Profit and Nothing But!
A Grin Without a Cat
Diamonds and Rust
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Leftward Ho!
At their best, documentaries can offer revelatory vistas of
neglected worlds. While audiences have been lulled to see them
as objective accounts of non-fictional narratives, this
mentality misses the prodigious artistry that can be found in
the form. The great ones mingle reportage and poetry, find
metaphors in the mundane, and dapple light on subjects ignored
by a culture moving too fast to care. These films offer singular
perspectives -- they make journalism and artistic expression
seem inextricable.
The closest Raoul Peck's Profit and Nothing But! comes to
art is its invocation of the great Chris Marker, the largely
unsung French radical
filmmaker whose call for "films that make the heart beat faster"
Peck quotes as an inspiration for his work. (More on Marker
later.) A movie of potent outrage and little sense, Profit
and Nothing But! sees itself as part of a valiant tradition
of leftist agitation in cinema. There is plenty that is
wrong and presumptuous with Peck's movie, and when he invokes
Marker's name, Peck's movie's flaws look all the more stark.
Profit and Nothing But! is a fierce indictment of
capitalism (or "capital" as Peck insistently calls it), taking
as its departure point the poor of Port au Piment in Peck's
homeland of Haiti. A one-time Culture Minister of Haiti, Peck
made a splash last year with Lumumba, his biopic of the
Congolese political leader who fought against the country's
Belgian colonizers in the 1960s. More than anything else, Peck's
movie served as a frame for Eriq Ebouaney's stunning performance
as the charismatic Patrice Lumumba.
Far less engrossing than Lumumba, Profit drags on
interminably -- a stunning achievement for a 52-minute film.
Peck has essentially made a home- video harangue, long on
indignation and short on argument. The movie intercuts footage
of Haiti's poor with interviews of French intellectuals and
man-on-the-street spots with the privileged denizens of Paris
and New York.
The film also includes excerpts from speeches by world leaders
like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Francois Mitterand,
who represent the capitalist cabal seeking to advance the cause
of the free market on the backs of the world's poor. Peck sets
out his organizing metaphor by showing footage of an old
commercial featuring a young Ronald Reagan as Peck's droning
voiceover intones, "We are all suffering from Alzheimer's."
Accusing his audience of forgetting the ideals of a vanished
left, he bellows balefully, "Capital has succeeded in buying our
silence." Peck lambastes the triumphalism of free-marketers,
arguing that capitalism's victories have only touched a select
few. Capitalism, the movie purports, has led to "no progress."
It's tendentious, indefensible claptrap like this that gives
progressivism a bad name. Relentlessly spewing bilious
agit-prop, the movie's greatest sin is arguably its refusal to
engage in any real dialogue about the harmful effects of
globalization and the callousness of the capitalist system. At a
moment when we need practicable measures aimed at improving life
for everyone on the planet, Peck offers us flagrant
self-congratulation. Those in agreement with Peck's basic
argument are expected to pat each other on the back for our
moral superiority, and shake our heads dismally as yet another
shot of a nameless Haitian child flits by. Thanks, but no
thanks. It's a movie for the converted.
One comes away from Profit and Nothing But! with just as
much knowledge about Haiti -- a country that Peck says,
"theoretically doesn't exist" -- as before seeing this film. By
contrast, take a movie like Life and Debt, Stephanie
Black's 2001 documentary about the effects of globalization in
Jamaica [PopMatters review and interview].
That movie also suffered from a stilted voiceover, but it was
blessed with the clarity of Black's vision. Focusing on specific
industries (textile workers, banana farmers, etc.), Black gave
her critique of globalization a human, compelling, and
persuasive face. Her movie has a focus and power that Profit
and Nothing But! doesn't even aspire to.
Then again, there really is no winning an argument against
Peck's movie: In a craven move, Peck inoculates himself from
criticism by anticipating it. According to him, capitalism's
victory has been so pervasive, so incontrovertible, that people
who fail to buy his worldview must not mean it -- they've simply
been brainwashed by the system. The claim is insulting to his
audience's intellect; there is little room for dissent when one
sees the world in black and white, and Peck proves himself no
better than the totalitarians he imagines running the world.
Perhaps Profit and Nothing But! suffered especially,
coming on the heels of my recent viewing of Marker's epic
documentary, A Grin Without a Cat. An account of the rise
and fall of the New Left from the 1960s to the 1970s, it was
originally made in 1977, but reworked in 1993 in the wake of the
Cold War's end. The movie shares with Profit a vigorous
leftism and the wry acceptance that capitalism has won. The
similarities end there. Subtle and dense, A Grin
contextualizes leftism, giving it the moral heft it deserves. A
needed corrective to a history written by the winners,
Marker's movie doesn't shy away from circumspection. He
identifies the collapse of the Left as caused partly by
ideological factions within the movement. In a way, Marker is
addressing the inevitable futility -- and persistence -- of
utopianism. An even more piercing insight is Marker's suggestion
that the collapse of the New Left was ultimately affected by the
Cold War superpowers. Touching on the collapse of the dissident
uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (thanks to Soviet tanks) and
the downfall of Chilean President Salvador Allende's socialist
government in 1973 (thanks to a U.S.-backed coup), the movie
posits that the two most likely embodiments of the movement's
ideals crumbled in the face of superpower imperatives.
Insightful and ambiguous where Profit and Nothing But! is
sanctimonious and shrill, A Grin Without a Cat is the
documentary form elevated to its greatest heights: it is art and
advocacy, memory and history. Perhaps it's unfair to compare the
two movies. After all, Marker is an old hand at this filmmaking
thing, and Peck is a relative neophyte. But if Peck is to
imagine himself as part of a heroic tradition, then his work
must be judged by the steep standards of his forerunners. Peck
may have the courage of his convictions, but that's not nearly
enough. Late in the movie, he asks faux-rhetorically, "Why make
films?" His answer -- "Because we don't know any better" -- says
more about his movie than he perhaps intended. Peck gives
leftism a bad name; Marker seeks to resuscitate its valiant and
moral heart.
* * * * * * * *
Playing as the second feature on a double bill with Profit
and Nothing But! at New York's Pioneer Theater was another
documentary called Diamonds and Rust. Israeli filmmakers
Adi Barash and Ruthie Shatz go aboard the "Spirit of Namibia," a
dilapidated diamond-mining ship, off the coast of Namibia, for
90 days, documenting the strange, dysfunctional dynamic among
the multinational crew. What the filmmakers find is a
fascinating microcosm, replete with the persistence of blithe
colonial attitudes (South African officers shockingly candid
about their racism), a spirit of camaraderie among the deckhands
(Cubans and Namibians singing Karaoke together), and even the
ship's own Captain Bligh (Danny Levin, the trawler's hard-ass
Israeli manager). Reticent and modest, Diamonds and Rust
is an engrossing experience and a pie in the face of diamond
company De Beers. Stepping aside and letting its subjects do the
talking, the movie effortlessly immerses you into a new world
and broadens your understanding of human experience in its
myriad forms -- precisely what all good documentaries should aim
to do.
— 31 May 2002
