All the Cliches in One Place: The Baader-Meinhof Complex and the State's Wet Dream

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Aust, Edel, and Eichinger have produced a cinematic moment that demolishes any of the romantic aura that may still surround these killers in some circles.

-neocon Jeffrey Herf

Only a movie like this can show young people how brutal and bloodthirsty the RAF's actions were at that time

-Jörg Schleyer

The Baader-Meinhof Complex, the 2008 film by Uli Edel written and produced by Bernd Eichinger, may be many things. From its trailers it certainly seemed exciting, and i expected great music. A bit of a disappointment on both counts, i'm afraid. On a technical level, the fragmentary, jumpy editing was a bit of a gamble - while it pays off at times (i.e. the May Offensive, and the Third Hunger Strike), it fails badly at others, i.e. during the final days of the German Autumn.

Like i said, the film may be many things. However, an honest portrayal of the Red Army Faction is most certainly is not. In fact, drawing heavily on the work of liberal journalist Stefan Aust, the film is a useful example of the various ways with which to lie with pictures.

The Red Army Faction, as readers of this blog should know, was one of the first communist urban guerilla organizations in Western Europe. Emerging from the New Left in West Berlin, it quickly found friendly bases in cities across the Federal Republic of Germany. While it's leading members - Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe and Holger Meins - were all captured after its 1972 "May Offensive" (a series of bombings against U.S. army bases, police headquarters, a judge and a right-wing newspaper chain), they enjoyed a close enough connection to their base that it was not long before new people had opted to join the underground, and new actions - now focussed on winning the prisoners' freedom - were afoot. (For a detailed history of the RAF, i suggest checking out the German Guerilla website.)

(In the film, Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin, Raspe and Meins are played by Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck, Johanna Wokalek, Niels-Bruno Schmidt and Stipe Erceg, respectively.)

Throughout its existence, the RAF was the target of a carefully orchestrated and sophisticated counter-information campaign on the part of the state, a campaign that would soon be described by many on the left as "psychological warfare." Not only were all manner of baseless rumours spread - that the group was planning on contaminating Germany's lakes with nuclear waste, that they had stockpiled chemical weapons, that they intended to kidnap children from playgrounds - but at a certain point persons unkown actually began carrying out bomb attacks in train stations and claiming them on behalf of "the RAF", even though the group itself issued clear statements denying their involvement. Today, given what we know of the ties between secret services and the far-right in various NATO countries, it seems most likely that these "false-flag attacks" were in fact the work of the state, intent on discreiting the urban guerillas.

In other words, much like radicals on this side of the Atlantic, West German comrades had to content with "their" state's own version of COINTELPRO. (For more about this, see chapter 9 of Projectiles for the People now available online: Shadow-Boxing: Countering Psychological Warfare)

The most pernicious - and most marketable, now that the group is no more - of these various dirty tricks and media smears, were the public psychological profiling that all members of the RAF were subjected to. Newspaper articles invariably made these comrades seem crazy; lurid details and fabrications about their personal lives were insinuated into any discussion of the group, the government's initial report (the farcical Mainz Report) even suggesting that weird sex triangles were inciting members to squeal on each other to the cops!

Following the capture of the group's most well known founding members in 1972, this aspect of the psychological warfare campaign became even more important. The RAF was one of the only urban guerilla organizations to manage to not only survive the capture of its key members, but to engage the state on the prison terrain to its advantage. Through the strategic use of hunger strikes, the RAF prisoners called attention to the pioneering of various forms of "white torture" by West Germany, including isolation and sensory deprivation, which many of its members were subjected to. (Sadly, as this New Yorker article detailed earlier this year, isolation is now widespread in prisons around the world, especially in the united states.)

Given how the prisoners' strategy relied on collective action and solidarity behind bars, the West German state went into overdrive to discredit the RAF "leaders," painting them as monsters who somehow were able to coerce other prisoners into joining these hunger strikes.

In short, the state was telling the people that the guerillas were a bunch of assholes. Really, should anyone be surprised that this is what the state would want people to believe???

In November 1975 the first RAF member died in prison. Holger Meins had been on hunger strike for six weeks; he was being force fed, but not given enough nutrients to keep him alive. The prison doctor could see he was dying, and so he... decided to go on vacation after asking for guarantees that he would not get in trouble! What's more, the Bonn Security Group - one of West Germany's secret intelligence organizations, which was pretty much in charge of how the prisoners were treated - ordered that Meins not be transferred to a hospital.

With Meins' death the psychological warfare campaign became instrumental. If you believed the newspapers, Meins was a weak personality type, bullied by group leader Andreas Baader, always sucking up to him. If you believed such a story, then you were confronted with the spectacle of a man starving himself to death just to win a bully's approval. Grotesque.

But most people did not believe the state's propaganda. Meins' death shocked the left, and many comrades decided then and there that they would join with the guerilla, that the time for talk was over.

Two years later, in 1976, another tragedy occurred that put the state's "hearts and minds" campaign front and center. Ulrike Meinhof, the RAF's leading intellectual, was found hanged dead in her prison cell. Just the day before, in court, she had accused the state of having a policy to kill off the revolutionary leadership.

Once again, the state pushed the line that Meinhof had been bullied by her fellow prisoners. Specifically that she had been about to leave the RAF, or to be kicked out, and that she just couldn't cope with this and so she did herself in.

This was widely disputed on the left. The prisoners issued documents Meinhof had been working on that showed her as committed as ever. And more than one observer asked why her autopsy was rushed, why her cell was not just emptied, but actually repainted, before her lawyers or family members could see it, and why her body was left in such a state after the first autopsy (i.e. missing organs), that a second autopsy was impossible.

An International Commission of progressive jurists and doctors was convened, and after several years it delivered its conclusion, suggesting that Ulrike Meinhof had been raped and murdered, and then hanged to make it look like a suicide.

Once again, the propaganda campaign was key: if you believed Meinhof was the victim of horrible bullying, that she was mentally ill, and that the RAF's support scene was populated by nothing but dupes or sociopaths, then you could safely assume that she had committed suicide. Everything else you could explain away as the work of unscrupulous terrorist symps. If on the other hand you rejected this characterization, you were left with a state murder.

And so on and so forth, culminating in the October 1977 "suicides" by the remaining RAF founders in Stammheim prison. The state's story is actually that Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were so machiavellian, so manipulative, that they not only killed themselves but purposefully tried to make their suicides look like murder in order to garner sympathy for their cause. Their suicide thus becoming their final attack on the state.

Questions about how they got guns inside their cells, why there was no powder burn on their hands, why the prison security cameras just happened to malfunction that night... all that is to be ignored. As is the fact that one prisoner survived the night with deep stab wounds, and to this day she insists she was attacked. (For more discussion of the Stammheim "suicides", see the German Guerilla website.)

The RAF continued on for twenty years after the night of the Stammheim deaths, but was eventually defeated. And as such, the psychological warfare campaign is now tweaked, becoming instead just part of capitalist history. An object lesson in the moral perils of revolution, and a declaration that there is nothing in the RAF's story that tomorrow's revs might wish to learn from. Key to this process is the suppression of any controversy or debate regarding the Stammheim deaths, and the whiting out of the movement context that the RAF emerged from and continued to draw upon throughout its existence.

The key text in this official history is the book that Eichinger/Udel production is based upon, Stefan Aust's Der Baader Meinhof Komplexe. A fascinating read, written in the same fragmentary jumpy style that the current film is shot in, Aust provided a wealth of information and details, as well as a narrative tying the RAF's various actions in the 1970s together. Not only was his book a "good read", but it "made sense".

That said, Aust has a particular position: he believes that the prisoners who died in prison committed suicide. While that's not unacceptable - for the record, i do not feel confident in my knowledge about what happened in Stammheim on those nights, so for me no position is beyond the pale - it should be noted that he also has a personal axe he has to grind.

Aust - who appears several times in the first half of the movie, played by actor Volker Bruch - was close friends with Ulrike Meinhof before she went underground, and remained friends with her ex-husband Klaus Rainer Rohl after she somewhat theatrically divorced him (she and her friends trashed his villa as a "political action.") He clearly admired her, and felt that her descent into guerilla warfare was a tragic mistake, one for which he blames Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, the group's founders, whom he consistently portrays as cruel bullies, if not psychopaths.

What's more, Aust was friends with Peter Homann, Meinhof's erstwhile roommate who had a serious falling out with the RAF during an early training trip in Jordan, and who later collaborated with Aust in kidnapping Meinhof's daughters from some Italian hippies she had stowed them away with. Aust and Homann claim to this day that the RAF was going to send the kids to be raised in a Palestinian orphanage, a claim disputed by Meinhof's biographer Jutta Ditfurth.

In other words, Aust is not a disinterested party. He knew these folks, he liked some of them and he disliked others, and as it so happens his personal feelings have been roughly congruent with the objectives of the state's propaganda campaign. Which helps to explain why his book became the standard reference regarding the guerilla even though it only covers the first seven years out of its 28 year history, and does not even try to explain the group's ideas or its relationship with the radical left - Aust's history is psychological history, nothing more nothing less, all the while leaving his own psychological motivations unspoken and unacknowledged.

If Aust's book is a useful, though problematic, source for information about the RAF, the Eichinger/Udel film is a sly and dishonest exercise in character assassination. This has something to do with the nature of film vs. the printed word perhaps. Aust takes his time, giving us forty chapters in over four hundred pages, taking sideways glances at individual members' childhood and student days, police operations, dirty tricks, and the overall political context. This jumpy non-linear style works very well in a book, where you can flip forwards and backwards to refresh your memory, and where things are explicitly explained, not just referred to.

In the Eichinger/Udel film most of Aust's mosaic is sublimated into news reports shown in the background, or the flash of a newspaper article. The film does not replicate the book, though it does reference it thoroughly - by this i mean that most chapters in the book get some kind of token representation in the film, but it may just be a five second scene (or even less!) which is incomprehensible unless you already know the story inside and out.

This selective representation gives the filmmakers wide latitude as to what to show and what to merely "reference" in a clin d'oeil. And this is used here to a purpose, sharpening the psychologial weapons the state crafted so long ago, making them now a part of "art". Gone is Aust's serious theory that the state knew the prisoners had guns and intended to use them to commit suicide (in essence, making itself their accomplice); there is no discussion here of prison authorities' attempt to force Meinhof to undergo neurosurgery, or the effects of sensory deprivation torture on Astrid Proll. These details - and oh so many more - are left out, ommitted, non-existent, and what we are left with is a nauseating look at terrorists as insane as they are inhumane.

