Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind.

"There's no voiceover preamble contextualizing Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind's slideshow of headstones and roadside historical markers, and no narration punctuating the cut-aways to foliage swaying in the breeze," notes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "If you know your history, you'll get what filmmaker John Gianvito's up to: a tapestry tribute to the standard-bearers of America's progressive past - 'a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance,' per the film's inspiration, Howard Zinn's tenaciously influential 1980 People's History of the United States of America, from which Gianvito draws his list of honorees."

Updated through 8/4.

"Some of the names will be familiar from high school textbooks - Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Susan B Anthony - while others belong to the more specialized honor roll of the American left," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The absence of any explanatory apparatus limits the pedagogical effectiveness of Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, but if you know at least some of the names and some of the history, it is a moving and intriguing reverie. Accompanying Mr Gianvito's film during its run at Anthology Film Archives is Saul Levine's New Left Note, a 26-minute silent collage of protest, as much a document of, as a documentary about, the turbulence of the late 1960s."

"John Gianvito proves once again that in the cinema simplicity begets superlative richness," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"Unfortunately, Gianvito concludes with an overreaching link to contemporary activism, introduced by foliage-obscured shots of facades of Shell, Wal-Mart and McDonalds," notes Bill Weber in Slant. "An unfortunate reminder of Gianvito's hamfisted polemical fiction feature The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, it's a concluding misstep. Profit otherwise keenly connects these giants of America's past to the living more quietly, in the presence of labor and feminist buttons next to flowers on gravesites, or the plea etched on a female organizer's tomb: DON'T IRON WHILE THE STRIKE IS HOT!"

"Gianvito, to his achievement, weds a socialist remembrance with the land itself; his film suggests the naturalness of American defiance, poured into its very soil," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

Nicolas Rapold talks with Gianvito for the New York Sun.

Earlier: Michael Sicinski's interview with Gianvito for Cinema Scope and, from Toronto, Darren Hughes and Gerald Peary.

Update, 8/4: "Though it chronicles numerous battles, protests and revolutions, the film's vision of history is arguably as static as its cinematography," writes Ed Halter at Moving Image Source. "Yet to reduce the impact of the work to this message would be a distortion. For another, more enigmatic thread runs through Profit motive: that of the land itself, signaled through an opening sequence of geological close-ups, and the 'whispering wind' of the second half of its title.... Whether depicted in lavish CinemaScope or loving small-gauge, cinematic landscapes are rarely neutral: think of the potent import they bear for dusty westerns or jungle-bound war films. But Gianvito's more visionary attempt to ponder the landscape itself, rather than deploy it as mere symbolic background, has its own precedents and parallels." Examples follow.

Posted by dwhudson at August 1, 2008 4:54 AM