ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Strikes On Screen

Episode Date: February 19, 2023

The ACFM groupmind went into overdrive on last week’s Trip, a wide-ranging conversation about the long and violent history of strikes. This time, Nadia, Jem and Keir take a closer look at cultural representations of worker organisation – that is to say, they sat themselves down with a huge stack of old movies and an […]

This is acid, man. Hello and welcome to this microdose from ACFM, the home of the weird left. This is one of those microdoses with the three of us, because we were recording the episode on strikes that has just come out in February 2023 and we thought, well, there's so many films about strikes we'd like to have a chat about them and share our insights. So this microdose today is going to be all about films about strikes. We're starting in the 1920s. So Jeremy, would you like to kick us off with a film that you've seen? Yeah, sure. So the first film I know of about it.

a strike is called strike, or rather, the Russian title I think is Staka. And it's Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film. Eisenstein, the great Soviet filmmaker of the early revolutionary and immediate, of the immediately post-revolutionary period, one of the great pioneers of the Montas technique and his most famous film that will be familiar to people. It's Battleship Potemkin. Strike like Battleship Potemkin is essentially, it's revolutionary Soviet Russia, producing the story of its own immediate history. So they were supposed to be part of a sequence of films which told the story of how the

revenue, you know, the history building up to the revolution. So strike is a dramatization of a film, of a strike, a factory strike in 1903, which is in the run up to the 1905 revolution, which is a sort of precursor to the 1917 revolution in Russia. And like Battleship Vitemkin, what it does is it really, it treats cinema as an art form whose narrative function, representative function, is really completely different from what it becomes in mainstream cinema from the 1930s onwards, really, which is from the 1930s onwards, cinema becomes basically a narrative form whose primary concern is interpersonal

relationships and individual experience, I would say. From the beginning of the talkies and with the popularisation of techniques like the close-up and the point of the individual point of view shot, basically cinema becomes about a kind of extension of the bourgeois literary project of producing a vision of the world, according to which it is the private experience of individuals and their intimate relationships with each other, which is the primary subject, the primary concern of narrative art. And the thing with Eisenstein is that's not what he's interested in. He's interested in the behavior of large groups. He's interested in the crowd as the active agent of history.

And it's the crowd scenes in Battlestip Hempkin, which you know anything at all about cinema from that period you might be familiar with. It's the crowd scenes and shots in Strike, which are really compelling. But I think even now, it's a silent film and it's very different kind of viewing experience to watching a contemporary movie. It's still, it's really, really compelling. It's a really engaging film to watch. And it really does make you think about how cinema can be a film. a medium which is about something completely different. It can be about collective

experience. Of course it was originally cinema had to be watched on screens. You couldn't sit at home on your own and watch it because people didn't have screens at homes. You watched it in a crowd. It is that for Eisenstein, Eisenstein's vision of cinema was that it was the medium of the crowds, of the radical crowd,

the potent collectivity, as I like to call it. And it's a really fantastic evocation of that. I mean, in some ways it's the most radical film we're going to talk about today. still having been made 100 almost 100 years ago. And is it available to watch?

It's probably on YouTube. I mean, I've got a file that I was given, that fell off the back of a lorry, but as we used to say when I was a kid. But yeah, it's easy to get hold of. But yeah, you're right. Eisenstein invents loads of the grammar

for filmmaking, i. like montage and all that sort of stuff. But it's a very, very different project to Hollywood. And so our list goes, jump straight to 1951. So it's like a big, big period through the 20s and through the 30s, which are times of like big, and the 40s, actually, yeah, big waves of unionisation, big strikes and lots of political conflict. I mean, we should say, look, we just chucked down a load of films that one of us had

seen or that we'd heard of that were about something to do with strikes. This is no way an exhaustive cinematic. history and I'm sure there's loads of stuff we've missed out so don't at us you know well do at us and tell us about the ones we've missed out because it'd be interesting yeah we'll tell people recommend that films recommend other please do recommend films other listeners could watch don't text don't tweet me saying I can't believe you missed X believe it we're going to miss it but even if you just do a Google you know it does seem to be a little bit of a gap which is a bit odd but like you know in some ways I suppose it's because well particularly Hollywood first

films of that era are escapist films, aren't they? They don't want to be confronted with this militant unionism, I suppose, something like that, I'm not sure. I mean, from the mid-30s onwards, until the 60s, really, films about trade unions are not mostly going to be films about strikes and class conflict. They're actually going to be films more or less in sympathy with the project of the New Deal and the welfare state in Britain. So they're about workers all pulling together.

So there will be plenty of films that, have a sort of mild anti-capitalist orientation, but they're not about strikes. They're about, you know, factory girls in the war and this sort of thing. I mean, the next film we've got is Man in the White Suit from 1951. So Eisenstein's film, Strike, you know, that is a revolutionary regime and a revolutionary artist trying to portray and understand the sort of revolutionary period they were in. By the time we get to 1951, you know, the portrayal of the unions and strikes in the man in a white suit is completely different because unions in that context, in the UK at that time, they're an established part of life, basically, and they're incorporated into life, they're incorporated into the way that government works, right? You know, the head of the unions is invited to number 10 with the head of the employers and they have to negotiate wage rises linked to products.

productivity rises, you know, unions are absolutely central to how society functions and incorporated within society. Man in a White So it's an interesting one to talk about in terms of that. So it's a film from Ealing Studios, which is this studio that they've got renowned for making comedies, but satirical comedies as well. I absolutely love Ealing comedies for all of their faults. And Man in a White Suit, it stars Alex Guinness as Sidney Stratton, who is like this, he's a sort of genius chemist who keeps getting sacked

from his job because he's so obsessive about his research. So he has to sort of like smuggle his way into to be able to do his research, actually unpaid I think when he, a particular point in the film, the particular point where he makes his great discovery. He discovers a material,

this white material that can never get dirty and will never wear out. What's the matter? Mr. Hoskins, it's work. I've done it. The radioactive groups and the fibre-forming molecules haven't catalyzed the internal rearrangement, not in the lease. I thought the polymerisation would be hysterically hindered, but it wasn't.

It wasn't. Where are my notes? Where are my notes? Mr. Stratton. I'll see you later. I've got to see Mr. Burnley. I can't do that. I've done it. I've done it. Stop him! Stop him! And so he discovers this presents it to the people who run this factory, Burnley's textiles, and they're all really excited about it. Oh yeah, well, basically, we'll call the market. then they realize that the rest of the textile bosses go and meet

and they say, look, you know, basically if you allow this to go ahead, we will eliminate our market. And Alex Guinness or Sidney Stratton goes to their workers who he thinks will be sympathetic, but of course they recognise that what's going to happen is that they'll be out of jobs if this goes ahead. So they go on strike. They have this strike to try to force the bosses to suppress this invention. And the like the portrayal of the unions and of the,

workers and particularly sympathetic in some ways. You could sort of see it as a sort of middle-class moralistic. Individualistic. It's the genius individual being held back and hold and his, the genius individual is the agent of progress. He's being held back both by corporate, the corporate conservatism, but also the bureaucratic inertia of the unions and the working class. Yeah. And it fits into it, like, Ealing comedies tend to have this sort of characteristic attitude towards, towards unions.

You know, they pretend to be even-handed in this way. Both the unions and the bosses are self-interested and self-interested, etc. I mean, I've always found this film really uncomfortable for that reason. That's a union man. But, I mean, it is also, it's a critique of industrial capitalism. it is a critique of built-in obsolescence, like planned obsolescence, as a feature of contemporary capitalism at a very early moment in the history of that being a part of the way that it works.

So it is a sort of critique in consumerism, but it is also, it has something to say about the apparent, what it sees is the complicity of the unions and unions and the union bureaucracy and a sort of working class small C conservatism with this. And it's a disposition and this analysis, it can really go either way. lead you towards a revolutionary critique of industrial capitalism and it's and a critique of bureaucratic corporateist trade unionism's complicity with that and that is a critique which is you know central to the revolutionary tradition going back to the 1880s but it could also lead you to just be

a thatcherite and so if it weren't for all if it weren't for the dead hand of the welfare state and regulation and the unions then this fantastic entrepreneur would be able to you know improve all our lives with his miracle fabric so it could really really go either way. And it does go, but it does go. It is, it's a sensibility which over the course of the 60s to the 80s is going to go both ways in the wider culture. Yeah, because you could give it a, you could, you could give it a reading in which is a critique of, of, the attitude towards technology and the capitalism, basically. So we talked about this, and I'll show about technology, about how the direction of technology is driven, not by need or, or its potential uses, but by

profitability. And so, you know, that's not an abstract critique. That's why pharmaceutical companies put huge amounts of money into researching drugs to deal with middle-aid impotence. I'm so glad they do, reader, dear listener. And they don't, you know, treat, do research into drugs which can save millions of lives in the global South. So it could be seen as a critique of that, which then has a sub-critique of the unions as, you know, a critique which says there's a limitation to a politics which is based around, you know, unionisation in which you were trying to push your own interests within the logic of capitalism. And if only we could break with capitalism completely, we could all be having white suits and running around the town, etc.