Baader emerges, surprise surprise, as the biggest asshole you'll have ever met, and Ensslin and Brigitte Mohnhaupt (played by Nadja Uhl) both as almost archetypical bitches. While the women are remorseless and cold, Baader just begs the audience to punch him in the face, as we see him refering to women as cunts and whores, accusing men of being homos and cocksuckers, and calling the Palestinian commander of the camp the RAF received training at as "Ali Baba" and a "camel-jockey". (It is never explained how the group came to have such good relations with the Palestinian movement, given what we see of their behaviour in Aust's book and Eichinger/Udel's film. Or how it continued for so many years with a majority female membership, including in leadership positions, for that matter.) But most of the time Baader - who in the real world seems to have been almost uniformly respected and even loved by those who worked alongside him - simply alternates between screaming incoherently and laughing inappropriately.

More than this, though, film shows its power as a medium in how a knowing look, a raised eyebrow, a quick grimace, can convey more than pages of innuendo. We read these "subtle" signals as more powerful than explicit communication, precisely because, being physiological, not requiring conscious thought, such expressions are normally far more honest. And so, perversely, we have a film in which Meinhof always looks like she's about to cry, Baader always looks like a self-satisfied frat boy, Ensslin always looks like she's holding something back. Repeated consistently for over two hours, these physical tells paint a disturbing picture of instability, confused motives, stubbornly wrong choices.

And of course the suicides. For in the film, there is no doubt, there is no cause to wonder, alternate theories do not exist: the prisoners all committed suicide, it's an open and shut case. How do we know? Well, Brigitte Mohnhaupt tells us so: this guerilla leader speaks in the film (as she never has in real life), telling us that the prisoners all wanted to commit suicide if the guerilla could not win their freedom, and even arranging to smuggle in guns for them to do this with.

"And Ulrike?" asks a stunned Susanne Albrecht (played by Hannah Herzsprung). "Her too," Mohnhaupt tells her. And, more importantly, tells us.

As of today, Brigitte Mohnhaupt (who was released from prison in 2007) has made no such statement publicly. Irmgard Moller, who survived that night in Stammheim with serious stab wound, still claims there was no such suicide pact. So where does this film - which claims to be "historically accurate" - get this from?

If you read Aust's book, you can see that there are two sources for this story. The first, Monika Helbing, was a RAF member who left the organization, and cooperated with police, becoming a snitch following her arrest in 1990, in exchange for a lenient sentence. Certainly, she had reason to want to go along with the state's story.

The second, and more important, source for this story is Peter-Jurgen Boock. This is Peter, played by a cute Vinzenz Kiefer, almost a point-of-view character in the second half of the film, whose knowing looks let us know that he can see it all going to shit. A sympathetic character, we never see him hurt anyone, though we do see him beaten black and blue by prison guards in a very early scene.

In real life, Boock is known as the "talkshow terrorist". He is the most famous, and disreputable, RAF member to cross over to the state. Back in the day, when Boock first met with Baader and Ensslin, he was smitten with them and wanted to join the RAF. They refused however, in part because they were worried about his drug habit.

Once they were in prison, though, Boock joined with the new wave of RAF guerillas. He claimed to have cleaned up, but also claimed that he had developed intestinal cancer, and needed painkillers. Believing this story, for years various RAF members were tricked into taking greater and greater risks to acquire painkillers and other drugs for him.

Boock’s ruse came to an end in 1978, when he and three other RAF members were arrested in Zagreb. The Yugoslav government tried to trade the four to the FRG, in exchange for a number of Croatian fascists the West German government had in custody. When this attempted exchange came to naught, the four were released, but not before Boock had had to submit to a medical examination whereby it was revealed that he was in fact a perfectly healthy drug addict.

Faced with the horrible revelation that they had been used (several members had gotten themselves arrested trying to score for him), the RAF guerillas set about arranging a safe haven for him in East Germany. Amazingly, when Boock refused to go into exile, insisting that he wished to continue in the RAF, the guerillas allowed themselves to be talked into believing him. And yet, it was not long after he returned to the west with them that he was trying once again to score—the guerillas now decided he must be exiled and refused to give him any say in the matter. Seeing the writing on the wall, Boock fled, arranging to turn himself in and to say whatever the state wanted him to, in exchange for preferential treatment in prison and an eventual pardon. (In 1988 several RAF prisoners - many of whom had had Boock testify against them in court - issued a statement outlining Boock's sorry history. It is available here.)

These are Aust's sources "proving" the suicides in Stammheim. Udel and Eichenger take this and gratuitiously tack on Meinhof to the deal, and there we have it: it's history now, i saw it in a movie, they killed themselves.

And so is hegemony maintained.

As i said at the beginning of this review, a dishonest film.

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Calle Santa Fe: Remembering Those Who Fought

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Calle Santa Fe 2007 / 35 mm / Colour / 163 min, Dir. Carmen Castillo, Chile - France.

On October 5th 1974 the Chilean military and political police (DINA) raided a safehouse in a working class neighbourhood in Santiago. Miguel Enriquez, a leader of the underground resistance to Pinochet and a hero of the revolutionary left, was killed and his fellow combatant Carmen Castillo was seriously wounded in a two hour long shoot out.

Castillo, who was six months pregnant at the time, was then dragged into Santa Fe street ("calle Santa Fe") and left there bleeding as soldiers argued about what to do with her; she would likely have died were it not for a neighbour who called an ambulance and insisted that it drive through the military lines to rescue her. Amazingly, the driver agreed and the soldiers did nothing to stop them.

Even once at the hospital, Castillo was not out of danger. Soldiers arrived, and what might have happened next - torture, detention, execution - was all too clear. Yet a nurse got to a phone and made a call to Castillo's uncle, and then the word was out: the junta was trying to kill a wounded woman, a pregnant woman at that. It struck a chord, and there was international outrage, and the junta - eager to be rid of this problem - had Castillo and her children exiled to France within a month. And so in this way we will be told that "the dictatorship could not overcome the acts of anonymous people."



In the years following memories of the shootout on calle Santa Fe would haunt Castillo, and would eventually push her to write and make several films trying to come to grips with what had happened. As if the superficially simple events of the day - "police killing guerilla resisting dictatorship" - were like one little loose thread, as she would tug on the story, Castillo would come up against questions - how did the police find the safehouse? who talked and why? - which would eventually see her re-examining the mythology of the resistance, and for a time have her excluded from it.

Castillo's latest film, Calle Santa Fe, recaps the events of that day, introducing us (briefly) to the radical left and the resistance to Pinochet she was a part of; but mainly this is a film about about how repression and exile, political errors and defeat have played themselves out in the film maker's life, the lives of her children and those of her comrades. Through her eyes we see what society looks like after fascism, after the butchers have safely retired and everyone else tries to pretend life is normal. We see this is as Castillo travels back to Santiago, to the house on Calle Santa Fe where Enriquez was killed and she was wounded, to the city where she meets family members - who have quite different feelings about her political activities - and also former comrades and neighbours.

*************

The Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or Movement of the Revolutionary Left, was founded in Chile in 1965 during the conservative pro-American presidency of Eduardo Frei. It brought together students, trade unionists, anarchists, Trotskyists and radical Christians, and was heavily influenced by the example of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara who had led a revolution in Cuba just six years earlier.

While it has been claimed that it was primarily a student group with little base among Chilean workers, according to the former members interviewed by Castillo the MIR found its strongest support amongst the poorest sections of society, presumably the unemployed, landless peasants and Indigenous people. According to one source, by the early seventies the MIR had only 2,000 members, as compared to the Socialist Party's 80,000 and the Communist Party's 100,000 within the Chilean working class. (In the Chilean context at that time the Communist Party was far more conservative and timid than the left-wing of the Socialists, being the strongest advocate of a peaceful strategy class collaboration, and a vicious critic of the "extremist" MIR.)

For the entire Chilean left this time was of course marked in every way by the election of Salvador Allende as president in 1970. The socialist Allende was the candidate of Unidad Popular ("Popular Unity") a coalition of left-wing parties which included the Socialist Party, Communist Party, Radical Party, Social Democratic Party and MAPU. Under his leadership the Popular Unity government would follow a cautious strategy, nationalizing key industries while also reaching out to the middle classes and right-wing military officers.

Calle Santa Fe does not tell us how Castillo ended up on the revolutionary left, and then in the MIR, but she has written about this elsewhere. As Mary Jane Treacy has summarized in Carmen Castillo and the Politics of Forgiveness :

...Carmen Castillo, daughter of the former rector of the Universidad Catolica, lived at the heart of the MIR throughout much of her young adulthood, an involvement that embraced not only her political affiliation, but also her social group of friends, lovers, and family. She reveals that her entry into revolutionary life at seventeen was primarily an infatuation with "la belleza del compromiso," the beauty of political commitment and obedience to those who embodied it. Thus she first turned to Beatriz Allende, daughter of the future president, and was fascinated by the young woman's refusal to conform to the norms of seductive femininity, insisting instead upon maintaining a serious mien that befitted her role as member of a guerrilla organization. Castillo's response to this example was to obey "la Tati:" "[m]e fascinaba su saber y su rigor, gustaba de obedecerle sin cuestionar, me plegaba a sus ordenes, buena alumna"/ I was fascinated by her knowledge and inner strength; I enjoyed obeying her without question; I followed her orders like a good student (vuelo 115). Castillo joined Allende's revolutionary group, serving as go-between ("buzon") with militants in Bolivia, and repeating that she must fight unto death ("luchar hasta morir").

As Castillo fell in love with Beatriz's cousin, Andres Pascual, who gave her a theory of revolution to interpret her practice, she entered into the leadership circle of MIR, married this Allende and had a daughter, Camila. When soon after she fell in love with Miguel Enriquez, she abandoned her flamboyant style ("good-bye to mini-skirts," she announces) to embody the simplicity of a serious revolutionary, following the wishes of her new com-panero: "me sentia alegre, descubria el gozo de obedecer a las exigencias del hombre amado"/ I was happy; I found the joy of obeying the demands of the man I loved (vuelo 120).

