Much of the U.S. left is atwitter about Oliver Stone’s latest film, South of the Border (2009): an eighty-minute-long travelogue/documentary about Latin America’s left-ward shift in the last decade. Those sympathetic to the counter-hegemonic tides of change in the region appear to have embraced what they characterize as Stone’s valiant journalism against liberal and right wing critics.
Democracy Now! easily the most important news program for the U.S. left, devoted an entire hour in celebration of the film. Members of the activist group, Code Pink, with the support of the Pacifica Radio station KPFK and the leftist film distributor, Cinema Libre, held a counter-demonstration on the opening day at the Laemmle in Santa Monica, in response to anti-Chavista protests, stating: “Join Oliver Stone as he seeks the truth and help support the people who fight for a free South America.”
Whatever the film’s merits are, whether it succeeds in challenging the perspectives of North American audiences who get their news about the region primarily from corporate press, its shortcomings are too reprehensible to overlook.
Without doubt, the film is lazy, oversimplified and injurious to the project of raising critical awareness about what is actually taking place south of the border. While it would be absurd to expect a scholarly discourse from an Oliver Stone film, surely it is not too much to ask, at the very least, that the audience had been given some indication that “socialism for the twenty-first century” is more complex than a cult of personalities — a cadre of leaders.
Denying the dialectical nature of the social and political transformations underway in Latin America, the complex relationship between the state and civil society, the film ends up replacing one myth for another, and concluding (in contradiction) that what is needed is a more ‘benign’ form of capitalism.
Congratulations, Oliver Stone and company. You have succeeded in not only misrepresenting one of the most important resistance movements of our time, but also in creating a thoughtless film that would do more harm than good, were it not so forgettable.
Yet, what is more alarming than Stone’s misguided and egotistical depiction of the Bolivarian Revolution is the alacrity of the U.S. left to support the film. This uncritical defense of mediocrity in response to accusations from the right defies the radical spirit of a critical left.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1944) warn us in Dialectic of Enlightenment that the culture industry, (of which Oliver Stone is a part), prevents the development of radical consciousness by reproducing capitalist hegemony. In a less extreme view, but equally damning, Douglas Kellner (1989), a ‘third generation’ Frankfurt school critical theorist, argues that we should “view popular entertainment as a complex product that contains contradictory moments of desire and its displacement, articulations of hope and their repression.”
The reception of Stone’s film by the left should come as a warning — an opportunity for the left to see itself and critique itself. Radical minds, according to philosopher and Marxist humanist Marshall Berman (1982), “encounter radical obstacles: their ideas and movements are in danger of melting into the same modern air that decomposes the bourgeois order they are working to overcome.”
This is not to say that a film about the Bolivarian Revolution is not needed. Revolutionary times have historically generated powerful documentary films. In the 1920s, Dziga Vertov, film theorist and newsreel director, pioneered nonfiction film with documentaries such as Man With the Movie Camera (1927). For him, cinema was a means by which one could understand the world in order to change it.
In 1976, film theorist and director, Julio García Espinosa, wrote his famous essay “For an Imperfect Cinema” to reflect on filmmaking after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Espinosa demystified Hollywood’s aim at technical precision as disingenuous. Instead, he called for the creation of “imperfect” cinema — films that require active engagement of audiences. Such revolutionary filmmaking, Espinosa argued, could help spectators construct new social realities.
Oliver Stone’s documentary makes no attempt to understand its subject matter: the camera functions more as a paparazzo’s apparatus than a tool for serious reflection. As such, it falls perilously short of its revolutionary subject.
The left’s reception of the film threatens to further impair critical thought. The defensive reaction to the film’s critics bespeaks the left’s avoidance of self-criticism. Rather than give Stone a free pass, the left should think about the film they are defending. Does it really do justice to the many variables of the Bolivarian Revolution? If we cannot be critical of everyone and ourselves — the left and the right — radical social change is impossible.