Anyway, the end of the, just to give you the plot, the end of it, the end of it, It ends up with the protagonist running around in a white, white suit, running around town, getting kidnapped by the bosses, getting kidnapped by the workers. And then his clothes start to fray, and he realizes he's messed his formula up. And, in fact, it only lasts a little time. What is the next film we've got on our?

Salt of the Earth, which I haven't seen. Salt of the Earth. So this is a film from 1954. So three years after Man in a White Suit, set in New Mexico. And in fact, it's a film about a strike that happens in New Mexico in 1951.

So the same year, man in a white suit gets released. But this one is completely, completely different. It's a sort of gritty, neo-realist sort of influence film in which the director uses, he uses five professional actors

and the rest of the character. are basically minors and their families. And most of that cast have actually participated in the strike three years before. So it's a strike around a mine in New Mexico. It's a really interesting film. They're acting in particularly great. I rewatched it this week. But that's because it's not using professional actors,

and that's not the point of it. But the politics is really, really interesting for its time. We would think of it now as like a film about the intersectional left or a film of the intersectional left. Because the miners are Mexican-Americans, they go on strike around safety, etc. But their demands are we want the same treatment as Anglo-American workers in different mines. So they have different sort of safety sets up, et cetera. The women, the wives basically, they say, look, you need to include like the sanitation in the company-provided house.

If you haven't got running water, we haven't got toilets. and the mail workers say, no, no, no, that's, we get our demands at work first, and we'll deal with that other stuff. We've got to get equality on the job. Then we'll work on these other things. Give it to the men. I see. The men, your strike may be for your demands.

But what wives want, that comes later, always later. Now, don't you start talking against the union again? But then, you know, the police get this, they get an injunction to ban the minors from being on a picket line. But the injunction doesn't include the wives. So the wives then go on the picket line and form the picket line. The police attack the wives. The wives end up in jail.

So it ends up in this situation where the men are at home trying to look after the children and do the cooking, etc. So they suddenly realize that in fact they should have, they do need to include sanitation, et cetera, and all of that in their demands. But it's like this really, it's like a, it's not a didactically political film. But its policies are really, really clear. You know, the Mexican-American workers, they make all these statements. The reason that the Anglos get better conditions than us is because, you know,

the bosses want to use that to make a split in the workers, basically. They can say to the Anglo workers, at least you're not getting dealt with in the same manner as the Mexicans. The director, Herbert Bieber Man, he was blacklisted by the House of an American Activities Committee and sent to jail for six months for a few. using to testify against other directors. This is this big part of them like McCarthy, Red Scare in America, there was this big wave of inquiries

trying to basically ban blacklists, leftist actors, writers, directors, and topics, basically, which will give you some sort of clue why films about strikes in the US don't just disappear are really not prominent through the 50s and early 60s.

So the film was suppressed, basically, that film. It became a sort of like one of these cult hits that emerged over the late 60s and early 70s amongst, you know, the new left. So that's salt of the earth. Well worth a watch, I think. And so then we moved to 1959 with I'm All right, Jack, another Ealing comedy. Do you want to talk about this one, Jim? Well, I'm All right, Jack is one of the most famous of the eating comedies.

It's probably, it might be the most famous British comedy of the 50s. It famously features Peter Sellers as a communist trade union leader, an organiser in a factory. The action of the film is around, you know, centres around a strike. I mean, it's not unlike, I mean, it owes a lot to a man in the white suit in a way. I mean, the central protagonist isn't a genius scientist. He's a sort of lovable loser from the upper middle class. You end up working a factory. But the attitude is very, very similar.

the attitude of the film is, you know, the film invites you to identify with a almost explicitly, some middle-class bourgeois liberal perspective, according to which both the slightly sinister, Leninist, but also corruptible, sort of Leninist bureaucrats of the trade unions and the some corporate executives of a company, they're all on the take, they're all out for themselves. Yes, here's another good one to start on. elective childhood and factory manhood. Oh, that sounds fun. Yeah, very descriptive.

It's all about how they run factories in a worker's state, however I won't spoil it for you. Have you ever been to Russia, Mr. Kite? No, not yet. One place I'd like to go to, though. All them cornfields and bally in the evening. I wish I knew as much about it as you do. You ever read near Lenin's works, have you?

No, I'm afraid I haven't. That'll open your eyes for you. open your eyes for you. I mean, this is ironic, basically, because I'm All right, Jack, is a phrase which it gets used. It's a colloquial phase in British 20th century culture, and it refers to, it's usually it's used as a sort of critical term. It's used as a term of moral censure against people who are seen as not exhibiting

any sort of solidarity towards other, usually other members of the working class. So I'm all right, Jack, means I'm doing fine, I don't care about anyone else. And so it is itself a term, which is drawn from a vocabulary of working class solidarity as a kind of ethic. But in the film, The I'm All Right, Jack, is sort of implied to be the attitude of the union bureaucracy as well and trade unionists to the extent that they see their kind of short-term interests being defended. And they're very, and they're very explicitly presented in the film as like obstructing improvement. to efficiencies in the factories, which is this naive guy from the upper classes, like what would like to implement for everybody's benefit in the factory. So, I mean, Peter Sellers, because it's Peter Sellers, you know,

it's famously, you know, it gives a very charismatic performance that if you've got even vaguely left-wing or pro-union, you know, inclinations, you can't help but find sort sympathetic. And I think the film makes him sympathetic despite itself. But I don't think it wants to make him sympathetic, really. think ultimately it's really a reactionary film, to be honest. It's a reactionary film sort of against the post-war settlement, from the perspective of the sort of liberalism of the 1930s, which is conscious of its own sort of residuality and is trying to eventually

going to try to reinvent itself as Thatcherism and Blairism really. So it's an absolutely fascinating film. It's a fascinating social document that I have really enjoyed sharing to students, like many times. But it is also sort of horrible, I think, actually, in terms of that it's self-satisfied, it's self-satisfied depiction of a social world, it thinks itself to be morally above in some way. I really, you know, I always, I mean, I would always show students that and then show them a taste of honey, which we're not going to talk about today, but I just think listeners can work out for themselves why I might show them a taste of honey after showing than this piece of liberal film

I mean the other thing to say about it would be to compare the role of of the women in this film to the women in Salt of the Earth because in Salt of the Earth their women are like they're struggling to get their own interest here they take the place of the men on the picket line here like the women in particular the wife of

Peter Sellers who's played by Irene Handel who I absolutely love and is brilliant in this, such a great actor. But her thing is, like, she's, she's a standing for middle class common sense, basically, you know. Yeah, well, she, which is not historically, totally inaccurate. I mean, women, I mean, you know, women voted, even working class women, mostly voted Tory at this time. And, and, you know, she, she represents that type very well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I know totally. But, yeah, so that, that's sort of interesting, that's

the role of women. And, but the other thing that's interesting when you look at it, when you watch it now is the women are this sort of these people who've got common sense because they're not inflicted with the British

disease and it's just fascinating to see the British disease is understood to be class politics. Yeah, totally. That's what they mean. And yeah, indeed they're not.

They're anti-political. I mean, these are things, all these films are anti-political. The eating comedies, the trouble of these are eating comedies with some, with the exception, I would say, maybe of whiskey galore, which sort of stands out as quite a different sort of film.

They are basically anti-political. They are all films about how politics is stupid and is like never gets anywhere and can only fail and should be countered with the kind of, you know, the good-natured, the everyday common sense of an English, of a member of the English liberal, petty bourgeois is it? Yeah. Although your leftist can still get some pleasure from seeing the British working class portrayed as work shy

and trying to do as little as possible and sort of in control of their factory, basically. I grew up loving these films, and I do love them. They're incredibly watchable. They're incredibly well made, and it is one of the few golden moments in British cinema history dealing in comedies. They're incredibly well done.

They're really reactionary, even compared to American films for the same time, period, to be honest. I want to talk about a film called The Working Class Goes to Heaven in Italian film from 1971. We have to talk about it on this show because if you've ever wondered where the name Navarra comes from in Navarra media,

it is named in reference to this film The Working Class Goes to Heaven, which is set in the northern Italian city of Navarra. I remember this film going around the 2010 student movement, but it's a real, real classic of, a classic depiction of Italy at that time, basically. And so they say that 68 only lasted two months or a month in France. It lasted 10 years

in Italy, i.e. there was a big hot autumn in that in 1968 which spread to the factories and then that continued in this really high level of worker organisation and militancy right up until the late 1970s.