[quotes from El vuelo de la memoria, by Carmen Castillo and Monica Echeverria. Santiago-Paris. Santiago: LOM, 2002]

While the MIR - which officially rejected electoralism - was well to the left of the Popular Unity government, it was not opposed to it, but rather maintained a position of critical support. For example, one of the former MIRistas interviewed by Castillo recounts how in 1970 the group temporarily called off all its actions in order to not hurt the Allende's chances at the polls. During the election campaign the Popular Unity candidate's own security corps was provided by the MIR, as the police could not be trusted and the groups own intelligence operatives inside the military and the right had warned them of plots against Allende's life. In fact Castillo tells us how some of Allende's MIRista bodyguards were being sought by police at the same time as they guarded him. Little surprise that following his victory the new socialist president would pass an amnesty for all members of the organization.

The MIR's chief criticism of Allende was that in opting for a "constitutional", legal and peaceful road to socialism, the new government was too intent in currying favour with the middle class, which meant sabotaging the radical workers' and peasants' movements and relying on the army to remain neutral and play its "traditional" role as protector of the State. The MIR, the only left-wing party to not officially participate in the Popular Unity government, advocated the creation of dual power structures as a step towards setting up a workers State. Rodriguez and other MIR leaders argued that that instead of relying on the army to protect it the government's only chance lay in arming and empowering the grassroots organizations of the working class while democratizing the armed forces, removing power from the anti-communist officer corps.

As an example of how far Allende was willing to go to placate his ruling class enemies, in 1971 when the MIR published its programme regarding the army and police forces in its newspaper El Rebelde, the Popular Unity government had all copies of the paper seized and laid charges against the programme's author. A sad sign of where things were at, all the more so as the last two point in the MIR's "scandalous" programme were that soldiers and police should "disobey officers calling for a coup" and "join with the people in their struggle against the capitalist class." (see Chile the State and Revolution, pages 193-4)

The MIR's criticisms were proven right on September 11th 1973, when the armed forces rebelled against the left-wing government, murdering Allende and bringing to power a military junta under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet - ironically, a man Allende had trusted to be his eyes and ears within the armed forces.

Castillo gives us a glimpse of what it was like to be a revolutionary on that day: the MIR sent word to Allende in the Moneda (presidential palace) offering to rescue him, but the president - "mindful of the power of symbols" - refused, even though he knew it would mean his death. Instead, Allende sent word back to the MIR, telling his left-wing critics that it was up to them to "continue the fight".

At first, comrades helped mount barricades in the working class neighbourhoods of Santiago, despite the order to go underground. The initial feeling was that this was where the people were making their stand, and that this was the proper place for revolutionaries. But by the end of the day it seemed that the army had crushed this resistance, and as night fell the entire organization went underground.

i wish Castillo had spent more time on this period, the lead up to the coup and its immediate aftermath. After skimming the book Chile: State and Revolution (by Ian Roxborough, Philip O'Brien and Jackie Roddick, Holmes and Meier Publishers 1977) i feel that there are a few things which just aren't mentioned in Calle Santa Fe, and should be. Not that i am unsympathetic to the filmmakers position - this documentary is almost three hours long, and i know that if she had provided all the details i would want it would be at least twice that. Still, in the interests of filling some of these gaps, i'll take a moment and mention a few points here...

According to Roxborough, O'Brien and Roddick the MIR benefited from having the correct analysis of the possibility of "peaceful change", but suffered from a very limited influence amongst the working class and peasantry. They even claim that many of the land occupations which were attributed to the MIR at the time were in fact autonomous actions of peasants or Mapuche Indians, and that accusation that the MIR was involved were a political smear, nothing more. Although they were correct in predicting that the "constitutional road" would prove itself to be a mirage, along with most of the radical left they did expect the armed forces to split, with a section moving to defend the Popular Unity government. When this split failed to materialize, the MIR was as lost as everyone else.

Also, i wonder if the rosy picture of relations between Allende and the MIRistas is not a case of wishful thinking some thirty years after the fact. As a martyr Allende has become a powerful symbol of resistance to fascism and imperialism, his decision to face death in the Moneda rather than flee or negotiate with the coup leaders being one of the most evocative images of that day. Nevertheless, the historical record is clear: in the lead up to the coup Allende was part of the more conservative faction of the Socialist Party, which along with the Communists formed the "right-wing" of the Popular Unity government, and as such opposed those efforts which might have actually have helped prepare the working class to resist the impending massacre. Perhaps there was personal warmth, friendship even, between individual MIRistas and Allende (after all, the presidents own nephew was a leading member of the organization!), but this did not prevent the PU government from trying to reign in the radicals as part of its strategy to woo the middle classes and the officer corps. i am left with the impression that some of the nice things all those interviewed by Castillo had to say about the martyred president might be just a bit exaggerated...

One more point worth clarifying: in terms of actual resistance to the coup, it is true that the MIR like others on the left called for a strategic retreat on the 11th, telling members to go underground. In retrospect, this was clearly the correct decision, the only one which did not lead directly to torture - often followed by death - at the hands of the military. At the time it seems that the MIRistas believed that everyone else was doing the same thing, and that the army had smashed the workers' resistance by the late afternoon. Yet in terms of honouring the dead, we should note that on this point the MIR were wrong: workers continued to fight for days after the Allende was killed, often led by radical members of the Socialist Party, and snipers continued to pick off soldiers for a week in the popular neighbourhoods of Santiago. Finally the military resorted to aerial bombardment and random massacres, the hallmarks of fascism in power, to terrorize the neighbourhoods and put and end to this popular, though disorganized, resistance.

Despite these minor holes, i found what Castillo and her old comrades had to say about this time to be of great interest, all the memories fascinating because they were so real. People told how they had read books about how to operate in clandestinity, about how to live a guerilla existence, but that when the time came they were completely unprepared, out of their depth. They threw on clothes that had been in style in their grandparents' day, men shaved their beards (and all stood out because their chins were whiter than the rest of their face!) and put on ties, and to the best of their ability they disappeared to organize the next stage of the resistance.

Those interviewed by Castillo are not so much typical of the MIR's fighters, but rather of those who survived, for by 1974 the junta had managed to hunt down and kill some 80% of the leadership, by 1978 some 800 MIRistas had fallen. This was a time of hardship and bitter losses. While the MIR managed to publish El Rebelde from the underground ("we often preferred to go without food in order to publish," one woman remembered), and carried out acts of "armed propaganda", defending the people as best it could and assassinating army torturers, even those survivors we meet in the film were almost all captured within the first year or two of the dictatorship, held in the junta's infamous prisons, tortured, and then expelled from the country in 1975.

Although the MIR had criticized Allende for relying on the army to protect him, its own preparations for armed resistance seem to have been far too tentative for the level of violence the Pinochet regime was willing to inflict. Which is really understandable if you think about it: how many of us have talked about catastrophe around the corner, criticized our less radical comrades for their naive faith in the system's stability, and yet made no real preparations of our own?

Beyond these initial weaknesses and reversals, these former militants explained that going underground itself had major negative repercussions. As one man explained, being a revolutionary means working with other people, making personal connections with the oppressed; clandestinity stops you from doing that, instead you must concentrate on survival, and as a result you risk becoming invisible to those you would prefer to be working with.

Although Castillo herself had lived underground alongside MIR leader Miguel Enriquez, she shares little of her own experiences of this period. So far as this film is concerned, her own story really begins with her capture in 1974. Expelled from the country, she became active with the international movement to expose the crimes of the Pinochet regime, all the while remaining a member of the MIR. Indeed, as a result of all the arrests and expulsions during these first years of struggle against the junta, many, perhaps even most, of the MIR's active members ended up in a similar position, living outside of Chile.

While Calle Santa Fe does not touch upon what life was like for Castillo in those years, she has written about it elsewhere, and according to Treacy's overview of her works this was clearly a time of great pain:

The MIR leadership, a hierarchical circle that kept its members under party discipline, still had an important interest in Castillo's life as "the Widow" and therefore carrier of Miguel's political essence. It sent her regularly on tour to build solidarity among radicals throughout Europe, even as she was barely coping with her many personal losses (vuelo 185-86). Her attempted suicide, or breakdown, inattention to her dying infant, and inability to care for the daughter entrusted to her care bear witness to Castillo's deep emotional distress at the same time that Cuba was demanding debriefings on Miguel's death, the MIR insisting that she remain in Latin America to play out her role as revolutionary icon, and former non-militant friends rejecting her as a troublemaker.

*************

If many of the surviving MIRistas had been forced outside of Chile by the mid-1970s, many of their lives were now to take a particularly hard turn. In 1978, with the declaration that "The MIR Does Not Seek Asylum!", the organization initiated Operation Return ("Plan Retorno"), by which militants were to be smuggled back into the country to carry out armed struggle against the military regime.

What gets explained here is so valuable precisely because it is what one can imagine getting left out of some left histories.

Operation Return was not something you volunteered for, nor was it just a matter of a few cadre sneaking back temporarily to carry off an attack. For a resistance movement which had been largely driven out of the country, Retorno represented a major offensive, a gamble of sorts, a plan to smuggle large numbers of militants into a country ruled by a brutal dictatorship in order to re-establish an underground revolutionary movement.

Most painfully, as many of the MIRistas had kids, the Operation had a second dimension - "Operation Shelter" - whereby the revolutionaries' children would be sent to Cuba, to be raised collectively while their parents lived or died far away.

This was obviously a difficult, excruciating, process, and one which was made all the more so as it had been decided by the leadership and imposed on the cadre. And although Castillo herself did not return to Chile at this time - as a high-profile MIR spokesperson she would have been a liability to the new underground - she too sent her children to Havana, "in order to devote my entire life to supporting the resistance" she says.

