Occupy the Silver Screen? 10 Films to Get You Ready to Occupy Wall Street

marmar

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Tue Oct-25-11 06:05 PM
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Occupy the Silver Screen? 10 Films to Get You Ready to Occupy Wall Street

from AlterNet:

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1. Margin Call

Okay, this one's a little cheater: I haven't seen it yet (it came out Friday). But by all accounts, the new film starring Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci and Demi Moore is uncanny in its release date. It is set at a large investment bank during the first 24 hours of a meltdown, very early in the financial crisis, when said bank realizes that its assets have about the same worth as the plastic dollar bills yuppies hand out to their toddlers. It is said to be morally ambiguous as a piece of art—while the deeds and realizations are of evil, apparently the character development brings in humanity you're not likely feeling for anybody in a Wall Street penthouse right now. But nuance is the best way to fully understand something, and ambiguity is, after all, the very reason Occupy Wall Street has thrived across so many types of people with so many different demands. I'll refrain from elaborating until I've gone to check it out, but suffice to say New York magazine's David Edelstein introduced his review of Margin Call with the kicker, "Movie night at Zuccotti Park!"

2. V for Vendetta

The Guy Fawkes masks adopted by members of hacker group Anonymous, and which populate the OWS protests, originate from V for Vendetta, a dystopian fantasy directed by James McTeigue, who had a hand in The Matrix as assistant director. Pedigree aside, V for Vendetta is widely considered to be a bad movie, but as eye candy and visual inspiration to protest goes, it's top-notch. (For a better go at the storyline, turn to the original comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, upon which the movie was based.) Besides, the concept is awesome: a Fawkes mask-wearing freedom fighter and an employee at a state broadcasting station unite against a fascist state that has taken over Great Britain, urging its citizens to rise up together on the fifth of November—the day the real Fawkes was foiled trying to blow up Westminster Palace in 1605. Despite being a horrible future dictatorship, though, Vendetta's Britain has a lot in common with our own situation, and imagines what life would be like if humanity's worst prejudices were taken to their worst logical ends. A comedian is executed for owning a copy of the Koran; a cure for a deadly virus is tested on political dissidents. It's just close enough to home to inspire preemptive protesting, before it gets that bad.

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4. La Chinoise

Jean-Luc Godard based his 1967 film about five young French revolutionaries on Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, but he was inspired by the discontent he saw transpiring around him, which eventually led to the 1968 civil unrest. Of course, the methods were quite opposite to the OWS tactics—in the film and the book, the characters were divided on whether to assassinate—but the ideologies are what's important. Godard was using the text to show the range of the New Left, and its interest in communism, which would eventually blow out into the largest general strike of all time. In that sense, it's not so much that La Chinoise was prescient but simply attuned to the culture, but it's an important touchstone for where we're at now with OWS—and it's a good record to try and break.

5. Gandhi

You want a massive nonviolent resistance movement? Gandhi will give you a nonviolent resistance movement. This 1982 Academy Award-winning film starring Ben Kingsley certainly paved the way for epic historical films raking in the Oscars. This one deserved it: a fairly faithful retelling of the life of Mohandas Gandhi and the movement he led to free India from the bloody rule of the British, and his later hopes to unite Pakistan and India, divided by religious strife in 1947. Watching the film, the huge crowds of joyous protesters swarming the streets are mimicked by the aerial views of Occupy Times Square and various Occupy movements across the world… and if you're feeling at all discouraged, it's these images and their inevitable, historical outcome that will bring back the heart. Like Indians of the early 20th century, we must make a movement that's too large to tell no. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152841/occupy_the_silver_screen_10_films_to_get_you_ready_to_occupy_wall_street/