline Lee, actress[d]
Ray Lev, classical pianist
Philip Loeb, actor
Ella Logan, actor and singer
Alan Lomax, folklorist and musicologist
Avon Long, actor and singer
Joseph Losey, director
Peter Lyon, television writer
Aline MacMahon, actor
Paul Mann, director and teacher
Margo, actor and dancer
Myron McCormick, actor
Paul McGrath, radio actor
Burgess Meredith, actor
Arthur Miller, playwright
Henry Morgan, actor
Zero Mostel, actor and comedian
Jean Muir, actor
Meg Mundy, actor
Lyn Murray, composer and choral director
Ben Myers, attorney
Dorothy Parker, writer
Arnold Perl, producer and writer
Minerva Pious, actor
Samson Raphaelson, screenwriter and playwright
Bernard Reis, accountant
Anne Revere, actor
Kenneth Roberts, writer
Earl Robinson, composer and lyricist
Edward G. Robinson, actor
William N. Robson, radio and TV writer
Harold Rome, composer and lyricist
Norman Rosten, writer
Selena Royle, actor
Coby Ruskin, TV director
Robert William St. John, journalist, broadcaster
Hazel Scott, jazz and classical musician
Pete Seeger, folk singer
Lisa Sergio, radio personality
Artie Shaw, jazz musician
Irwin Shaw, writer, playwright
Robert Lewis Shayon, former president of radio and TV directors' guild
Ann Shepherd, actor
William L. Shirer, journalist, broadcaster
Allan Sloane, radio and TV writer
Howard K. Smith, journalist, broadcaster
Gale Sondergaard, actor
Hester Sondergaard, actor
Lionel Stander, actor
Johannes Steel, journalist, radio commentator
Paul Stewart, actor
Elliott Sullivan, actor
William Sweets, radio personality
Helen Tamiris, choreographer
Betty Todd, director
Louis Untermeyer, poet
Hilda Vaughn, actor
J. Raymond Walsh, radio commentator
Sam Wanamaker, actor
Theodore Ward, playwright
Fredi Washington, actor
Margaret Webster, actor, director and producer
Orson Welles, actor, writer and director
Josh White, blues musician
Irene Wicker, singer and actor
Betty Winkler (Keane), actor
Martin Wolfson, actor
Lesley Woods, actor
Richard Yaffe, journalist, broadcaster