Castillo interviews her own daughter, and also the daughter of a fellow MIRista, the one being remarkably understanding and sympathetic to the whole process, the other summing up her feelings as "Mom, you left me for shit!" In a discussion with many of these mothers, one woman explained that there were no separate women's structures or spaces in the MIR in which to discuss Operation Return or Operation Shelter, and figure out what was really the best thing to do - "not even a place to cry together" over the loss of their kids, as one woman remembered. "We could have never imagined how much pain we were causing," explains another.

i found this section to be of such importance because it dealt with a real problem that confronts people carrying out illegal resistance, and which - because of the sexist division of labour - is particularly heavy for women. All over the world people have sent their kids to be raised by others as they have entered situations of particularly heavy confrontation, but this is obviously a very difficult choice, and one which most people will not make if there are other options. This dilemma may be avoided by small groups in situations where one can "volunteer", where one is not forced underground; but in terms of mass movements, simply mooting the point and saying "that's what needs to be done", is going to mean developing a movement which most people will not want to join, and one which will hampered by the predominance of mainly young men.

i'm not offering any solutions, and what criticisms come to mind are accompanied by the respect i have for what one woman explained, that she "wanted to build a better world for our children - and left them to build this world"... nevertheless, Operation Shelter appears deeply flawed, which is what makes it useful to think about. One obvious point to make is that what it means to be deprived of one's parents really depends on the way in which one had been raised up until that point. Children who are raised collectively, either by comrades or by extended family networks or some combination of the two, will fare better than those whose mother and father were the central caregivers. But there are limits to this logic, as children who are exiled along with their parents, or children who survive along with a few key caregivers, are likely to enjoy a particularly close bond and dependency with those particular adults. & even if children are raised collectively by many adults, what happens when suddenly most or even all are instructed to leave? no obvious answers...

i am particularly curious about the gender balance within the MIR at this time - while i imagine that like the rest of the Chilean left it had had more male than female members prior to the coup, was this still the case in 1977-8? War often changes gender balances, especially as the enemy may find it easier to identify and kill male combatants than women (i.e. just look at the fact that Enriquez was killed, but Castillo was sent abroad after a quick campaign which made much of the fact that "the military was persecuting a pregnant woman"). How many of the combattants who were to go underground in Chile in Operation Return were women? and how was this decision made? Is this what one male MIRista meant when he criticized himself and the party for having been too rigid, for having excluded cadre who were not willing to abide by decisions? And what part does this question play in Castillo's question as to whether or not Operation Return was really worth it, sending so many back to be killed?

questions questions questions...

*************

For all this, the 1980s were a decade of open resistance to the dictatorship. Reinforced by the returned members, the MIR carried out a variety of armed actions. We are shown video footage of truckloads of stolen food being redistributed in working class neighbourhoods. This also seems to be a time of inventive tactics, developed in relation with the communities of people the dictatorship oppressed. One woman recounts turning a neighbourhood into a no-go zone for the army simply by distributing loads of soccer balls to local kids who played with them in the streets and thus just happened to block the army's vehicles.

It would have been good to see more on this resistance to the junta in this period, either by the MIR or by other groups. As it is, we are given these examples, and some footage of demonstrations, and then... we are suddenly told that the MIR leadership decided to liquidate the organization in 1989, just before the dictatorship was to allow the first presidential elections in almost twenty years!

The announcement comes as a shock even to us just watching the film; it is clear how much more horrible and confusing it must have been to those who had survived and resisted underground. The decision was not explained, and even today it seems some former members do not understand why it was taken. Militants were simply told to get married, have kids, go to school, and forget about their life underground.

In the words of one former MIRista, she now felt like an orphan.

*************

Watching Calle Santa Fe i could only think that history can be like a gun, and some unlucky people are fired out of it like bullets. They may not "win", or even strike their targets, and yet they themselves are ripped apart, paying a great price for even having dared to try.

Re-reading this review, i see with some dismay that i have not been able to do this film justice. Or even given a fair impression of what it's about. Most scenes are not historical footage, but are of Castillo as she wanders through the downtown Santiago, or through poblaciones, or around the old calle Santa Fe, looking at post-fascist Chile and asking herself, torturing herself, with the question "was it all worth it?" So much sacrifice, so much pain, and here the murderers were allowed to write their own ending, to retire in peace, while men and women like herself and her comrades are the odd ones out, reminders of possibilities that were closed off, battles that were lost and are now eagerly forgotten.

If Calle Santa Fe left me with so many unanswered questions about the MIR, it is probably because this film is not simply about the resistance, but about what a post-fascist society like Chile today means to those who resisted with such uneven results.

In this sense i am reminded of another excellent film, The Dark Side of the White Lady, which tells how the Chilean Navy's flagship Esmerelda was turned into a torture-ship during the first days after the coup. The Esmerelda is a national symbol in post-fascist Chile, something like Canada's Bluenose, and is still used with pride by the navy for ceremonies and tours abroad. The film opens with a small demonstration outside some military ceremony on the ship, calling for truth and memory and honouring the people who were tortured and killed on board... while passersby look at the protesters as if they were freaks, one woman explaining that if Chile is so "prosperous" today it is only because Pinochet saved it from the communists.

The day after Castillo was captured and Miguel Enriquez was killed his brother Edgardo issued a statement that "The fight will not be over until we have hung Pinochet by his balls at the Santiago Place d’Armes." But Edgardo was himself killed in 1976, while Pinochet got to die a natural death in 2006 at the ripe old age of 91. There was no anti-fascist victory, and today those who fought and managed to survive appear as embarrassments or anachronisms.

Nor does it seem like yesterday's guerilla has an obvious place in today's left. One of the hardest moments in Calle Santa Fe is where Castillo meets a younger activist in a bar, ostensibly to talk to him about her hopes to buy the house where Enriquez was killed and turn it into some kind of left-wing community centre. The young man she is meeting with - perhaps in a staged conversation, but certainly one which represents something real - tells her that such a plan does not really interest him or other younger activists, that they've almost had enough with hearing of those who fought and died, and that instead of commemorating what the older generation did (or failed to do), they prefer to act as they believe their elders would have. Which may be fair but is also unclear, and leads to more questions than answers.

One of Castillo's former comrades tries to convince her that the MIR had an effect, that it has a legacy, and that this can be seen in the new "horizontalist" left of today. Not party-based, but more "social" he says, as the camera zooms in on some hip hop street musicians rapping about poverty and capitalism, as if to say "This is what it was all for, this is our legacy." But for me at least the scene is unconvincing, this kind of nostalgic cozy sentimentalism, whereby whatever "they" did was worth it as it gave rise to whatever "we" are up to today.

To leave aside questions of cause and effect, success or failure, does not seem an adequate way to honour the past or really even see the present.

& for what it's worth, Castillo herself does not seem entirely trusting of such a tale.

If for nothing else, Calle Santa Fe is worth watching for this sadness and this honesty. Carmen Castillo shares with us herself, and her doubts, and her feelings of defeat, her questions of whether all sacrifices were necessary, or even useful. These are hard questions, and there are no answers, certainly not at this stage in the game.

*************

Calle Santa Fe is by no means a complete story. As i mentioned, Castillo has been driven to examine her past in the revolutionary left, and what happened to it. She has written several books, and in 1993 made her first film, a painfully honest, and surprisingly sympathetic, portrait of the woman who broke under torture and gave her and Enriquez up to the police (La Flaca Alejandra: vidas y muertes de una mujer chilena released in english in 1994 as In a Time of Betrayal).

Castillo first learned that the DINA had managed to "break" many captured MIRistas, and use them as double-agents to draw out and capture guerilla fighters, in the late seventies. Revealing the extent of this in a memoir she wrote at the time shattered the organization's mythology regarding its political prisoners, and led directly to her being expelled from the MIR, which accused her of doing "moral damage to the Revolution, MIR and the memory of Miguel."

Given this, one might expect Castillo to be one of those "ex-leftists" who feel a need to reveal all about the "bad revolutionaries" they once hung out with. i have not read her books, but judging from what i have found online, and from watching Calle Santa Fe, nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, while certainly not uncritical, Castillo is so clear in her sympathies and her unflinching solidarity with her own past and truth, that when she mentions in passing that she had "become distant" from the MIR in the 1980s i thought i had heard wrong, and it was only in reading about her on the internet that i learned of her expulsion and realized that this was in fact what she had said.

i went into Calle Santa Fe not knowing much about the MIR or the resistance to Pinochet, and had never heard of Carmen Castillo. While the film was almost three hours long i left the cinema with so many more questions than i had had before. The lead up to the coup, life underground, Operation Shelter, resistance in the eighties, life in exile for those who did not return - there is so much that is touched on, but only just touched on.

This is a compliment, not a criticism. i fully intend to check out what else i can find by Castillo, and will keep an eye open to what she does in the future. If the workers' movement in Chile was defeated by extreme violence, experiences around the world have shown how the left can also be suffocated by its own pablum and easy distortions. By showing us her own life and that of her former comrades, by not retreating from solidarity but also not giving in to self-serving "fibs", Castillo shows us what it means to treasure the truth, all truths, including the difficult ones.

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Kunsten Å Tenke Negativt (The Art of Thinking Negatively)

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Kunsten Å Tenke Negativt, (The Art of Thinking Negatively) 2006 / 35 mm / Colour / 79 min, Dir. Bård Breien, Norway.

Definitely one of the few great movies i saw at the World Film Festival in Montreal this year.

The setting is a "positive thinking" self-help group for people struggling with disabilities and depression, run by Tori, an offensively pat and insincere State-appointed social worker. The story unfolds as this group melts down in its efforts to "save" Geirr, a depressed and angry man in a wheelchair who would rather do dope, get drunk and play russian roulette than stay focussed on other people's ideas of what he has to live for.

(Spoilers ahead!)

i think this movie "works" so well because of the feeling of disgust that we all feel when confronted with inauthentic sympathy, with people who have it easy telling others to "just look on the bright side". This film stretches this fairly common feeling into one where we the audience are left identifying with the depressed and wheelchair-bound characters in this movie, with their pent up resentment and even hatred of their "compassionate" care-givers, whose own emotional disabilities can end up overshadowing mere spinal cord injury.

In this regard the character Gard, whose own carelessness left his partner Marte a quadraplegic, is by far the best, and the most loathsome, of the bunch. Obsessed with himself and with how difficult Marte's condition is on him, he explains in an aside that "they" have it easy, as "they" can just sit in their wheelchairs all day and other people look after them. After he dumps Marte, Geirr congratulates this prick for having his whole life ahead of him: "You've got it all. Except for brains, looks or personality that is."

