Thanks Richard,
I reflected, having sent my mail, that, as you say, there are many films which reflect the present conjuncture. As you say also, all those which respond to McCarthyism have strong resonance with the present. I should probably have restricted myself to films which, rather than simply producing effects of recognition or perhaps explanation, also suggest ways that one might begin to reimagine an oppositional project. Much twentieth century political film-making is tied to the existence of an already elaborated oppositional project, constituted collective actors (be it the proletariat or colonised peoples) and institutional actors (parties, unions). This elaborated oppositional project is no longer there. Because of this, have many political films have lost their purchase on a present or at least a good part of it? Even if, for example, Battle of Algiers has started to work again as an anti-imperialist film, the national liberation struggle at its heart can no longer be viewed with quite the same eyes as one it was. The film is OK for critique but no longer as proposition. That is why, in the end, my preferred political films, for now at least, are those which suggest how a leftist project can be (re-)assembled from fragments.
I should probably have added the Dardenne brothers to my narrow list. Rosetta and The Promise both seem to me to be about reinstituting fundamental ethico-political choices in the wasteland left behind by the enforced dismantling of the industrial working class. But The Son - removing anything like an oppressor from its even sparser cast - seems, despite its brilliance, to settle on being ethical without any more being political. Their films are nonetheless astonishing for showing characters who resist without a language with which to name their resistance.
I'd be interested in what films you or other people think are currently useful in the sort of 'propositional' way that I've outlined.
Yours,
martin
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