Bourgeois Fantasies: McKinsey & Company
Hi,
This is the fourth and final excerpt of a recent project. Here’s a short description:
I wrote about two films, Chris Marker’s Cuba Si! and Agnes Varda’s Salut les Cubains. The films are about Cuba, yet they are not made by Cubans. Each plays with the visual language of politically-engaged documentary, the video essay and, at times, poetry. They are examples of many things: the optimism felt by artists, writers and filmmakers about socialism through the 20th century; they are tremendously influential examples of avant-garde cinema; each is a turning point in the life and career of its maker.
The earlier excerpts ‘losers who didn't get to write history’, ‘Castro as Gary Cooper’ and ‘Filmed at full speed’ are available online.
Chris
Film still, Salut les Cubains by Agnes Varda.
There are no socialist revolutions to flock to anymore. Few political projects seem to hold any sense of possibility, especially in the face of the totalising destruction of the climate crisis and the petty resurgence of nationalism. I find it difficult to think of the future; mostly, it feels like things around me – the nation state, institutions, communities, individual rights and freedoms – are coming to an end in one way or another. Perhaps this end has been growing and building for some time, metastasizing until it is inescapable now, or perhaps it was always there, built into the foundations and predictably coming to its inevitable realisation. Against this context, to pay attention to forgotten films might seem like a kind of retreat from a multitude of crises. Perhaps. But to retreat is not to surrender. These films may be artefacts and relics to us now, but they were weapons in their own time. Somehow they still feel spiky and dangerous, demanding, all consuming and full of possibility, still vibrating with an energy that could speak to us anew.
I watched them on subscription platforms that charge by the month. I returned to them again in badly edited YouTube clips. I found writing about them in awkwardly photocopied journals and in paywalled academic articles – a whole contemporary digital infrastructure is built under and around them, somehow keeping them alive but also keeping them away from contemporary audiences. It is almost like they're contained. You wouldn’t expect the algorithm to push them to your feed. You would have to somehow sneak behind a paywall to find them. But first, you would have to care. You would have to know about them to seek them down. Cuba and the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, socialism of the Global South, would have to resonate with you, and there would need to be a means and mechanism for this idea to transform into action on your street, neighbourhood, community and country.
For these films to lead to something now, as Marker and Varda had hoped for their own time, their message would need to test well in a focus group; a politician would need to have a billionaire mention it over dinner; McKinsey & Company would need to include it in a report; The Daily Mail would need to print it in all caps. But somehow, both films have globbed themselves on to the digital and intellectual infrastructure of our lives, holding on but still hidden. Alive, somehow. Perhaps they have been carried on by the names of their creators who are much more well known for all their commercial and critical hits. Carried forward by the prestige of Marker and Varda, they have become art – beautiful things, certainly, but somehow this is a tragic outcome.
I think these are special films because of the traditions they bring alive. They stand somewhere in between Russian revolutionary filmmaking, espoused by the likes of Dziga Vertov, and the critical attention paid to image, text and language by theorists through the 20th century. They also suggest that art is not merely a tool of political struggle, a way of conveying messages and drumming up support, but something integral to it, something that changes how we see ourselves. Revolution – both political and cultural – has the capacity to change how we see the world, how we see ourselves and those around us. If there has to be a culture war, that's what it should be.
Once you’ve paid close attention to the lives and work of Agnes Varda and Chris Marker, you start seeing contemporary versions of their ideas everywhere. Perhaps this influence is an indirect, unconscious overlap – a shared set of concerns and attitudes about what can be done with images, or what they do to us. They approach photography and cinema in a hybrid manner, fluidly shifting between ideas of time, presence, voice and memory. The temporality of images takes on different connotations between photography and cinema, with the stillness of the former often contrasted with the latter. From this point of view, photography underscores what has happened while cinema puts the past into motion.
Each film is an example of Varda and Marker’s career trajectory. They demonstrate the risks that each took, and the innovations that they would contribute to other artists, prefiguring decades of artistic filmmaking practice to come. On an immediate and visceral level, I like these films because of that. Because of how they show Marker and Varda working ideas out, doing things that would resonate with many others that I admire. And in a similar way, I think returning to these films might prefigure something else, might make other things possible. The challenge of slowing ourselves down, of attuning to the moment and motivates off screen, is part of the promise that they offer us.