Geirr's role in this movie is clear from the beginning. He is the truth teller, and telling it straight is more important than "feeling good" or "having hope" or anything else that other people may obsess over. "Fuck people with friends, fuck people with families, fuck people with their whole lives ahead of them," is how he puts it in one scene. When he gets Marte stoned and she starts insisting she can feel her legs he wheels up to her and explains that pot just can't do that. When the depressed Lillemor - who was a "normal" housewife until her husband dumped her for a younger woman, and who is still not quite sure as to whether she is truly one of the "suffering" - looks at the group and shouts that she doesn't belong with people like that, that she's a normal person and belongs with normal people, it is up to Geirr to point out that this may be true, except that normal people don't want to have anything to do with her.

The film ends with an unlikely reconciliation between all involved, and things seem to be going better because they were allowed to go worse. "We should do this more often - just we'll call it a party and not a meeting," says one character. Even Tori is allowed back, and when she sees how good everyone is feeling Geirr points out that she too will feel better once she learns "the art of negative thinking."

The humour in this film comes from the tension between authentic suffering and insincere compassion. My only ambivalence in watching was to how much of its appeal involved me, with both arms and legs working fine, using "disabled" characters as a metaphor for "real suffering", and getting a funny thrill from having people break taboos and "tell it like it is" in the safety of a film...

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Juju Factory

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Juju Factory, 2007 / 35 mm / Colour / 97 min, Dir. Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, Democratic Republic of the Congo - France - Belgium.

Warning: There are spoilers in this movie review!

A humourous and super-clever social commentary on... exile and migration? Belgian colonialism? racism in Europe? the psychology of the colonized? of the decolonized? of the comprador bourgeoisie?

Yeah, i think all these things.

i saw Juju Factory at the World Film Festival in Montreal last week. It was sharp as a tack, and a lot of gutsy, experimental, ways of shooting which would normally turn me off all worked perfectly, which from me is saying something (i.e. like many, i hate artsy shit). My only regret was that director-writer Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda was there to see that less than twenty people had shown up. Don't know if it's the Festival's fault, if it's because it was a late showing, or if it's a Montreal thing, but it's a real shame that so few people came out to see such a good movie.

Linear as a moebius strip, Juju Factory is full of references both implicit and explicit, right down to its name - as another reviewed has pointed out, a "juju" is a talisman or charm which can protect one from evil... but in French "juju" sounds like "jouet", a mere toy...

This is the story of the writer Kongo Congo (thumbs up to actor Dieudonné Kabongo Bashila), who finds himself living in Brussels' "African neighbourhood", Matonge Village. With a repo man threatening to take away all his belongings, people back in his homeland depending on him to send money, and a need to express his own feelings about exile and about his roots, Congo agrees to write a book - supposedly a "travel guide" to introduce Matonge Village to white europeans - for an allegedly "African" publishing house. So begins the conflict between Congo and Joseph Désiré, his publisher and thus his boss, an African man who insists he is Belgian, who goes so far as to ask the statue of King Leopold for advice for how to deal with this his uppity writer.

As Congo writes of his homes, both the land of his birth and that of his exile, we see human beings, silly and funny and angry, dealing with life. But although there are characters and there is humour here, this film is far from being a straight up narrative, its more a combination of scenes and sounds, as the "real" world and the text of Congo's book seem increasingly intertwined ("my imagination makes love with reality," as the author explains to his skeptical sister in-law).

Dreamy sequences and symbolic conversations all flesh out what eventually appear less as relationships between characters as between what Frantz Fanon might have called "species". At the same time, hints appear that the book he is writing is in fact the film we are watching... and as Joseph Désiré becomes increasingly rigid and demanding, insisting on a prettified advertisement about ethnic colour in Belgium's capital, Congo becomes increasingly haunted by thoughts of Patrice Lumumba and the history of European theft and pillage on the African continent.

Really this is Bakupa-Kanyinda doing the writing, and this film is really as much about the real Matonge Village and the real nature of colonialism as Congo's book is supposed to be. In an interview the writer-director has said as much, explaining that the film resulted from his own thoughts about the role of some Africans in maintaining the slave trade. (Little surprise that as Congo finishes his book he renames it Juju Factory.)

As Congo struggles with the book and with his own family dramas, he comes into greater and greater conflict with Désiré on a number of different levels. All the while the publisher/dictator keeps on putting off promised payments to the writer/nation, until he finally cancels the deal, shouting at Congo that he can bury his memories of ancestors and freedom fighters wherever he wants, just not in his book... the folly of power, as if a publisher was anything without a writer, as if the strongmen of the neo-colonies would be of any value to the real kingpins without the people "underneath" them.

This sets the stage for the film's turning point, one which makes it more than just good, as we learn that Désiré's "secretary" is in fact the president of the "Help Africa" foundation which is bankrolling this contentious book. She will have nothing of Désiré losing Congo. Unlike the europhile dictator, this white woman loves the book - now titled, of course, Juju Factory - and in one fell swoop arranges for it to be published without any of Désiré's cuts, and then has the publisher straight out fired. Colonialism as mindfuck: it was never Désiré's company at all, not any more than it was his book.

When Congo tells his former tormentor to fuck off, he suggests that Désiré would be well suited for some other job, for instance he would make an excellent African politician. The meaning couldn't be more clear even if one had forgotten about Mobutu Sese Seko, who the Belgians and Americans put in power after they killed Lumumba, and who had been known as Joseph Désiré Mobutu before he changed his name... Bakupa-Kanyinda is making sure we understand that this is not just a film or a book about likable or dislikable characters, but is about the real world, as we see Désiré wandering down the street warming to the idea of what a great leader he will be...

The film ends with Congo being all the rave with hip Belgian society. Like icing on the cake we see him interviewed by young Belgian journalists, but notice: their entire focus is on the titillating ("Did you have sex in the museum?"), or on the portrayal of the white bit characters in the story ("A bit of a caricature, don't you think?").

Brilliant.

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Someone Else's War (not a review!)

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A quick recommendation: check out Lee Wang's film Someone Else's War.

i was lucky enough to be at the world premiere of this film at the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival a few days ago, and think it is a film that should be checked out by everyone in the anti-war and also especially anti-capitalist movements.

Unfortunately i do not have time to write a review, or even an adequate synopsis, at this point. Our trip to SF was a bit of a disaster in terms of the anarchist bookfair i was counting on to pay some bills, and has left me in hyperventilation mode regarding work. So i'm gonna try and be disciplined and not blog until i get some of the most pressing crap out of the way.

Nevertheless, to explain why i am recommending this film: it's not revolutionary, and it's not even anti-imperialist, but it is an informative expose of the U.S. army's dependence on migrant Third World labour to maintain its military infrastructure within Iraq.

I learned, for instance, that 80% of Halliburton employees are not American. This overwhelmingly Asian proletarian workforce earns less than $400 a month (compare to $75,000+ a year for American Halliburton employees), live in segregated camps surrounded by concertina wire and patrolled by private security guards, rely on table scraps from the US Army cafeteria to survive, and are sometimes not even paid the wages they had been promised.

While not touched upon in the film, i could not help but think of the many parallels between these workers' conditions and those of other trafficked individuals. This is indentured servitude, with a fee paid by the workers in order to be "placed" in a job overseas, putting them in a position where they are obliged to work a certain amount of time simply to pay off this initial debt. Some have signed up to work in other countries, only to be told - once they're already far away from home - that they must either accept a placement in Iraq or be heavily fined.

Not a review, not even a good synopsis. But i've got other work to do. If you can, check this film out!

(a list of upcoming screenings available here)

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Legacy of Torture: the War Against the Black Liberation Movement

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This excellent article by Wanda Sabir gives the background to last week’s arrest of nine former Black Panther Party members and supporters is from the San Francisco Bay View, whose site seems to be down at the moment, so i am mirroring it here.

i should point out that i have several copies of the DVD Legacy of Torture, which gives background to this case, and now would be an excellent time for people to arrange public screenings. Email me at info@kersplebedeb.com to work something out.

Legacy of torture: the war against the Black Liberation Movement
Eight Black Panther veterans charged in 34-39-year-old cases based on torture

by Wanda Sabir

Last week when I was speaking to Richard Brown, who was enjoying his well-earned retirement, we spoke about his friend and comrade John Bowman, who’d been tortured back in 1973. Brown was looking forward to both the screening Sunday, Jan. 28, at 12 noon of “Legacy of Torture: The War Against the Black Liberation Movement” at the Roxie Cinema, 16th and Valencia, and the celebration of Bowman’s life at 3 p.m. at the Center for African American Art and Culture, 762 Fulton St. at Webster in San Francisco.

At the preview screening of the work-in-progress last October, Ray Boudreaux and Hank Jones were on the panel, and Richard Brown was in the audience. This Sunday they were all going to be at the theatre and the memorial. Now they are all in jail. But the show, said filmmaker Claude Marks of the Freedom Archives, will go on. The gathering, just a day after the protest against the war, is yet another opportunity to develop a plan for action.

The war at home against liberated Africans is obviously still going strong.

When I saw the unedited cut of the film last year at East Side Cultural Center during the Black Panther Party’s 40th anniversary weekend, I was stunned at the audacity of this government to trample the rights of its citizens with impunity. Hadn’t they learned that even one’s enemy has rights?

Having assailed the Black Panther Party in 1968 as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” Federal Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover used any and all methods in the FBI’s arsenal to dismantle the operations of an organization developed to “serve the people.”

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a youth movement. The five men profiled in the film – Ray Boudreaux, John Bowman, Richard Brown, Hank Jones and Harold Taylor – were in their 20s in 1971 when they were accused of killing a police officer in San Francisco’s Ingleside Station.

In 1973, 13 Panthers were captured in New Orleans. Several of them were subjected to the brutality of torture, including beatings, electric shocks with cattle prods, hot water-soaked blankets and plastic bag asphyxiation, many of the same forms of torture used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

They captured Jalil Muntaqim and the now deceased Albert “Nuh” Washington in 1971 in San Francisco. Herman Bell was captured in New Orleans. Ruben Scott was tortured so badly in New Orleans that he made accusatory statements. He later recanted and helped to expose the brutalities committed in New Orleans, but he appears to still be a government witness.

Fast forward to 2005: 34 years later each man is called before a state grand jury on the same charges. Of course, they all refused to cooperate and were thrown in jail. They were later released when the grand jury expired Oct. 31, 2005. The men were warned that “it wasn’t over.” In June of 2006 they were served with a DNA subpoena during the early morning hours. Richard Brown said they swabbed the inside of his mouth.