And this is like a real document of that. It's shot in a sort of cinema verity style by this director Eliopetri who was a member of the Communist Party who left after the 1956 invasion of Hungary.

So it's like a dissident, a dissident communist, if you're like. And like, you know, lots of the shots were shot inside a factory, which was at the time occupied by protesting and striking workers. And so lots of the extras in the film are, you know, basically workers on strike in, getting filmed in their factory, etc. And it's about this guy who, who's really into, basically, he's like, you know, a really fucked up guy. Lula Masa

and when we first meet him he's the most productive worker in a factory he's really proud of his productivity and the money he can make then he basically loses a finger in an accident that starts him in this process

of like questioning his previous attitudes basically it's a real film that portrays this idea of the refusal of work which is like a real key concept and that probably a strategy I would say in Italy the 1970s and that concept the refusal of work

originates in the chemical factories up in Porta Magera, which is near Venice, where these workers in the chemical factories, they'd gone on strike, they'd earned the right to have a certain percentage of days a month to go and study, basically. And but the thing they study, the organized study groups, and they study the effects of the chemicals that they're producing on themselves, and they realize after a while that these are cancerous. And so, like, the, the factory's response is to raise wages in compensation for the hazardous conditions. And their response is, no, you only have one life. You only have one life. That means there's only one solution to this. We have to work less or not work at all in these sorts of conditions. And that's this idea of the refusal of work.

They refuse to take the capitalist point of view, basically. They take the workers' point of view, the point of view of living labour of life. And it's repeated in this film, the working class goes to heaven. In fact, one of the cruellest scenes I've ever seen film, I mean that, sort of ironically, is when the workers have to go into the factory in the film, there's these groups of radical students

outside who hand them literature, and they're shouting at them, going, it's dark when you go to work, it's dark when you come home, the bosses are stealing your days, the bosses are stealing your life. And, like, Lula, when he chopped his finger off, he sort of starts to think, well, they're right, basically, you know.

he starts to get involved with the radical students, etc. There's his classic speech that you can see on YouTube in which he repeats that, basically, says, look, it is dark when we go to work. It is dark when we go home. You know, what sort of life is that? You know what I mean? And then he leaves a sort of strike around

the refusal of this piecework system against the wishes of the union, etc., get sacked and then re-employed. But, you know, it's not a sentimental film like some of the films you'll watch later, which are quite sentimental about strikes. It's like, you know, it's harsh or volatile. Lula's no heroes, sort of like half-cracking it.

Anyway, superb film. See it if you can. Because we don't we're redopied this cotin? Eh? So, we'll work even at the domenica. Maybe we end up here in the night. Anci, maybe we put together as the bambini, the don't.

The babies, we're, we blotting to work. The don't we, we're just batting in bock. And we go, that we go. that we're going on without staccare. Avant, avonty, avonty, for these four lique

vignac, until the death. Yeah, it is a classic the working class goes to happen. I mean,

it's sort of the point at which Italian neo-realism converges with the emergent sensibility

of Italian Autonomism. Not unlike 1971, the 1971 British film, carry on at your convenience.

Carry-on films for anyone who doesn't know are a film, really the immediate descendants of the Ealing comedies. So there are a sequence of British comedy films featuring an ensemble cast

which, you know, crops up again in the same films. And they start off as quite gentle, you know, just very, essentially just eating comedies. But then they also acquire this reputation for

you know, a lot of sort of sexual innuendo becoming increasingly risque as you get into the 70s. And that's mainly what they remembered for now, sort of lots of ridiculous puns and lots of sexual innuendo. That element sort of goes into the Benny Hill comedy, which is sort of, you know, that's the only element that's left when you get into Benny Hill. And so it's this sort of, it's a combination of the sort of mannered middle class liberalism, of the eating comedies, with this sort of, this more boredy sense of humour, which is often saying. to have its roots in the music halls and sort of seaside postcards of the early 20th century.

So anyone my age or kids age growing up in Britain grew up watching a lot of these films. And Carrying or Not Your Convenience is called Carrying Your Convenience, ha ha because it's set in a toilet factory. You know, so a toilet is like a public toilets in Britain and sometimes referred to as public conveniences. And it centres around a strike in the toilet factory. and it's funny. I mean, I don't remember if this was talked about in the one book I read about it years ago.

So I only picked up this claim from the Wikipedia article on the film, but apparently it was the first carry-on film that did poorly at the box office. And this was widely attributed to the fact that the trade unionist are presented in the film as ridiculous. And that this was seen as alien

the core working class audience for the carry-on films. It's definitely true that audience skewed more working class than that for the eating comedies, but I still think it is really interesting that essentially, I mean, of course, all of the portrayals in carry-on films are slightly more cartoonish and slightly less subtle than those in eating comedies. But broadly speaking, the workers aren't portrayed

as desperately less sympathetic than the bosses, and the portrait, I would say, in carrying on at your convenience, I think, the portrayal of the workers is pretty much just, and the trade unionist, rehearsing the stereotypes that had already been established in the union comedies of the 50s. And I think it probably is also an indicator of the changing mood of the times, the increasing working class militancy, the increasing union density, and the growing sense that unions were engaged in a struggle with the capitalist class to represent the interests of the workers. rather than just being engaged in a sort of cozy duopoly with the capitalist class, which is the way they're presented in the 50s films. So I think it is really interesting. I don't know, didn't you watch it this week here? I did, yeah, yeah.

It's one of those ones you can watch. You can have it on while you're doing something else. I have got a soft spot for carry-on films because of my age, as you mentioned earlier. This is really one of the worst ones now. It's really rubbish. and like the trade union shop steward, Vic, it's just like the butt of all the jokes. He, you know, there are jokes going around everywhere,

but he is the butt of them, basically. You know, even that him and the boss's son are sort of like batting over the girl. And, you know, he actually gets beaten up by the boss's son and then who runs off with the girl. And then the end of the film is when, you know, the workers and management all pulled together to fulfill a big order. like, you know, it's basically much worse than the most of the other films,

some of which are really, really bad as well. But, yeah, in some ways, I think it's much cruder than the Ealing and less sympathetic to the unions and the shop stewards than the Ealing comedies. It is time we made a stand. Come on, brothers. Keep the line moving. Are we? Or are we not? Going to get what we want. Accept them as is more.

I mean, on the factory floor. But I think it is really interesting that this was the box office failure. You know, it was a licence to print money. They couldn't, you know, you could make a carry-on film in a formulaic manner as they were and they would just keep printing money basically, just keep being successes. And then this was the first when it's a failure. I mean, I think it does represent a sort of cultural turning point because this is the beginning of the real anti-union,

the very fierce anti-union backlash of the 70s and 80s. It's going to end up in forming the mainstream. and British politics and culture in so many ways. But also, also the same year, 1971. So we've got three films from 1971, unsurprisingly, really. I want to mention Ken Loach's film, The Rank and Files. So this is one of the first films produced by Ken Loach, the British radical film director and filmmaker Ken Loach.

I'll be very surprised if anyone listening to ACFM isn't already familiar with Ken Loach. and his long-term script-writing collaborator Jim Allen and it was actually a TV play but it's an hour and 20 minutes long so it's pretty much film length and you can find it online pretty easily and the rank and file was

is a film about it's about a strike that historically did take place in 1970 at the Pilkington's Glassworks in St. Helens and I've watched loads of Kenloach's films but I only watched this for the first time during the lockdown actually

this was a lockdown the first stages of the lockdown when everybody wasn't doing any work and was just sitting around watching stuff and I watched this and it was very affecting to me because my dad lived in St. Hanan's from 1980

for you know up until sometime in the 90s and I really got and we were you know Stenance is a pit town and that was where I sort of experienced the minor strike because my mum and dad were separated but I would spend every weekend with my dad for most of the early 80s.

