shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>
>
> just out of curiosity, what would be a radical movie?
I guess I really don't know. Perhaps a movie made _for_ a radical movement; that is, one responding to the observable needs of a radical movement. That of course implies that no radical movie can be made under present conditions. I don't know what use, if any, was made of Modern Times in the '30s. In the years around 600 b.c.e. in Athens the Iliad was a radical poem, because the Athenian Democracy was grounded in the establishment of _geographical_ political units, the _demes_, and they cut across family lines. Hence Book 24 of the Iliad was used (and this may have been why written copies were made) as a way of undercutting blood ties as the only legitimate poliitcal ties. I doubt that the author of it had dreamt that it could be used in a Democratic revolution!
In the realm of science, at the beginning of the 17th-c, Plato was a radical text; Galileo wrote a poem, "Against the Aristotelians" or something like that. In Japan in the 1930s Shelley was regarded as a conservative influence, Eliot as a radical threat. (Empson reports a Japanese scholar referring to some scholar as "not sound on Shelley" (i.e. potentially radical in politics because he was reported as being against established literary canons). And some women in England and the U.S. in the '20s thought of Eliot's poetry as liberating, and in the context, it was. "Intrinsically" it is pretty damned reactionary of course.
I think I'm moving towaerds the position that no text (or movie), in and of itself, has any politics whatsoever. The politics are decided by its use, not by the work itself.
Carrol