There they were: FBI and policemen standing on the Panther veterans’ doorsteps – some of these officers the same men who were present during their tortures in New Orleans. John Bowman, who died just last month, told attorney Soffiyah Elijah that he’d never had a good night’s sleep since. All the trauma came back.

When I asked Richard Brown if he was worried about the open-ended prosecution spread over 36 years now, he said: “I was named as a participant in 1971 in the murder case. All Panthers were targeted. If we were doing something constructive, we were singled out. They killed Bunchy Carter, arrested and imprisoned Geronimo. It was just our turn. We were next on the list.”

When asked where the case was now, Brown laughed. “As far as I’m concerned, they don’t have a case. They are going forward. They plan to indict us, convict us and sentence us. They’ve been telling us this for the past three years: ‘Don’t get comfortable, because we’re coming after you.’

“Thirty-six years ­ if they had any kind of case, they would have arrested us by now. I haven’t been officially charged.”

“Yes, this case bothers or worries me because they never let the fact that they didn’t have a case stand in their way. They can come up with something tomorrow – evidence they found, people that have a hundred years’ sentence that they will let go home if they testify correctly. They can come up with this.

“They can just manufacture a case. They do that. If they want us, they can come up with something to take to the DA. It’s a different time now. They don’t want to go to trial with nothing, hoping that racism will pull them through.”

Tuesday, as the president was about to give his State of the Union address, these men, now know as the Grand Jury Resistors – Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64, of Altadena; Richard Brown, 65, of San Francisco; Harold Taylor, 58, of Panama City, Fla.; Harold Taylor, 58, of Panama City, Fla.; and Henry Watson Jones, 71, of Altadena; plus other former Panthers connected to the case by “new evidence,” were arrested all across the country and charged with conspiracy and the murder of the Ingleside policeman and a series of other unsolved cases from 1968 to 1973.

Also indicted are Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom), 55, and Herman Bell, 59, former Black Panther Party members who are eligible for parole in New York, as well as Francisco Torres, 58, of New York City and Richard O’Neal, 57, of San Francisco. Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, 62, was still being sought.

In 1971 people who remain unknown to this day raided the FBI offices in Media, Penn., and stole files exposing the Bureau’s illegal operations against Black revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam and other progressive organizations and movements. Detailed accounts of the systematic attack on Black leaders and Black organizations came out in public hearings hosted by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho. This was the first public disclosure of the U.S. government’s Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program), and it forced the FBI to “agree” to dismantle this illegal activity.

“All these guys (arrested) are in their 50s and 60s and 70s. The (government) is sending a message to the young people: ‘Don’t even think about joining any liberation movement,’” said journalist Kiilu Nyasha, also a Black Panther veteran.

The Black Panther Party was formed to make Black communities safe from police brutality, yet the government aggression never ceased. Cointelpro intensified, government agents infiltrated the organization and created or encouraged internal differences to the point of using the dissent to destroy individuals and the effectiveness of the movement that the Party was building.

Richard Brown said that when he joined the Party, “he and his comrades didn’t expect to live,” so they didn’t fear death. At 22, he’d always been an advocate for Black people and knew then and now that through “unity we could do anything.”

“The village looked out for us,” he said. In “Legacy of Torture,” Brown said that he wasn’t going to help the government prosecute him because they disrupted his life ­ hurt his family, cost his friends their reputations and even employment opportunities. “They are the guilty ones and they should be investigated, not the other way around. I’ve been contending with this for over 30 years.

“In light of what’s going on presently with the chief justice sanctioning our president’s use of evidence gotten through the use of torture, that’s technically saying they can go back and take the evidence they obtained through torture, arrest us and convict us behind tainted information.” In the film the men spoke of how the New Orleans police told them to sign the statements that the agents wrote if they wanted the pain to stop.

Interview with Richard Brown

Wanda Sabir: When did you start traveling around the country on speaking tours about what happened?

Richard Brown: “We started talking about this when people didn’t believe the government was capable of doing something like this and, because it was primarily happening to Black people at that time, it was overlooked and not believed. We feel if the American public is educated, they will demand it stop.

“I would like those guilty of torture brought up on charges. They said it was illegal way back in 1973 at the Church Commission when they found they’d violated the Panthers’ civil rights over 300 times: They were guilty of unconstitutional acts, guilty of torture, guilty of coercion, guilty of lying and passing false information to get people to lie on different folks, and manufacturing evidence, even to the point of assassination and murder. It happened to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Bunchy Carter.

“It was all a part of that Cointelpro program they had to annihilate the Black Panther Party. We feel education is the best way to bring this to an end.”

WS: “Legacy of Torture” director Claude Marks said you hadn’t really talked about what happened to you prior to making this film. Given what you said, it was understandable, since no one believed your stories anyway.

RB: “Actually, when they broke us up, they literally broke the Party up. Many of us went to different parts of the country. I stayed in touch with most of them over the phone. Someone like John Bowman, who was a part of the family, he and I saw each other over the years, but we rarely spoke of the torture.

“We went on with our lives and continued to serve the people the best that we could. I went off into community-based organizations to do as much as I could for my community and for my people. I just continued with the teachings and the principles that brought us to the Party. We honestly didn’t actually talk to each other before they came back for us in 2005 ­ this crap all over again. We thought they’d finished back in the ‘80s.

“They just swooped on us all over the country one day and arrested us and tried to make us go before a grand jury and testify, and we decided independently of one another that we were not going to do that. We were all held in contempt of court and arrested, actually locked up. They took us away from family and spirited us around the country, and no one was able to communicate with us.

“I was locked up for quite some time: six weeks. My attorney didn’t know where I was. They kept moving me around.”

WS: The right to a telephone call is not true?

RB: “They didn’t give me a phone call. People have to be approved beforehand to receive calls. My attorney wasn’t able to get through. What you have to do is contact them beforehand, pay a fee to get them on a so-called system. What you’d have to do is write them to contact the phone company and pay a fee so they could receive calls from the jailhouse. Not being able to get a letter out, I wasn’t able to tell them.

“It was part of a technique to put more pressure on me.”

Brown has been a community activist his entire life. He worked for the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in the Fillmore, the same area of San Francisco he grew up in. He worked at Ella Hill Hutch for almost 20 years in housing and employment, in criminal justice and as an advocate for the people in the community. He was able to continue “for Black people in the Fillmore what I was doing in the BPP ­ serving the people.”

He said of his friend Bowman: “John grew up in this area, also on McAllister Street. He touched a lot of people’s lives – an organizer, a warmhearted person everyone could relate to. He could educate and motivate. He was a great man.”

WS: Seems like all of you are great men – to be able to live through that. The reenactment in the film of the torture scenes, while not literal, is enough to make one imagine the horror and pain. It’s one thing to imagine it; it’s another thing to go through it. Sometimes it’s not physical but psychological. People have been going through psychological and physical torture ever since slavery.

When that was happening to you, did you think you’d live though it?

RB: “I didn’t actually get tortured there in New Orleans at that time. Three of us were tortured: John Bowman, Ruben Scott and Harold Taylor. They arrested me and I was about to be taken to New Orleans, but (the case) was thrown out of court when the evidence acquired through torture was found inadmissible.

“I was fortunate that time. The greatest torture is psychological torture. But I’ve been beaten while handcuffed. That’s so common for Black folks I don’t even call that torture. It’s the MO for police to deal with Black people in that manner. When they focus on you and try to break you, that’s a torture tactic. Police jumping on you while you are handcuffed and outnumbered was ordinary, even typical behavior.”

WS: Obviously it didn’t stop you from doing the work. How does one, given the legacy of torture and the potential for it to reoccur, continue to serve the people? It seems like you’d be terrified of the harassment, knowing that if you continued they could come after you. Anytime you could get assaulted or killed.

RB: “During the time the Black Panther Party was started and we saw the oppression of our people coming down on us, nearly everyone decided we were in it for the long run. None of us expected to live. That’s an unfortunate thing to say, yet, given the time, none of us saw an actual future. Once you make up your mind that you are going to go forward regardless – you do. No matter what they did to us, we were determined not to stop.

“I wasn’t actually doing anything except serving the people.”

WS: How old were you when you joined the BPP?

RB: “I was a little older, at 22. The average age was 17 or 18. They were very young people, some as young as 15 to 16. I found out about it on the news coverage of Oakland.

“I was doing things in San Francisco – not to the extent of the BPP, but I love Black people, I love my community and I continue to care about people. My level of consciousness was pretty high, so when the Panther Party came along with the kind of spirit I had, the kind of nature I had, it was a perfect vehicle. So we started the Black Panther Party in San Francisco.”

WS: You started it?

RB: “Actually, I was there. Dexter and some other people started it.”

WS: I grew up in San Francisco a member of the Nation of Islam. The mosque was on Fillmore and Geary.

RB: “We had several offices on Fillmore Street, on Ellis and Eddy. We’d see a bigger space and move. We were all over Fillmore.”

WS: Did the Panther Party and Nation do any organizing around any issues?

RB: “Not politically. There was an overlap. We supported each other.”

WS: I found that out at the 40th anniversary. A lot of people I knew in the Nation were former Panthers. You said you loved Black people. I presume you were raised in a home that was African centered?

RB: “Yeah, to a certain extent. I was raised by a single mother, as my father was killed when I was 4 years old. I had a lot of help from the community. I had uncles who took the place of my father. Back then, there was a community. The village looked out for all of us and helped raise all of us.

“Because of that, because I grew up in an environment where people cared about one another, I grew up to care about people also. Growing up in a Black community, it was natural I’d grow up caring about Black people. That’s the way I see it: unity and love for Black people.

“I grew up in a different time. I know who we truly are, what we are capable of and what we have accomplished. To see what’s going on nowadays kind of hurts me. The violence that’s going on, particularly with the youth, that’s really disturbing. I do all I can to try to put an end to that, to let them know that that is not who we are or where we should be headed.”

WS: Do you think the violence is a symptom of something larger?

RB: “Of course. It’s a symptom of racism and slavery. We’ve been conditioned to not unite, to not love one another. They took our culture, our language, our religions, everything. Employment, the lack of employment, the educational system the young people have to put up with, the bombardment with media ­ violence: the movies that they watch, the music that they listen to ­ it’s all a part of the problems that youth grow up with.