He had lots of friends who were people who had been involved in those struggles and some of the people I got to, the guys I got to know best were guys who had worked at Pilks as it was called at the Pilkington Glassworks factory in fact, you know, one or two. I would say the guy who first taught me

anything about Marxist things. was a guy who had been blacklisted from the, you know, for having work to the, at Pilks. So it was really, yeah, it was really, it was really, it was really sort of, yeah, for me, it was very affecting to watch that film. And it is a really, it's a great early example of Ken Nature's sort of signature style of extreme naturalism and, you know, mixing sort of professional actors, or not professional, mixing some actors with people who were actually involved in the events and kind of verbatim. him repeating, trying to repeat or bits of dialogue from the actual, you know, from the actual

events themselves. So it's a sort of, it's both a film and a sort of attempt at a kind of oral history. It's a really, really interesting document. Very powerful piece of word. The Nguyen! Hous! Hagen! Out! The year after that, John Lute Godard

makes his great film about to strike. Do you want to talk... Nadia, you've seen this. this one. Yeah, irony not lost on me that women find their voice in the 70s as they do on this podcast. So, too va bien. It's all fine. 1972 French film, as you said, Jeremy, by Jean-Luc Goddard with his collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin. And this film's actually got Jane Fonda in it and Eve Montaun. It's a great film. Really recommend it to anyone who can find it out there. So far, I've not been able to find a verse.

version that is free to watch that has English subtitles, but there are clips out there worth seeing those. So it's set in a workers' strike in a sausage factory, the theme of sausages and striking returns from the Icelandic weather strike talked about in the full trip. So it's hailed, I like this film, and I do agree that it's more nuanced and less romanticised kind of view of the 1968 French student strikes, because it kind of does tackle the outcome of failed organising, but also the sexism and misogyny in the movement. And I think the differences between like rank and file and union bosses as well. And I absolutely love the cross-section

panning scenes, which is very Brechtian. For those of you who don't know Bertolt Brecht, he was a German theater practitioner and playwright and a socialist, realist artist. And I love the way the kind of film speaks to that kind of art form. Socialist, but anti-realist. Because he thought that the whole notion that you try to create a kind of naturalistic reproduction of actual social life in the theatre was just reactionary and stupid. Yeah, sure. I mean, I have seen him refer to in that way, but maybe I'm thinking about a different form of understanding it. So, no, we're agreeing. It's the same thing where theatre is an educational form.

Like you're not supposed to lose yourself and believe that you're somehow in the film. That's what we mean, right? Are we in agreement about that? Yes, yes, absolutely, yes. It'd be more accurate to call it anti, you know, he has been called. Some people do call him socialist realist, actually. But, I mean, he was opposed to the socialist realism of Stalinism, but it was really anti-naturalism.

And, indeed, he's like, and Williams calls him a critical realist, I think. So I'm being, I'm being a bit, I'm being a bit, um, pedantic. No, no, I think, no, I think it's important. I'm with, when I've got a bit of a background in theatre and the way it was kind of described in performing art is that he never wants, like, Breck never wanted the audience to not, to understand that they were like beyond the proscenium arch. Like, you understood that this was a play and it was a play that's trying to tell you something rather than to, you know, to feel subsumed in the action as if it was, I think

naturalism is the right, naturalist is the right word for it there, yeah. Well, he was reacting against the naturalist generation like Ibsen in the theatre, who were kind of in Chekhov, who the whole thing was, oh God, this is exactly what it's really like to be in a bourgeois family. Like, Brecht sort of, you know, I mean, the classic, the classic Breckian technique is the breaking of the fourth wall. The actor addresses the audience. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Indeed, you're absolutely not supposed to suspend disbelief. And yeah, this film is full of that. It's full of, it's full of like, you know, people talking about the fact that they are making a film and talking to the camera and like talking about the budget for the film and stuff. Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, it is in a way a film about how capitalism destroys society. And it has been referred to as like a manifesto for post like 1968 student revolt, you know, and then there was the general strike that happened in France as well. But the thing that I really want to to draw listeners attention to is this, it's not quite the penultimate scene, but it's very close to the end. And I don't want to do a plot spoiler on this one for anyone who hasn't seen it, but there's about seven-minute scene, which I think is an aesthetic masterpiece, which takes place in a supermarket. And it just starts with this kind of sound of this kind of checkout sound. And the conveyor belts, like, you know, with everybody checking out their stuff

from one end to the other. And the camera just pans back and forward and it's one continuous scene and it's just the action from the beginning to the end completely changes like the kind of atmosphere and events in this supermarket and it's kind of worth seeing for that alone,

especially the cashier girls who seem to react in quite a different way to everyone else. It's a great scene aesthetically. Well, that is the standardical, I think of five, three years. Four years of five, three years ago. Three grand, generally, democratic, of union popular.

Well, yeah, well, that is the standout scene, I think. And it's also, I mean, yeah, it's this seven minute, yeah, as you say, it's this seven minutes, at least sequence where you're just panning back and forth across the supermarket. But then in the aisles of the supermarket, these sort of slightly surreal vignettes are being acted out. So there's an official of the Communist Party.

And remember the Communist Party at this time by people like Goddard are seen as kind of on the side of bureaucracy and the union hierarchy and even the state against the students and the shop floor workers. So he was trying to sell a book, you know, who's kind of hawking his book, which you wouldn't get in a supermarket normally. And then there's a bunch of stuff. students kind of going around filling up the supermarket trolleys, like trying to get people to just take everything for free. So is the sort of action, the sort of French anarchists we're

doing at that time sometimes. And yeah, the whole, I mean, the whole film, I mean, the film explicitly references May 68 again and again and again. And it is this sort of, it is a sort of meditation on like the condition of the left, I think, in France, like four years after in May 68 and the fact that nobody's really sure what it meant nobody's really sure like where how you should go forward from it and yeah and it's I mean but it's by I think of all the films we're talking about today it's by far the most like self-consciously avant-garde like formally like it's and it's quite if it's not that easy to watch all the way through but it is and it's also it's not that clear I mean at the end of it you're not entirely it's not

entirely clear what the point is, like what the point, where they're trying to get at, because it is more an invitation to a set of reflections on the kind of problems of the left at that moment, rather than, I don't think it is a manifesto, actually. I don't think it really, I think it's written from a, it's produced from a point of quite self-conscious uncertainty about what, you know, how things might or could go forward from the point they, they find themselves at historically. Postmodern randomness, perhaps. It's not past modern. Maybe that's what it's pointing. No, well, what's going on at this time in terms of both theory and practice on the left?

I mean, this is the great moment of kind of radical theories, the moment of Deleuze and Gratari, it's the moment of cultural studies really constituting itself in the British, you know, the University of Birmingham. And it's the moment when people are trying to work out, you know, they're not sure. People are really not sure, well, what does it mean to have, what would it really mean now to have a radical aesthetics of cinema? Because it's very different from Eisenstein. It's not like Eisenstein wanting to just depict the heroic revolutionary craft. Like it's much more, the film is surprisingly for a self-consciously Marxist avant-garde film. It's very focused on the individuals and their own subjective experience. But this is the thing that's going on, you know, this is the moment when Marxists are also really into psychoanalysis

and they're trying to figure out what it would mean to really understand your own subjectivity, your own pushments in completely historical terms. Which, of course, that's what we're all trying to do on this show as well. we have more fun doing it than they would seem to have been doing at the time. But I mean, what people thought might be happening in 1968, it was a historical sequence that began with the French Revolution was going to reach its ultimate conclusion in the establishment of a full libertarian democratic communist utopia

across Europe and America and stuff. And by 1972, he's exactly the moment when it's completely clear, well, that's not what's happening. But what the fuck is actually happening is not clear. You know, women's liberation is happening and is challenging all kinds of preconceptions about what a desirable form of politics should even look like. People are questioning their own internal experience.

People are experiencing, on the one hand, this is a key theme of the film. It's also true that people are experiencing a level of prosperity and a level of social equality that up until that point in history, radicals are generally assumed could only be deliverable by a socialist revolution, that they didn't even think any form of capitalism could deliver. So there is all this ambiguity, there's all this complexity. the level of theory and aesthetic practice, and this is going on across areas of music and writing about film, it's going on.

This is the moment in the theatre, and indeed, people are rediscovering Brecht in a lot of contexts. So people are trying to figure out, like, well, what does it even mean? What would it mean to do, like, genuinely radical arts? Like, what would that even look like, given that we also know that an awful lot of art on culture is just complicit with turning us into these self-obsessed, but also politically complacent bourgeois subjects. And, you know, it's still a really compelling question. We still, you know, we're still asking that question today. But this is, and I think it's that,

you know, the film is, it is, it's an attempt to engage with that question. But I don't think it, I think it sort of, I don't think it knows what the answer is. That question about, like, you know, what do you, how do you have, like, a, a, a revolutionary art in the age of mass consumption, etc. That's figured in the very first scene of the film where basically it's just shots of somebody signing checks and then there's a voiceover

of the director and somebody else discussing how well, you know, if we get some famous actors like Eve Monta and Jane Fondering, you know, then people will give us a load of money. So they're like putting it up front this thing of like how do you use mass culture and fame in order

for revolution and all that sort of stuff. But it's also like, I think you can link some of the like the formerly um avant-garde bit so there's lots of like jumps and like repetitions of the same scene from a slightly different angle in the in the film which are like brechtian alienation things but it's also it's a bit like that sort of representation of the stuckness that of of the left and society at that point you know they're stuck they're having to try to repeat they're repeating things they can't break they can't find the new etc and all that sort of stuff i watched it for the first time last week straight after watching carry on at your

convenient. And the juxtaposition of those two was just the type of jump that we need in order to resolve this question. Hey, this is Nadia. Hope you're enjoying this microdose from ACFM, the home of the weird left. You can go even weirder and left here by subscribing to our newsletter, which we will now be sending out with every new trip, so no more than about once a month. with bonus content and updates from the ACFM crew. To sign up, go to navara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. For more music and less chat, follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify.