“It will turn around and go forward again.”

WS: What are the lessons that have come out of the prolonged harassment with the government? What are the lessons you’d like to share with someone doing political organizing work for African or Black liberation?

RB: “We all get tired. You get exhausted, yet you can’t give up. You will be successful. If I die tomorrow, as far as I’m concerned I have been very successful serving my people with my comrades over the years.”

WS: When you look at the legacy of Cointelpro, which now is called Homeland Security, and the laws have been codified under the USA Patriot Act I and II, how, with Cointelpro, the letters, the tapped phone calls, the infiltration creating an environment where people couldn’t trust each other ­ and black folks were already having trouble trusting each other –

RB: “Conditioned not to trust each other.”

WS: Yes, exactly right – coming over on those slave ships. My question is how do you establish trust, maintain trust, in light of a situation where we know this government does not want African people to come together. What can you do to establish trust, or do you just do your good work and don’t worry about it?

RB: “Do your good work and don’t worry about it. The Black Panther Party started out with just a few people. San Francisco was a small operation. Sometimes you have to just start with yourself and people see what you are doing, and once they trust you, you build from there.

“It’s very hard to get Black people to do anything together and to stay together for a long time, but it can be done. The Panther Party proved that it can be done. Other organizations have proven that. You don’t have to be my blood brother; you can be my extended family.

“We have the foundation to be able to overcome the barrier of not being able to trust each other. Somehow over the years Black people have somehow overcome, worked together and made progress. In our time, we have to pull it together and go forward in order to not die here.”

Interview with Claude Marks

Director Claude Marks says his film, “Legacy of Torture,” examines the increasing legislative legitimacy over the past 30 years that gives the United States the right to torture people.

“We saw last year in the contested public space between Bush and other forces when they chose essentially to carve out a space for themselves to redefine what torture was, so that water boarding is considered harsh treatment but (is now) a legitimate form of interrogation, and that’s only one example,” he said.

“Of course, the U.S. government, some of that – you can tell what kind of pressure they are under with Abu Ghraib, with Guantanamo. I think what the film tries to do is to say that this type of physical abuse and violation of people’s human rights has been happening in the United States all along, particularly in prisons, with the retaking of Attica very substantially documented – the level of torture and treatment of people, including targeted assassinations of some of the leaders of that prison rebellion that took place in 1971 in New York.

“It’s also true that these people in this film, former members of the Black Panther Party, when they were arrested, were tortured. This set of government violence against the Black Movement takes place in the context of Cointelpro and attempted to wipe out the leadership of the part of the Black Movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s that most challenged the legitimacy of the US government’s racism, repression and segregation as well as its role conducting wars in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

“This is one of the reasons why Cointelpro functioned in such a targeted or focused way, because they defined the Panthers, in particular, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, as the single largest threat to the U.S. government.

“The Black Panther Party was revolutionary and it in fact challenged a lot of people’s notions about what the U.S. could be, should be. And (the BPP) revealed and unmasked that level of internal oppression and apartheid that takes place within these borders and has (taken place) historically.

“The film tries to say this has never ended. As a reporter in the mid-’70s, I was part of breaking the story of what happened in New Orleans in 1973 (when the Panthers were arrested and tortured).

“I interviewed the men brought to San Francisco in 1974. What we did was to air on KPFA that some of the Panthers arrested were subjected to incredibly violent, tortuous treatment.

“And in 1975 some of the cases that were put together by the San Francisco police and federal government against former Panthers were thrown out because at that time, testimony and statements arrived at through torture could never stand up in our legal system. Now that’s changed, and this is what we try to point out in the film, that the government is trying to make torture more acceptable.

“I’m convinced that’s why the state attorney general’s office and the federal government felt that they could come to the doors of these former Panthers, the same officers in some cases who were present for the torture in New Orleans, come to their doors some 30-odd years later and say, ‘Remember me? We’re going to do this again.’

“That’s pretty hard to wrap my mind around: to go to your door and see the man who tortured you in your youth telling you you are going to go through this again because the terrain is somewhat different under the Patriot Act and the laws have changed. The courts are more reluctant to sanction the government’s abuse of human rights and civil rights, and so to me that’s what the film tries to talk about.

“The point it tries to unmask is the consistent nature of this kind of extra-legal behavior on the part of the U.S. government and its agents, despite the Church hearings in 1972 and the supposed dismantling of Cointelpro,” Marks concludes.

“The Legacy of Torture” moves between interviews with the men and interpretive reenactments of the torture scenes, which were just as jarring and upsetting as if we could see the face of the actor or hear the cries. The film is a meditation on what can happen in a democracy when its caretakers are left to their own devices. Freedom once again a commodity up for grabs as soon as one stops guarding it.

“We have this unique insight from people who have experienced these events, who are willing to step forward and try to get people to understand that it’s up to us and the kind of movement we build to force the United States to be accountable for this illegal, inhumane behavior, because the courts and government infrastructure and the elected officials are either unwilling or unable,” Marks said.

“Legacy of Torture” is a visceral experience and a wake up call. For information on the screening or the memorial, sponsored by Freedom Archives and the New College Media Studies Master’s Program, call (415) 863-9977.
Bay View Arts Editor Wanda Sabir can be reached at <mailto:wsab1@aol.com>wsab1@aol.com or <http://www.wandaspicks.com/>www.wandaspicks.com. The addresses for sending words of encouragement to the two Panther veterans at the San Francisco County Jail are Richard O’Neal, 2300818, 850 Bryant, 6th Floor, San Francisco CA 94103, and Richard Brown, 2300819, 850 Bryant, 7th Floor, San Francisco CA 94103.

San Francisco Bay View
4917 Third St.
San Francisco CA 94124
(415) 671-0789

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[Movie Review] Songbirds, a Musical Documentary about Women in Prison

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Songbirds, a film by Brian Hill
lyrics by Simon Armitage, music by Simon Boswell
UK / 2005 / Betacam / 62 min / english
Contact: Sue Collins, Century Films, Studio 32, Clink Street Studios, 1 Clink Street, Londres SE19DG Angleterre. T: +44-207-378-6106 F: +44-207-407-6711 | sue.collins@centuryfilmsltd.com | www.centuryfilmsltd.com

i saw Songbirds somewhat by accident. It was on a double-bill with Cottonland, a film about drug addiction in Cape Breton Island. Cottonland was so good that i would have left the theatre right away to gather my thoughts and write a review, but i had bumped into friends and so i stayed to hang out with them for the second feature – and i was glad i did.

Songbirds is a documentary about women who are in prison. Not about “women in prison” – with the exception of a few incongruous discussions of lesbianism and masturbation there is nothing about prison life here – but about the lives and experiences of the women who end up incarcerated.

So this is about what happened before getting locked up, and it’s pretty horrific. Almost all of the women featured in Songbirds are survivors of male violence, including rape at the hands of strangers, husbands and fathers. With the exception of Theresa – the only obviously middle class woman interviewed, and tellingly the only one who committed a serious violent crime (manslaughter) and who was nevertheless getting out soon – male violence forms a backdrop from which it is almost impossible to separate their current imprisonment.

There is Mary, who is 35 and has been in and out of prison since age 15, when her own mother turned her in for having drugs in the home. As she explains it, her mother wanted to scare her, but never imagined she’d actually get locked up. Today, she has been in and out of prison for all but one of the past twenty years. At one point she mentions that she has been raped five times, at another she talks about her child being placed in care. We see scars up and down her arms from slashing.

Another woman, Sam, had a father who beat and raped both her mother and herself. When as an adult she saw her child beaten by her partner she found herself unable to intervene, so she brought him to school, hoping that the teacher would see the bruises and notify children’s services. They did, but with unforeseen consequences: her kids were taken away from her. This led to her marriage to an abusive well-to-do man, in a desperate (and unsuccessful) ploy to win custody back by showing that she had “gotten her life together.” She ended up in prison after setting his house on fire after he tried to coerce her into having sex with him.

Most of this film introduces us to other women with similar stories. In and of itself, i think this makes Songbirds well worth watching, and these interviews remind us that traditionally prison is not the main institution of patriarchal control.

As former political prisoner Susan Saxe explained in Gay Community News back in 1987:

My own experience among women in prison tells me, as numerous studies and observations of others have shown, that an overwhelming majority of incarcerated women began as victims of child abuse. What differentiates them from all the rest of the abused women who do not go to jail? Not much, except that like the battered women who finally turn on their attackers, they sometimes fought back. They rebelled against their abusers, became throw-away or run-away children, were jailed, or were placed in institutions by parents who saw them as “crazy” or “delinquent.”

Again, the message is the same: submit to abuse in private by a parent, husband or boyfriend, or fall prey to abuse by strangers – the pimps and pushers on the street or the social workers, wardens, officers and attendants in the prisons, mental hospitals and detention centers. (Susan Saxe, Telling Someone reprinted in Cages of Steel: The Politics of Imprisonment in the United States, Maisonneuve Press, Washington DC 1992)

Historically, for more “privileged” women the father and then husband was supposed to be able to play the role of jailor; she was in his custody, and the State was simply a last line of patriarchal defense if these more personal and informal mechanisms of control were somehow breached. The situation was more complicated for working class and poor women, and women from oppressed nations, but informal mechanisms of control were still far more important here than they were for men.

Today still, this history of informal male control means that for many women there is little freedom to be found on either side of the prison walls. This is the jarring fact alluded to by one woman after another in Songbirds, who explain that life “on the outside” is in many ways worst than life behind bars. Mary explains quite matter-of-factly that she got herself caught on purpose last time, just so that she could go back to her “home” behind bars. Sam described prison as a time out from the hell her life had become with her “successful” abusive husband. In a statement that really spoke to the fact that as a survivor she is both stronger and more “free” than many, she explains that if she doesn’t like things when released, she’ll just come back. “You can do that? Just choose to come back here?” asks the director… “Sure, I’ll just get a gun and shoot a few perverts. I could do that no problem,” she answers. And i’m sure she was not kidding…

Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur noted this very same phenomenon when she was being held at Rikers’ Prison in 1978. As she wrote in her essay Women In Prison: How It Is With Us:

For many, prison is not that much different from the street. It is, for some, a place to rest and recuperate. For the prostitute prison is a vacation from turning tricks in the rain and snow. A vacation from brutal pimps. Prison for the addict is a place to get clean, get medical work done and gain weight. Often, when the habit becomes too expensive, the addict gets herself busted, (usually subconsciously) so she can get back in shape, leave with a clean system ready to start all over again. One woman claims that for a month or two every year she either goes jail or to the crazy house to get away from her husband.

For many the cells are not much different from the tenements, the shooting galleries and the welfare hotels they live in on the street. Sick call is no different from the clinic or the hospital emergency room. The fights are the same except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the system is the same.

i am also reminded of the words of former political prisoner Bo Brown, who in the movie 3 Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation explains that “Prisons are just a microcosm of this [the outside]. This is just minimum security and it’s prettier you know, it’s green and lovely and we have more choices about where we go and what we eat and who we do things with, but the same things operate.”

There is no illusion here about prison playing a positive or therapeutic role. Just some stone cold realism and honesty about the extent to which you don’t have to be in prison to be imprisoned.

A truth which of course has more or less reality depending  on your class, nation, race, age… and most definitely your gender.

Songbirds would have been more on the mark had its director Brian Hill heard the words of these former political prisoners, who all analyze prison as an extension of other mechanisms of control. Unfortunately Hill seems to paint it as some kind of benevolent alternative. The words “country club” almost come to mind... so much so that i can’t help but see this as a bias, a desire to frame prisons (and, more broadly, the State) in a positive light. But then i also appreciate what he has said, that “it’s an awful indictment of any society that some people prefer to be in prison than out.”

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A film about women who have survived abuse is something of a long-shot in terms of the “public at large.” In real life women often have their very survival held against them; to have been a “victim” is to be dehumanized, and makes one less interesting than the “heroic” fantasy-figures Hollywood preps us to admire. Women who have survived male violence are often considered something of a social eyesore. The capitalist patriarchy trains us to mistake their battle-scars for weakness, their virtues for vices.

Much the same for prisoners – to be locked up is to be considered a “loser,” and the eyes glaze over as people tell their stories of how they ended up behind bars. Living in a capitalist society, infected with its shallow individualism, our minds acquire an orientation by which we focus on the trivial and ignore the very facts we should be paying most attention to. So the million and one details of how people end up faced with choosing between imperfect options, each of which brings them further from where they want to be, most often alienate the viewing public. While they should in fact be startling to us, angering us, waking us up to the fact that something is not right in this world.

Or at least that’s my experience of how many people (the kind of people who think of prison as a place they could never end up) react to this kind of story.

Which is where the music comes in.

After being interviewed by director Brian Hill, these women had their words taken to poet Simon Armitage, who composed songs based on their stories. The women were given singing lessons, and professional quality video editors, and we see them perform these songs throughout the movie. So you have women telling these gut-wrenching stories of their lives before prison – the lowest common denominator being rape and battery from men, and the use of drugs to dull the pain – interspersed with these moving songs they’re singing about the very stories they have just told.

To say that this format is effective would be a major understatement.

Music – which is really just poetry with a tune – is capable of communicating truths in a way that a simple account of the facts cannot. Perhaps in the same way that expressionism or surrealism provide more accurate representations of certain relationships and dynamics than realism does. Where people have internalized the system’s lies and acquired this capitalist knack of blaming the victim and celebrating the bully… music and poetry become ways to catch people off guard, to outflank our own subconscious complicity with repression.

Or as Songbirds director Brian Hill explained to CBC’s Rachel Giese:

if you’re dealing with people who are marginalized and people who have committed crimes, no matter how liberal you are and how sympathetic, i think there’s a tendency to define people by what they’ve done: she’s a crackhead, or she’s a prostitute. It stops us from seeing anything else about them. If you get people singing, they’re actually pretty vulnerable. It gives them another dimension: this is a person who has talent, creativity and is brave enough to stand up and do this.

[…] The women were much more involved in the process than in a traditional documentary. They okayed all the lyrics and had a sense of ownership over the project. i do think the women are magnified. The music does give them an extra dimension. Take Maggie, for instance, the Irish traveller in the film, who sings a country and western song and then a lullaby for her children who’ve been taken into care. Maggie is a crackhead. She is a bogus caller – i don’t know if you know that expression in Canada, but it’s a person who knocks on the doors of elderly people and then invites themselves in and robs them. It’s horrible what Maggie does. But she’s something else, too. She’s a mother who grieves for her children. And she’s someone with talent. She can really sing. And that’s the truth about Maggie. She’s all of those things.

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While Songbirds is a very moving and well done film, a thorough look at women in prison it is not.

As i already mentioned, there is no real discussion of life in prison. The violence and oppression that Hill shows us is purely intimate and interpersonal. The violence these women have endured is at the hands of “their men,” and hardly a word is said about other agents of oppression. If anything, the State appears as a benevolent actor.

i don’t want to exaggerate this criticism. These women are saying that in their lives it is their fathers and boyfriends and husbands who have been their oppressors, not the local cops or capitalists, and we should listen to this and mull it over and if this shocks you then you should rework your theories to take this into account. It doesn’t mean we should stop being anti-cop or anti-capitalist, just that we should not blinker ourselves to the fact that this may not be enough, may in fact cover up the “primary contradiction” in many women’s lives.

But we know that in real life many women are abused by an alliance of intimate and impersonal oppressors. This is the point so well made by the three women former political prisoners i quoted above. As Bo Brown, Susan Saxe and Assata Shakur each noted independently, the cops and courts and prisons are not an alternative to patriarchal oppression, just a different expression of it. An extension of oppression on “the outside.” When they do occur, collective responses to male violence are hindered if not simply repressed by the State. And finally, just as many men take advantage of the informal power they enjoy in intimate relationships to abuse and exploit women, so also do many men take advantage of the opportunity offered by their formal class position and relationship to the State – as bosses and managers and cops and social workers and prison guards too – to do the same.

Songbirds came out in 2005, the year that an increasing rate of suicides in women’s prisons in the UK finally crested. The preceding several years had seen a constant increase in the numbers of incarcerated women killing themselves – and for every woman who succeeded many many others would make the attempt. The widespread self-violence in women’s prisons in grim testimony to the fact that these are not “nice places” the State maintains – and the fact that the wave subsided when it did is proof of a direct correlation between repressive sentencing, overcrowding, and an unsafe environment. (2005, the first year the suicide rate decreased, was also the first year that the number of women in prison in the UK decreased.)

All of which is missing from Songbirds.

Viewers may also come away with a distorted idea of how much women in prison may or may not have in common. There is a national divide here which speaks volumes about capitalism and imperialism, but which is glossed over, its true import covered up.

Songbirds introduces several “traditional” white prisoners, four of whom are English and one Irish, each of whom has their own song and their own in-depth interview in which they discuss their life herstories. We are also introduced to many foreign women, some of whom are serving very long sentences, who were caught trying to smuggle drugs into the country. The interviews with these foreign women are much more superficial, and rather than each singing their own song, they all do one musical number together. What's more, unlike the citizen-women whose songs recount their lives and what led them to finally break the law, the foreign women's song only deals with the actual crime of drug smuggling itself. Hill gives a quick overview of how these women end up working as drug “mules” perhaps, but he chooses not to provide anywhere near the same degree of detail or focus as provided the other prisoners.

This emphasis on British citizens blurs several facts. To gloss over the “drug mules” is to gloss over one of the most important new elements in women’s imprisonment, for more than anything else it is the incarceration of female drug couriers which lies behind Britain’s skyrocketing women’s prison population. One in five woman prisoners in Britain today are foreign nationals, and half of these are from Jamaica. So that Afro-Caribbean women, only 1% of the general British population, account for 24% of women in prison in Britain today.

That these women’s predicament is also a result of men and male violence is documented in the film – but completely absent are the other (fairly obvious) factors that push Third World women to accept this dangerous work.

To flesh out this picture we can turn to feminist anti-prison activist and scholar Julia Sudbury, who has written about precisely this phenomenon:

Between 1980 and 1989, Edward Seaga’s conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JPL) pursued the ‘Washington Consensus’ model of neo-liberal economic reforms, privatizing state-owned companies and public utilities, scaling back local government services, introducing user fees for education and health care, and obliterating an already weak social safety net. Although People’s National Party candidate and former socialist Michael Manley was reelected in 1989, Manley and his successor J.P. Patterson have continued the economic path established by Seaga and his powerful international backers. These policies have led to layoffs of public service employees, many of them women, a reduction in social service provision, and dramatic increases in the cost of basic necessities. The impact on poor women has been particularly harsh because traditional gender roles burden women with the responsibility of caring for children and sick or elderly relatives. When the state sheds its role in providing social support and public infrastructure, poor women fill the vacuum. (Julia Sudbury, “Mules,” “Yardies,” and Other Folk Devils, in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, Routledge, New York, London 2005)

Sudbury notes that these women, pauperized by neo-liberalism, are the “exploited, poorly remunerated, and ultimately disposable workers of the global drug industry” – making the drug trade no different from other sectors of global capitalism, in which all manner of mechanisms both formal and informal concentrate the harshest levels of exploitation on to the female proletariat.

To say this, and to say that this is an important factor in women’s imprisonment even in countries like Britain, is not to deny the importance of “intimate” male violence, but simply to insist on telling the whole story, which is that there are different ways in which patriarchal oppression plays out for different women. Nation-class joins gender-class as a factor that can lead a woman through the prison gates.

An entire film could be devoted to the super-exploitation of women by the illegal drug sector, and their scapegoating by “tough on drugs” politicians, and i don’t want to fault Hill for not having chosen to make that documentary. But given the fact that the incarceration of foreign women for drug offenses is such an important factor in women’s prisons in Britain, and ever-increasingly so, it comes off as almost offensive that all of these women got such (comparatively) superficial treatment. (Not to mention the fact that their musical number was almost upbeat in a goofy kind of way.)

Despite these shortcomings, Songbirds remains a truly amazing movie, in both content and form. The “musical documentary” aspect, which had turned me off when i read the description (sounded awful corny, you know) makes this film a truly powerful experience, allowing the women to express far more than a dry interview format would. So much so that i left the cinema in a daze, blown away by what i had seen and heard, and it was only much later that i realized that fine as it was, it could have been even more.

Still, a real treat for a movie i initially had no plans on seeing…

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