Just search for ACFM. And to support us to keep bringing you even more from the ACFM Cosmos, support our hosts Navarra Media for as little as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. That's all for now. Stay weird and wonderful, folks. This afternoon, just before we started recording, we started recording late

because I finally managed to get hold of a copy of this film Norma Ray, which was a Hollywood film produced that came out in 1979. It was a big hit. It won Sally Field, the Immortal Sally Field, a very interesting American actress, won an Oscar for her portrayal of a southern, I think the film's set in Tennessee, a factory worker, working a textile factory, who becomes radicalized under the tutelage of

a Jewish New York, a New York Jewish labor organizer who comes into the town, deliberately to try to organize her factory. I just got in the town about an hour ago. Hi, how are you? I parked my rented car, got out, and before I had a chance to adjust my crotch. The chief of police was on me saying, who are you? I don't know you. What the hell are you doing here?

So I told him, I was a labor organizer. Come to put a union in the OPM Lee Textile Mill. And he said, the hell you are, boy, and he gave me a ticket and told me to get my ass elsewhere, right quick. He was dead right, too. It was a commercial success and a critical success. In 1979, this is a year before Reagan's going to get elected. And it's, I mean, it's kind of interesting because to me, the sort of cinematography, it really sort of reminded me. of things you were going to see on TV over the next few years, things like Hill Street Blues.

There was this commitment with certain kinds of left liberal, I would say, sort of left liberal politics, which included being quite positive about trade unions and was recognised that the New Deal settlement was coming under threat, coming under pressure, and that various forms of collective action were necessary to defend it. And, yeah, that's the historical context. But the film's not really about a strike. I got all excited because I sort of didn't know. I thought I didn't know about this film.

It was my partner, Joe, who said, what about Norman Ray? And I was talking to about film, I thought. And I read about it and thought, oh, yeah, this was massive. And it's, you know, it's centrally about a woman, you know, which is really important for us. So I was kind of scrabbling around for ages to find a copy. And I managed to find, only managed to watch it this afternoon. But then it turns out there's no strike in it.

It's about an organizing drive, which in a way is, you know, is very realistic. I mean, especially in those parts of the United States, it's getting the union organised and recognised is the first step to any kind of action. It's the key thing. But it's a really interesting film, and it's a film that's very, very much informed by the experience and politics of women's liberation as well.

Because as a piece of drama, what it's really about, as much as anything else, is the relationship between Sally Field's character and this union organiser. And it sort of plays very much on the fact that there is a sort of, there's a degree of sexual, but I mean, more importantly in a way,

romantic sort of tension between them, as they are sort of attracted to each other. And but they are in other relationships with each other. And it's the fact that they sort of don't, ultimately, you know, they become friends rather than lovers. And they, and, you know,

the central character is portrayed as this, you know, this quite highly sexualized, straight woman. So it's sort of, it is very interesting because I think it is, you know, it was very much part of, part of the discourse of women's liberation and feminism at that time to kind of assert the fact that, you know, relationships between men and women who were straight, you know, could be productive and friendly and solidaristic and

wouldn't necessarily have to be governed by logics of sexuality and romance. And I sort of, I only realized right at the end of the film that I had seen it years ago when I was much younger, like maybe in my teens, but I had completely forgotten that it was anything to do with, it had anything to see with a strike and that it, or not it was right, with union organising, that what I had remembered actually, I'd remembered it as being a film about heterosexual friendship.

So it is sort of that as well. So it is a really interesting film. Sounds very interesting, but I've got a strike in it, so we're not including it. No, I'm joking. But also, I sort of realized this week that I had sort of, I had definitely mixed up in my mind. I mean, not surprisingly, this film

with the next one we're going to talk about from eight years later. Eight years, 1987. This is personally one of my all-time favorite films. I will sometimes cite it as my favorite film. I don't actually think it is the best made film that we've even talked about today,

never mind the best made film I've ever seen. It really had a huge effect on me. It is John Sales, the great American independent film maker John Sales, probably the sort of nearest equivalent to an American Ken Loach. And it is his film about the West Virginia Coalfield Wars of the 1920s or a key episode that takes place in that. It's his film, Mata 1. Mata 1.

And it is, you know, it is remembered today. I mean, it is remembered today, as a sort of iconic film of the American Labour movement. It's a very self-consciously, and I would say unashamedly, sentimental film about a real historical episode that takes place in West Virginia in 1920 during the struggle to have the have mine get miners organized and get unions recognized. The Coalfield Wars were incredibly violent, you know, period of American labor history. You know, not really, I mean, it was really like something out of the early 19th century in Britain.

You know, people got, I mean, there were people, minors and on the one hand, and, you know, and, you, the mining companies and the security companies, they hired the so-called detective agencies. They were really, we would call them security companies, you know, shot at each other. They had pitched shooting battles with each other on various occasions. And this is about a history that leads up to one of those. It features, you know, a saintly and eventually martyred union organizer,

who is a former wobbly, one of the industrial workers at the world, you know, talking about the one big union. that the workers should all join. It features the utterly stop and standard predictable scenes in which the black workers demonstrate their capacity for solidarity and help to overcome some of the ingrained racism of the white workers.

And probably my favourite bit, the Italian immigrant workers, you know, also are brought into the union and are sewn to have probably historically very accurately at 1920, a rather more sophisticated understanding of what a union is and how it fits into a kind of history working class struggle than the Appalachian minors who were kind of encountering all this for the first time. Really, really moving use of music in the film. Again, it's pretty schmaltzy.

But there were these scenes where, you know, a black minor playing his harmonica and a white appellation minor playing the fiddle and an Italian minor playing. I mean, it's a sort of zither, I think, that the Italians are playing. Or a mandolin. It's a mandolin. are sort of playing bits of each other's music and the music or they're playing separately and then they start to listen to each other playing and they they converge on a sort of hybrid tune. And it's, you know, it's very romanticised, it's very idealised, it's all quite soft focus, but it's also very moving, it's really a real sort of tearjoker of a movie, and very, very powerful, you know, in very deliberately trying to make, you know, a film that might appeal to, you know, somebody who's only way of engaging with cinema,

is through sort of hollywood, sort of sentimental cliches, but telling them a really radical story in the process. Yeah, I think it's really quite something. It feels a little bit like a Western. Do you know what I mean? So it's set in a small town and the... That's right. The sheriff and the mayor on the side of the miners,

and then the mine owners bring in this, like, really evil detective agency who basically had just there to, like, kill and shoot. and intimidate the miners back to work, basically. And the union organiser is Shane, you know, who wanders into, the stranger who wanders into town, but tries to end up saving everybody, but then he ended up getting martyred. And the showdown is like a high noon sort of thing,

because the sheriff and then they're standing off against this big force of detectives, and there's a shootout and all of the miners, you know, shooting from various places, etc., which is apparently it is a, you know, something that really did happen in matter one of them. it did. It did. It did really happen. Riff Raff is a film by Ken Loachie came out in 1990, and I saw it in 1990. I haven't seen it since.

And I'm, is there a strike in it, definitely. Well, I don't, there's, it's a, it's partly about trying to organise on a building site. And I say I watched it during my Ken Lachathon in lockdown, although I had also seen it in 1990. And I'm not sure if they get to the point of an actual strike, but Ricky Tomlinson plays a construction worker who does have a, he has a history of labour organising. And the film is partly about the difficulty of organising in the construction industry and the necessity for organizing in the construction industry. I mean, it is one of Ken Loach's most perfectly realized films. I mean, it's a film about

construction workers, and one of them gets hurt, and they're trying to, you know, this group of construction workers are just sort of trying to live and work together and make a life of themselves. And I would say, it's, you know, it's one of Ken Loach's sort of slice of working class life films, which also, which presents working class life as always necessarily, you know, cause up with processes of struggle.

And it is, it's one of his most perfectly realized examples of that genre, I think. We should probably also say that Ricky Tomlinson, who's best known now for his role in the Royal Family Comedy series, like this was his, either his first acting job or his breakthrough acting job, anyway.

And so Ricky Tomlinson... He'd already been in Brookside for a few years. Oh, he hadn't? Yeah. Well, that sort of spoils my narrative a little bit. But let's talk about Ricky Tomlinson. Because before that, before Brookside, he was... Which is the number...

soap opera set in Liverpool, which is the, I mean, we could do a whole thing about Brooks. Brookside starts off as these almost Ken Loach television, this radical thing about working class, a working class community in Liverpool, actually a mixed class community in the Liverpool suburb that is dramatizing all this sort of class tension and the experience of factorism. And then by the end of the 90s, it's just become a sort of byword for sensationalists, soap opera. Let's do a whole episode on Brookside. The first ever lesbian kiss on UK TV.

Yeah, that's true. Anyway, Ricky Tomlinson. Sorry, I interrupted. Ricky Tomlinson, class hero. Yeah, he basically had led strikes on a building site, on building sites and been famously put into prison in the mid-1970s. So he was a sort of working class hero who, you can see why he ended up in a Ken Loach film.

Yeah, I would say if you want to know, about that, I would listen to, I've recommended before, the working class history podcast. And working class history did a few episodes, I think, about the history of the construction, about the struggles on the construction sites, especially in the 70s, and Tom Litton's involvement. And that's excellent work. 1990, I, millions of people without songs. Do you know how many people that have to work in this country? Oh, three and a half million.

Do you know how many of them are building workers? 250,000. Yeah, but that's a one of them. behavior, so of course they want to wear. As millions of makers of unused land, the mock-tot-locked greenbells for building on, and the brickyards are stocked with Geyer. No one should be without a home in the 1990s.

Crazy, man. You've got them off again. All right, yeah, I won't talk long about Hoffer. So this is like a 1992 film about the famous international brotherhood of Teamsters union leader, Jimmy Hoffer, directed by Danny DeVito, who is a good leftist, and starring Jack Nicholson as Jim.

Jimmy Hoffer, it basically just recounts Hoffer's life. So it basically, the start of the film is, is Hoffa is waiting in a car with a friend in 1975 to meet somebody. He disappears in 1975 because it's not just about, the international brotherhood of Teamsters is basically tied up with the mafia. And then the film then sort of cuts to Hoff in the 30s where he's organizing a strike, basically, organizing truckers in America and organizing a strike, you know, and you see him wielding a baseball bat,

beating up non-union workers who are going into strike and, you know, basically a really, very violent scene. Then he becomes a leader of the Teamsters. The Teamsters become really famous because they loan. Their pension schemes are used to build Las Vegas, basically. The Mafia uses the Teamsters pension schemes to build the hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. And then basically, it ends with him getting killed by the mafia

and basically nobody ever finds his body. So Jimmy Hoffa, it was a huge incident in the 70s, and it's still this thing of, you know, you'd see on the Simpsons Jimmy Hoffa's body at being found or emerging or something like that, basically. Mr. Hoffa? Yeah, that's right. But it's sort of interesting because that time when unions in America became a sort of buyword for corruption, et cetera, lots of ways, that's the outcome and part of the process probably as well, of that red scare linked elimination of a whole layer of leftists and left wing union leaders, basically, which created the room for this other form of unionism.

Yeah, well, that's right. Yeah, I mean, the militant, you know, the militant layer of organizers who came through the wobblies, came through the Red Scare Panics of the early of the 20s and 30s. You know, a lot of them, you know, they're driven out of union organization as unions get more incorporated to the mainstream American capitalism during the high period of Fordism. But, you know, the vacuum left by that layer of militant, club working class, organic intellectual organizers. You know, that vacuum in many contexts is filled by the freaking mafia. And then the fact that it's been filled by the map is used as an excuse for more, like, anti-union propaganda, which, you know, runs through films from, like, on the waterfront, for example, in some ways. On the waterfront, written by Elia Kazan, who famously testified against his friends at the House and American activities, and then made on the waterfront to sort of try to justify himself. but anyway there's a nice punchline to this because from the 1970s there's been like there's been campaigns or movement

to try to redemocratise the teamsters and it succeeded last year so that the teamsters for a democratic union basically got control of it and who did they displace when they got control of the union

Hoffer's son James Hoffer Jr. Anyway it's part of it and that's one of these hopeful bits about you know It's one of a series of unions that have been sort of recaptured by campaigns or democratise them and push them in a more industrially militant direction over the last few years. But one of a real signal one actually because it only happened last year.

Yeah, I mean, for British listeners, we should explain, the Teamsters in America are the key transport union historically. So it always sounds, it's a very funny, strange name to non-American ears, teamsters like they were literally I mean once upon the time there were people driving teams of horses but they're the equivalent of the transport and general workers who eventually emerge into Unite

in British Union history So So On our list of films, we're leaping ahead, we're leaping, the 90s is quite sure this time, we're leaping ahead to the year 2000 and one of very few British films about the mind strike, Billy Elliott. Nadia, you should talk about this. Yeah, Billy Elliott is a great film, I think, and yeah, year 2000. Also was made into a stage production, quite a successful stage production, and the way.

best end in London, which is more actually political than the film. And apparently there's a lot more Margaret Thatcher in there and more of the kind of sense of community. But the basic plot is about father-son relationship. And this is taking place in the northeast. I believe in a mining town in the 1980s, a fictional mining town. And Billy just wants to do ballet. And in the backdrop of the minor strike, you know, culturally it's that kind of difficult situation. of a son wanting to do something that is, you know, stereotypically for, for girls with the whole backdrop of all of what was happening in the minor's strike, which, you know, you guys can talk a little bit more about. But for me, I think what's also really interesting

about the film is there's this one line where I think there's one of the other characters. I can't remember who it is, who basically, you know, Billy reveals that he wants to, you know, do ballet, that he's been invited to go down to London and join the Royal Ballet. And the character says, the Royal Ballet, do you have any idea what we're going through? And I think that's a great encapsulation of, you know, class and culture in Britain and how it kind of plays out and that whole know-your-placism and how that stuff is kind of transmitted through culture, you know, especially with the backdrop of, you know, Thatcherism and the minor strike, etc. So I think it's a a fantastic story, because, you know, it's about that specific relationship,

but with this, like, really massive political backdrop of what the community that this boy is living in is going through at the time. I'm not sure what the message is with Billy, sorry, leaving his hip home, you know, his mining town and going to London. I'm not sure what the message is there, but it's a great film to watch, especially Julie Waters, who's amazing as the chain-smoking ballet teacher. Today, Billy missed a very important audition. Audition. For the Royal Ballet School.

The Royal Ballet? School. That's where they teach the ballet. You've got to be joking, though. No, I'm perfectly serious. Have you any idea what we're going through? I've been in a fucking cell all night, and you come around here, talk and shite,

and you, fucking ballet! What are you trying to do, make him a fucking scab for the rest of his life? Look at him! But do you guys want to talk more about the minor strike stuff? Well, this is the thing. It's like, it's obviously, it's not a film about the minor strike. I mean, it's, so, it's not, but it's not disingenuous of me to describe it as that,

because the minor strike just hadn't had that much presence in in cinema, British cinema. Totally, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's not a film about, it's a film about a boy who just wants to dance. I mean, in many ways it's a very cliched, even by 2000, it's a very cliched story about a boy, you know, about somebody who wants to be, who's a bit different from his community and wants to express himself and eventually gets to do so. So in some ways, it's a kind of star-forming lamar. Now, it's a sort of, you know, a star is born sort of narrative, or they're,

that the actual film The Star is born is much darker than Billy Elliot. It's a sort of star is born narrative of a kind which is familiar going back to sort of musicals from the, you know, from the 30s onwards. You know, the shop girl becomes a star sort of narrative. It's that sort of thing. It happens to use the minor strike as a backdrop in a way I'll talk about in a minute. It's also, it's very typical, I would say, of films from exactly the late 90s and early 2000s. I mean, I don't think I like it quite as much as Nadia. I see why people like it.

But there was a whole load of films from both Britain in America around this time, which to my mind are just incredibly self-congratulatory about how brilliant it is that now we're not homophobic and sexist anymore and how bad it was that we were like really, really homophobic and sexist in the 50s. And the 50s, usually it's the 50s, but sometimes it extends all the way into the late 80s, as it does in this film. And the film is like on the side of the minor strike. probably the most interesting scene is the one where he goes to audition in London at the Royal Ballet and the people auditioning him say oh good luck with the strike and you know it's true

like people you know are you know London lovies in in the early 80s were mostly would have been quite sympathetic to what they would have seen as you know the struggle of the miners and they were all on the same side against Thatcher but I mean there's this really weird there is this tension in the film between well what is it is it I mean is it a because it does want to be a film, which is sort of sympathetic to the miners. It doesn't want to just present the sort of patriarchal conservatism of Billy's family as this repressive prism from which he has to escape, which is what a slightly earlier version of this narrative would probably have done. So it's, but it ends up, therefore it does end up just sort of sentimentalizing

the minus. And they're just this sort of, the minor strike is this very sentimental backdrop. You know, it's almost like a hovey sound for it. For non-brate, For non-British listeners, the hovis is a popular brand of sliced whole-meal bread. And for years and years, they had this advertising campaign, which was just these literally sepia-tinged films set in some unspecified moment of the past,

like the 30s or the late 19th century, in what seemed to be a northern mill town. So we still, and they would have this sort of brass band music or clarinet music playing very slowly, is a very sentimental sort of Vaughan Williamsish soundtrack and we still think of the

we still talk about Hovis advert is like a it's a synonym for sort of sentimentality about the history of about the industrial North and Midlands you know

which is also completely depoliticized in its sentimentality I were no more than me I to a grass up of what I ran off from home I packed up my marbles me catapult, and we all be sandwiched

and off the wind. And so there is something a bit of that, to be the idiot for me. But, you know, the way, but it does, you know, yeah, it does have all these tensions. And there's this tension between, well, is this a narrative about, a liberal narrative about the individual escaping the confines of their community?

Or is it a kind of elegy to the lost world of the mining communities? Or is it a kind of act of mourning? Or is it, does it, and I guess the film is interesting because it does, it does sort of know, The film does know in a way that, say, the Fool Monty very clearly absolutely doesn't know, that something has really been lost, you know, something, that moving into a world in which you can expect to even working class people not to be homophobic and to let their children do their own thing and express themselves become ballet dancers. The process by which we've got to that world is a process which has also involved like significant losses, you know, the losses of the mining communities. their forms of solidarity, for example. So it sort of knows that. It sort of wants to express to the audience the fact that it knows that. But I think it ultimately doesn't know

how to reconcile those things in a way that later pride will absolutely find a way of telling a coherent narrative about all those things, which is politically much more radical and much more insightful, I think. So Maiden Dagenham is a 2010 British comedy drama and it's about the Ford Sewing Machine Strike of 1968 at the Ford plant in Dagenham, town in Essex, which was actually brought into Greater London, just before that. But it's a film about this real life strike, which we talked about in the trip, which we recorded earlier. And it's about equal pay for women. And there's also a stage musical of the film now as well.

So it's a real story about the women protesting sexual discrimination and demanding the equal pay for equal work. I watched the trailer again. I mean, it is quite a saccharine, you know, a film. It's not in any way avant-garde or anything like that. But I watched the trailer again and it almost made me cry because of that sense that any of these films, and we're going to talk about pride in a minute, but where, you know, this is a real life situation where women worked really hard to basically say, we want to be paid the same for doing the same work,

which was not self-evident at the time. And it really kind of brings to mind the fact that every single time, like these struggles are had. It's quite easy for subsequent generations without a political education to assume that all people would get the same pay for equal work. But that wasn't the case for women, and we wouldn't have had the Equal Pay Act without it. So, you know, it's kind of a nice, fun film to watch,

but, you know, it will make someone like me a cry. So there we go. That's Maiden Dagonum. Yeah, the woman who led the strike always insists that it's a mistake to say it was a strike over equal pay. It always seems a bit pedantic, but she says it wasn't the principle of equal. It was like they were all machinists, like making seat covers. and they wanted to be on the same pay grade

as some other group of workers who were mostly male. So I've never quite understood why it's not why that wasn't in this struggle for equal pay, but I feel like I've got to honour the fact that she always says that. She said that. She did a talk at UEL. We organised at an event when they first released this film. No, no, at Dagenham, they were like,

you know, there were pay differentials amongst skill levels. And the machine is, this seamstress, the people who, you know, the women who primarily made the, that did upholstery and stuff like that, their work was classified as unskilled, but they were paid below the unskilled workers and it was obviously quite highly skilled.

So that was, that was the provocation. Yeah. You put them together. Go on. It's a forward property, I believe. Oh, stupid. We have to take all these different pieces and work out how they go together

because there ain't no template, is there? And we have to take them and sew them all free hand into the finished article. The same with a door trimment. God knows what else. That is not unskilled work, which is how you've regretted us.

My sense when this woman did this talk was that it wasn't really about the issue of whether it was about equal pay or not. It was that she felt that the history of the strike had been subsumed into a sort of liberal feminist narrative and she wanted to be seen more. to be seen more in terms of a history of worker struggle. I was really excited when they made this film

because, you know, I've been teaching at University of East London for years, which used to have a campus at in Dagenham, like really near the old foreplot. And it doesn't anymore, but also for years, I mean, sadly, I don't get to do this anymore. Like, I used to show them a documentary about the Dagenham strike, about the actual events, and they were always really interested in it. It was always really sort of exciting.

and occasionally I'd had, you know, like students who were retirees who'd kind of, you knew, who'd even been involved or known about it, and that was years ago. So I was really delighted when they made the film. And I do think, you know, I think we did, I mean, I'm okay with that really sentimental popular films about strikes. I just think that the presence of trade unions and working class struggle in mass culture is so weak these days, at least in the English-speaking world, that, you know, it's politically really useful to have, you know, tear jerking films about people being in humans.

I mean, is that one of the reasons why? Is it the lack of this stuff of why it makes us cry? I mean, I should say that we have referred to this in the last, in the last, the full trip that we recorded. And also, you know, I've been talking about it here. Like, you know, like, I for one, and I know the guys as well, I mean, I don't know if it's definitely the same case as me. But, like, I can't cry generally. So for all sorts of mental health and historical reasons, like I don't know how to cry. I find crying very, very difficult. But the one thing that always sets me off is any film or any visual media that has to do with solidarity

or like, you know, union workers like winning their rights or something. Like I absolutely go into floods of tears. It's a really interesting thing. And I wonder if it's partly because of the fact that like you just said, Jeremy, like it isn't out there. Is it because it pulls on us emotionally and we're about to talk about pride in a bit, but like on something that is representative of the kind of world we want to see? I mean, I don't know. That's just an interesting thing in itself.

Maybe you should do an episode on crying. I do cry at this stuff, yeah, like loads. Like it really, I cry at a Ken Loach film or a John Sayles film, like nothing else. They literally like nothing else. I think Made in Dagnum and a bit like Billy Elliott, and I'd probably put like Brast off as well, which is a film from 96. which isn't about the minor strike, but it's about a mining town 10 years later

and it's brass band and all that. They're all a little bit like union struggle can be represented because that's in the past. That's something that happened in the past, wasn't it? And it had some good effects, etc. But that's all in the past sort of thing. Yeah. Is that true of the next film we're going to talk about pride from 2014?

Well, I think pride, I mean, pride is sent. I think, no, I mean, I don't think it is. I think pride, I think we've come out of the other side of this period. I mean, this is the high moment of Blairism. The high moment of Blairism, which ends in 2010, indeed. The Emaiden Dagonin comes out. That's true. The high period of Blairism, and we haven't talked about, we could, alongside Brastoff,

we could talk about one of my favorite films to talk about is the full Monty, which is the Blairite film par excellence. You know, it is the film in which what happens, a bunch of unemployed industrial workers find out the participating in the service economy and fully objectifying them and commodifying themselves in the process is fantastically fun and liberating

and it's something everybody should be doing and be happy about doing. It is just extraordinary a piece of propaganda for the specific Blair rights sensibility which has some, no question, progressive elements insofar as it questions traditional forms of masculinity

and it accepts women's equality in the workplace and relationships and their equality as sexual beings as as given and as good things. That is all good, but the class politics of it are, you know, the historical politics of it are fucking horrific. And yeah, and so, and that comes out in 97, 98. And that high moment of Blairism is full of this discourse, which is, you know, is sort of nostalgic about features of progressive history and labour history, but wants to absolutely make them anodyne. It wants to remove the sense that there's any kind of sacrifice involved. Like it's just sort of fun.

You're doing fun stuff, you know. A maiden dagonum is sort of, you know, it's a girl's romp having a strike. And yeah, it does want to do that. And I think pride is, it does mark, it's one reason it's such an important film for us. It's, we've come out the other side of that. It comes out in 2014. And when Pride was, I remember when they were talking about, before Pride came out, I kept thinking,

oh, it's just going to be Billy Elliott in South Wales, isn't it? You know, there's some, though, they're going to ruin it. And it is sentimental. And also, it does, it does too much play into that narrative about, oh, isn't it brilliant how progressive we all are now? because weren't they old, weren't they sort of conservative in the past? Because I've mentioned this before on the show. I mentioned again, again, the working class history podcast series about coal miners,

lesbian and gay support of the coal miners is brilliant. And partly one of the points it makes is that actually, unlike the way it's depicted in the film, it is not the case that lesbian and gay supports the coal miners, this activist group of self-consciously queer people, I self-identified gay and lesbian people who wanted to actually support the minor strike. It's not the case that they turn up in the South Wales village and they have to overcome the homophobia of the miners because the homophobia of the miners had law,

according to the historical record, had largely already been successfully deconstructed by the influence of women's liberation within the community going back at the previous 10, 12 years. But despite some of those little, despite some of those concessions to a sort of kind of liberal centrist, progressivist

cliches. Ultimately, it does make very clear the film is very self-consciously a film about struggle, about the value of solidarity in and of itself, and about solidarity as something meaning more than the aggregated experience

of personal self-liberation of the individual participants, which is what all those liberal films are basically about, I think. What do you think? Well, I grew up in a town in the next valley across from where pride is set during the

minor strike. And there was a fair bit of homophobia around. I'm not going to deny that. But like, I love the film. And I think it is different. I think it is different because it's basically much more portrays, it's a much more of a political film than than the earlier ones, I think. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It can be read as like an intersectional left film, basically, you know? And that's, you know,

something that was also there in salt of the earth back in, you know, back in the 50s under the first films we talked about. I've had a lot of new experiences during the strike, speaking in public, standing on a picket line, and now I'm in a gay bar. If you don't like it, you can go home. As a matter of fact, I do like it. Beer's a bit expensive, mine.

What I'd really like to see is thank you. If you've supported LGSM, then thank you. Because what you've given us is more than money. It's friendship. When you're in a battle against an enemy so much bigger, so much stronger than you, but to find out you had a friend, you never knew existed.

Well, that's the best feeling in the world. best feeling in the world. So thank you. One thing I just want to throw in about that film is everybody always goes on about the stuff happening in the valleys in the film. But actually, but the film begins, you know, with a depiction of like the radical, political, gay, left milieu of London in the early 80s. And it's fantastic as a depiction of that. It's fantastic as a depiction of that. And that is what makes it, that one of the things that makes it, you know, such a more radical film. Because it isn't just about remembering a mystian. remembrance of the valleys. It's also about, you know, I mean, even if it's romanticising it,

it's a fantastic thing to romanticise, like the radicalism of the GLC. And the fact that these guys, that the guys involved are communists and our self-identified communists is not hidden at all. It's very, it's part of the Mizonsen of that, the early scenes of the film. And that is brilliant. That is, that is, and you don't, you would never get anything like that. You know when Billy Elliott is reading like a Trotsky's newspaper. Talking about romanticising. I'm going to romanticise the name of the famous fundraiser, which I have a copy of the poster of, which is the pits and perverts fundraiser party at the Electric Bull Room in London, which I just think, wow, I mean, it seemed like it would have been such an amazing event to fundraise

for the miners, and what a hilarious name. I think there's also something there that the film says that's really important about, like, the crossover in different identities and attached cultures because I feel like it's not like, you know, the lesbian and grey support, the minors are, like you were saying, Jerry, it's a depiction of like the multiplicities of identities and realities that people live within. Yeah, no one finds themselves in this film. People become more than themselves in this film. They don't just, they don't find themselves. Everybody becomes more than themselves. Exactly. Exactly. So it's not just that, you know, there's not this kind of one dimensional like, you know, the women like, I am.

a lesbian. It's like I'm also a worker. I'm also a human. You know, I'm also someone inhibiting this like reality of the political milieu in the UK at this time. And it really kind of between that and the unfolding of how solidarity happens and how people are thinking on the level of like human beings, it just cuts through all of the like the bullshit narrative that we're fed, you know, these days about like how humans make, how humans make decisions. and where self-filled interest lies. Like, I just think it's really good for that. It, like, you know, slaps a lot of that kind of discourse in the face,

and it's brilliant for that. And it does just really make me cry. Like, just even thinking about it now is putting it on edge. Yeah, I mean, 2014, you know, that comes out. Future cultural historians are definitely going to look back and say, well, you know, the 2017 general election results should not have been such a big surprise because this prize, if you'd have told people 15 years earlier, you were making this film, like you wouldn't have got money to make it,

And it turned out to be, you know, it was a commercial success. The closing scene of this film depicts basically the fact that the Labour Party took on the cause of gay rights, partly because of this massive vote by the National Union of Minas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, is that, do we, I don't know much about this. I'm interested in your opinion. Like, do we think the Labour Party would have been so open and taking on, like, gay rights into its program if it wasn't for the National Union? of minors vote, which was because of the actions of, you know, lesbian and gay support the

minors? It definitely would have happened, but it would have taken three or four years longer. Not loads longer. I don't think even probably maybe not five years, but it would have taken longer. And it was hugely significant. And it was hugely significant also to like to gay people, that the miners did that. You know, that the NUM came round on the issue. You know, I mean, it also shows the minors, the NUM leading the prime.

I march. So, yeah, it was. I mean, I just think to answer the question, there's no question it was historically significant. I once went up to Mike Jackson. He was the guy, the activist, the LGSM activist who wears the glasses in the, or he's portrayed it in the film. At a Navarra party that we were all, actually, he was there. And I'd know than it before, but I had to go up to him and say, look, mate, you're a working class hero. I just couldn't stop myself, basically. He handle it very graciously. Yeah, we were all at that part. Yeah, I shook his hand. I never do that. Look, ACFM listeners, if you haven't seen the 2014 British feature film Pride and listened to all of the episodes of the Working Class History podcast, again, about lesbian and gay support the

minors, I just, I forbid you to listen to any more ATFM until you've gone and consumed all that media. You are, you're barred. Go listen to go consume it. Go do it. And also, the final film we're going to talk about today is another film. You've got to see this film. Everyone has got to see this film. The Boots Rydies, 2018 film, sorry to bother you.

I said, the Goddard film, I said, Tuvabian is probably the most avant-garde, formerly avant-garde film we're talking about today. I mean, maybe equally formerly avant-garde, is this 2018 sort of surrealist, very slightly sci-fi, surrealist comedy, which partly centres around, you know, the whole question of the nature of solidarity and takes as one of its main plot features, industrial organising, labour organising, in a call centre. And it's, you know, it's a black film, you know, made by a black director,

filming, featuring mainly black actors. And it is an absolute document of the revival of black radicalism, you know, after the emergence of BLM, which I think we're also seeing manifested in various other parts of the culture. And is just historically one of the most significant things that's happening in terms of, you know, politics, certainly in the Anglosphere, but I think globally over the past few years. Just an extraordinary piece of work. And again, I mean, really one of my favourite films, like one of the best films that I've ever seen, I think. So it's been categorised as

Afro Surrealist, so it's got some sort of surreal elements to it. And, you know, surreal in a way it's like, not surreal, what it means is like over, more than real, basically. And the surreal elements are to do with well, all sorts of stuff, basically.

Equis sapiens, I know whether we want to do spoilers on this, but at certain points, they're sort of like horse, human, crossbreeds, etc., which takes this sort of quite, in some ways, realist, like a film based in realism, into this sort of surreal sort of stratosphere. And you would put that alongside, like, TV series such as Atlanta. And so that Atlanta gets, Lekeef Stansfield stars in as Cassius Green, Cassius Green, who is the star, sorry to bother you, is also in Atlanta, which also has this, like,

real rooted, like real gritty sort of realism of life in Atlanta and then further afield as the series goes on. But like, every now and it just goes to this completely surreal place. You know, there's definitely something in the, there's something, something about that sort of like African-American, that black experience in the US in a post-BLM sort of era that is provoking this turn to, it's not alienation techniques, Brechtine alienation techniques, such as Dutva Bien. It's something else, you know, it's that, it's a recourse to absurdity, basically,

you know, some sort of like level of absurdity, but which isn't sort of separated from realism. You know, it's seen as part of realism. I, well, or it's experienced as part of realism in a sort of way, sort of like that old world building. And perhaps it is because, like, that wave comes, post the first wave of BLM, then post-Trump's election,

where it's obvious, you know, not going to get, these are like really raw, horrific experiences of police murders, you know, and the social movements arise at them, that you are not going to get an immediate resolution of those. This is going to be a long struggle and, you know, you need some way to interpret these horrific experiences. And like, where did surrealism come from? Surrealism emerges after the First World War as a reaction to these horrific experiences of the First World War. I don't know what it is, but there's something going on there, which I think makes surrealism a good place to, a good way to understand it.

I'm Cassius Green calling on behalf of stop a mud hole in your app.com. Sorry to bother you, bro. We've gone on longer than we thought. We added several films we didn't think we'd talk about. That's a surprise. All right, we've got to go, Tim, because Keir and I have got a game in five minutes. Oh, for fuck sake, we have. I've got to get the dinner.

All right. And now I'm going to have to order pizza for the kids. Okay, we haven't pressed stop on record. That was good fun, I'm pressing stop now. Wow, that's too far out.